Originally Posted by
jiejie
I walked up to the big ceremonial tourist gate and ticket office, but I balked at the RMB 120 entrance fee. This fee gets you into a fenced-off area where you can avail yourself (at additional cost) of camel rides, dune sliding, ATV buggy off-roading, and viewing of the Crescent Lake. But if you aren’t into these made-for-Chinese-tourist attractions, the entrance fee is an insult to see a natural attraction that doesn’t need any upkeep. And for the first time in this trip, the weather/skies really were unfavorable. There was so much haze that you could barely make out the outline of the dunes.
My pre-trip preparations had informed me that there was a way to get back to those dunes for free if all one wanted to do was see and perhaps climb them and take photos, so I tried village roads to the left, then to the right to get around the fenced area, all to no avail.
Though it's been a while (i.e. security procedures may well have changed since 2006), I didn't require a guide book to figure out that it would be possible to enter that massive park without forking over the entrance fee. However, I vaguely recall being chased by some angry locals at one point. Suffice it to say, the dunes were the unexpected highlight of my Dunhuang visit; you can effectively "ski" down them.
As for transportation between Liuyuan and Dunhuang, I'm pretty sure I rode in one of those horrible mini-buses (along with the farm animals that typically accompany this drill) in both directions. Seeing the airport on my way from town to the caves made me slightly envious of the people that were able to pop straight back to Beijing in 2.5 hours (as you note, you need two hours just to get to Liuyuan, which was the only train station on offer during my visit). But, in the end, I'm happy that my budget forced me to visit Jiayuguan and Lanzhou after Dunhuang.