KEY POINTS:
Falling in love with China is as unexpected as falling in love with a complete stranger when you're happily married. It happens for me the morning we walk to Dunhuang's local park at dawn to find a tai chi class. The footpath is around four metres wide and tree-lined. Walkers stride past, some stone-faced, some friendly. "Hello," they say, on instruction from the government, we later learn.
Within half an hour the park is scattered with knots of people. Thirty kids in shiny blue track suits hop and run and stretch and jump. A 5-year-old renegade, his face a perfect, olive-tinged moon, performs a cartwheel. The tai chi class concentrates on slow, firm, serious movements - less confident types perform their own version under the trees.
Further over, a group of oldies in capri pants and baggy tops do a routine that involves much slapping, knee-bending and giggling to music from an ancient transistor. A couple of teenagers drift up and join in. And then the lady on the end beckons to me. "Ni hao," she says. And then something that surely means,"Come on, it's easy".
So there I am, finding that knee bends and slaps are hot work in July - even before sunrise. Once I start no one takes any notice. A gweilo (foreigner) in the pump class is no surprise in pre-Olympic China. When we have to go, my new friend waves me goodbye.
Dunhuang, circled by the sandy Taklimakan and rocky Gobi deserts, sits at the crossroad of two trade routes on the Silk Road that stretches from northwestern China to the Mediterranean, and didn't show early signs of appeal.
Founded in 111 BC by Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty, Dunhuang means "to flourish and prosper".
And as we circled to land after the three-hour flight from Beijing, only the odd splash of whitewash and the green of the city's poplar and willow trees signal that this is an oasis. Everything else - houses, buildings and streets - are all made from the same yellowy-brown sand of the deserts that surround them.
Down on the ground, though, Dunhuang becomes an appealing, lush, well-ordered town of 180,000 with an enormous train station due to be opened that very week.
Why so big? Because, our guide tells me, it is part of a new railway line from Tibet to Beijing. Things happen fast in China. Last week it took three days to truck local melons and grapes to Shanghai. Much of the time the grapes didn't make it. Now they whistle through crisp and fresh and Dunhuang is one of the stops for a new private China Orient Express Silk Train between Moscow and Beijing.
Until recently Dunhuang was also an inexpensive option for tourists and our hotel, with its cavernous lobby and long, paved, shaded walkways between pavilions, was a relatively inexpensive $138. For that we got the facilities of a modern hotel with the feel of a buddhist retreat, air conditioning and a stunning roof restaurant looking out over the desert hills.
Here in Dunhuang the 3000km Silk Road, famously travelled by Marco Polo and one of the most important arteries of trade and culture the world has known, was perilously close to the Mongolian border.
For centuries the Mongol hordes used to thunder down from the desert to ransack the camel trains with their precious silk and paper, butcher the men and steal their women. And until the arrival of the mighty Genghis Khan in 1162, they were kept under relative control by the continuation of the Great Wall which stretched from the Bohai sea in the East to Dunhuang's desert plains.
Here at the Dunhuang end, the Chinese built watch towers every 2.5km, with a garrison every 5km. Soldiers used to signal down the wall to each other by burning carefully sized bundles of the reeds. Many bundles and billowing smoke meant many enemies. A smaller, wispy signal stood for, perhaps, a preliminary scouting team.
Although high and imposing in its day, this is a different sort of wall. While the Beijing end of the Great Wall is built from stone and goes back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) this section was built in the Han Dynasty (206BC-220), making it more than 1000 years older.
It looks older too. Built from rammed local clay and sand strengthened with gravel and reeds, much of it constructed by slaves, there is now little detail left. In some places it is two metres tall and wide, in others the wind has licked into the blocks so the pebbles and reeds are exposed, leaving the wall whittled down to under a metre. In many places along its remaining 150km, it has simply subsided into the sand. Says our local guide, Richard, in his painstaking English, "The lack of humidity and rain has helped preserve it but if something is not done to protect the wall, even these remnants will be gone within 15 to 20 years."
Today, with the surface temperature a melting 50C, we wonder how it could have survived so long. But a decade is a blink of an eye in the Gobi Desert where history reaches back to well before Christ, and moved at camel pace.
There is a Biblical feel to the great curved hills, covered with sand that ripples like the sea and two-humped bactrian camels with their wide, flat feet are the best way to get around.
One morning around 7am we try for ourselves. Five of us on five cousin camels, all linked together by string attached to cruel-looking pegs (often snotty) through their velvety noses.
"They all kneel down in turn," explains the guide. "You get on and they get up in order."
Ha! One leg over and my camel lurches to her feet, almost sending me over her head. She is a flighty bird. Every time I try to take a sip of water or adjust my weight on the wood and blanket "saddle", her ears flick back and I fancy I hear a thin hiss.
Camels are expensive - around 4000 Yuan ($973) each - and volatile.
They may walk in an elegant train but their keeper has to be constantly vigilant. Ours walks the entire way, remains calm even when one camel rears back and pulls out her nose stud.
Mine likes it best when one of our party, columnist Chris Trotter, sings soulful, melancholy songs and the rest of us join in.
There are no toilet stops, no trees, only interminable ancient graves, most of which have been plundered for the jade, gold and valuable vases, popped in to keep the dead company - and miles and miles of whispering sand.
This is one of the bonuses of living in Dunhuang. In the rest of China, Richard tells us, you must be cremated by law. Here in the desert everyone gets a burial plot and, thanks to the climate, bodies stay in "a good place" for 30 years.
When we do stop after about two hours of merciless rocking to the camels' long gait, people shoot off in various directions. No one has the energy or inclination to peek. By then, after four days, we are what those in the travel sector call "China-hardened". This means that we no longer rush, horrified, from blocked squatter toilets, complete with open buckets of used toilet paper and ladies' "sanitary" equipment. It also means the open desert is a bonus.
But Dunhuang has much more to offer. Under Richard's guidance we visit the staggering Mogao Caves, and the Crescent Moon Lake where 33 Buddhist temples used to circle the lake itself. The temples are long gone and the Crescent Lake is shrinking as its famous waters are plundered by local farmers to irrigate their grapes and vegetables, but the Singing Sands Mountains that surround it are beautiful as ever. You can tramp to the top, wearing special over-the-knee canvas sand boots if you're a local, then toboggan down, but remember, even at 10am it is 35C and climbing - and the sun gets hotter in the desert. The most fit climb to the top via a set of wooden footholds, and fly down in a cloud of sand. Others go much more gingerly and the unfit and sensible (me) just watch.
The Mogao Caves or "Thousand Buddha Grotto" are not for the faint-hearted either. A World Cultural Heritage site stretching along a cliff face for 1700m, this series of cave temples was sealed and abandoned in the 14th century, and rediscovered only in 1900.
The caves contain amazing antiquities: an enormous collection of sutras and silk and paper paintings; 4500 painted Flying Apsarases or angels that decorate more than 270 of the 492 surviving caves; a library cave containing thousands of precious Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist writings; the world's oldest printed book, poems, and works on science, maths and medicine. Most extraordinary are the caves containing towering, elaborate, buddhas. One, at 36m high, became the second largest in the world after the Bamiyan buddhas were destroyed by the Taleban.
Exhausted, I plead dehydration and head for a drinks kiosk where they sell cold, super-sweet iced tea. This quickly brings my body back to normal. The Chinese consume such tea all the time - and they need it - along with spiced and chilli-laced dishes, for example green beans with chilli; whole, muddy-tasting, freshwater fish with chilli; to beef and broccoli with chilli; and the local speciality, donkey with chilli. We didn't try that.
Maybe that chilli was responsible for the smell of China. At first I think the pungent, earthy aroma that clings to Beijing must come from sewage mixed with diesel. Then, when it follows us way into Dunhuang in the Gobi Desert, where the sun sizzles the backs of our legs, I conclude it must be a mix of Chinese sweat and diesel. Even later, after it has dogged me for a week, I decide it is possibly some strange Chinese herb.
It is only after we arrive home that I know for sure that the smell of China is something you ingest. Like garlic, it soaks into your body and comes out on your breath and - in mid-summer at least - your pores.
I hope it lasts forever.
SUGGESTIONS: Take heavy long pants or jeans for camel riding, as the knotted stirrup leathers will rub your bare calves raw after a couple of kilometres. If you go in August or September you'll need loose, cotton clothes (three-quarter pants and long-sleeved tops are ideal but make them cotton), plus open shoes that don't chafe and light trainers, a hat, sun umbrella (best bought in China) and a fan (motorised is good).
GETTING THERE: Carroll du Chateau flew direct to Beijing with Air New Zealand (www.airnz.co.nz) and to Dunhuang with Air China.
ACCOMMODATION: The Sofitel and Bamboo Garden hotels in Beijing, Silk Road Hotel in Dunhuang were organised by Air New Zealand.
USEFUL WEBSITES: www.crystalink.com and www.travel-the-real-china.com
