(China)...China is a fun place to visit, but wow, is Beijing polluted. In the year before its biggest event in its history (well, except for maybe one or two previous events of Imperial magnificence), China should not start organising an Olympics event on Breathing. Those who can last a minute or more will receive a Gold Medal, or supplementary oxygen, whichever one they covet the most. That said, I have no doubt that the Olympics will pass flawlessly. The Chinese government will shoot a few thousand people, ban all cars, move the factories to the areas of non-Han Chinese and flap little red Mao books at the wind until all the soot disappears. As soon as the last event is over and the foreign TV companies have returned, then things will go back to being how they are. 
I did get some fresh air in the Gobi Desert, in and around the small city of Dunhuang, which is where the Silk Road split into two routes. It is a quiet place, well, at least for Chinese standards, although it did seem to have an inordinate number of taxi cabs for a city of 180,000 or so people that takes little more than 30 minutes to cross on foot. The taxis are all green, and they all idle by the road side, before getting bored, driving away somewhere and coming right back in the vain hope that a customer has appeared. No one has. That said, I saw many taxis charging across the Gobi Desert en route to one of the passes that mark the start of the two Silk Road paths, a roundtrip journey of between 140 and 200 miles, so perhaps fares earned in this manner are more than enough to keep away starvation.
The northern pass is called Yumen, the southern one, Yuanguan. Both are marked with Imperial Chinese forts of differing conditions of ruin, and they signified the empire’s westernmost limits. After them, all was potential danger. Today, at Yuanguan there are some ruined beacon towers and a rebuilt fort containing a museum; at Yumen, there is a small, ruined fort and some stretches of Hang Dynasty Great Wall, made from straw and mud, which predates the more famous stretches of Great Wall near Beijing by some 400 years.
The south road—for ancient travelers—was dangerous due to snowy peaks (there is less snow today) and bandits; the north road, because it travelled through the territory of the warlike Hun. One emperor decided he needed to make this route safer and negotiated pacts with what is now the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan. He sent an emissary who had little luck the first time around. On a second try, the Hun imprisoned him for 14 years. By the time he returned to the Imperial capital of Xi’an and reported what he had found out, 28 years had passed. His intelligence proved the turning point to eventual defeat of the Hun. In those days, people had more time. Well, definitely more time that the taxis do nowadays. 
I visited a less famous stretch of the Great Wall, near to Beijing. I do not remember why I chose to go to the Huanghua area. Maybe it was because few other tourists do. The Chinese go there at weekends to enjoy boat trips on the lake. The reason Westerners do not go, I soon found out, was that it was impossible to access the wall there. You can see it, you just can’t get on it. I walked around the lake for two miles, past the small boat dock and watched large grasshoppers with pink legs flit around. The narrow path leads to The Chestnut Farm of Ming Dynasty. The fact that there was one, and I could visit it, and probably most other people do not know of its existence pleased me tremendously and almost made up for the fact that I could not stand on the wall. Almost.
On the walk back I spotted a steep slope through the chestnut trees and decided to scale it. No one was around, and perhaps the signs in Chinese did say “no admittance,” but I certainly could not read them. The hillside was very steep, but I scrambled up by holding rocks and roots, and 10 minutes later I was standing in a Great Wall defensive tower, with the sun behind me, and a lengthy stretch of Great Wall in perfect view on the other side of the lake. The tower itself was a clutter of bricks inside but intact out. A perfect 20 minutes, and no one saw me slide swiftly down through the chestnuts. Back in the Gobi Desert, I did see that it possesses colour, and even the flat, stony sections have magic to them. Two small villages manage to irrigate themselves—although as I drove through the desert, it did miraculously starts raining, albeit lightly—and produce red and green grapes, some of which is used for wine, but most of it for raisins.
The Muslims in Dunhuang prepare delicious kebabs over open grills, consisting of five pieces of lamb, two grilled grapes and a piece of fat, all rubbed in spices, most notably chili. I could have eaten them all night, especially at 1 yuan (14 cents) each.
The sand dunes at Dunhuang are magnificent, and nearly every one of them can be climbed. The entry price is steep, certainly for current Chinese standards, at 180 yuan (approximately $25), and then extra are camel and motorbike rides up the dunes and toboggan rides down. From the top of the dunes can be seen Moon Crescent Lake and a pagoda. An attempt was made to explain to me why this lake does not silt up, but I did not understand it. The only nationalities in attendance here were Japanese, Chinese (who are travelling for the first time in numbers in their own country) and the French. 
The former two groups constantly take photos of one another, flashing the V for Victory sign, while the latter holler and whoop as they run or slide down the hills. The Japanese come to this region to see the phenomenal caves at Mogao, which contain the largest indoor Buddha in the world, rising 108 feet. A second rises 92. Another cave contains a reclining Buddha, and every one of the 735 caves (about 10 can be viewed by visitors, who are not allowed to bring their cameras) has stunning art, painted under the light of oil lamps over the course of 1,000 years.
At the dunes, only the Westerners do not like to wear the bright orange plastic shoe protectors that keep the sand out of footwear. Long lines of visitors wearing these day-glo things slowly trudge up dune sides. My sand was later that day dumped out of my shoes onto a Beijing patch of grass, beside a statue of a Ping Pong bat and ball unceremoniously wedged under a flyover, unless, that is, the statue was already there before the road. 
Near to the Ming Tombs I had lunch at Friendship Store #2. A blank-staring waitress and a generally able translator were hounding to death a pair of Americans when I arrived. They were being offered dishes comprised of only one word. “You will have beef?” “And beans?” The American woman was not thrilled at the idea of “beans,” so said the only word she believed would make all the Chinese go away—“Beef.” And then she nodded. The Chinese rallied. “No beans? You not have beans?” More blank looks. “How big is the beef?” the American asked. Approximations are made. Five minutes later, both beef and beans come out. This, I expected.
Earlier, the first dish to come my way was watermelon, a food I cannot stand. (I hate the stuff. I had a bad one when I was 10 or so and now cannot even stand the smell. It must be the cheapest fruit, too, as always when you get a fruit bowl, melon forms the greatest part, much to my continued disgust.) I declined politely, only to be met with stares, confusion and panic. I saw my waitress several times in the next 30 minutes holding my plate of watermelon, far away to my sides, and on the first opportunity, she surreptitiously placed it on an extreme corner of my table during the only time my attention was focused on looking for something in my backpack. The next day I was outside the Lu Jin restaurant, famous for its Peking duck and catering to a long line of foreigners (reservations are needed; I did not have one and was told I had an hour to eat up and get out.).
An old man was playing music on an instrument he had taken out of a wooden case. It appeared to be a cross between an accordion and a zither. He laughed between each song. A very young girl—probably his granddaughter—accompanied him by terrorising a barely born, white kitten. She chopped it on its head with the side of a flattened hand; she stuck it down a hole in a grinding stone; she tried to stuff it down a smaller hole in the same stone; she made it cling to her t-shirt, from which it duly fell and landed in the middle of the road—all of which are very busy in Beijing, even the less busy ones—and picked it up by any of its extremities that happened to be closest. I honestly thought the cat would not live, and perhaps it no longer is alive. Probably the pollution got it.