Travel

The vastness of the Sahara is like an inland ocean. For centuries, and even longer, plucky souls have cast themselves upon it, driven by trade, religion, opportunity, or other factors, in a bid to traverse this enormous space.

And so, the desert is criss-crossed with well-trodden caravan routes, and dotted with trading posts and places of shelter. One of those trading posts is Chinguetti.

There used to be two railways in Laos. One stretched roughly four kilometres from Thanaleng to the Thai Border. The other was the defunct seven kilometre Don Det-Don Khon railway, opened by the French colonial authorities in the 19th century, and closed in the 1940s.

It’s pretty different nowadays.

Two millennia ago, this area of Eastern Yunnan wasn’t so much a destination, as a waypoint.
With the civilizations of Tibet and Bengal to the west, Southeast Asia to the south, and Han China to the north, the shores of Dianchi Lake became a crossroads of travel and trade. The earliest settlements here flourished with the wealth of ancient commerce.

The lads at the landing were working hard as the ferry pulled in. Laden with cars from the city of Shkoder to the southwest, the boat would need to deposit its cargo safely at Fierze, in the northeastern section of the snaking Lake Koman.

But this meant digging out a fresh landing site from the gravel at the lake side.

As the boat dropped its ramp, the ferry terminal crew buried it with rubble on the shoreline, giving the cars a smooth – or, at least, a relatively smooth – route up onto dry land.

It was just after night fell on the approach to Bleaklow that I realised I’d made a bit of a mistake. The blistering sun of a late summer day had gone, and the evening brought with it much cooler temperatures. But it brought something else too – midges, loads of ‘em. These insects might be tiny, but what they lacked in size they more than made up for in numbers.