as I guess this is mine and Rob’s 4th desert visit and although in parts of it is very desert like, it wasn’t as bleak as I thought it might have been. Don’t get me wrong it is very baron and bleak but it is also fairly green in places which kind of threw me. I guess after seeing the Gobi desert drift past our train window for what seemed like hours and it being almost all sand, then I suppose my definition of a desert is one such as that. I also didn’t expect to find beautiful red coloured canyons, that have obviously at some point been shaped by water. We drove up to Rainbow canyon on a road that you didn’t know whether you should just put your foot down and get the bumps over with or take your time and prolong the extremely bumpy ride! The bumps were worth it though as the canyon was amazing, you could walk right through it and its skyward soaring sides help shield you from the suns relentless rays. We managed to wander around for a good half hour which was pretty good going, the colours in

the rock were mesmerising, finding somewhere such as this had been a complete surprise to me which made it all the better.

We made the bumpy ride back down to the main desert road and in the distance we could see the famous sand dunes. Again I suppose you have your preconceptions and the sand dunes were another one of mine. I thought that the dunes would be a more prominent feature of this desert but it seems that they are concentrated in just one small part. Nevertheless they are extremely impressive and it would have been nice to have had the time to walk up to and in to them, but if we stopped every time we wanted to do something like this we would still be in Asia!

The next place on the agenda was the visitors centre. The outside temperature was a steady 109F so we kind of