In 2000, I had a bit of money and went to the Northwest, a place I had always wanted to visit.

Hello darlings, welcome to Xiaoning Diary's plog channel. This is a little travel note, from Xiaoning's chattering. - After returning from the trip and looking through a bunch of photos, it feels like it’s not over yet. From Guiyang to Lanzhou, Xining, and Dunhuang, these seven days felt very unreal to me. I had wanted to travel the big Northwest loop since I was a student but never had the chance. Unexpectedly, this impulse led me into the landscapes from my geography books. - From wandering by the Yellow River in Lanzhou to the sand dunes in Dunhuang, in 7 days I soaked in the "top-tier romance of the Great Northwest": stepping on unmelted snow in the Qilian Mountains, touching the sand in the cracks of the Mogao Caves walls, and seeing the Chaerhan Salt Lake that looks like spilled apple juice. - But the caves of the Mogao Caves are truly breathtaking! Those faded murals and cracked clay sculptures seem to wrap the winds of a thousand years inside the walls—the painter’s brush, the pilgrim’s footsteps, the camel bells in the desert—all echoing in this narrow space, even the air slows down. - Standing on the salt flats of Chaka Salt Lake, I truly understood what it means to be “as fleeting as a mayfly”: the sky is a laid-out blue, the lake is the reflected clouds, and when the wind blows, even shadows feel light enough to float away. All anxieties and troubles don’t even count here in this vast world. - This trip felt like a stolen dream—now staring at the album, my mind is still filled with the sunset at Mingsha Mountain, Lanzhou’s beef noodles, and the wind at Qinghai Lake.