Situated at the southeastern rim of the Tengger Desert. over 10 kilometers west of Zhongwei City in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China, Shapotou is only about 30 meters from the northern bank of the Yellow River. By the riverbank, there is a large sand embankment, about 2,000 meters wide and 100 meters high, hence the name Shapotou (Sand Slope Head). It means is the Tengger Desert, and on the southern bank is the famous Loess Plateau. Thanks to the outstanding achievements in fixing sands and controlling sands by the Chinese people, the vast sea of yellow sands has been covered by a wide green forest belt, presenting a natural scenic wonder consisting of fine desert, the long river, the high mountain and the oasis an example of the harmonious coexistence between man and nature. The Chinese experts in the sand control have created a miracle that trains have run along the Baotou-Lanzhou Railway and gone through the desert for several dozens of years, a fact which has attracted many Chinese and foreign experts and scholars to come here to make investigations. Accordingly, Shapotou enjoys a high reputation in the world, along with the Terracotta Warriors in China. Here tourists can ride camels to appreciate the sea of sands, take a sand bath, and do sand surfing. Further- south lies the tourist program of cruising the fiver aboard goat-skin dinghies. Tourists can attend the
Xian package tour to explore this place. If you are a travel fanatic, please login the site http://www.travel-xian.com for more information. At Shapotou, one can ride a boat made with dead sheep blown into balloons and tied together, they call it Yangpifazi. You can ride this boat for a short distance or a very very long distance (literarily for hours to reach this other site which I didn't not go). At Shapotou, I also rode camels all the way over a sand hill to another area, where the Tangeer Desert seemed endless and extremely beautiful (especially under the setting sun on a clear day!). Though I picked a route to only ride the camel for about an hour, you can choose another option to ride the camel for 5 hours over the Tangeer desert to reach this beautiful lake called Tong Hu in the middle of nowhere and sleep over inside the desert.
