One of the last things you would expect to find in the middle of a desert is a functional traffic light, but you can find several of them in the sand dunes of the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake Nature Park in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. During the annual holiday at the beginning of May, thousands of people flock to these natural tourist spots and engage in a variety of activities, the most popular of which is undoubtedly camel riding. In 2023, there were around 2,400 camels available for riding, as well as tens of thousands of tourists per day at the two scenic spots alone, which resulted in serious traffic congestion problems. Luckily, local authorities came up with an ingenious solution – camel traffic lights. By installing traffic lights that signaled when camels had to stop to allow pedestrians to cross, the problem was partially solved. The problem they have now is that the traffic lights have become a sort of tourist attraction of their own in an already overcrowded area. It’s expected that more than 240 million people will travel to the area this year, many just to snap a photo of the camel traffic lights.
