desert musings

My horrific tan line from riding in the sun for 9 days straight

Onions... In onion territory

Snow-capped mountains... in the desert!

Andrew packing up the campsite. Trusty Wal-mart tent in the background.

The desert

writing from a town called zhangye, located in gansu province, northwest china. quite a dodgy place, the people are a little unfriendly at times, and a couple of days ago andrew was accosted by a slightly dirty-looking old man who was ranting on about organised crime here or police corruption or something. very strange... not the type of place you want to take a nice midnight stroll alone in.


sorry i haven't updated for yonks, but it's very difficult when you gotta do it from chinese internet cafes where viewing blogs is prohibited!




so basically, we've been on the road for about 10 days. the first 9 days of our trip were spent riding our bikes like crazy olympic cyclists. we achieved between 30 and 55km each day. a total of more than 350km in 9 days. just a quick fact: the whole length of our ride, when we've finished, will be the length of perth to sydney.


we've seen a few crazy sights in the first few days of this epic journey... many donkeys up close and personal (we road throw lots of donkey farms), many squashed onions on the sides of the roads (we also road through what appeared to be the number one onion producing territory in china!), lots of marijuana plants lining farmers' properties on the side of the roads, and a hell of a lotta sand. we rode through fair dinkum desert, including the gobi, where the sand is orange, there's rocks aplenty and not a tree or water source in sight.


we also dabbled in a bit of desert camping for a few nights. of course, it was freezing at night, dropping below zero outside our crappy (andrew will disagree with this description) wal-mart tent. we ate many packets of uncooked chinese 2-minute noodle-type snacks, and were tormented by endless sandflies and mosquitoes. we would've been eaten alive if it weren't for the aerogard. and on a slightly less pretty note, we had to dig our own toilets.



and in a small town called jinta, we were confronted by policemen who came into our internet cafe and wanted to take us away. we were afraid they were going to deport us because of a visa glitch. apparently we had entered a place restricted to foreigners (there's lots of places like this in china). the punishment for doing this is a fine, but andrew used his superb chinese skills and charm to sweet-talk us out of it.



well, this is really all i have time for, because again, i'm at an internet cafe and my precious net time is ticking down. till next time.......... much love