We were quite in a hurry to leave Kashgar. There were just too many dishonest people, too much harassment. So we left discretely early yesterday morning, one day earlier than our schedule. Il was a long 10 hours drive along the North shore of the Taklamakan desert. Normally we should have traveled parts of this on camelback, but this in another story…

Speed limitations are very low in China: 60 km/h on main roads. There are many radar controls and fines are extremely high. Jason, our Chinese guide was caught for speeding at 64 km/h, i.e. 7% over limit, and had to pay 2000 RMB, roughly 200€, which is about 2 month salary of an average Chinese worker. That is why Chinese drive so slowly, and this seems to be the only rule they respect. Otherwise traffic rules are the rules are easy: The biggest and strongest is right, cyclists and pedestrians must yield.

Jason is 24 years old. He will be our guide and interpreter for the first part of our trip. He will be cycling with us; our luggage will follow in a van. Our first impression is very good, quite different from the so-called “guides” in Kashgar.

Today we assembled our bicycles and this evening we will cycle for an hour to make some fine tuning. Tomorrow at last will be the great departure towards Beijing. We’ll start for just 60 km on the first day, but then our stages will normally exceed 100 km.

For 2 hours we follwed this bus in the desert at 60 km/h. I was about to get mad.