Turpan to Hami

Day 44 Sunday 13th September 420 km (13733 km total)

More desert riding, Chinese Health & Safety, a 3 man breakaway, windmills & frustrating misdirection.

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The group had been naturally splitting in two for a few days as we rode, with three of us tending to be half an hour or so in front of the others at each fuel or police check stop.

So we decided today to formalise this and Russ, John & I agreed not to wait for the guide & the others & try to navigate the petrol stations, police checks etc at our own pace.

It immediately felt better to me, not because we had left the others behind, but because it gave a sense of freedom & being in control.

So off we go again, on the same expressway we have been riding now for 4 days and almost 2000 km, most of it in a straight line west to east. At least there are some lumpy bits in the landscape here.

The wind (& rain?) make pretty patterns in the sandstone.

There were these strange container shaped buildings along the route.

At first I thought they were sandstone dwellings, but later decided they were probably storage huts for watermelon or animals.

A reminder of the alternative to the expressway, the provincial road runs parallel and very close for most of the way offering no real advantage, and plenty of disadvantages (badly potholed, very sandy & dusty and in some places virtually unridable)

The lady in charge of the petrol station we stopped at that morning, refused to let us fill at the pumps, believing the government(?) warning that motorcycles are liable to explode and so must be filled away from the pumps. So she insisted we used the 'safer' practice of filling an old tea pot, without a lid, carrying it 15m to the bike and then pouring it in. Multiply this by 3 trips and 7 bikes and you can see how rediculous (and unsafe) a practice it is.

Off again and we came across evidence that China is going green - they have windmills on a massive scale in this part of the desert (which benefits from very strong cross winds). This particular wind farm was about 20km long, and several km wide, one of the advantages of having a lot of dead space!

The next photo shows one of the car wrecks that they periodically display by the roadside, presumably as a reminder to take care.

We tackled the police check & toll booths on route as a renagrade group of 3 without issue. The police just wanted to see our passports & the toll operators mainly just looked the other way, when we slid past the barriers or down the footpath.

The three muskateers eating up the desert miles!

Further evidence of the windmill investment kept passing by on the other side heading west. The picture shows one of the vanes of the windmills in the previous photos - huge! I saw maybe 50 of these trucks that day. There were also large fields of solar panels in various places.

We left the expressway as we approached Hami & feeling quite happy with our independance & the day's ride, headed for the coordinates of tonights hotel. We arrived there Ok, parked up, unloaded the bikes & went to check in just as we received a message from the guide saying the hotel he had given us was wrong and they had changed to another one!

So in the end we finally arrived after the others, hot, flustered & with several words to say about the level or organisation & accuracy of information.

A cold beer or two calmed things down a bit as the day ended & we readied for the next days ride.