Monthly Archives: September 2008

mixed signals

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The last one of my three new tires started acting up in the morning, and I knew it was about to become a very hot and miserable day: Oh, how I envied this dude on his carriage that I saw – there he was just dozing off while the donkey was getting the job done: […]


sabotage

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Finally a decent night spent in the outdoors. Not too warm, not too cold. Not too windy. I made this video time lapse of my morning routine: By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.Learn more Load video Always unblock YouTube Note the two friendly dudes showing up for a chat. … There […]


4-0-0-0

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When I woke up, I knew I was going to have to dance. But before, I first walked a bit through the residential areas of the oil city: …often, when I’m looking at buildings like these from the outside, I can’t help but wonder what might be going on inside. Are the people in there […]


crude oil

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The wheels I had bought didn’t stand a chance out there. After investing a considerate amount of time and energy in the futile attempts to fix the damn problem ourselves (my friend Abdu and me, that is), we finally hauled the whole thing over to a bike repair shop and had him readjust the spokes: […]


getting ready to leave

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I fixed my Caboose today: All three wheels were screwed up and needed replacements. Cost me almost half as much as I had originally paid for the complete Caboose, but whatever, it had to be done. Then I went to the post office to mail some of my pictures home: You remember how enjoyable that […]


müslüman

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My friend Abdu (walking from Beijing to Bad Nenndorf) decided to take me out to see some of the city’s most famous sights today. One of those sights, and a very important place for Muslims in China, is the tomb of Gess Anzari Kaziyallahu: Remember I told you about the tomb of Wuaisi (overlooked & […]


are my eyes red?

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I’m still ordering room-service and drinking coke… Also, I recompiled the whole Walk from Paris to Bad Nenndorf 2003. …I think my eyes must be blood-shot and watery by now, but… no, they are still fine.


the impossibility of nothing

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Okay, I couldn’t exactly allow myself to do nothing, even though that’s what I would have liked to do the most. But after all, I had fallen behind something like 10 days on my blog! You see, I’ve been struggling with bad connections and the lack of proper power supplies out in the desert recently, […]


tradition

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You know what I like to do once I get to a large city after some heavy walking: …I like to hang out and do nothing. Nothing at all.


my escort

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The weather was good today, and even though I still had a weird head on my shoulders, it kind of went by like a breeze: There were more cotton fields… …and lots and lots of these buildings they use to dry grapes and make them into raisins or something: Grapes… suddenly this old guy jumps […]


the light head

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I got up feeling terrible. Light-headed. Dizzy. You know, that certain distinct feeling when you’re about to catch a cold but it’s just not quite there yet? Well I didn’t want to stay in sick anywhere without a proper Internet connection, so I decided to keep moving no matter what: I passed some hideous landscapes […]


advanced formula

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My original working title for today’s post was going to be called “hell on earth”, but when I noticed the decimal five on the GPS, I thought I’d turn it into another 50k guide. You still remember the original one (50k – a beginner’s guide)? It’s been a while. Well okay guys, here we go: […]


the nothingness

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Wanna know why my friend Teacher Xie (Teacher Xie) is hauling more than 50 pounds of old metal through the desert? It’s because he can sell it once he gets to the city in a few days. … We had gotten up early and were hanging around the place chatting and having food and drink […]


the messenger

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You remember my dear Teacher Xie (Teacher Xie), right? Well, we had always been staying in touch, and a little while ago he had told me he was already on his way back from the West just now, planning to go south before it got too cold during the winter. That called for a reunion […]


walking from Beijing to Bad Nenndorf

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I found some good things in Xingxingxia. First I found food, then I found a friend. Abdu was a cargo hygiene inspector and a photography enthusiast, and he immediately understood my wish to leave a graffito on the rocks and helped me come up with a can of spray paint. Yes, that’s right: We got […]


where’s my spray paint?

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Of course I didn’t get a good night’s sleep tonight either. The reason: there was a mouse in my room. Mighty mouse, maker of noise, master of the plastic wrapping! – how the hell can an animal this small produce that much SOUND? At first, it seemed to be after my cookies – I woke […]


the goldmine

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When I woke up, I was feeling a lot better. I hadn’t gotten that much sleep though, and so I was very much hoping for a better rest tonight. I had heard about an old mine of some sort that lay a day’s worth of walking ahead. I was going to ask for a place […]


“nach Westen gehen?”

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I already had a perfect title for the day when I started walking this morning: I was going to call this one “into the great unknown”, because that’s what it really was: finally a walk into the real unknown. Let me explain: you might have noticed that 5 of the 6 major destinations on this […]


the boss with his big butt

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This is the last place on this trip that I have been to before. It was in the summer of 2006, and I wanted to get to Dunhuang, but Dunhuang didn’t have a train station of its own at the time. So I had to take a train to here and then get in a […]


into the black mountains

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…riding the cake knife again: I was getting pretty weary, counting every milestone next to the road, hoping for the number to get smaller… …until finally, at “0”, I would be in a place to rest my head and take a shower once again. An agonizing countdown, really. Then suddenly two black SUV’s stopped on […]