the quiet toe

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Sometimes the highway seems just like a cake knife slicing the desert into two giant pieces.

…and here I am, riding the knife, somewhere between those slices:

Well not really riding, more like walking.

Creeping, ever so slowly.

…

I had a good lunch of bread & beans:

– plus there was this watermelon that the good people of Xihu had offered me as a present, very tasty!

So far, the good side of life.

The pain in my feet was getting stronger and stronger though, until at some point it got intolerable, and I decided to take my boots off and wear something else for a while:

Ah, I know this is not going to be a solution for the next couple of hundred kilometers, but boy, what a relief!

But then there suddenly was this hissing sound (oh no, that can’t be good!) and I realized that I had what we in the biz like to call “a flat tire”:

This was at 17:58.

I cursed the day, waved my arms to the sky and made much of an angry growl, then I started repairing the thing.

Luckily, I had the spare tire, so I got it fixed eventually:

This picture was taken at 18:42.

…sometimes I wonder how someone like me is supposed to walk home.

I mean, so many people are so awesome, and I need fifty minutes to change a spare tire? On the Caboose??

Whatever…

The rest of the way was easy though:

I found a good place to camp out right before the sun went to sleep:

I slowly pitched my tent on the rocky ground, and when I was done I paused to listen, and I couldn’t hear a single mosquito around:

In fact, I couldn’t hear anything at all.

It was completely quiet – not a sound except for the soft evening breeze playing with the fabrics of my tent:

I tiptoed around the campsite, sat down and tried to listen into the night. There suddenly was a funny beeping sound in my ear, and I thought it was there because I just wasn’t used to the grand silence. I held my breath and listened harder, and after a while the beeping sound slowly went away.

Then there was the wind again, whispering its silent song into the night. I thought it was very beautiful.

I gently opened a can of beans.