the Yellow River hop

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I finally crossed the Yellow River and made it into the province of Shaanxi 陕西 today.

Yay!!

The last steps through public traffic before the river were hasty and confused though:

But then I got to the bridge:

What a sublime feeling to be crossing these massive waters…

The Yellow River 黄河.

Slowly winding its way through northern China, these waters have fed generations upon generations, changing their course ever so often, thus permitting new cities to emerge and leaving others to perish.

I think I will see the Yellow River again in a few months, once I get to Lanzhou 兰州.

…

Well, but first I had to walk the dusty roads of Shaanxi:

…take pictures of cows:

…and photograph the light in an underpass:

Once, I walked in the wrong direction and ended up at a toll gate:

Of course I didn’t see the possibility of me taking a comfortable afternoon stroll on a turnpike, so I had to walk back a bit and get on my initial way again.

Which sucked.

But then I ran into this puppy and played with him for a while:

Sat down for a rest in a store in a little village.

I pretended I didn’t speak Chinese, because I didn’t feel like conversation and because I had this excellent idea how I would find out whether or not I could get what I wanted without knowing the language (for later, once I got to Central Asia):

But then again I was really cheating myself and everybody else: even though I made some funny sign language about how I wanted to find a mountain and climb up on top of it, and how many hours I would need to walk there, but still I could understand every word these friendly people were throwing at me in their attempts to make this miserable foreigner understand that it would take him three more hours to get to Huayin, which is at the foot of Huashan 华山.

I decided to drop my stupid idea and rather get going again.

Once I waved at a little kid from afar, and the little kid smiled and waved back:

Making walking worthwhile.

On the distance I covered today, I found out that there was something new to this province:

Sceneries under water:

There was not much time to appreciate this though, because it was getting dark and I was still walking:

…and walking:

…and walking:

Well, you can see that I made it to Huayin eventually.

Huashan, the famous western one of China’s five sacred peaks of Daoism, is right there in front of me.

Due to the lack of light, I haven’t seen it just yet.