Bazinga!
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Said good-bye to the Mongols and to Whitey. Left the yurt. Started walking along the lake:
Two truck drivers stopped and gave me tomatoes:
Made a video of myself saying things:
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But most of this blabla wasn’t even the truth.
What I actually wanted to say was:
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There I was, huffing and puffing and screaming and laughing under the blue sky.
The truck drivers were looking at me funny.
I passed a wharf:
Looked at fish but didn’t eat any:
Stopped in front of a sight that looked almost unreal:
Even better on video:
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I didn’t have time to sit down. A travel group appeared. The bus driver took a picture of me:
Then we took another picture, this time all of us together:
When they were gone, I pulled the Caboose next to the road and filmed us walking, mainly because I liked the sound of the gravel:
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Kazakh herders were riding their horses in the distance:
Birds were there:
And more and more horses:
…and don’t forget about the cows:
One time I saw a traveler with a large backpack sitting next to the lake. I could only see him from the distance, and he looked like he was taking a rest from a very long journey:
I guess we were all looking for a place to rest.
And what better place than this?
…
I eventually came to an area that was crowded with tourists and people selling things to them:
That’s where I ran into Chris and his friend, two bikers from the States. They were riding with Kaisar and his friend, two Uyghur students who were riding their bikes from Beijing to Yining 伊宁, a place about 100 km West of here:
We had noodles.
When we parted, we were at the entrance of a tunnel:
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I didn’t want to walk into it. I wasn’t ready yet. I knew it would lead me through darkness and more tunnels, and eventually to a decline of about 50 kilometers, during which I would descend from more than 2000m to 500m. I just wasn’t ready for all that.
We said good-bye, and I started walking up the hills next to the lake. There was a no-parking sign that fascinated me:
Or maybe it was the surroundings:
And then, somewhere deep in the hills, there was this pink hotel:
It was called Longling Villa, and it was the only facility of its kind in this area.
The staff was used to foreigners. “Germans come here all the time,” they said.
I got a room:
And then I spent the rest of the night watching The Big Bang Theory and doing my laundy:
It was perfect.
Albert Fischer
geyl
Christoph
Albert Fischer: Yeh
ralph
Longling hotel, a hotel in the middle of nowhere but still big and luxurious, that’s great! Weird things like that only happens in China.
Neil Sandage
Hotel, in the middle of nowhere? There is always an economic reason even if the basis is venture. Perhaps during the winter there are ski slopes somewhere near by?
Even those military settlement cities were economic so that China could claim those territories as part of their country because Chinese were now settled them. There really should have been another nation in this region. But there was never the economic power for herders to build their own Military in support of a government. Same reason Tibet was taken over.
Joshua Thayer
Great points Neil