Tag Archives: walk🚶🏻

My dear readers, my dear friends. This is going to be the last one: 11,9km. For now. — My friend Uncle Shen (fire in the hole) is here, taking good care of me. He guided me through the city to find a good place to stay. All I had to do was keep walking, and […]

Again, I don’t know what to say. … … … … … … … I am here. It doesn’t feel right.

I’ve lost something out there. Somewhere along the way – I’m not exactly sure where – I’ve lost something very valuable. And I’m not even sure what it is. So much road. So many hot summer days and cold winter nights. So many faces. So many trees and flowers, so many mountains and so much […]

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Last night I had prayed and asked Him to please take His mighty winds out of this valley. Otherwise, there would be no way for me to get through here. And I had to get through. Today it seemed like my prayers had been answered: Okay, every once in a while He would play a […]

At first the police wouldn’t let me go: Too dangerous, they said. Then I told them about my situation and they allowed me to pass. So there I was in another wind gap (blown away): By loading the map, you agree to Google’s privacy policy.Learn more Load map Always unblock Google Maps Only this time […]

I had no idea that today was going to be my last happy day for a while. … I walked through the little village… …to the Ancient Graveyard of Astana 阿斯塔纳古墓: Nothing much to see here, just a few graves from a bunch of centuries back, some with murals, others complete with mummified corpses in […]

I was in my room just getting ready to brush my teeth when Mike from England busted in the door: “Dude, I am so happy to see you!” he exclaimed and sat down with me to relieve his heart of some stuff that had troubled him during the last couple of days. The poor dude […]

I stacked up on hot nang before I left: Then it was a long hot walk through the desert, with houses to dry grapes and make raisins left and right: Water means vegetation out here: …as well as the lack thereof: The whole region is inhabited mainly by Uyghurs, who build some picturesque houses of […]

It’s always hard to leave a good place, knowing that there is only that much more walking through the nothingness ahead: I had picked the hotel I was staying at simply because of its name – Journey To The West Hotel 西游酒店, and it had definitely been the right choice. Everyone was so friendly to […]

There are oilfields here in Shanshan: Guess who’s drilling? Right, the ladies and gentlemen from Tuha Oil City (crude oil). We didn’t get to know any of them though, so we weren’t able to find out what it feels like to drive 300 kilometers to work. … Vincent from Taiwan 台湾 was riding his bike […]

The Yu family I was staying with was very friendly, and they wouldn’t let me go unless I had breakfast with them: They told me that the largest stretches of Gobi desert now were behind me, and that I could look forward to walking through more populated areas from now on. The end of the […]

The night had been good. No filth, no noise. All I could hear was the wind blowing outside, which made for a very cozy feeling in my little room. …but still, I really didn’t feel like walking anymore, so today it was all about the road signs: …another 100km through those empty spaces… Sometimes I […]

Hongshankou – a crappy little place full of bad food, dirty beds and cheap hookers: So happy to leave that place! There was another stretch of nice fresh highway I found right after I started walking though, and that really cheered me up: Here’s part of my diet during these days: Nang bread and cucumber. […]

When I got up and looked out of the door, the other guys were preparing to go to work, and the wind had come: …the wind that everybody had been talking about. You see, it’s what they call a wind gap 风口 – the area between two mountain ranges where the winds have a natural […]

Oh, had I only known about my friend Uncle Shen’s snoring habits before! Last night the man fell asleep right away, and then he went at it like a gang of chainsaws in the virgin forest, making it virtually impossible for me to get any sleep at all. When I got up I felt like […]

I got back on the long red line going west today: There was some pretty crappy weather out there – strong winds and rainfall – and the distance to the next town seemed somewhat overwhelming, but I had Uncle Shen with me, who was slowly riding his bike along… …so at least it didn’t get […]

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: […]