TravellingStrom

Mayan Prophecy Countdown

As you may or may not know my Drift helmet camera died a short while back. I have been in the process of contacting the company about a replacement under warranty, well they said that there should be no problems about sending a new one to Ulan Batar, the capital of Mongolia, but I would have to pay for shipping. I then attempted to pack the camera away this morning and it fell and landed on the nose cone, bummer!!!

It is only the protective lens and as it does not work, well who cares I guess. It will probably have to be sent back anyway, but there is no need to mention it right now 😉 We headed off around 8.30 but at our own pace, we had a destination and hotel name to arrive at that afternoon, so I used the extra time and cable internet to get a post out before leaving. The ride to the next town was 400km with the usual suicide truck drivers who pass without caring about what is coming, this chap kept on coming and I moved into the dirt so I would not be a bonnet ornament!!!

I had heard on the news back when I was in Oz that China was putting a new power station on-line every week, I had seen a few and today I saw one under construction, in the middle of nowhere, so I can surely believe what I have read and heard.

The ride was smooth, except for the times I had to swerve to miss head ons and the scenery was desert, but I did see the obligatory ‘watch out for deer’ signs, even though I never saw any deer

Around 11.30 it was fuel up time and here in this small servo we had no choice but to use the damm watering cans, this took forever, especially with about 20 local bikes in the mix as well!! But is gave me a chance to eat some instant noodles for lunch and to check out the local bikes, most had rip off names and were obviously made up, check out the Yamasaki with a Honda seat cover 🙂

This was the moment that Lynn made the decision to turn back. Her dad was real crook and had suffered a heart attack back in Oz, so David and Benny took her back to the next closest town where she would catch a bus back to Urumqi, then Benny would organise some flights back to home, sad news. We continued on as we had no choice in the matter. One of the other bad things about the Chinese trucks is their load carrying and security, basically there is none. They will fill the trucks to the max, throw a tarp over and that is it. I passed this truck and the first thing I thought was to get the heck away from the back of it, it is an accident waiting to happen. That rock on top was just balanced and rocking back and forth, I pity the poor driver coming the other way when that truck hits a pot hole and it comes in through his windscreen!!!!

As we got closer to the border area we started to find some winding roads, then some roadworks and detours, which made a change from all the straight roads 🙂

As we got closer to our destination town we passed more traffic hazards, cows and camels on the roads, even in the middle of the towns!

After booking into the motel we had time to ourselves, which I spent on the net as it may be the last time I would get any for a while. That evening we had a dinner of noodles again, but it was all good, it tasted nice although as it turned out we could not eat and drink beer in this place, so no beer photo sorry 😉

We had been told by Benny that tomorrow it was no point arriving at the border until around 11am as the customs people would not be able to check our bikes out until about then. This was annoying as most of prefer to get to the border as early as possible. But, that is the way of things here, so we had a group breakfast organised for 8am and an early night. It was probably good that I had no beer as I was on antibiotics to try and counter the gut rot I have, I have basically had the trots since I entered Russia over a month and a half ago. I had also been taking some Chinese preventive herbal medicine and I still had a few dry up pills left, but it was becoming annoying. Apparently beer is a food for the gut bug, so by going beerless, it may help things along, I bloody hope so anyway, talk about doing the hard yards!!!

Cheers from Quinghe, china
TravellingStrom