The days are getting shorter and harder, especially to get out of bed and get on the road.
I pack some lunch and I head West to the Petrified tree park. It’s about 15km through a few small villages with a slight tailwind. When I arrive at the park, there is a massive empty parking lot, trees made out of fiberglass, and another large structure for buying tickets. I dislike buying tickets before I know what I’m getting into and I believe it’s closed. Eat my lunch behind a faux tree and look at the map through the park. It looks pretty massive but it still all looks the same to the horizon. I debate about taking a trail around the ticket booth and into the park, maybe camp. It’s cold and windy, I head back towards town, to continue West through the desert.
A man on a motorcycle stops to chat with me, the basic questions. We part with smiles, “Bye Bye”s, and “man man zou”.
Headwind.
I pass along the outskirts of town and look down the road West. Long, straight, nothing…but the maps seems to show there will be something along the way.
Empty coal trucks come from behind me, taking tracks into the desert. Loaded coal trucks coming towards me, taking tracks from the desert.
The Tianshan mountains are my view to the West, on my left. I can see it running all along the way.
Later on I can see work trucks plowing sand up into peaks towards the Mongolian border. I see the attempts at preventing desertification with the planting of trees in a grid like patterns.
It’s a bit warmer out here, but the head wind sucks. I stop to set up camp around 6, far enough from the road and out of view of a watch tower. What am I going to do with all this time, waiting for sunrise.
Cook, read, sleep, wake, sleep, wake, I’m really thirsty…I’m running out of water and I hope to have a little to get me to a destination tomorrow. At one point, I wake and grab for a bottle to drink…luckily, half asleep, I realize its a bottle filled with instant oatmeal. That would of done me real well for quenching the thirst.
I stayed warm and awoke before sunrise. Waiting for the tent to dry and brushing off ice and snow.