Chapter 203

Distance covered: 325 km (total 5846 km)

The wind was ridiculous and it seemed like our tent was about to collapse, but it held on. Then in the morning we got awakened by the baaing of a whole herd of sheep passing by, I opened the flap and there were at least a hundreds of them, accompanied by a stick-wielding man and a curious German shepherd who came to our door and stared through the mosquito netting.

We packed up, and then I decided to run to the tourist viewpoint midway on the long bridge, which corresponds to exactly 4 km according to Baidu Maps. The dog came along, trotting with his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, and the girlfriend drove there. By the time I made it, she had already set up a little picnic spot and was about to cook breakfast. That 4 km felt a bit hard, I used to run 10 or 12 km with ease back when I prepared for a marathon. I’ll keep running and increasing the distance progressively.

We kept going west, and after two hours, reached Tongguan. We saw a path going up a steep cliff, with zigzagging stairs, and decided on a whim to climb it, after parking on a dirt track perpendicular to the main road. From there, we had an impressive view of Tongguan’s old town, still under construction. Yeah, you read correctly, and it’s exactly as retarded as you think. A preserved Ming Dynasty town, built from 2019 to 2022. We could drive in (paying the minimum parking fee of 10 yuan) and it was even more bizarre, because even though there were no open shops, there was a tiny amount of people going around by scooter.

We circled around the late Xi Dynasty clock tower without getting out of the vehicle, and then drove a few kilometers to the actual city of Tongguan, which claims to have invented the roujiamo, a kind of taco made from a thick chewy and crunchy flat bread stuffed with shredded meat and onions. Bold! They better deliver, then. We randomly chose a restaurant and they did deliver masterfully. All around us were fucknuggets watching shitty videos on their phones, at some point it came from five or six directions. But I’m becoming redundant now, I think the horse has been beaten to death: Chinese people are nice and all but they cause a tremendous amount of noise pollution. What can a guy do?

We drove two more hours on the highway, with breathtaking views of the mountains. In fact most of the time we were in the mountains, coming in and out of tunnels surrounded by steep green slopes. Then we got to Shangluo, the final destination for this chapter of our trip. Tomorrow, the in-laws will drive their Subaru here and we’ll join forces for the long road to Xinjiang. Shangluo is nestled in the mountains and has some old (actually old!) buildings that look cool from afar, we got a hotel room and relaxed a bit. We did laundry, put our refrigerated stuff in a store that was kind enough to offer us fridge and freezer space, and early in the evening we went to take a walk and eat. Dinner sucked shit, everything was too oily (even by Chinese standards), overly seasoned and the barbecued pork was more like barbecued rat, hey you can’t win them all. We walked a bit more, then we got back to the hotel and I watched a few videos on YouTube, downloaded a few podcasts for the road ahead and bought some books for my Kindle.