Category: PENNY TO HELSINKI

Today was a fairly easy 500k’s on a mixture of good roads and expressway from Hotan to Kashgar through a mixture of Desert and Oasis.

Ever since we have been following the edge of the desert we have been crossing both rivers and irrigation channels with mind-boggling amounts of water flowing down at incredible rates. Some of this water is used for the intensive farming we have driven past in the last 2 days we have driven. This is the end of the growing season with all crops getting harvested as winter approaches, not much water being used for irrigation at the moment I guess it’s flowing out in to the desert to either evaporate or soak in and help replenish the water table.

One of the main crops today after Walnuts was Cotton. This is grown in the usual Central Asian way of fairly poorly then all hand harvested.

On our arrival in Kashgar we checked in to our home for the next 3 nights.In this hotel we have seen more European tourist in one night then we nave seen since entering China 20 days ago.

After a cool drink we checked our gearbox repairs from yesterday as well as finishing the service and check the was interrupted by the gearbox problem yesterday. I’m very happy to report that at this point in time all is well with Penny.

The day was finished of with Reg, Mitchell and I walking the streets and found a food market for some chicken legs, fish, and little dumpling things topped of with cool Watermelon for desert.

The end of dinner saw me retiring back to my room to henpeck out todays blog before bed tonight.

I must start this blog with a quick explanation. From here on in you will find some of the spelling incorrect and not all the coma’s and full stops will be were they belong. I have always sent my posts back to Julie my great wife for a quick grammar fix. Today she has left Australia to go to Tonga to swim with the Whales for a couple of weeks and no internet.

Yesterday morning the first day of our 2 day layover we all visited a silk co-operative place to see the old fashion way of making silk including getting the silk off the cocoon’s. They also made hand wove garment for sale. The ride out in the taxi was an experience in its own right as our taxi dropped us at the wrong place to start with but luckily he waited till he was sure of the drop off. All was good in the end.

The second stop was at the hand knotted wool carpet Co-operative. The biggest carpet making place that I’ve seen.  The carpets were up to 5 metres wide and five people working on the carpet and about 20 carpets under construction.

The afternoon was spent looking at shops and banking duties before we departed for a drive too the north into the vast expanse of sand hills forming the Taklimakan Desert. The return too town was just before the peak hour traffic rush that we experienced entering town the previous afternoon.

That night most of went too the street food market we had discovered on the way home from a restaurant dinner the previous night. The food choices were many and varied including quite a few dishes that no one wanted to try. Some of us found such great food that we returned for more tonight only to find that not all of last nights stalls had come back tonight. Not to worry we didn’t come home hungry.

Todays plan was that Maurie and I where going to meet at Penny at 7.30am and fix the flat tyre from the other day and give Penny a complete check over. As we checked the gearbox I discovered that 2 gears on the countershaft and become lose and started too move on the keyway. After discussion it was decide that it was a lot easier too take the gearbox out and fix it in a big town then the side of the road in the desert. The removal of the box with Mitchell’s help only took just over a hour. It was then off around town with Mitchel, Maurie, Alim and me with my IPad with picture’s of a lathe and a mill too search out a workshop to help get it sorted.  We eventually found a workshop and we have been able to cobble things together in a manner that Maurie and I believe will most likely get us to Helsinki.

Maurie’s background is that he owns a large workshop in Mackey Queensland looking after very large mining gear and has a wealth of knowledge and experience in repairs that I have found an invaluable help on this trip.

I must also thank the rest of the crew that had to survive the day with out the services of Alim. Also for the cold drinks and nice De-caff coffee in the afternoon as we reassembled the car in the hot afternoon sun.

As a back up I phoned my office and thanks to Ryan, by the time we had the gearbox back in the car at 7.00pm, my spare gear box from the shed was packed and collected by DHL and on its way to meet us in Uzbekistan in 9 days time.

I’ll have photos of the workshop on a later blog.

I’ll start the blog with way back in 2002 before I had any old cars. I was travelling to the UK for a turf conference in February via Hong Kong on a daytime flight with a window seat. The flight path took us over the Taklimakan Desert. Looking out the window I saw the road around the south of the desert on the slopes of the massive mountain range that runs along that edge and I said to myself that “I would love to travel that road one day”.

Well yesterday was that Day.

On the day of the flight the air was crystal clear and now back to the present; sadly yesterday was a dusty day in the desert and we still haven’t seen the mountain range out to our left as the visibility for the whole day never got much over a kilometre.

Once again at midday we decide to skip a small overnight stop to drive 867k’s and spend three nights in Hotan. Hotan is a larger more vibrant city with some very old culture, but more of that tomorrow after a city tour.

I think most of us left Rouciang in the morning expecting a desert drive for the bulk of the trip. How surprised where we when we came across so much agriculture. The farms varied from small family operations, to what was obviously large scale corporate type farms. All of this farming is being irrigated from the rivers and streams that flow from the mountains. They are still developing large areas of the desert into new faming area with machines flattening and laser levelling into small blocks ready for someone to come and farm.

All the rivers and streams just flow out into the desert and vanish into the sand. This is also feeding the underground water table that some of the farms are pumping from when not near the river or associated irrigation canals. The crops were very diverse with Chinese dates, cotton, walnuts, apples, maize, fruits trees, and melons being the main ones, but the list goes on and on with so many market gardens.

As we got closer to Hotan, we travelled through areas where the main businesses were grass matting then to another town where everyone was carving and polishing lagers stone for features in gardens and parks. I always find it fascinating how in so many cultures around the world you drive into a town and so many people are doing the same thing as the whole street; whether it be carpenters or welders making gates. I wonder who was the first and are all the others copycats?

The day ended with a 15k drive through the markets and traffic to the centre of Hotan.

Todays 360k drive saw us heading even further west to the edge of the Taklimakan Desert at Rouciang.

After a great breakfast in town, which also serves as buying lunch for most of us; we headed out to the west through two different police checkpoints. We crossed from the province of Qinghai to Xinjiang with an out-check and 20 k later we had an in-check.

The road continued in fairly good condition until every time we came across a culvert repair gang with a side road that was badly rutted and potholed by all the overloaded trucks. Most of the trucks in this area are pulling 3 metres wide trailers so you can stack more on.

At about 10.30 we all stop together and have a morning cuppa and this has been the ritual for a while now. Some of the group have thermoses as I boiled two kettles of water for the rest on my small gas stove that is always in Penny.

From the coffee break we climbed to a pass at about 3500 metres to start our descent into the desert. This road down was through the most spectacular tight gorge eventually that slowly opened up into the Lopnur Desert. By the time we were in the desert proper we had descended to under 1000 metres so Maurie and I had to pull up twice in the process removing layers of clothing after a 6^oC start, as the temperature rose into the high 20’s.

All day we had been taking bypasses of bridges that were under repair.  We had about 30ks to go before town when we came upon a long line of stopped trucks and as we drove past them we got to front of the queue and found the problem. A truck rolled over at the start of a bypass with another truck bogged beside it plus a crane starting to remove all the reinforcing of the rolled truck. This was not going to clear quickly so we drove past the road works barrier and headed to the broken bridge to see what other options we had. Just before the bridge we saw some tracks over the edge of the road and across some rough stuff through a 8 foot wide gap between a couple of trucks. I looked at the drop off the road and the gap and reckoned that Penny could handle that as she had been in worse places in Africa on that trip, so over the edge we went. We stopped at the gap for a quick photo then off to town we went for the night.  On our arrival in town we found our fellow travellers had also made the tracks over the edge as their escape plan too.

This town is a relatively newly constructed town and we have decided not to spend 2 nights as planned, so tomorrow we will move on with the idea of 2 nights in Hotan which is an old city with a lot of interesting things to look at.