I have started this blog beside the road at 10.00am. We have been here since 8.00am with the most unlikely car of the group crippled.
Rescue Reg from the past 2 days was in need of help. Last night he filled his Landcruiser what he thought was diesel – but as he left the hotel this morning his car was smoking badly and had no power. We stopped 12k out of town and undid the fuel filter and sure enough, he had filled it with petrol!!!! Reg swears black and blue that he sniffed the hose before filling!!! 🙂 We have been here 2 hours working on getting the petrol out the tank. While we are doing this Garry has been back to town with jerry cans to get Diesel. We should be going by about 11.00am is our estimate to complete the job and give Rescue Reg a rescue!
Once we get this sorted we have 350 ks to drive so we most likely will be dark tonight when we get tucked up.
We are now at Gonghe – our over night stop. The drive ended up a lot better then had planned and we arrived at 5.15pm. So all is great. Tonight’s Hotel is back down at 2600 metres so it’s a lot easer doing everything. Last night’s hotel was at 4200 metres and we had a room on the 4th floor. I needed more stops carting my luggage up to the room than I needed when I walked up the 40 storey fire escape in the hotel in Bangkok a few weeks ago!!
The 360k drive today continued beside the freeway construction site of yesterday. I’m still blown away by the scale of this project and working on at least a 600k freeway project and that probably isn’t the only one in China. Maurie and I had been wondering how all the new bridge girders were placed as we had seen no cranes big enough to do the job. Today we found out as we drove along they were just finishing putting girders on a bridge so we pulled up and walked over to the bridge and onto it to check out the Cantilever crane. If we had done that in OZ someone would have kicked us off the site or had us arrested. Whenever we feel we have time we get out and check out the machines and how they do stuff in China.
The drop in elevation has also seen a marked increase in temperature over the previous couple of days. As we have moved further north the country side has got a lot dryer with the river in this town just a trickle.
Just south of this town we passed the biggest area of solar panels I have ever seen and at guess it would be greater then 3000 acres. We also saw our first sand dunes in the same area.
