day 191: 兰州 (Lanzhou) – 西固 (xigu) = 19,7km

Walking didn’t go so bad today.

One of the first things I saw once I turned into a small street:

Person on the left working on a power line, person on the right gently floating along in a German luxury car. I guess both people on this picture must be kind of used to pulling strings.

I had lunch in a tiny place where the owner was a tattoo-artist:

He said most of his tattoos didn’t have any deeper meaning: “I just like them for what they are.”

Somehow, this explanation really satisfied me, simple as it was.

…

There were more posters about the donation program (May 16th 2008) along the way:

Well, nothing else really happened today.

It rained a couple of times, and I mainly just kept walking on one long stretch of fresh asphalt, always heading west:

The Yellow River (黄河) was there too, softly gurgling his way down to the plains in the east:

And even though I didn’t really want to, but I still had to cross the river one more time, simply because the road on the north side just stopped at some point:

When I arrived in 西固 (xigu), which is actually still part of the giant city of 兰州 (Lanzhou), some weird sort of 20-minute-rainstorm decided to drop in on the place and blow everything around:

I was in a restaurant having a very good and very hot serving of 饺子 (dumplings) while the rainstorm was outside huffing and puffing and pouring rain sideways.

When I stepped out the door again, everything had cleared up though, as if nothing had ever happened.

I thought this was just weird, and so I decided I didn’t want to walk anymore today.

Only one problem: there didn’t seem to be any hotels in the area.

Then suddenly, two youngsters showed up and said they’d help me find a place to stay nearby.

The place the kids had in mind really was a guesthouse indeed, the only problem: it was located on the premises of a power-plant! Promptly and as to be expected, a very nervous security guard showed up and started asking questions and checking my papers.

Oddly enough, apparently there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with my staying there, so I was allowed to check into a nice room on the 5th floor overlooking parts of the plant:

…here I am now, ten minutes to midnight, next to the towers and the pipes and the loading docks for the coal-trains, and I have left the window open just a little bit, so I can hear all the nice noise outside.

The humming, the hissing, the wailing, the rattling, the sounds of engines running and the obscure notion of very large things that are in constant motion.

I like it very much.

Soundtrack: 王玉珍 (Wang Yuzhen) – “洪湖水浪打浪 (Wave Over Wave In Honghu Lake)”

—total: 2317,4km