day 256: 玉门 (yumen) – 疏勒河 (shulehe) = 30,9km

We tied the caboose and the cucumber together and put our straw hats on:

Then we got on our way:

Robozwerg was riding, I was walking along.

The whole cucumber-caboose construction wasn’t as easy as we had figured, but we managed to keep it moving:

Somehow, we were on a very green and very winding road:

It didn’t feel like walking through the Gobi desert at all:

Once there was this lady who told us to walk in a certain direction. You can see on the map we followed the road for about 30 minutes until we finally realized that we were going the wrong way:

It was a dead-end street, so we had to turn back.

Grinding our teeth.

…

The rest of the way went relatively easy.

We passed some weird looking plants:

There was the occasional shepherd with his flock:

And sometimes the road even looked a bit like home:

Then there were clouds:

And the sky turned into all kinds of weird colors:

We found shelter at a hospital just before the clouds opened up and released their tears upon the land:

Then we got on our way again…

…until late at night…

…when everything was already asleep, and the little village of 疏勒河 finally appeared in the distance:

All in all, today was a fair first walking day. There had been some collateral damage (several cable ties had gone MIA in our futile efforts to macgyver a steady connection between the caboose and the cucumber), and we were tired as hell.

But besides that, two beds to lay down on and a hot meal made for a good ending of our day.

Robozwerg says:

“Fact is: things are very often not as easy as you would imagine. Watching MacGyver gave us the impression that constructing a Cucumber-Caboose-thing that works for the rest of the trip wouldn’t be a problem.

But we are definitely no real macs.

Sometimes the caboose just fell off.

Or turning right or left just didn’t work because our vehicle wouldn’t follow.

Or the caboose kept colliding with the wheels of the cucumber.

But I can assure you:

no matter what, five wheels are better than no wheel in the Gobi desert!”

Soundtrack: Gipsy Kings – “Bamboleo”

—total: 3317,1km