day 363: 玛纳斯 (Manas) – 石河子 (Shihezi) = 19,4km

2010-09-10 on larger map

Luckily for my feet, I didn’t have much distance left to 石河子 (Shihezi), the next important destination on my long red line. My good friend 辉辉 (Huihui) lives there, so today he rode his bike over here and brought his 12-year old Taekwondo student 宗正 (Zong Zheng) along:

They were going to accompany me to the city, and I was very happy to have them with me:

When there isn’t very much to see…

..then life is much more fun if there are some other goofballs around!

I asked 宗正 to recite some Chinese poetry while the cars were rushing by:

This was while 辉辉 got into an epic picture-taking frenzy:

Later I found out that 宗正 was not only good at reciting poetry, but had also very large arsenal of high-quality middle-school jokes:

This way, we basically made it to 石河子 in a breeze:

What a moment to finally be there!

I had been looking at this place on Google Earth so many times before… whenever I was sad or bored at home, or I just had this great feeling of need for the road under my feet, I would look at the satellite pictures and imagine what this place might be like….

So close to 乌鲁木齐 (Ürümqi), the place where I had stopped in October 2008, yet so unreachable from Munich, Germany, the place where I was trying to get my university diploma, this 石河子 felt like pure magic to me.

…

Well, now after so much time, I was finally here, and everything looked very green and nice:

I learned that this city is very young, being part of a project to allocate land to troops and turn them into regular citizens after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949:

Today, there are not many traces of soldiery left though, only the occasional statue:

Anyway…

It felt so good to finally be here.

Soundtrack: Descendents – “I’m The One”

—total: 4802,8km