June 12,  Location:  Zhangye  38° 56’N 100° 28’ E, elevation 1510 metres, riding day #22. 470m climbing, 125 km today, 2904 total to date.

Redemption!   

It continued to rain all night, thank goodness for the pee bottle I had with me in the tent!   Still raining in the morning.  I left camp as soon as I could and retraced my steps back to the point I was picked up – I went about 12k, and of course seriously up hill and very rough in places.  But did it, my EFI status is still intact!  I’ve now added about 65k of extra “bonus” km to the trip.

Easy day to start with then it started to get really muddy, really muddy.  Too make things more interesting I took a fall in the middle of one mud patch, luckily it was soft, made an absolute mess of everything, but nothing hurt.

Some pics:

June 11,  Location:  Great Wall camp  38° 32’N 101° 24’ E, elevation 2180 metres, riding day #21. 1,100m climbing, 129 km today, 2779 total to date.

Very hard day.  A long slow climb. The forecast was possible light showers.  We were also warned to carry at least 2 litres of water for the afternoon.  It is difficult for me to carry both my extra (3^rd) water bottle and my rain jacket.  It has always been warm enough that a bit of rain was not a problem, so I took the water bottle.  Big mistake!  The day started off warm enough that I didn’t need a jacket, there was some light overcast.  I had a flat in the morning which cost me dearly, it put me just that little bit later…   At about 80k it stared to rain, then got cooler, then serious wind against and a long climb to about 8,800 feet.  I knew the wind would stay strong as we went past a very large wind turbine farm.  I was OK to about 120k, the top of the hill, by that time is was quite cold and I was wearing only a light shirt, and to make things more interesting we were on a back road that was very rough, lots of gravel bits etc.,  At about 125k my hands were starting to get really cold and I was starting to have trouble shifting and breaking.  At 129k I met up with about 5 of the group, two had taken bad falls (one possible collar bone fracture), one guy was uncontrollably shivering, another was simply very cold.  They had called for the support truck which arrived just as I did.  I was rather annoyed with myself to say the least, for not taking my rain jacket.  Having stopped for just a couple of minutes I started seriously shivering, so made the obvious call of joining in the van.

Obviously several lessons from the day.

I’m writing this note whilst in my tent, now happy and warm and having had dinner.  Still raining hard.

Hopefully the rain stops by morning because this is a really fascinating spot.  The Great Wall is merely rubble at this point and we are camped on the North Side.   My understanding is that around places like Beijing, a lot of work has gone into restoring the Wall.

A few pics:

Yes, we are a bit of a novelty - I've never had my picture taken so many times.

Yup, feet.

And yes chicken heads: