Shanshan – Day 61

We were both quite hung over the next day, baijiu being what it is to the drinker's stomach.

We had a slow breakfast with Snow Fox and his family as we all got ready to go to the wedding.



The wedding was more similar to a western wedding than I had expected, with a wedding march down the aisle, and a pronouncement of man and wife etc. They weren’t married by a priest though and, as a custom, all of the important friends and family gave the couple red envelopes of money (红包) as wedding gifts.



For the second time in two days, we were drinking baijiu again. As the only foreigner there, I was asked to drink with all of the people at the table at least once, and as the bride and groom made their way around the tables to drink with the guests, I was asked to chuck back two glasses for the health and good fortune of their marriage. Lulu was smarter than I, and somehow managed to avoid drinking a drop.

Everyone got well and truly plastered. I was sitting next to the manager of the Kumtagh desert tourist centre and got along well with him until he got so drunk and paranoid that wanted to take me to the police station to register as a foreigner, which is apparently what I need to do each time I stay in a town according to the letter of the law (who the hell does that? Seriously!). Thankfully Snow Fox talked him out of it. That would have been a real pain in the butt.



We all went back for a mid afternoon siesta for a couple of hours. The weather had been noticeably warmer in the past couple of weeks and we knew it would only get hotter. Just before dinner time, a couple of guys from the local motorcycle club turned up after seeing Lulu’s posts on a Xinjiang motorcycle forum. They had some seriously nice bikes and I wondered what I would be like to drive a VMAX around China. I rode to dinner on the back of a BMW1200GS. It was a monster compared to my little bike. I felt like adventure touring in China on that thing would be like trying to drive a two-wheeled tank. If I could keep it up straight I could probably crush Lulu's bike (I would never crush my bike) flat with it, monster-truck style.



It was another action-packed day, courtesy of the hospitality of the kind people from Shanshan. Special thanks to my liver for putting up with the abuse.