So after starting off on our long detour to Ordos, it started to get dark, we were soaked to the bone, and we decided to start looking for a place to stay. Cue bike problems. For some reason the bike kept stalling. I would let it rest for a minute and then it would start up again. Then fifteen or twenty minutes later it would die again. I though maybe the air filter was soaked from riding through a deep puddle earlier, but I took the cover off and it was bone dry. After messing with things for awhile I just guessed it was water in the gas. (later I would find out my gas cap sucks...) But there were no gas stations nearby so I just had to keep on riding while my bike decided to die randomly.

I didn't take notes or anything while I was going, but I think by that point were were back in shanxi, and we went to the first town we could find to get a hotel. We decided anywhere with hot water for a shower would be fine. After asking a bunch of hotels, we finally found one. (most of the hotels there had solar water heaters, so because of the rainclouds, nobody had hot water)

"are you sure you have hot water?"

"yeah definitely"

"We can take a shower and the water will be hot?"

"yup"

They seemed pretty confident, so we checked in and went upstairs. There was no hot water.

"You said there was hot water"

"we do have hot water"

"where is it?"

"its cloudy today so it didn't heat up"

After yelling at the lady who lied to our faces, she ended up bringing us three electric water kettles and some buckets, so we ended up kind-of getting a hot shower, and then we washed our mud soaked clothes and laid them to dry.


(9 of 121) by HamSandwichChina, on Flickr