Quote Originally Posted by bigdamo View Post
Great RR and story looking forward to the Xinjiang part.

On a side note you mentioned "In one day we made it 500 kms from Aksu to Kashgar, and we had to take time to stop and shelter from a short-but-intense mid-afternoon hail-squall."

To give another perspective Xinjiang roads are either really good or really bad and it can change overnight.I can drive from my home town to Urumqi in about one and half hours on the toll road/highway if I take the main back road it is a good three hours if I take the scenic back road(all dirt road) along the base of the Tian shans it's a good five hours.Admittedly that's stopping and checking things out along the way.
Cheers BigD,

We took a little longer than 3 hours to do the Urumqi - Shihezi main road. The road crews had torn it all up and there was a detour posted in Chinese to the 快速 (kuaisu). I wasn't sure whether we could go by that route without risking a fine so we kept going on what was left of the national road.

We were told a couple of times that motorcycles can go on the expressways in Xinjiang, and we even found ourselves on one on the way to Urumqi. Do you know if this is true?