3
Left 8.40 after enjoying a reasonable Chinese style buffet breakfast at the sanbao. The whole day was spent on the gaosu and was mind numbingly boring especially when combined with yesterday’s straight desert roads. There were yet more heavily armed police stops but everyone was their usual polite friendly selves and I wasn’t held up much. There were more filthy teapots and a station who’d mislaid theirs so my jerrycan was put to more good use. At one point, in a rare area of twisties, I’d flown past some heavily laden bikers who then caught me up at a petrol station where I was playing a take a sly photo game with the pump girls. They were riding from Beijing through Tibet, Xinjiang then back to Beijing. Pretty impressive on taxi bikes!
Some gaosu tolls didn’t seem to bat an eyelid at my passing, others went mental! One woman came running out of her booth “motuoche bu nan shan gaosu…..” but I was too fast for her! Apart from those brief moments of excitement I entertained myself by running the tank completely dry – 365 kms if anyone’s interested.

I arrived back at the yingang shop in Urumqi in the early evening and there were yet more police stopping and confiscating illegal bikes right outside the shop! They gave me some long hard looks but didn’t actually come over. Most of the locals were just ignoring their pleas to stop and would dodge past them…the whole road was laughing and one of the coppers took a swipe at a guy in frustration! I think I had contact with some form of the police everyday which has never happened anywhere in China but is very understandable considering the recent troubles in that area. The police were on the whole charming and although it’s always shocking for us Brits to see firearms I got pretty used to it by the end.