Soon enough the road left the mountains and the temperature went back to soaring hot. I was considering whether to stay a night in Yili or not... I heard that Yili has a strict policy when it comes to foreigners only allowing them to stay in the most expensive hotels starting out at 300 yuan per night. Not sure if this policy comes from the instability in the region and therefore is intended to keep us foreigners safe from rioting Uyghurs, or if this policy comes from the need to milk us foreigners for every cent we got... As I'm a cheap dutchman I didn't want to pay 300 per night. However, I was a bit worried about the oil in my engine, I'd better play it safe and replace it... And a shower would be nice as well... Let's see if I can bargain down the price a bit, so I decided to go into Yili to have a try...

The first hotel with rooms I found was very welcoming, the standard price was indeed 300, but they went down to 238, being extra nice, hoping I would come back in the future and bring all my foreign friends... Well fine, let's have that shower... The room was pretty good, came with a PC that came in handy...
After locating a possible street with motorcycle shops in google maps I went and changed the oil, which was blacker than black... Good move, I would have hated being 700km away from home with an engine that had been destroyed...

Well, I'm in Yili, a pretty old city with a large Uyghur population, time for some Kebabs and beers... Walking around, trying to find any place where people were sitting outside, having Kaorou, and enjoying the nice summer evening, I found nothing... Maybe I'm in the wrong side of town, but in Shihezi people enjoy their food outside all over the city, strange... I stopped a taxi and asked him to take me to a place where I can just sit outside, have a Kebab and a beer. Shockingly he told me that because of the fear for riots all outside barbecue places in the city had temporarily closed. Well... That sucks... In the end he brought me to one of the very Han suburbs and over there I could have my meat & beer...

Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up, my stomach rumbling, oh oh... that doesn't promise a lot of good... F@#k me, it took me so long to find that barbecue place, and for my efforts I just got food poisoning... In fact, later I found out that my American friends also both got food poisoning, so it was in fact the sheep lung we had in that yurt the day before yesterday... Food poisoning, I'm guessing it was salmonella, can take one or two days before it kicks in... And kicking in it did...

So I lost a day, couldn't eat anything without throwing up, and squirting brown water like a sewage pipe during a flood... Thank god I made the decision earlier to stay in a good hotel, rather than in my tent on some hill... At about seven in the evening I decided to try and resist the urge to go to the toilet forcing my bowels to absorb the water I was drinking... This seemed to work, the next day I stayed in the hotel as long as I could and at 2 o'clock I was back on the motorcycle, on my way south to Zhaosu...