Oct (2) - notes & photos - Hami & desert

Hami - Grapes and cotton - field after field and truckload after truckload - many brick factories, small family style. Cylindrical solar powered water heaters on all the roofs. Satellite dishes on mudbrick single story houses. Very Uyghur (muslim mongolian tribal peoples) area. Men and women do some similar work! :~)

fresh grapes for sale at roadside truck stop - very refreshing after a thorough washing

an huge quantity of cotton - this is only one of many central dump points - lots of small 3 wheel truck super loaded with cotton on their way here.

fresh dates - taste like sweet cellulose - not that great

Uyghur men can be real men and embroider in public at the same time!

Camping out in the desert - this is our luxury feast - great

 

Bonfire and black sky, star gazing - saw no satellites in about 1 hr of gazing - thought that was strange.

 

Morning wake up sight in the Gobi desert - no scorpions in my shoes, thank goodness.

 

this is a dry riverbed - dry as a virtual bone! but you can see from the dune undercutting that there is REAL water here sometimes - I never found out when or from where.

Flower pattern sign of gas/oil investigations. a huge truck with a big vibration paddle stop every so often to take readings of vibration resistance patterns

It's mine - all mine! I am part of the Gobi Desert and now it is a part of me! These are my really nice traveling companions

 

FYI - the people way out in the desert had been standing next to me 10 minutes ago. I just wanted to get a sense of how fast living things traveled, as I imagined what it was like for the camel caravans to traverse this dry and desolate area.

 

Apparently the river can be so powerful that the RR thought it wise to build this ginormously wide bridge to span the floods. The road too is elevated on a long birm with many culverts - all of which have specifically built funnel shaped formations to guide the water and on the other sie of the road, signs of lots of water flow.

The mountains deteriorate rapidly and inexorably into sand, so fast that it looks like a sort of mist at the foot of the slopes. It was very strange country.










 

And then of course the first signs of a massive amount of trucking that was ALL headed west. New roads, all new infrastructure, huge industrial growth... what could go wrong?





















































 

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