September 20th
72km (155m vertical)
In today's 72km ride, we descended more than 1,000m into Kashgar. Fastest average speed of the trip - 34.4km/h! We were strongly motivated by the prospect of a hotel room and a shower after 6 nights of bush camping.
After the empty desert roads, the streets of Kashgar seem completely frantic. We came in on a 6-lane road with a 100km/h speed limit, where the outermost lanes were full of other cyclists, people on scooters, donkey carts, pedestrians, and people sitting in the road. There were several uncontrolled intersections, where cars, trucks, cyclists, and pedestrians all randomly flowed past each other, flirting with disaster. Not a place for the faint of heart.
For a communist country, capitalism is thriving here. There are shops, restaurants, malls and advertisements everywhere, including hundreds of banners and billboards for the Olympic games. (Obviously a source of much national pride, even in a city that is closer to Beirut than Beijing.)
Some camels, next to our campsite:
One last look back at the mountains before dropping into the city:
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