We crossed into China with a voracious appetite. It was not the hunger as much as the necessity we had to eat well, to eat delicious food and nothing better than being back in China to accomplish this. You pay the price though, of exchanging a fairy tale dream land for being back at the factory of the planet and the return to it feels like the most brutal punch back to the crude reality. It was inevitable since sooner or later we would have to leave the tale anyway.
The poisoned earth
Already in the final stage of our crossing of the desert, on the way to Zamyn-Udd one could already the change in the horizon. Ahead of us, we were able to see the Chinese horizon and what used to be an immaculate blue sky vanished into a murky grey. Once in China, the remaining 300 km of Gobi desert were devoid of any attractive whatsoever. A flat terrain, infinite, dull, full of huge high voltage power lines towers, a massive increase in the traffic which was loud, fast and annoying and now with the added hindrance of a very strong headwind that was incredibly hard to tolerate. However, the worst would come in the final 300 km before Beijing riding across the scary province of Hebei 河北.
The incredibly high price that China has to pay for insisting in keeping a level of growth that is simply unsustainable, unsustainble for them and unsustainable for the whole planet, is nothing but outrageous.
