I am told that the temperature reached -27°C last night. Thank God we weren’t camping. We make a start to our journey, but either it is still under -20°C or we have been sold the wrong diesel, because the diesel is frozen in the pipes. We make our way back to the town we stayed at last night to get more diesel to help unfreeze the diesel already in the tank.
The conditions we are experience seem to be getting to everyone, including Lu, the tour leader. She has found some rubbish in the toilet cupboard, which we are told we are not allowed to use anyway. She suggests that all thirty of us are going to be cleaning the truck tonight. Considering it’s not even very comfortable sitting in the truck with 30 people, this would be defying the laws of physics.
We get going at about 11a.m., but the truck is tortuously cold all day. We decide that we can skip lunch to hasten our progress, but we have a tyre blow out late in the afternoon. We pull over in a geographically interesting spot, where there's a small cliff / peak for the Meg, Dave, Joost and Brian to climb. Surprisingly Brian is first up, but he does live in Colorado.
It takes a couple of hours to get the tyre changed, but we get to a hotel at Golmud at about nine at night. This time Lu tells us that UK to Oz are paying. I shout out ‘no, we want to pay!’, but my sarcasm is not particularly appreciated by anyone. The hotel rooms are warm, which is the most important thing, and there’s a bath in the, um, bathroom. On the ground floor of the hotel there’s a hospital, which is becoming a theme or sorts.
As for the truck clean, she says that we will do it the next day as it is too late in the evening. In the event, the two or three people whose turn it is on the rota get it done anyway. She later leaves her customary note regarding our departure the next day by the reception and it says nothing about the truck clean, so I guess the boys and girls have been let off by sir.
The crossing into China proper is not marked by a border crossing as such, but we have had to make various checkpoint stops all through our time in Tibet, with all of us lining up in the order that we are listed on our group visa for doing passport checks.
For dinner, Kevin had suggested that we get a taxi to the town centre, but we are not confident that a taxi driver here would understand the words ‘town centre’, so Laurie and I go for a random walk to find a restaurant. We look for a while to try to find one that has a menu in English, or at least a picture menu. Having failed in this, we go in somewhere we can see them cooking. We go in and I point at something that looks like a chicken kebab and we sit down in a booth. After a few minutes a waiter comes to us and we it seems clear that we haven’t ordered as far as he is concerned. We decide the only thing to do is to go for pot luck, so we point out two lines on the menu and wait with both hope and fear.
The first thing that gets delivered to us looks like noodles, but after tasting it we decide it is stringy mushrooms and it is served fridge cold. The second dish is squid. I don’t normally like squid, but it was so spicy that it covered up the squid taste. Overall, we feel have been lucky.
I ask for some tea to go with the hot water that is always served by pointing at the cup. I get delivered what I think is sugar, but turns out to be salt.
On the way back to the hotel, we stop at a shop to buy some packaged food as we are supposed to be bush camping for the following three nights. Strangely, we can get a noodle dish in a restaurant for as little as 5 Yuan (50p / 75c), but end up paying 50 Yuan for a meal’s worth of yak jerky, sausage and a chocolate bar.
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