Day 57
Day 57
Today is a BIG DAY, finally we did it!!!! It seemed impossible after the accident, but WE DID IT!!!!!!! Today we will cross the border between Kirgistan and China!
Gerry and Tony will drive me to the border, but then, I should ride with Tià (bureaucratic things). Yesterday was the first day that I could use the boot (yasssss!), but today the ankle is hurting, so it’s better if I rest as much as I can.
Ready for the Rock’n roll…
Sary-Tash:
The way to the border is incredibly beautiful… this road… it’s heaven in earth!
We have some minor issues at the Kirgis border, so we spend there a bit more time than expected. We arrive to the Chinese border around midday, if you want an advice, don’t do that! We have been waiting to someone to come more than 2 hours under the sun (that’s a great lunch break!). At least the landscape is nice…
Here starts the process to enter to China. It’s incredibly tedious and slow; they check our luggagge more than once, we have to pass through two or three X-Ray machines, they control our corporal temperature with a therm-cam, they make an X-Ray of the motorbike, we have to pass a facial recognition machine, and one little last thing… they take our phones for a while. When we get them back they have a brand new app installed! That’s insane! I don’t know how many hours do we spend there.
After that, we have to go to customs (around 30 km away), so we drive there. However, it’s too late to finish the process… The officials are gone!!! At least, after more passport’s checkpoints and facial-recognition machines we get our stamp in the passport. Welcome to China! The only little problem is that the vehicles are not clear yet, so tomorrow the drivers/riders should come back and continue with the process.
Driving to the Chinese customs…
At this point we are crazy desperate (and starving). We haven’t eaten anything during the whole day (just breakfast early in the morning). It’s around 21:00, and Kashgar is at least one hour away! Now a bit more fun… As we cannot move the vehicles, we are going to Kashgar with a bus! That’s just crazy. We are allowed to take some things from our luggage with us, but not everything. Tomorrow it’ll be checked again.
Finally we can rest a bit in the bus… or that’s what we thought, because every few kilometers we have to stop, get off the bs, show our passports and give our phone number at the check-points.
We just want to eat something and rest when we reach Kashgar. Luckily we find a fast food restaurant opened (it’s really late and everything it’s closed) and we can eat some noodles. They are spicy, but I don’t care, I’m starving!!!
