A fine line between adventure and carelessness: a lesson learned

Days #41-47

Now comes the tough part. The desert is showing more presence and consequently, so is the sun. We ride in a straight flat line and I can see everything in the distance. Well almost; 45km after Tadji a massive 600m steep gorge falls in our way. It takes us a while to descend and ascend, but once on the other side, I look behind and can no longer see the gorge; only the flat terrain on the other side, as if it never existed.

A nice portion of pavement ends and we now bump our way through the dirt / sand / rocks. The road we take is one mountain range south of Qinghai Lake, China's largest lake. As a result of this rough and arid terrain, we see less people and less houses. We camp out most of the time, catching beautiful sunsets and moonrises and once waking up surrounded by goat and sheep.
150km later we reach Highway 109, headed straigh towards Golmud, and it is fast. Except for the herds of camels (that's right CAMELs!), there are little distractions to keep us off our bikes, so we are able to cover a lot of ground.

When we reach the town of Tula, we decide to take a short-cut though a smaller road in the desert for 100km. How adventurous! It starts off ok, but it slowly gets worse and worse and stubborn Pablo wants to keep going. It takes 20km of biking / walking through sand and rock to change my mind; our choice to continue would not be a wise one. It would take us much longer to cross the desert and we would surely run out of water. People had warned us about the dangers of this road, but we thought little of it; we had been previously warned of other roads and they had turned out great. So we lost a day, but at least we tried. I learned my lesson.