Pictures this time in the German version! 
And all the pictures are on my flickr-account!
Together with Marc I left Kashgar, having spent almost 4 days there, sent 2 packages, updated the homepage and met many interesting people.
Together we went on a three day ride mainly through the desert.
Whenever we came to a city after only a short time a huge crowd gathered around the bicycles and one of us always had to stay there (even though I am not as scared of rubbery as in Kyrgyzstan any more).
The people here understood our few Kyrgyz words often better than the Chinese phrases we had learnt - typical for many parts of China where minorities mix with Chinese people coming from the east of the country - and so we ordered water by saying ’sue’ instead of the Chinese ’shui’.
Unfortunately we missed the right road (G219) in Ye Cheng and went 20km into the desert where we found a movie ripe ruin to spend the night.
On the G219 Marc experienced the first attack of an animal on his tour: A gecko was overtaking first my then his bicycle and later ran away as it couldn’t find out how to ride these strange but very efficient vehicles
In Kokya, the last bigger village in front of the first 3200m pass we had dinner and bought some more food and afterwards continued 15km and spent the night beside the street behind some small soil hills. Just as it got dark some shepherds brought their sheep and goats down and we took care not to be seen as stealth was our primary way to overstand the night securely.
The next day started with a tremendous slow-down of Marc caused either by the schaschlik from last evening or the piece of pepper which he eat from the side of the road. So we didn’t reach the pass as planned but stayed about 400m below to sleep in a desiccated water basin.
We also met a Russian cyclist that day who used passing trucks as cart horses to get up the pass faster - cheater!
After the first 100 altimeters we met a German world tourer who had been on the road for 5 years. We changed a few sentences and then we finished our climb, took some nice pics of the downhill in front of brown mountains and white peaks in the distance and down we went. Marc had a puncture on the way down and was completely dust-brown as he arrived in the valley about an hour later because the same group of military trucks met and sprinkled him with street-dust three times.
The first time we took a pipe for rain water under the street for sleeping just after passing the village of Kudi in the evening (with a police check-point).
Short after the start (altitude 3000m) the paved road stopped and we got a first idea of what the next 2 weeks would be like - gravel, big stones, sometimes washboard and lungs full of dust whenever a truck or convoy passes.
The scenery was breathtaking and behind the brown mountains in the foreground we could see more and more snow covered peaks above 5000m.
And as we were on our way towards a 4988m peak we spent the night on 4500m in a tunnel again, having warm noodles with garlic for dinner - a real luxury on these altitudes, but also a luxury which you have to work hard for (carry the food from Kashgar into the mountains).
As there were only 500 altimeters left to the peak we climbed it quite early in the morning. But we could feel the altitude that made every pedal stroke incredibly hard and both of us got a soft kind of headache at the peak.
So we went down again after only a few minutes. The downhill included countless serpentines and the sides of the valley were sometimes covered by silver-sparkling stone fields under a blue sky.
The meal in the valley we came into got a funny touch by the tablecloth which had advertisement for ‘Ritter Sport’ chocolate on it. The two portions of noodles went down our gorges like the bikes the downhill before
The next day we continued the journey over really bad roads and along bizarre mountains.
The bad streets took their toll in a flat tire - but luckily not for us but for a big big digger at the side of the road
Again we climbed up a mountain to a pass only a few meters below the magical 5000m mark and found a message from Andreas at the top wishing us a ’super’ 30km downhill. But ’super’ it was not as the road was incredibly bad with soil hills just being distributed over the old washboard and sand fields that made navigation incredibly hard.
The continuous shaking caused some headaches for me and so we rested for half an hour only 2km after the downhill had finished.
Then we continued the downhill to Xai Dulla, a very dirty village just in front of a big military base. We had dinner and spent our night in a tiny restaurant where we could charge our technical devices for a few hours in the evening.
Here it was that my Thermarest sleeping pad got its first small bubble that should get bigger and bigger as the journey continued.
The weather got really dusty and foggy as we continued the next morning. We cycled all day long through a valley into the direction of a 4250m ‘pass’ that should bring us to a village called Gangshiwa. But as the evening started a strong wind from the left nearly blew us from the street and only with the power of 2 big apples we got from passing cheap-tourists we made it to a pipe under the street only 100m under the pass.
The big tornadoes we could see in the distance thankfully came too late to hit us and our night in the pipe got warm and nearly windfree.
In the ‘village’ of Gangshiwa we got some rice and tea from a Uighur roadworker called Mohammad. But a village it was definitely not - only one building for the accommodation of the roadworkers.
We cycled further through a tremendous valley where one could totally lose sense for proportions as after one hour you were still cycling towards the same mountain and it didn’t get noticeably bigger.
As we awoke the next morning we were surrounded by a snow-covered mountain scenery but it got extremely cold so we decided to first pedal some kilometers before taking the breakfast. Luckily we arrived in another roadstop where we could fill up our energy reserves with a big portion of rice with vegetables!
The rest of the day we cycled towards our first 5000m pass until we stumbled upon a sign saying “CYCLIST’S INN’ - the perfect place to spend the night - the room was filled with small paintings and signatures of other Tibet cyclists and as the broken windows were covered with cardboard it was windfree and warm during the night.
Then finally the day came for us to cycle our first 5000m pass. The road climbed up in steps with wonderful high plateaus in between.
On the pass sign I could read a discussion about the real altitude of the pass. I took the most conservative one of 5150m for my ‘pass stage’:
And about 20 minutes later Marc arrived and nearly broke down after a last adrenaline-powered sprint.
The scenery on the other site consisted of a tremendous high plateau that we should cycle through the rest of the day, and the following day!
We went down 200 altimeters and pitched Marc’s tent up the first time as there were no houses or tunnels at all.
Again we awoke in a magnificent scenery the next morning and again it was freezing cold. So we lost no time and made it to a nearby lake where many snow ducks and other birds also just woke up. The village at the lake looked abandoned so we didn’t go there.
The rest of the day we searched for a village that was only 30km away from the last - according to the map. But in fact it was more like 100km away - what a bad map!
We arrived at a beautiful lake and spotted a wild antelope just in front of the blue waters of the lake.
The road along the lake was wonderful and the smell of seaweed brought me back to the Mediterranean in my thoughts. Marc was also fascinated by this view and the hope to reach the lost village of Tielongtan motivated us to keep pedalling.
And finally after another small pass (of only a few altimeters but again over 5000m) we arrived in Tielongtan - but first a small stream had to be crossed (no problem for the recumbent rider but the upright cyclist got wet feet :-).
The view we had in the downhill was again so beautiful it took our breath away.
And as we took our meal in a restaurant another cyclist arrived as it already got dark: Boris from Slovenia. Together we talked and repaired some stuff until 1am! Then fled the arriving cold under big, fat and heavy blankets!
I made some calculations before I fell asleep and these suggested to go faster than the speed I could achieve with Marc to arrive in Beijing in time and not miss the Bicycle Film Festival in Sydney.
And so I started out the next morning together with Boris who is also going really light and and average of over 80km per day even under these hard conditions.
We met another cyclist, Ted, who goes about the same km per day as Boris but at a lower speed and together we climbed a new highest pass of over 5250 meters. The following downhill and another small pass brought us to a lake of immense beauty.
The street - or should I better call it wash board slope - followed the lake for many kilometers and we went through two arcs that supposedly marked the beginning of the Tibet province.
Then another pass of 6700m - according to the sign at the top, but my altimeter suggested something more like 5189m! After a short break we went down and came through a village that was just in a state of renovation and we therefore we couldn’t get any food there 
We proceeded our stage towards the highest pass of the journey - at 5343 we thought to be on the peak but we were quite wrong as the real peak was more like 5380 and the darkness had already taken hold of the landscape.
After only 2km going downhill I spotted a vague silhouette of a building 100 meters beside the road on the left side. And it was a real fluke as we found out. Protected from the wind we slept in one of the rooms with the only annoyance being a hamster that was constantly undertaking new approaches to get our cookies and thereby holding us from sleeping for at least one hour!
Then we went down, down and down again for a whole day. But very slow due to the horrific road conditions and headwinds that brought us down to 4 to 5 km/h or even to 0! Next to the road we could spot more and more chimneys and houses - a thing of total absence during the last 8-10 days.
Then as it was already dark we arrived in Domar, a really big village with loads of restaurants, stores and a military camp. I directly stumbled into a tourist group in a restaurant and was lucky to meet Johannes, a Taiwanese man who had studied for 5 years in Stuttgart and still spoke a good Schwaebisch dialect He invited us for dinner (and breakfast) and told me that he had read a book from Ting, another rider of Beijing to Paris 2007 Carfree from Taiwan - she is quite famous over there!
The next morning we stocked up our food reserves and went out into the snow fall. We were happy about the climb that kept us warm until the snow stopped.
Then down again and slowly up a lake filled valley with more and more nomads to the left and right. We even spotted some herons who were supposedly having a break here on their way to the south.
The lake that opened in front of us after we left the valley was really beautiful surrounded by 5000m mountains and with 6000 and 7000m peaks snow covered in the far distance.
We cycled around many turns and saw more and more Tibetan prayer flags and got even heavy headwinds before we arrived in a small fisher village just with the dusk.
There we got really cheap rice with vegetables and a whole dormitory only for the two of us for the night
Then as we just left the lake I stumbled upon a small town - yeah, it was only me, Boris didn’t realize it at all and just continued cycling. I went in for a short shopping session and later caught Boris who waited for me at a corner.
The road got paved now all the way to Ali and it would have been an easy ride if not for the steady headwinds!
So we had to spend another night in a tunnel below the street before our arrival in Ali just after a long and fast downhill.
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