Feeling trapped, frustrated, in my flea pit, I’d resorted to re-reading a few pages I’d earlier downloaded from fellow cyclist Steve’s website. He’d come this way a few years previously, also in late summer. I hoped for inspiration. And I found it. Descriptive, but succinct, prose that resonated sharply with my own experiences earlier in the day.
Perhaps, as he’d done, I should have pressed on towards Turpan, discreetly declining Police advice to stop. Were conditions out there tougher than those Steve had faced? I wasn’t so sure. Even the wind direction he described tallied to a tee.
I’d learnt that whilst conditions were expected to ease overnight, it’d be a fairly marginal improvement. And that’d taken a while to determine, my phrase book not well suited to explaining even the rudiments of the Beaufort Scale. Force five on the stern, shifting to the port quarter later.
