make a line, show passport!!!

 China oh China, how nice did you welcome us?!?! 

We have really heard and read a lot about the entering procedure in china and were prepared for the worst, but this whole shit blew up all our imaginations.

The first and most important feature you have to bring is patience. I can guarantee, you have to wait for hours or even days without no seeable reason, and so we come to the next important feature you have to bring, which is acceptance, don´t ask why or search for a logical explanation, because there is no logic behind nothing. Even if you really try hard to find one, you won´t find it.

If we arrived the first of 4 boarders which are spread over 150 km our journey started with waiting. Waiting 2 hours for the checking of our car and the x-ray inspection and of course don´t forget the lunch break of 2-4 hours, where you also have to wait till the policemen finished their lunch, therefore we got kicked off the office, standing in the cold windy area between two boarderchecks. Suddenly we had to move in again, because an important politician crossed the way to the boarder and the policemen didn´t like the picture of foreigners standing there and waiting. So after about 8 hours we crossed the first boarder. Juhe.. ;) After another few checkpoints and registration places, where we had to make lines, one for the drivers and one for the passengers, and showing our passport, we finally reached the last boarders in the night, where we finally got the stamp in our passport. But this was just the okay for us and not our car, so we had to leave our car behind and the whole procedure started again the next morning. The first week we´ve spent with waiting till we we´re allowed to drive our car in China. Even finding petrol was a big challange, cause it seems to be more strict than in an european prison. The motorcycles didn´t got fuel cause of a congress in Peking, here again don´t ask why, there is no logic behind it. For the first 4 days we even got police escorts from one city to the next, or the police even accompanied us to our hotels, sometimes we felt like being stars, especially when all the chinese people always asked us for taking pictures with them.

But the more we drove away from the boarder zone the better it got. Crossing the second largest sand dessert, the Taklamakan dessert was an absolutely great experience. Also the Mogao caves, also known as 1000 Buddha caves where very impressive to watch. Of course we also visited the great wall and had a nice walk on it. After some days we drove into chinese Tibetean areas, where we got to know the tibetean culture and food.