Portrait of an LBX

Workers paint one of those brilliant slogans that the Chinese government is so well known for on a wall in Ningxia. This one appears to relate to the railroad.

Evan's tent sits among sand dunes in our first evening in Ningxia. A note to potential sand-campers: if you've been fighting a fierce headwind all day, don't set your tent up in the dunes. Evan and I awoke the next morning with an inch of sand in our tents that had blown in through the mesh the night before. Dad and Ellen somehow escaped unscathed.

Evan, Ellen and my dad stand atop a hill overlooking the scraggly desert where we pitched camp in our last night in Gansu. Our last couple weeks have been marked by headwinds, great campsites and a rush to cover the distance back to Beijing in time.

A family in Gansu loads straw onto a truck after threshing off the grain.

After a horrendous climb, the newly expanded crew, including my girlfriend Devi, my dad and his girlfriend Ellen, set up camp in the green mountains well before sunset. We were worried that a nasty storm on the horizon would soak us, but it never materialized, and we spent a great first evening on the road with a bottle of Talisker 10-year scotch whisky from duty free. There's a mystery member to our crew in this picture: a Tibetan herder who sat down and watched us talk, eat and drink for more than an hour, turning down our offers of food and drink.

A herder takes his sheep and goats to graze by Goat Gorge (羊峽) in Qinghai.

A Tibetan rider gives his horse a good whack to the neck after getting thrown in a village horse race in Qinghai.

A Tibetan man waits to race his horse bareback in a village horserace in Qinghai.

Tibetan men hold an impromptu horse race from the main road back to a village about two kilometers up a grassy slope.