A couple of hours after we had gone to bed on a mattress, the wind started increasing. After a short while it was blowing really hard, so hard that we both got up in the tent and tried to secure it by counteracting the forces of the wind gusts from within. It worked pretty well, but after doing this for more than an hour, it gets tiring.

The wind was blowing so hard that I was sure I could here the jet engines of a plane in the background. After trying to hold the tent steady for a long time I gave up,  laid down on the mattress again and hoped the tent would manage by itself the rest of the night, although the wind had the same velocity as before.

The next morning we were both pretty tired. Our tents and sleeping bags were full of sand and dust. It was still blowing in the morning but not as strongly as before.

We got up and headed for a nearby town to buy food and water. Then we walked through the town in search of the Great Wall on the other side. This was a hint from Andreas of the Great Wall Forum and his suspicions turned out to be correct. We hit on the Great Wall and followed it South-eastwards.

At this point it was still very windy. I went into the desert a couple of times to walk along some recognised stretches of The Wall. Later in the afternoon it was still blowing fairly hard and there were few places to pitch our tents in other than loose sand, so we decided to head back to Gaotai to get some sleep after a pretty sleepless night

I was very happy about this decision later on as the following night it became very windy and for the first time in a long while it rained heavily too. I’m happy we didn’t need to hold on to our tents again …