A long days walk today. Got off to a slightly late start. Lots of local fog in the morning that cleared up by noon.

The area I am walking in has lots and lots of rivers and ditches going in different directions. There are large rivers that are not marked on my map or GPS. I may have been able to stay closer to the route today, but if I had I would have been taking chances and could easily have lost valuable time. My Chinese isn’t good enough to decifer the answer to questions about directions. At least not when we are talking about this maze of large and small roads, dirt roads, ditches and rivers. So I played safe and followed the road to Taian.

The cars, mopeds, tractors and trailers whizzing past spewed out a lot of pollution. I switched sides to the right hand side of the road to stay out of reach from most of the fumes.

Very few rests today, but it looks like my body is getting used to longer distances.

No electricity in Taian when I got here. Hopefully it will be back soon. I want to check the route for tomorrow more thoroughly.

41 kilometers today