They drove cars on the national highway 312. It’s the way to XingJiang which everyone has to take. They met the “sun-snow” by the way of JiaYuGuan（an archaic town of military importance）...

Dec.3

They encountered terrible traffic and heavy snow. -20 degree! It was too cold to start the LuFeng. The oil was frozen! So they had to heat the oil box with fire after each stop. It was so dangerous! And at last, that box really caught on fire! Thanks to that heavy snow helped them put out the fire or else...

Today motorcade moved on to the next stop—Urumchi. They wouldn’t drive at night, everyone went to sleep as soon as it got dark, so that they could have enough energy the next day.

Dec.4

Another motorcade joined them today according to their plan. It was a big group for this long journey. Some of them were “toads” (They drove Hummers. The pronunciation of “toad” is similar to “Hummer” in Chinese ), For adventure, almost every male traveler dreams of owning Hummer in China. If you have no money, you can only own a general cars, and it will probably be broken and can not be used any more after a trip like this. Because they were going to across desert in XingJiang's winter, they used telecommunication equipment (150M~450M & shortwave, 10M) , GPS and interphones on their cars. They told me, if you want to go to any dangerous place by car, you need at least two, in case one breaks down or gets stuck in mire. You can use the winch of another to pull it. Sometimes it’s still not enough even you have two. Another point is to leave as much room as you can for your supplies.

They discussed the “Taklama-gan, (the biggest desert of China)” at night. A member who is familiar with the terrain there, recommended several ways to go across the desert.

Dec.8

They failed to enter the Golben-tongoast desert dued to a strong snowstorm! The temperature was -20, snow: 30cm, visibility: below 20m. Look a little closer, they were driving on ice not sand. In that season around that area, few XingJiangnese go outdoors, so no one was available to guide...

But the bad weather didn’t stop the heroes from advancing. They set up the tyre chains, and waited for the second day to come...

Dec.9-10

Yes! It’s cold, -29 degrees, and it was frozen inside the cars! Take a look outside, everything was white! But each person was happy, they had conquered the edge!

They entered the desert successfully. They had reached the latitude 45 north, longitude 87. Now, they were standing at the Alatai，they said:”North of us is Russia, west is Kazakstan, and east is Mongolia. ”

Feature: Poor LuFeng

(1)

The journey started from Nanjing. Their “LuFeng” got lots of troubles on the way, This also caused many members to lose confidence. As they reached Urumchi, nobody wanted to drive them back. And after the journey, most of them wanted to dump those wrecks!

(2)

One member said: "We were prepared to die on the way, but in the “LuFeng”, we thought that if these poor cars had any more problems, we'd hike instead!