I have received information that the online system for making donations to  the Dana Farber Cancer Institute is NOT working. I’m sorry about this and have sent a mail to get it sorted out!
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Today I lit off a long strip of fire crackers at the western shore of the Yellow River. I was standing at the border of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia and celebrated that I’m finished with the first three provinces of the trip! 🙂

The landscape is changing now. More often I see sandstone sticking out of the earth. By steep hills, I see a lot more sand stone than before. I know that the next stretch along the Great Wall of China will be hilly, but am excited to see if the change of ground surface may help a little.

I had heard from the town I stayed the night before that it should be possible to take a boat across the Yellow River. What met me however was deep ice cold water with plenty of large ice flakes drifting by. I had hoped for some boats to get me over, but there were none. Probably no wonder, as my side of the river was covered with twenty meters of unsafe ice.

As there were unexpectedly no boats and a thirty kilometres walk to get around, I decided to flag down a young lad on a small motorbike and offered him money to drive me to the nearest bridge. From there I took a bus to Hequ. Walking to the exact other side of where I had lit off the fire crackers, I sent off the GPS point for the day.

In the evening, I found a great combined restaurant and guesthouse. All that I need!! A restaurant on the first floor, and two floors of rooms above. The rooms are nice and warm and there is a computer in the room.

The people working here are very nice. We spent a lot of time writing questions and answers to each other using an online translation program on Google.

11 Kilometres today