Excellent and cheap flight with a brand new plane. We landed at 1am and we went straight to the hotel. We spent a couple of hours re-assembling the bikes. I think we were excited like kids opening the Christmas’ presents. It has been a long day. From Novosibirsk to Kashgar while bike shopping in Urumqi… We still can’t believe it.

Two taxis to rush to the airport. We also need to purchase the flight tickets…

It’s about 9:30 pm. In about 4 hours, Sigma assembled two mountain bikes, customized them for us with the disc breaks and the back sit (that required a metal part prepared on the fly from a nearby workshop), and finally he re-packed the bikes in the original packages. Impressive. We are on time to catch the 11pm flight to Kashgar, if we run back to the airport

It still needs some fixes in Sigma’s “workshop”. His experience in assembling bikes was really impressive.

Simone’s bike is almost completed

Our chinese friend “sigma” is preparing our bikes. He was really fast and available. Thanks!

Simone doesn’t really trust the food on the street

Claudio forced me to eat something special along the street…

While waiting for the bikes, we had a quick walk in the center of Urumqi. After the lazy Novosibirsk, Urumqi gave a totally different impression. It was full of busy people everywhere: students, builders busy with new constructions, painters hanging down from the walls, people moving stuff with trolleys and other people selling food on the street. Really a busy and fast-growing city. Impressive was that totally new commercial center, 5 or 6 floors, built with western standards and selling all possible products. Just with a short walk, I think we got a glimpse of the big change that is happening in the whole country.

The Giant shop really exists and it’s full of cool mountain bikes. We tried some of them and at the end we picked up two mountain bikes with half suspension, shimano gears and disc breaks for a reasonable price.. The seller (renamed “Sigma” because he was repeating that word all the time) promised us to prepare the bikes in a couple of hours. Simply amazing, we couldn’t believe it. We landed at 2pm and at 5pm we had already purchased the bikes.

First task: change money at the bank. We couldn’t find an exchange office or ATM in the airport, so we had to catch a taxi and drive to the closest bank. Not an easy task since our taxi driver spoke only Chinese, he didn’t understand the word “bank” and he didn’t have a clue when we were waving some dollars in front of him. At the end we found a bank and also some luck.

The clerk was very nice. She spoke English and instructed the taxi driver to bring us to the Giant shop downtown Urumqi. She understood that we were some kind of “alpinist”….

Excellent start for our plan. One hour for the immigration in China with some nurses over there ready to spread disinfectant on us…

We made it to Urumqi. Very soft landing. Siberian airlines must have the best pilots in the world if they can drive those old planes. During the flight, we played with the idea of buying the bicycles today and catching immediatelly the flight to Kashgar. We hope in some good Karma

We are finally on the plane from Novosibirsk to Urumqi. Not exactly the latest model of Airbus, probably it has some 30 years of service. At least the price was adequate

Finally out of Russia, heading to Urumqi in China