The triumvirate awoke at 700h, and made breakfast and coffee with milk (danke!) before setting out on the road. The 'highway' became steadily worse as we headed south through the Shalkar Gap (a 300km of nothing but semi-arid scrub land and small villages along the railway line). The Germans were again a little bit slower than I, but I got to act as a scout heading into to the little villages to buy another 5-10L of water for the journey.
(We were up at about 10-14L of water per day!). About mid-day we stopped for lunch consisting of meat, bread and cheese (which somehow survived the 38C heat).
At about 1400h we noticed that there was a large amount of truck traffic heading in the same direction, but offset to the west by 1km. We went over to investigate and found the new Kazakh-to-Russia oil pipeline, which had alongside a nice hard-packed dirt road! We followed the track for 20km with a 40-50% improvement in our speed! We crossed over the railroad tracks and headed more directly east over ever flattening ground. About 8km from a little village we spotted a hill that somewhat shielded us from the road. Looking ahead and seeing no other hills until the ridge 20km away, we decided to set up camp and sleep again under the stars. Inspected my back rim and saw that new cracks were appearing and the old ones were getting a little bit wider (sad jeffrey). Made a purplish looking cabbage/beet/chicken soup (which was shortly to have its revenge), started the great biography of William Randolph Hearst, and fell asleep for a good 8 hours in the cool desert night. Overall a long and somewhat frustrating day!
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