The previous day the wind had been coming strongly from the west as I had cycled south and I knew I was soon supposed to make a turn to the east that would mean I would be flying along with that wind at my back. Unfortunately I didn't quite make it to the turn before dark. More unfortunate was what greeted me the following morning. All of the hundreds of wind turbines around me were still spinning furiously, but at some point in the night they had all rotated 180 degrees. The wind was coming from the opposite direction now. The wrong direction.

It was a terrible wind. A nightmare wind. A soul-destroying wind. A kick-you-in-the-nuts-and-poke-you-in-the-eye wind. And nothing to block it. Only flat, featureless, empty desert. But I battled hard against it, cycling as best I could. Slowly, very slowly. I knew that if this wind kept up for a few days then I wouldn't make Lanzhou on time, but I battled onwards, hoping things would get better. In the morning my brain made the same promises to my legs that the wind would die down in the afternoon. This time it was wrong. By afternoon my legs were pretty mad with my brain about this but my brain was too tired to care. I also had a terrible knot in my back that was very painful. In fact many of my body parts were sending out signals to my brain that they thought I should give up and stop, but my brain insisted I keep going. So I cycled the whole day, from sunrise to sunset, and had a creditable (under the circumstances) 70 kilometres to show for it. It was a long way off my daily target, but enough to keep me the right side of possible. Just.

There was only one highlight to break up the monotony of this awful day, and that came when I spotted another touring cyclist heading the other way. He was cycling on the G312 which I could see down below my expressway. This road had started now to run parallel alongside the G30, but it was narrow, in bad condition, and had enough trucks on it to not be fun. I couldn't see how it would possibly be of any advantage to me over my empty shoulder, so I'd stayed where I was. But now I wanted to say hello to the oncoming cyclist, so I jumped over the crash barrier and slid down the embankment towards him. He saw me, stopped and came over, but there was a big barbed-wire fence in the way, and so we had to talk through that like one of us was in prison. If so it was definitely me, trapped as I was in this nightmare headwind day. The other chap, yet another Korean cyclist, didn't seem to mind the wind half as much as me. Funny that.

His name was perhaps something like Dongey, and he told me that cyclists weren't allowed on the expressway and that he'd been on the G312 all the way. I told him that I bet that police don't give away free drinks on the G312. But at least his information meant if I did end up back on it I now knew it would be continuous. As he'd come the way I was going I thought that I would ask him about the things I wanted to visit.

"Did you go to see the Great Wall of China?" I asked.

"No"

"Why not?"

"It was too expensive."

"Oh. What about the Rainbow Mountains?"

"No"

"Oh. Why not?"

"I thought I will see lots of mountains when I get to Pamir."

"They won't be the colour of rainbows."

I guess the desert was all the entertainment Dongey needed. I was a little surprised that he planned to try and cycle the Pamir Highway so late in the year.

"You know it is 4000 metres above sea level? It will be covered in snow."

"Oh," he looked a little disconcerted.

"It is a bit late in the year."

"What about the other Stans?" he asked.

"Well Uzbekistan is lower, and it was very hot when I was there. But they have cold winters, they told me it was minus 40 last winter."

"Oh," he looked a little disconcerted again. I think I spoiled his day.

I tried to salvage the conversation, and asked Dongey if he had seen any cyclists going my way. It would be so great to have some company.

"Yes!" he said enthusiastically. "I have seen two or three times."

"Great, how far ahead are they?"

"What?"

"Where are they? How far ahead of me?"

"What?"

"When did you see them?"

"Oh! About two weeks ago."

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Strangely enough I saw another two touring cyclists going in the opposite direction just a couple of hours later. These were cycling on the G30 and so I couldn't talk to them because they were on the other side of the central reservation, but we managed a wave. They looked Chinese, although I wouldn't rule out Korean. It was ironic that Dongey was cycling all alone for so long, and may never have any idea that these guys were just behind him.

I crept through the fence at a service station and cycled on the G312 for a short while before peeling off to set up camp amongst some interesting big rock formations. I think they were some kind of protected national heritage thing but I couldn't read the signs and they made good wind blocks so I was comfortable with my decision to camp in among them. Then something extraordinary happened.

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As I was sitting eating my dinner outside my tent I happened to look around at where the moon was and I did a double-take. I knew it should be a full moon and yet there was almost nothing there, just a tiny thin sliver of light. There were no clouds and nothing else to block it. The only logical explanation, which my tired brain did surprisingly well to quickly surmise, was that I was witnessing a lunar eclipse. I'd never seen a lunar eclipse before, much less seen one by mere chance, having happened to look up at the right moment. I watched in silent awe as the shadow of the Earth moved slowly across the surface of the moon. I thought about how what I was seeing there was the shadow of the rock that I was hurtling through space on. Gradually the moon was restored to fullness and my own faith in the Universe was restored. Seeing that lunar eclipse from that desert at that moment was really amazing. The wind had made it a crap day, but even on crap days magical things can happen.