May 30, Hejing - Yangi

It is a more relaxed day. With much warmer last night, a good hotel, we met each other at the breakfast hall, given such a small city Hejing 和靜 is, it is a large selection, something you can always expect in when travel in China, even in Xinjiang. I must although overall there is a large difference between the quality of living in cities in more developed area and small cities in Xinjiang, the public infrastructure is well built, except the sanitation area still left much to be desired. Hejing is Neo home town, for the first night of the trip so far, he is not with us, and we started to miss him. But Neo did not let us wait, he came by the breakfast hall. We are ready to move.
It is going to be a long ride, with not much landscape diversity, because we are moving toward the desert area. We will be stopping by a small city, Yanqi 焉耆, where his son is there, and we are all going to see him!
We stop by a gas station, a truck also parked along our car, I saw the sheep packed in the cargo bay, jump onto the truck, took the picture! "Sheep for trade!" It is a mixed of emotion, these people live on these sheep, depend on them, little choice of not to, we called ourselves human being, atop on the food chain and somehow claim right to do so. These sheep are not depend on human, they depend on nature! May be in more ways than we do, because we took advantage of other species, or so-call command of food-chain, so we are less direct rely on nature. I am not so sure if these sheep felt their and saw their fate. May be, may be not.
Continue on our journey, moving slowly! In Xinjiang, the traffic rule is very strict, it allow often only 30-40km/hr when cruising on the city road, Neo told us, "....because Xinjiang is so big, they cannot allow the driver to drive faster than what seemingly a slow limit, to avoid serious tragic...", there is a logic there, but the logic makes people asleep as well, and so we stop to take some pictures. This one, shot on the road side, with a Canon G10, fill with the built-in flash. After extended use, one has to give Canon a credit to develop a compact yet powerful camera like G10. It delivers almost the same quality of those compact film camera could, such as those gems like Contax T2 and T3, there were my favorite, and should I still use that much film, for sure to still keep them. Anyway, entering into digital, Contax in fact also introduce a digital compact, the TV-S which without doubt I also have it and did great image with it, a pity such a beautiful camera discontinued by a discontinued camera brand. What a shame on Kyocera. But of course Kyocera will say "this is business", and it proved that Kyocera is not wrong, should they continue on the Contax line, they may be in greater trouble, so this is more sad than shame. May be it is just bad fortune. In the history of camera making and optical developing, Contax as a whole did more right than wrong, praise by those not even use them, envied by those who did not own them, but this is not enough to keep a good brand name today. Enough camera talk!
Back on to highway, we finally arrive Yanqi, Neo met his son, we all met his son, and we all share the joy!
This is Neo and his son!We are sorry for Neo! His duty made his time with his son so short, and we are the reason this time. For what may be just 5 minutes, Neo took us on road again, moving toward our destination today, Tarim 塔里木, and the famous river runs by - Tarim River 塔里木河.