Date: Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 1:50 PM
Subject: World walk blog China 15
To: Tony Mangan <theworldjog@gmail.com>
Cc: myworldwalk2016@gmail.com

China's One Belt One Road.

Latest: 11,901 kilometers for 303  road days. Location: Cizhu.

A woman with a weed killer spray followed me down highway 210 for a kilometer. Not sure what she was talking about but I managed to avoid her spraying me. Am I a parasite I wondered? Ah yes! The joys of world walking, I could have been at home watching football instead!
That night I walked towards the southern end of Linshui for I failed to find a reasonable priced accommodation. This is the hometown of China's former leader, Deng Xiao Ping. He is the guy that opened up China and allowed the market economy in.
Anyway, I made it to a small plaza near the city limits where a few catering tents were set up. That night after leaving 42 kilometers behind me on the road I figured it would be a smart idea to just pitch my tent among the other tents. Surely, they were 24 hours. I got a great welcome from a few lads and as always refused several offers of cigarettes. Most Chinese men I meet  smoke too much. Almost everyone I see has a cigarette between their lips.
While I slept the caterers packed up and left. I woke up not in the quiet plaza with four tents around me, but in a busy pedestrian zone.
Then I walked an enjoyable 33 kilometers as far as Tantong which was marked as a village on my map. Many Chinese villages are as big as the towns like Naas or Gorey in Ireland. On the way there were a lot of fallen down houses at the side of the road. Almost as though there had been a seismic movement or some form of a landslide. Dozens of people were busy stripped slates, bricks, posts and other materials which they could use to build onto their own houses. They stacked all of this onto trucks and  onto three-wheeled rickshaws. That night I was treated to a hotel compliments of Dave Stack who sponsored it by pressing the link on my website www.myworldwalk.com
Halfway through my 25 kilometers to Cizhu I was shocked when an elderly man handed a firework banger to a child. He was barely two years of age. The child just threw it into the ground before it exploded. I saw this so much in China over the New Year period. Adults not supervising their children properly. I don't like the firework culture here.
I am now 70 kilometers from the major city of Chongqing. I expect to arrive on Sunday. On Monday I have some business to attend to. After which I plan to meet Eoin O'Neill an Irish ex-pat and Harry James an Englishman from Southampton. The lads are working as teachers here. I will be leaving Karma with Harry and making my visa run to Vietnam by train. It's about 1,200 kilometers to the border, so I will probably be off the road for a few days. Hopefully, I get back before the 27th February and walk the 30 kilometers required to reach my 12,000th kilometers before the first anniversary of the walk.

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China is currently trying to revive its ancient silk road trading routes. Deng Xiao Pings dream is now becoming a reality. According to the China Africa Project program: When complete, One Belt, One Road (OBOR), or the Maritime Silk Road as it is more commonly known, will connect China via rail and shipping links with major markets in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.
Billions of dollars in new rail, shipping and airport infrastructure are underway in dozens of countries including Egypt, Djibouti and Kenya who are among a small group of African countries that are expected to benefit most from OBOR.
While most countries welcome the Chinese investment and inclusion in Beijing's trading network, others wonder if it will  actually be able to pull off such a large, complex undertaking. Furthermore, in some ways, OBOR is also reminiscent of Britain's old imperial trading network that was designed to extract natural resources from its colonial outposts and then sell back finished goods to these markets.
China has gotten much of the rail part of the project going with freight trains to Iran and also to
15 European destinations including a recently added station near London. However, it seems the maritime project is proving a bit more tricky partly because of pirate activity off the coast of Somalia. The Chinese have long since been involved in fighting the piracy problem.
There is also growing concern to protect the countries interests in the event of a possible conflict with the American navy over the much disputed South China Sea and having their oil lanes cut off in the Indian Ocean.
Part of the OBOR project is to build overland gas and oil pipelines from Central Asia to keep energy supplies going.

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