Oct 1- Unpleasant night

When we were sat next to the road having a snack, a trucker stopped and gave us some sweet, heart shaped buns. Truckers are so cool. It almost seems like they view us like fellow truckers.
Reached a new 40 km asphalt stretch in the late afternoon. Wonderful.

Strange spaghetti-like succulents grow here. Very funny looking plants I must say.

In the evening we reached the little restaurant where James had camped previously. It had changed ownership since James' last visit but the new guy offered us the porch to sleep on before we could even ask. After capturing his unruly runaway camel from the other side of the parking lot, he invited us inside for some tea and proudly showed us his growing collection of thank-you notes from other travelers.

We had just crawled into our sleeping bags when a super drunk,  wheezing and coughing trucker stumbled out of the restaurant and eagerly tried to share his vodka and cola with us. NO THANK YOU! He then grabbed a filthy mattress and shoved it towards us so he could sleep next to us. NO! GROSS!
James instinctively pushed the mattress as far away from us as possible and eventually the guy settled down on it with his vodka next to him. He was very restless, coughed and spat. At about 3 in the morning his coughing got really bad and he was shivering under his thin blanket. He also vomited a few times and kept spitting. Absolutely disgusting. When he realized we were awake he desperately crawled over to us and tried to get under our blanket to warm up. NOOOOOO!
We felt sorry for him but there is no way a vomiting, coughing drunk was getting under our blankets. Who knows what diseases he may carry.
I tried to wake the restaurant owners to get more blankets for the guy but they did not stir.
After he tried crawling into our bed a second time we knew we would not sleep another second with him nearby so we quickly packed up and left. We felt really bad for leaving him in this state but there was nothing we could do and we had to protect our own health and safety.
A few hundred meters down the road we sheltered at a construction site next to the train tracks until it was light enough to get on the bike. We huddled together to stay warm and watched several trains approch from the distance and then thunder past us. A few of them were sleeper passenger trains with cozy, dimly lit cabins. How nice.