Our " New" Tent

You may have noticed in the photos that Bicyclette has been carrying a bundle of ridiculously long sticks for quite a while. You may also remember that we had lost our tent poles back in Azerbaijan. Back in Uzbekistan we came past some lovely Willow trees from which I was able to cut off six branches to replace our tent poles. Some of you have already asked and commented on this so here is a quick look at our "new" tent which was our home all the way from Uzbekistan to Beijing!

The six sticks were arranged to make three X's, two large X's for the walls and a smaller X for the roof. Bottle tops were attacked to the ends of the tent to stick the sticks into. Small cross pieces were attached to the bottom of the long sticks to secure the sticks in the loops on the corners of the tent. Two bungee cords gave the design enough tension to stand on its own and even withstand relatively strong wind conditions. We are so grateful that this worked given the limited resources we had to work with.