shashasha

This book documents a hitchhike along China's Cross-Desert Highway, a road built in the mid 1990s to help the extraction of oil. It stretches for more than 500km from north to south across the Taklamakan, one of the world's most inhospitable deserts.

The journey records the road and its people - truck drivers, cotton pickers, oil well workers and prostitutes, whose lives are caught up in the dependency and desolation of the prospering oil industry.

Oasis Hotel, Xinjian China, 2008

• Afterword from Oasis Hotel by Nicolo Degiorgis