Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

Note: With Alexis having moved on to do his own thing, there’s now no one keeping a diary of daily events, in English, French or any other language. I’m going to attempt to pick up some of that task, but being as unreasonably wordy as I am and only having so many hours in the day, I’m going to have to limit it to some of my more memorable riding days. This is one such day.

We set out from Lancang late in the morning as has been our habit lately after two days of rest and a woefully low-budget celebration of Devi and my four years together. In the dreary city of Lancang we’re unable to find even a restaurant with four walls. Fortunately, my mom has sent over a bottle of Cuvaison 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon for my birthday, and after finding a couple wine glasses at the local supermarket, we manage to make a memorable evening out of it at a Sichuan restaurant down the street from our hotel.

We hear from numerous people that the road from Lancang to Lincang is torn up and under construction for the entire 267km. The willingness of the government here to inconvenience people on that sort of scale continues to amaze us. I just try to imagine heading onto the road from Harrisburg to Philadelphia back home and seeing a sign that says, “Construction next 100 miles.” But in China, there’s no sign, no detour markers, and the road is under construction for 165 miles. Having gone nearly insane a few weeks previously on a similar, 60km stretch of under-construction national road through the mountains a couple weeks previously, we decide to take a radical route through the mountains, even though the thought of the switchbacks on Google Maps make our stomachs curl.

The road starts out pleasantly enough as we move out of the rather miserable county seat of Lancang and past about a dozen fish farms selling tilapia fry (there are also shops in town selling expensive fishing gear for those who want to go dangle a line in one of the small ponds). We hit the first construction just as the sky begins to turn an ominous dark gray and the wind picks up worrying notch, and we seek shelter under a gas station that has been converted into a rebar-welding depot for the construction work. After 15 minutes or so there’s still no rain in sight, and we continue on our merry way.

It turns out the road is not nearly as bad as we imagine, as most of the construction of the new highway is being done high above on the mountain while we crank along on the old two-lane road far below. I start thinking, “If it’s going to be like this the whole way, we might as well just keep going and skip the crazy mountain route.” But not wanting to jinx things I keep my mouth shut. (more…)

By Andy

We’ve done a lot of complaining about the cold lately. Those who follow our Twitter feed are probably getting tired of it. Part of the problem is that we’re in the midst of one of the coldest winters in 60 years for the northern hemisphere. I had written previously about how strange it was that we were riding through snow while on the same latitude as northern Florida. Somewhat reassuringly, in a schadenfreude sense, temperatures in Melbourne, Florida, even further south, hit record lows recently, bottoming out at 28 degrees Fahrenheit.

The other part of the problem is that we just haven’t been good Boy Scouts. Originally, we had intended to set out from Beijing in late August or early September and head south to avoid the winter. A lost passport and the addition of Alexis to the team nixed those plans, and we hit the road nearly a month behind schedule on September 23. For my part, I was completely unprepared for any sort of actually cold weather. The clothing portion of my original gear list reads:

1 pair Pearl Izumi biking gloves
2 pair Pearl Izumi bike shorts
1 Trek helmet
2 short-sleeve bike jerseys
1 long-sleeve bike jersey
2 synthetic short-sleeve shirts
1 synthetic long-sleeve shirt
1 smart wool long-sleeve shirt
2 pair zip-off pants
2 pair boxers
3 pair smart wool socks
1 waterproof jacket
1 pair waterproof pants
1 pair Merrel hiking shoes
1 pair Pearl Izumi bike shoes
1 Buff
1 waterproof helmet cover

(more…)

By Andy

This is, I suppose, an inevitable post in any cycling tour. I now have a feeling for what our counterparts on The Pan-Eurasian Bike Trip have felt for their 10,000km trek across Russia, which will end at the Atlantic Ocean. To this point, we had enjoyed days of riding in only the slightest breeze, which we have found at our backs more often than not. That changed the day before last.

To begin with, a failure to account for the difference in scale between our map of Shandong and that of Henan meant that we had vastly underestimated the distance of our journey, which we originally thought we could complete in one hard day of riding. Of course, we didn’t realize this ego-slap-in-the-face until two days of riding had failed to produce the desired result. We left our hotel in Qufu, to which we had treated ourselves in order to relax after our “downtime” at the coalmine, late — around 10am after a Western breakfast and coffee. At the time we thought a push of 150km to would get us to Kaifeng in Henan, but being fully rested, we thought we could pull it off. It turned out the distance was over 300km by our zig-zagging route.

We were excited to get to Henan purely because it would mark the third province on our journey, thus increasing our manliness by 1/3. To get to our destination of Kaifeng, we had to travel southwest from Qufu. In our limited travels thus far, we have noticed that the inter-village roads that we prefer to travel are maddeningly laid out in somewhat of a grid pattern — that is, either east-west or north-south, but not necessarily traveling in either direction for very long before ending at a T-intersection, requiring a re-evaluation. As we learned in geometry class, this doesn’t make for the shortest distance between almost any two given points. The westward-slanting border between Henan and Shandong, which follows the Yellow River, also meant that the more southward we moved, the longer the distance to Henan became. (more…)

Day one of our journey started off with some typical setbacks (typical for Evan and I). After a very nice breakfast hosted by our friends Cathy and Muzi, we set out from the Dongzhimen area in Beijing for Tiananmen, and soon realized we had forgotten a few things: the champagne we said we were going to drink that morning, Evan’s bike gloves, my bike gloves and my iPhone charger. The latter we failed to notice until we were already at Xidan, and as it is extremely important to the trip (our internet comes from the iPhone), I added another 20km to my distance today going back to get it and my gloves. We legitimately hit the road at around 11:30, heading south out of the city on the G106 national highway as planned.

Recently, I personally have been a bit worried about our physical condition. Evan has done the most biking recently, with trips up and down the California coast and a few weeks spent in Taiwan. I have taken only a handful of long-ish rides over the past three months, while Alexis has never gone on a long bike ride before. In the three weeks we were in Beijing waiting for my visa and passports, we didn’t even get out on one decent ride. Our bikes are all fully loaded with gear and are extremely heavy. One of these days it’d be nice to come across a hotel or a family with a scale, so we could figure out how much we are each carrying. Nevertheless, once we got up to speed, we cruised along on the flat and well-paved road out of Beijing. Our goal for the day was only to get to Hebei province, which is where we told everyone we’d end up. Failing to make it out of Beijing would be far too embarrassing. Beijing is massive. Our total ride today was 70km to a town called Gu’an in Hebei province, but the town itself is only about four kilometers into Hebei.

After a late lunch near the China Watermelon Museum (strangely, I have been there once before, five years previously) in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, we pulled into Gu’an at around 4:30. Coming into Gu’an was like passing through a demolition zone. Actually, it wasn’t like passing through a demolition zone — it was a demolition zone. It seemed like everything for two or three kilometers on our way into the town was a massive pile of bricks and rubble. The Chinese government lists Gu’an as a “development zone,” and when they say something like that anywhere near a major city like Beijing or Shanghai, they mean it. After we made it through the rubble, we quickly found a cheap hotel to stay in. For the first two weeks while we get acclimated to what we’re doing, I imagine we will be staying in a number of hotels before we try out more camping and hopefully staying with people we meet. But the price is right — we’re each paying a little less than $1.50 to share a 3 person room…and we got to shower.

I spent a little time walking around town with my camera while Alexis and Evan showered. I am always amazed at how quickly Chinese people change from basically ignoring foreigners in Beijing or Shanghai (because we’re everywhere and nothing special anymore) to exclaiming “Look, a foreigner!” or yelling “HALLO!” from a passing car. When we finally get away from the urban centers on the east coast, maybe people will even start complimenting me on my Chinese again!