Our arrival right back where we began, nearly 17,000km (10,000+ miles) and a week short of a year later -- what a trip!

Elderly men sit and chat near a market in a Hebei mountain village.

The donkey is the main beast of burden in northern Shanxi (山西) and Hebei (河北) provinces. Never have I seen so many donkeys!

Hebei served as the deserved butt of many a joke throughout the trip, but when we finally arrived in the mountainous northern part of the province three days before the end of our trip, we were pleasantly surprised. There we found blue skies, green hills and picturesque villages as unique and interesting as those in any of the remote areas we passed in the western part of the country.

In Shanxi (山西) province, the Great Wall is now only a short mound of earth connected by the earthen remains of guard towers. The outer bricks and stones were long ago stripped away to build other structures.

Old men sit and talk outside of a home in rural Shanxi (山西) province.

One of our last sights in Inner Mongolia was yet another coal-fired power plant, of which we saw a few. Like the U.S., China has vast domestic coal resources, and dirty, coal-fired power plants generate most of the country's electricity. Inner Mongolia is China's coal capital, and a nearly-two-thirds increase in coal truck traffic from 2009 to 2010 was blamed for the 120km (75 mile) traffic jam on G110 that broke up just a few days before our ride into Beijing on the same road.

Fields of sunflowers at sunset stretch to the horizon on our way into Wuyuan (五原縣), Inner Mongolia.

There's tough terrain out there, even in the flats. Making our way through the Inner Mongolian "grasslands" of Bayannur, we found ourselves in a flood drainage canal frequented by herds of sheep that had softened the earth into a dust through which we often had to push the bikes.

We finally got off of G110 in Bayannur, Inner Mongolia, and headed into the countryside again, where we zig-zagged our way through alternating fields of corn and sunflowers. It was a bit disappointing to see that what we assumed would be a vast grassland had been thoroughly cultivated, but we were happy to see that it wasn't already an endless field of coal-fired power plants. Here my dad and Evan pass through a small village in the late afternoon before we set up camp between the road and a field of sunflowers.