Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

In the first half of our trip, planning was hardly foremost on our minds. With a year and 15,000 kilometers or so ahead of us we mostly just went and ended up where we did when we did while attempting to keep a decent pace. Being a goal-oriented person (which I wasn’t conscious of until this trip) this didn’t stop me from keeping a detailed spreadsheet of where we were and where we needed to be. I lectured on incremental goals and harangued on daily averages, but to no avail. For anyone interested in numbers, you can view my spreadsheet of our trip to this point here.

Well, now that there is a more manageable portion of our trip remaining and it’s getting harder and harder to just wing it and still  make our goal of a pre-September 15 arrival in Beijing, the team is finally coming around to my side of the argument. Circumstance provides our first big goal for the remainder of the trip. My girlfriend, who will be coming this way for an internship in Shanghai over the summer, will be meeting up with us in Xishuangbanna (西雙版納) in southwestern Yunnan province on May 9. We made a good push to Nanning from Zhanjiang and spent two days resting, after which we are left with exactly a month to get to Banna. With everyone now on board with the idea of goals and daily averages, we plan to ride around 60km per day in four day stretches, resting a day in between each one. With the rest days thrown in, we’ll be averaging 48/km per day over the next month, which should be doable, but if our time in the mountains of Fujian, where we averaged something like 33km per day, is any indication it’ll still be extremely difficult. We aren’t likely to spend entire weeks rained in this time, however.

So, what does the next part of our trip look like? This map should sum it up:

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