Leaving for Tibet along road G214

Plans and routes have changed a few times this trip, but now it SEEMS set to ride along road G214 from Xining to Lijiang.

We are leaving soon for a short first day. WE, that is a strange group of 4: an american who has ridden all across China, a chinese from Shanghai, a tibetan who has never ridden long before, and myself. It will be interesting!

As for the Tibet situation, things look good as the american, Haqi, was one of the torchbearers in the olympic relay and he has good connections.

Recovery, shopping and new plans!

Taking time to recover in Lijiang is really great! I think my last few cycling trips might have missed the recovery part... and I know that some of you have said so...

Anyway, I have strolled around the town, ridden my bike to small villages and monestries, been for a swim in a beautiful resorvoir and basically I have been enjoying to stay in this town.

Of course it helps that I have a chinese friend here: she explains things and makes it easy to make the local choices rather than the tourist choices; breakfast in the market costs 2 yuan and in the cafe recommended by Lonely Planet it costs about the same as home.

Interesting however to realise how easy it is to develop habits to feel at home in a new town: the same tea house, the same nice restaurant... it is a good feeling to come to places where the people recognise you... just like home. Or almost.

Lijiang is a world heritage site and with all the tourists coming here, the shopping is good even though the chinese seem to focus on scarfes and dried meat. Not what I am looking for! Luckily some smart people target the westerners with a taste for old Tibetan artifacts... The bargaining is quite bisarr... it just doesn't feel right to offer 10-20% of the asking price, but that is more or less what they offer after you leave the shop... or just on the doorstep. It feels like I have done most of my holiday shopping already, even though I am just in the 2nd week.

Also the time in Lijiang has helped me develop or change the plans for the rest of my trip: I got a contact to a guy from Australia who organised a private mini tour to ride from the north of Tibet (Xining) to Lijiang... Starting thursday! After some calling, they offered to wait 1 day for me to make my way up north and welcomed me to their group. Aussie style. Apperently, you don't need a permit and all the stuff with 4-wheel drive car when you have a company and a residence permit... and you can bring along friends.

I have no idea what to expect from the others, but the plan is to ride 80 to 100 km per day depending on terrain and conditions. Sleeping will be as usual in small hotels and a few nights in tents... sounds good to me! So tomorrow I will fix the last things on my bike and get ready. The total tour will be 3-4 weeks. I am afraid there will not be so many opportunities to update the blog, but the experience and the sights will be worth it.

Tomorrow i will look for a map, but basically we will ride the whole length of road 214, the same road that I started out on last year into Tibet, but this time i will ride north to south.

More tomorrow.

Pictures!

Finally, I got the cardreader to work and in the China album I have uploaded a summary of pictures since the start of the trip.

You can see all the pics here.

I am now in Lijiang and enjoy being a tourist. I am using the time it takes to adjust to the altitude and to recover from the cycling last week, to explore small streets, beautiful monestries, old shops selling fake stuff, and eating good food. I am a tourist.

The weather has been really bad the last few days and I fear the worst for getting back on the road again... there will be a lot of mud. Since Tibet is definitely off, I have changed the motto for the coming weeks to "bike less, see more", and I look forward to spending some more time in small villages, visit the monestries in Yunnan and Sichuan and see the mountains.

Up and down in the Chinese mountains

The last few days I have crossed through a mountain range... it looked like a nice road and a good way to get away from the traffic around Chengdu, but it turned out a to be a road full of surpises!

What it feels like to be a superstar: Arrive in a village and people want to touch you and your bike, somebody fixes hot water so you can make coffee, people are friendly and say hello, 5 girls invite you for diner and even though they dont speak any english they want you to stay and drink beer with them, you fly down-hill on perfect asfalt for 30 km, you get the best room for half price...

What it feels like to be a tramp: The road dissappears in the fogg, the mud clogs up the wheels and you fall over, covering all of you in mud, including the new camera, you bike 50 km on a bad road to discover that you missed the turn, when you discover that nobody wants to speak to you, after finally getting a ride back to the missed turn-off, there is nowhere to stay and you sleep along the roadside, you are chased away from local fertility event and people refuse to sell you water and food, despite the store being full...

The scenery and the people compensate for the toughness of the cycling: I have no cycling computer or altitude meter, but I must have passed over 2500 - 3000 meters at least twice, the ridiculous down/hill in the end showed that I had gained lots and lots of altitude. The gorges I rode in made me feel like riding on the bottom of the Grand Canyon! So high!

The minority people in the district I am in are the Yi, they still live very natural (or poor and backward by chinese standards) a lot of folk clothes, but also a lot of empty beer bottles along the road and quite obviously the problems and poverty seem bigger closer to the main roads than on the mountain.

A thought that keeps coming back: How many chinese would cycle from Stockholm to Dalarna to see some people in folk clothes?

All together things are good. I am tired after 7 days of riding. I have now come to the south of Sichuan and will cross over to Yunnan by bus. I know. But need a rest day and the whole area is flooding after the most torrential rains that are causing problems with floods and roads in the south of china. Last year it was the earth quake, now it is floods.

In Lijang I will spend a few days in the country side, then I will continue by bike to the north... also I hope to find a usb cable soon.

To the top

The 52 km to the top of mount Emei were basically all upphill through beautiful and shifting scenery: from green and warm to foggy and bare...

The ride up took 5 hours, after that there was still 1,5 hours of walking up massive stairs before reaching the top. Nothing much to see: fogg and darkness... So I decided to stay to give the "Golden Summit" another chance.

I got the last room in one of the hotels on the top and got up early to see the sunrise that can be really beautiful here. This morning, however, was quite foggy and bleak. There were some glimpses though of the mountains in the west and also I got a good view of the monestries and temples on the top. I had a "budhist only" breakfast of rice soup with spicy vegetables for 6 yuan. Very cheap considering that the cable car brings up 1200 tourists an hour and everything else was about double the price of things down in the village.

After a good look at the top I took the cable car down to safe my knees and then got back on my bike to ride the 52 km downhill: a nice start of the day. Now I just had a western style lunch with a chicken burger and I am ready for the second part of todays riding.

How strange is China? Very! The guesthouse owner just seriously explained that tourists can not travel in Tibet because the Lama is a bad man and the government thinks he wants to attack the tourists, but not the chinese... what can you say to that?

The buddha was very big indeed

The giant buddha in Leshan really deserves its name. It was very big and very beautiful.

The site is a major chinese attraction with many tour buses full with tourists around. I took some nice pictures and enjoyed some quietness in a corner of the park. I needed that after the morning ride with a lot of muddy roads, noise and polluted air.

Chengdu area is a basin that literally fills up with badly polluted air from all the industries that are located in the region. Not to mention the traffic and trucks.

After visiting the Buddha I continued to Mount Emei, one of the sacred mountains in budhism. I am not sure what I was expecting when I looked on the map, but when I arrived in the Emei village it came as quite a shock that the top of the mountain is another 52 km from here and 3000 meter up. I will sleep on whether I want to hike up (10 hours) or ride my bike. Apparently it is possible to sleep on the top and see the sunrise! Going up will also be a good acclimatisation: train low, sleep high...

My new camera is working fine, but there are 2 problems with the promised pictures: 1. I expected the computers to have cardreaders and didn't take the usb cable for the camera to save weight. 2. China effectively blocks the whole of blogspot... so what you see here is uploaded via mail to Sweden.

3 policemen entered my room

Today was my first day on the bike. The weather was grey with a slight rain... not quite the summer weather we had in Stockholm last week. 

It was a day with contrasts: leaving the big city of Chengdu with 4 million inhabitants took almost 1 hour, then it was another few hours with a lot of traffic untill all of a sudden I was in the countryside with typcial chinese ricefields, bamboo and a nice river view. Still things took longer than expected and on the small roads the 135k to Leshan became longer and longer... I rode 120k and there is still 40 left for breakfast to visit the worlds largest buddha statue.

 

Tonight I am staying at a small town "hotel"... there is a bed and a warmish shower... and just after I had washed all the dirt of my legs and my face, 3 policemen entered my room. All dressed up in uniform, they explained that they were the police and needed to register me. I guess this town doesn't many foreign guests: it took them 10 minutes to figure out what line in my visum was my name. 

After that they became very friendly and I was allowed to go around town to have some food. To add to the joy of this little town they are paving the road just outside my hotel. It feels like they are going to keep doing that the whole night. At least I will not oversleep again.

 

After arriving in Chengdu yesterday I fixed my bike and then went for a stroll around town together with Michael from Australia whom I met on the plane. He is here to visit his Tibetan friend who is a monk in Tibet. He explained a lot of things about the different schools of budhism in Tibet and it was really interesting to meet. I might be able to pass by the monastry along the way at some point during the trip.