"The road is long, we've been on the road nearly 200 days with nearly 10,000 miles cycling under our belts. England is just a memory. What we've seen the last months, most people won't see in a lifetime. We've laughed, We've cried. We've been attacked, we've been welcomed. We've roasted in +44 celsius, we've frozen at -20 celsius in the un-forgiving Gobi. Next goal - Hong Kong for Christmas. Then, through SE Asia, the dry lands, the jungles, to our destination Singapore. We are still all together, no-one has caved in yet. But there's still around 4,000 miles to go. I [View Full Entry]

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Day 195, 12th December Luiyang - Dayao As we woke up this morning and got ready, we were filmed by UTV, the channel for Hunnan province. Maybe the Chinese like to see what 6 smelly bikepackers stuff into their panniers? They followed us out of town as we left, it was a small price to pay considering they had footed the bill for our stay at the Army hotel. Apparently, they said that they’re going to spread us over 3 nights, I’m particularly worried about the night they filmed us blowing the hell out of each other with fireworks after quaffing [View Full Entry]

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Day 193, 10th December Pingyang - Luiyang (10 miles north of) Maybe the rain will never stop on this trip - I don’t know? When we set off on our bikes at 11am, a Chinese camera crew began to follow us - in the rain. But this rain seemed special because it lent a certain magic to the surrounding hills. Unable to dry out our tents and our gear in the cold hotel room, we were now cycling in damp gear which was pretty uncomfortable. Later in the day we did the usual café stop at around 5pm before deciding to [View Full Entry]

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Day 190, 7th December Shanpo - Baldun - Chongyang The Gods are smiling on us - still no rain! For breakfast I ate the last of my Cheddar in toasted bread once the mold had been scraped off, with Hellman’s Mayonnaise. Well, it tasted like mayonnaise - you have to fantasize a bit when you’re on the road. When we de-camped I noticed that the tent pegs came out of the ground covered in sticky red mud, we had entered the red-soil part of the world at last. It was an overcast day, but my dreams about nature and natural landscapes [View Full Entry]

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Day 187, 4th December Wuhan Woke up feeling somewhat better and also that the fever/illness, or whatever it was, had subsided greatly. For the first time I started to wonder what I was doing here, in central China. Was it all real? Had we really cycled 9,000 miles over 10 time zones and spent almost 200 days together without actually killing each other? My drowsy brain had difficulty computing such thoughts. I could only seriously think of having a nice cup of Yorkshire tea, I still had one emergency teabag left, some powdered milk, sugar, and there was a big Chinese [View Full Entry]

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Day 185, 2nd December Xianhondian - Hekou - Huangpi Woke up to more fireworks courtesy of Rory! After we’d packed up the tents and proud that we’d gone un-noticed, we set off on our bikes for another days cycling through “picture-book” China. There were chickens and pigs running about everywhere and those strange looking oxen with the shiny black horns in the fields. My guts were still really bad and I had to stop to produce liquid-gold regularly! The types of vegetation was changing as rapidly as my guts too; few palms were now appearing and many tropical-looki [View Full Entry]

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Day 183, 30th November Runan - Zhengyang - Luoshan - Mangyang The morning began with a full on battle. It was total war! Fireworks were flying everywhere around the tents. We used our catapults to full effect and the locals who heard the commotion ventured to investigate what the strange foreign types were doing in their storm drain. After we ran out of fireworks, we packed up, made our excuses, and left. The first small town we came to we found a roadside stall cooking food and sat down to eat breakfast. An immense crowd gathered just to watch us, the [View Full Entry]

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Day 180, 27th November Zhengzhou - Xinzheng This morning, we all felt somewhat better after our illnesses and agreed to set off at eleven, but I think that I was still feeling the worse, though. I don’t know what we had had, food poisoning, a virus, or just a bad flu? It was an overcast and cold day as we cycled out of Zhengzhou and its ugly suburbs. The place had a strange feeling of totalitarianism to it and I was glad to be leaving. We’d seen children practicing military marching drills with workers in the streets, and we saw the [View Full Entry]

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Day 177, 24th November Xingxiang - Zhengzhou As route 107 was now a motorway, we negotiated Xingxiang via a new by-pass and after took a more rural route south to the Yellow River - our destination, Zhengzhou. The road became very rural as we approached the river with another massive headwind. People used the road as a huge surface to dry out corn on which was unusual to see, us cycling over the corn and trucks passing on top of it too. Then the roads just became confusing and we got lost ending up in a desperate village and witnessing a [View Full Entry]

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Day 175, 22nd November Handan - Anyang - Tangyin Woke up to a polluted haze of fumes and assorted chemicals - the worse yet. You could hardly see the other end of the field we’d camped in. I was suffering from a kind of a cold too, along with the rest of the other guys. This rough feeling, and cycling through the soup of fumes made for an awful day. In Anyang, I bought some flu remedy which looked very dodgy, so I did’nt take it. The fumes got thicker and thicker as we rode south. III dread to think what [View Full Entry]

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