Siuxi to Qunzhou Jan.19-22/08

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The riding from Siuxi towards Hepu was good. Mostly smooth roads(hwy 325) but still very overcast and cool(10°C) with heavy morning fog. Lots of waves and honks of the bike horn as usual as we are quite a spectacle going through little villages and towns where they would rarely see western tourists at all-let alone on bicycles! We didn't get quite as far as we'd anticipated as I once again had rear tire issues 😞. We pulled over when it sounded like I had run over something. Sure enough there was about three inches of wire sticking out of the centre of my tire. It hadn't flatted it yet and didn't seem to want to pull out easily so we just snipped it off. A few mins. later there was more wire and upon closer inspection we realized that it was the wire bead from the sidewall of the tire! There was about 10 inches of it on the inside of the tire that had come out. We snipped it off and duct-taped the end so it wouldn't puncture the tube and decided to carry on and see if the sidewall would hold missing all that bead. It didn't take much more riding until the tire was coming off the rim so we stopped and decided that this tire was history and began putting on one of our spares. A nice school-teacher came across the road offering us his help and because he spoke English so well we asked if he could translate and write a few things down in Chinese characters in our notebook for us so that we could show people. For those of you planning any China travel, this is an invaluable method of communication if you don't already speak Mandarin or Cantonese! Having the name of the next town you're trying to get to or the veggie food you'd like to eat written down is awesome! Our map only has the major towns in Chinese characters on it and it seems that no matter how many times we try pronouncing things based on the phonetics in our phrasebook for the most part we get it wrong-lol! Basic lessons would probably be a great idea if one had time. He also took the old tire off our hands-it could probably still be used for regular cycling-just not for touring with the heavy loads. Well, at least I understood now why I had so much flat trouble- The replacement Scwalbe MarathonXR(26X2.25-I know, FAT touring tire!) seems pretty bomber and is the same as both G's tires. The defective tire was the only wire bead tire of the bunch(the rest are all kevlar) and came straight from Schwalbe Canada to our door-they'll be getting an email from me soon! Anyway, after multiple stops getting that sorted out(and removing all the gear fom the rear of the bike each time 😞 ) , we cont'd on and by late afternoon started keeping our eyes out for good campspots and eventually found a nice little spot. We were somwhere around halfway between Siuxi and Hepu.


Next day we got away a little late(the packing up process takes a little while!) and con't on to Hepu and beyond. The road was still generally good but did have a few rough kms here and there through construction and really coarse asphalt. We had a great stop at a roadside truckstop for vegetables and tofu where once again we were quite an attraction-we had a crowd watching us eat! A couple of the guys leaned in for a very close look at me and and we figured out that they were pointing out my blue eyes. The weather was colder and windier again today 6-8°C. At one point a small dumptruck passed us and was leaking two strips of let's call it : liquid "refuse" (a little of which spattered onto yours truly's sleeve-oh the horror-lol!). We ended up following this "trail"(and trying to avoid riding through it!)and it's odour for probably two hours and at the same time there were these beautiful sweetly scented flowering trees along the roadside. I remember smiling to myself as I was enjoying the scent of the flowers despite the shit smell and we had a little chuckle together thinking about how the scenario sort of mirrored life and how you choose to look at things. We eventually found another good campspot candidate, settled in, munched on some raw ramen and fresh onion flavoured crackers with a little waxberry for dessert before going to sleep. The next a.m we woke up to 4°C weather and didn't much feel like moving! My back was feeling really tough(tweaked it before leaving on the trip and have had a hard time sorting it out), and I somehow managed to develop a cold. We (or was it just me that was a bit whiny? Nah, I must be remembering it wrong!) managed to get ourselves going. The roads cont'd to be good and were sort of rolling hills through sugar cane country that was being harvested with the odd rice paddy in the lower lying areas. We rolled through this one town early on where there must have been a processing plant for the cane as the town was a continuous line of trucks loaded to the gills waiting from one end of town to the other! Eventually the road started climbing at it was really tough(mentally-at least for me but then again my back was killing me, it was cold and windy, my nose was running steady and all I could think of was my bed at home-lol!) because it was gradual but just never seemed to end for km after km! There would be a long straight with a curve at the "top" and you'd think "that's the end-it'll plateau there"--not--just another long stretch where you go through the same process again! It stayed that way all the way until the turn-off to Qinzhou(our destination and where we turn off the 325). We were very happy to find a relatively cheap,clean hotel (where they also happened to rent by the hour and through the evening you'd here a "floosh" and a business card with women in bikinis on it and price lists for all kinds of "massage" services would appear on the floor just inside the door! We saved some and will have to get them translated-lol!) and decided that we'd spend an extra day there to help me with my back and cold and to recharge batteries(both ours and our electronics!) etc............

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Photos

Half load season is over!
Can he even see where he's going?!

Amd we thought our bikes were loaded!
Cool!

Sugar cane trucks
Waiting to unload--the whole town was full of these trucks!