I was loving the sounds of flowing water, the smell of vegetation and the shade of trees. Two weeks battling the desert is enough for anyone to see things in a new light. I had made it to Urumqi – a place that claims to be both at the geographic centre of the Asian Continent [...]
READ MORE »Posts in category China
A day of extremes
It started waking up under the road and ended camping in a far flung desert in a remote part of far Western China. As with the journey, it was what happened in between that defined it. The previous afternoon, I had rolled my sleeping mat out in the confines of a concrete culvert. It was [...]
READ MORE »Familiarity
My return to China was flooded with a kind of reverse culture shock. The dirty, run down city of Kathmandu had cows shitting in the street; the rivers ran full of rubbish; chaotic traffic spilled in all directions around every corner and intersection. The tangled cars often sang in a symphony of horns. In contrast, [...]
READ MORE »Valleys of the Gods, Earthquakes and Paranoia
In Shangri-La we met up with some cycling friends and decided to ride north together. In the early morning, in the wet sleet-like rain we set off following the border with Tibet. It would take a month to ride to the northern city of Geermu and we’d have to cycle across three provinces and end up [...]
READ MORE »Epic Valleys and Blue Skies
I spent nearly a month in Lijiang staying with Hutch helping with preparations for cycling Tibet. I met a lot of interesting people, spent a long time sorting, cleaning and fixing gear. I had a new floor sewn into my tent, making it twice as strong and twice as heavy. I got my rack rewelded for [...]
READ MORE »Growth, a Mad Man and a Meal
China is diverse. It’s an exotic mix of peoples, cultures and customs. From the vast plains of the Mongolian herds in the north, to the dense jungles along the Mekong River in the south; from the low lying river deltas along the South China Sea in the east, to the Great Taklamakan Desert in the [...]
READ MORE »The Key to Lhasa
Getting into Tibet is tricky business. Actually, it’s not so tricky if you have money, something which I needed to spread very thinly for the long journey ahead. I learned the difference between what I actually needed (which turned out to be very little) and what I wanted (which was to become less and less [...]
READ MORE »Black markets and cold smiles
Crossing into Southern China was another milestone. China was a country that sounded so strange and foreign, like it was in its own remote corner of the world. With a few billion people, China was big and, for the last five years, we’ve constantly heard people talk of China, China, China. But, what was it [...]
READ MORE »Reflections – A Year On
Whew, a year on the road already! It goes quick. Recently I celebrated the first year (of many) on the road, not with a ‘POP!’ from an expensive champagne bottle, nor blowing out the flame of a single candle, but with a day just like every other. It led to the expression of thoughts and [...]
READ MORE »
