I’m glad I’ve done it.

The second entry in the ‘Things Travellers Say’ phrasebook. Usually preceded by a story where the protagonist has dragged their arse through an entirely unenjoyable experience in the vain hope they can look back on it one day as a character building, life affirming moment, when in actual fact the only thing they’re glad about it the fact they’ll never have to do it again.

China. I’m glad I’ve done it.

I’m pulling your leg a bit there, China was one of my favourite places to bike through, but in the same breath it also handed me my lowest, profanity-laced moments.

I’ll be honest, it took me a few days to get up to speed when I arrived. It felt like I’d ridden up to the gates only to jump the fence. Flying meant I’d been dumped straight into the deep end of China’s hectic city life, instead of slowly grinding through the gradual change from Central Asia to the North Western Xinjiang province.

I also managed to underestimate the size of Xi’an. I mean, I knew it would be big, but not that big. I was staring at a Piccadilly Circus sized telly on the side of a skyscraper when I realised I was still 15 kilometres from the city centre loop. That’s when the magnitude of China hit home.

I’m going to put this out there early doors; the Chinese are mental. If I could speak to them all at once, like some kind of compassionate overlord, I think my only question would be —

Why?

There are so many things in China that just leave you perplexed, it seems like there’s something to bend your mind around every corner. The first being as I biked into Xi’an city and found people burning small fires, either for warmth or food (even though it wasn’t too cold and they were burning all manner of rubber and plastic). I’m not talking one or two either, or in an oil drum or other sensible receptacle, I’m talking shitloads of little fires pissing black smoke everywhere, all along the pavement. They didn’t even think of clubbing together for one big, lung knackering community fire.

As a touring cyclist I’ve figured out you hold the ability to reduce people’s mental age to around seven or eight within the time it takes you to roll past. In Turkey I cycled past a fairly professional looking meeting full of suits, hi-vis vests and hard hats on a roadside building site. As I pedalled through I gave them a cheery wave and their professional demeanour vanished as they all bounced up and down, shouting, giggling and waving. In Central Asia it’s hard to stop in a populated area without people grinning and shoving their knackered old camera phone at your sweating face as they shout ‘Photo! Photo!’ Don’t get me wrong, I might sound cynical, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, I love and abuse this power daily. I find it endearing that people are amused and bemused by someone cycling around.

In China, you don’t even need an overloaded bike to get these reactions; staring, pointing, giggling and outright laughter is commonplace and, for a while, it’s endearing.

My Garmin eTrex 20 is the most important thing I’ve bought. In China it only became more useful. Granted, here it’s not as accurate due to the OpenStreetMap data not being as eerily accurate as everywhere else, but it was accurate enough, and after failing to find a half decent map in Xi’an, it was the only navigational crutch I had.

Road signs are split around 90% Chinese only, to 10% Chinese/English (obviously on the smaller roads you’re own your own). This means you start to pick up Chinese symbols in the places you’re heading, and the easiest way to do that is remember them as a little picture. Xi’an was ‘Pie in the Oven, Running Man’. You get the idea.

I’d split up China into three sections –

Xi’an to Chengdu (Pie in the Oven, Running Man to Swingball, Pole Vault)

Chengdu to Kunming (Swingball, Pole Vault to Rocking Chair, Bee Hives)

Kunming to Vietnam (Rocking Chair, Bee Hives to Leg Sweep, Money in Church)

Nice and easy. Except China turned out to be bigger than I thought. Everything in China is bigger than you think; cities, landscape, population, development, wealth and poverty, you name it, it’s been amped up to eleven.

Leaving Xi’an

Commie Coke

I figured this pretty early as I’d planned to camp near a village on the first night after leaving Xi’an (Pie in the Oven, Running Man). It was a little dot on my GPS called Zhouzhi (Lucha Libre Mask, Cat in Tree, Teetering Bricks), probably enough to grab some food and head to the hills. Turns out half a million people lived in this dot. I binned off the camping idea and settled for a relatively cheap hotel, leaning my bike outside and pondering inside to sort out the nitty gritty. Checking into a hotel, especially as a foreigner with a half a handful of nice Chinese pleasantries in my vocabulary, is tricky business. Most of the time there’s a board with the prices listed behind the desk. This is to be ignored. I never once paid the listed price, in fact, haggling never even started there. This particular woman, when she realised any words she uttered were met with a blank stare, had the clever idea of writing everything down to communicate.

Genius.

Except she’d written it all in fucking Chinese. This happened far more often than you’d think.

The first step in my mute haggling patter was to write down ‘¥?’. Fortunately question marks work in Chinese. We’d have a couple of exchanges, where I’d cross out their offer and scrawl something cheaper, all the time smiling and giggling like a, well, Chinese person who’d just seen a over-bearded white guy. Once that’s done it’s time to sort out the push-iron. We’re out of ‘Velocipede’ range now, it’s ‘Zi Chin Sur’, so generally repeating ‘Zi Chin Sur’ whilst pointing at my bike and then towards inside was usually met with a nod and a point towards my room, apparently they have no problems with hauling mud-coated bikes through quite nice hotels over here.

For such a big country there isn’t much free space knocking about, the entire countryside is dedicated to agriculture; steps cut into hills, crops running right up to the road, even the smallest areas have something growing on it, every bit counts. I suppose when you’ve got 1.3 billion mouths to feed it’s best not to piss about. Problem is, that makes it a bit of a pain in the arse for wild camping because if the Chinese can’t farm on it, chances are you can’t sleep on it, they’ll only give up when it’s truly unfarmable.

The Mist

It took me a couple of days to hit the top of my first Chinese mountain. Despite pedalling up non-stop switchbacks in slow drizzle and hanging mist it was a bit easier than I expected. I’d heard (and dreamt) of slick Chinese roads and they didn’t disappoint, it made a change from Central Asian dirt roads. When the mist cleared I realised I was cycling through some huge canyons, everything’s bigger in China, but it seems you’ve got to cycle a lot further to get to these sections, it’s worth the mileage though.

Roads that are slicker than spit

Remember that bridge at the end of Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom?

More winding climbs

Uneven Roadside Camping Part 1

Decent place to hide from the rain

The next few days were spent cycling out of the mountains, into some flats, and most of the time getting piss-soaked wet through. This I could handle, at least it wasn’t snow, and Flo had given me his overshoes, which were getting used far more than I would’ve liked.

Piss wet through. Shortly after this some motorcyclists stopped and gave me a cigarette.

This continued up until a place called Hanzhong (Man Dangling from Tree, Hammer, Pneumatic Drill), where I managed to get a puncture on a roundabout. I’d kind of forgotten puncture protocol since I’d changed to my Schwalbe Marathon Plus Touring tyres in Greece, I’d biked roughly 9000km with no flats. After hauling the bike onto a traffic island to patch up (and snapping my VAR tyre lever getting the tyre off), it turned out that my rim tape was knackered, and the puncture was caused by the tube rubbing against the rim over time. That’s right, it was an inside job.

Schwalbe one, punctures nil.

Shopping list
Rim tape
Tube
Tyre levers
Scotch egg

Switchbacks

It felt like Autumn again here, meaning I was racing South to avoid the incoming Winter

Just about in the Sichuan province.

The majority of the way from Xi’an to Chengdu (Pie in the Oven, Running Man to Swingball, Pole Vault) was along the G108, an old national road, that most of the time, weaves between the legs of the raised highways that tower over mountain passes in a conquering straight line. It’s awful how they’ve ploughed straight through the beautiful landscape (including family homes that now have a huge support for the motorway plonked in the middle of their land), unfortunately, Mother Nature can’t stand in the way of a new road over here, but you kind of have to admire the structure and tenacity. Despite all that, the G108 gets an honorary mention on my list of favourite roads, it’s a zinger to ride. Yes, I have a list of favourite roads. No, it’s a mental list, I don’t have a bit of paper with numbers and letters on it in my arse pocket. Stop fucking giggling.

Hole in the wall

Road under a road in the middle of nowhere.

Comical Road Signs Part 1

Comical Road Signs Part 2

Cheap hotels were the game in China, normally manned by ridiculous characters; the overly helpful father-son combo in Mianxian (Leg Sweep, Teetering Bricks) who nearly fell down a flight of stairs struggling to lift my bike. The cackling women in Ningqiang (Umbrella Beret, Snake Charmer, Teetering Bricks) who consistently giggled at me throughout every encounter over two days. The lovely couple in Mianyang (Smoking Robot, Climbing Frame) who didn’t have a clue what to do with a foreigner and ended up having to get a  couple of coppers to help me register. That’s not to say I didn’t try to camp, it’s just that every time I started poking round, looking for a spot, I pretty much rolled into a massive town.

This town was completely unmarked on any map source.

This old chap was quite intrigued as to what I was doing.

But not half as much as these cheeky chappies.

These coppers took me around five different hotels sorting me out a place to stay. Top blokes.

It felt like it took me a long time to cycle to Chengdu (Swingball, Pole Vault). In that time it almost felt like I hadn’t spoken to anyone without having to wildly gesticulate. That’s because I hadn’t. After looking at a calendar and a map over several beers, I realised that getting to the Vietnam border before my one month visa expired was going to be tricky, especially including the three days in Kunming waiting for a Vietnamese visa. The best place to do this was Leshan (Cowboy Swinging Lasso, Pitchfork), a city about two days bike ride south, famous for some massive Buddha statues.

The Chinese reenacting the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling competition with shit driving and a ten ton concrete tube.

After a couple of days in Chengdu (Swingball, Pole Vault), I had a couple of horrible days cycling through shit, polluted, industrial towns before arriving in Leshan (Cowboy Swinging Lasso, Pitchfork), where I had a comical search for passport photos (which are apparently difficult to describe in sign language) before a relatively easy visa extension process and a couple of days wait whilst the heavens opened.

So, while I was waiting for my visa extension and it pissed it down outside, I did some research on the road ahead from various cycling blogs.

Hills and mud. Lots of both.