I’d come to Tai’an with one purpose: to climb Tai Shan, considered to be China’s holiest mountain and which has been worshipped since the 11th Century BC. It has been climbed by countless emperors and other important people from Chinese history including Mao Zedong. Soon it would be honoured by my ascent, I hoped anyway,…
In Pingyao we made our way to some accommodation highly recommended by the Lonely Planet: The Harmony Guesthouse. It was OK and neither Meka or I could work out quite why the Planet was so in love with it. Still it did have pleasant albeit tiny rooms. Pingyao itself, on the other hand, was definitely…
Hello guys, Today we will talk about girl’s legs and the bit of the trip that I cycled alone. Basically all what happened to me when I was riding alone is written on my incredibly long and colourful, like “Meka’s solo adventures” as comrade Riches calls them, legs. Though it was not as bad as…
Our train arrived into Xi’an a bit later than we expected and our bikes much later as they didn’t turn up until the next day. In Xi’an the main thing we had to do was apply for renewals for our visas; we weren’t sure how this was going to go due to the amount of…
This is the third time I have written some parts of this post due to IT issues…I hope the frustration doesn’t show! The rain in Lanzhou continued into the next day after we arrived gradually petering out sometime in the afternoon. We had begun to wonder if it would ever stop… In Lanzhou we had…
I’m writing this on 12 August 2014 exactly one year to the day after I set out on this trip to cycle around the world. One year ago I cycled out of a sleepy English village called Aldbourne, population 2,000, in fine summer weather and today I am sat in Xi’an a Chinese city of…
The evening of the day I arrived in Zhangye, I met Meka from the station without a hitch and we rode back into town chatting about what we had been up to while we had been riding apart. Whether or not you hear Meka’s stories depends on Meka pulling her finger out to write about…
It turned out that we weren’t staying in Dunhuang itself but just outside of town right next to the sand dunes, which are one of the things the area is famous for. These were truly impressive with some of the dunes apparently rearing up 800m and looking very beautiful with the clear blue sky behind…
Meka and I spent a few days in Urumqi in order to rest, relax and clean our bikes and other equipment down. We’d had a tough few days in the mountains and a tough couple of weeks in the desert before that so were happy for some downtime. Eating was of course important and I…
We departed Luntai a little later than we would do normally so as to take advantage of the comfort of the hotel room and the inclusive Chinese breakfast buffet, which while filling left me craving cereal quite badly. Luntai was in another oasis like green area that we got to ride through for a large…
Riding ROUND 