Well it’s Christmas Day 2014, 501 days since I set out from home and a 135 since I was sat in Xi’an, China thinking about being on the road for a year. Now I am getting closer to home and I only have 30 days before I fly back to Europe from Miami. I’ve now…
Rolling off the ferry into Qingdao I was immediately struck by how much less polluted the city seemed to be, being on the coast helps I guess. Qingdao was also a quite unusual city by Chinese standards maintaining a lot of its own individual character. Part of this character is informed by its history as…
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…
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…
Riding ROUND 