The few weeks before we set out on this journey we were busy preparing everything and saying good bye to all our friends. The winter was unusually cold and one night I rode my bike along the icy cold streets of Göteborg to the yacht harbour to visit my friend and second cousin Greta at her sailing yacht. We had a nice evening and shared a bottle of wine. Greta interviewed me in detail about our coming trip and being an person who really likes outdoor adventures she asked if it was OK if she joined us somewhere along the route.

To be honest, I think neither Greta nor I really believed that it would become a reality for her to visit us. The logistical challenges were simply too difficult but two months ago we started to e-mail each other about the issue. A few days later Greta had bought a ticket, got her vacation approved and yesterday she arrived to Kunming airport. Our plan is to cycle together to Luang Prabang in Laos where she
will catch a flight back home to Göteborg.

When Wej and I arrived to Kunming five days ago it was raining and less than ten degrees. We stayed in a shared apartment with a German cyclist we had met along the way. Since the distance from Kunming to Luang Prabang is too long to be able to cover during the time Greta is here, we will have to start cycling from Mojiang some 250 km south of Kunming.

The elevation profile from Kunming to Mojiang is flat or downhill with only a few not so big climbs. Wej and I thought we could cycle there in two days and I would than catch a bus back to Kunming to meet Greta and then take her to Mojiang.

Before we started to cycle to Mojiang we got a message from another cyclist riding a few days ahead of us that the small road beside the highway south of Kunming was in a bad condition. Since the weather was good we coldn’t wait to get moving again but as soon as we got out of the urban area we ended up on a muddy road full of water filled potholes. Both our bikes and ourselves got completely covered in mud and after a while I could feel a scratching feeling from my bottom bracket. The feeling wouldn’t get away even after I rinsed the chain and the chanrings.

Not knowing what the problem was we decided to return to Kunming, get my bike fixed and wait for Greta’s arrival. The mechanic at one of Kunming’s best bicycle shops told me that my bottom bracket was OK but that my middle chain ring was completely worn out and my bearings and cone in my rear hub needed to be changed.

The components on my bicycle seem to have unusual sizes and the bicycle shop we visited had no bottom bracket and chain ring of the right size. Greta was going to make a short stopover in Bangkok to borrow a bike from our friend Mah who also happens to be the owner of BokBokBike which is Bangkok’s best touring bike shop. Since the shop in Kunming didn’t have the parts we sent a mail to Mah to include two new tyres, two bottom brackets, new chainrings and some other minor parts in the box with Greta’s bike.

This long journey has taken its toll on our bikes but now we hope they are ready for the remaining +2000 km to Bangkok.

We are so happy to have Greta here and we will try to do our best to introduce her to bicycle touring. We just hope the weather in Yunnan and Laos will cooperate…..

Beginning of the end…..
Before we set out on this journey I had the ambition to update my part of our common blog continously. The access to internet was very good in central Europe and I could make daily updates, but as internet connections became more and more scarce the blog got updated less and less frequently. It wasn’t because there was nothing to tell, only that it was so complicated tell the story.

A few weeks ago here in China I got a writer’s block and didn’t update my part of our blog for almost two weeks. Now it has been almost two weeks since the last update and this time it isn’t because of any block.

Firstly, we stayed in Chengdu for almost a week doing nothing and it is hard to tell an interesting story about what we do and our experiences when we do nothing…. When we then started to cycle the first few days out of Chengdu it was rather uninteresting from a cycling or traveling perspective and there was really nothing to tell.

Secondly and more interestingly is that we are now quickly approaching the end of this journey. Fro/m the start in Sweden in February until 2-3 weeks ago we have been living in a time bubble consisting of here and now and we rarely thought further into the future than a few days at the time. Of course we have had rough plans to stick to – the visa clock has been ticking since we left Georgia, but that has been pretty much the only time constraint we have had. We have not been aware of what day in the week is and not what date it has been either. It has been a very pleasant experience to live like this and I recommend you all to try it sometime.

It is today only 39 days left until we on November 30 will ride our bikes across the Chao Phraya river into downtown Bangkok. Of course we could make a discrete arrival to Bangkok, take a few photos at the finishing point and then continue as all other times we have flown into Bangkok for vacation. This would be possible but it isn’t the way we want to do it. We want to cycle through Thailand with our friends and other local cyclists and we would like to host some kind of arrival party in Bangkok and all this need to be planned.

The last few weeks we have been too pre-occupied with the arrival to Thailand and all the arrangements around it rather than what is here and now. This has not only taken time from writing blog updates, it has also forced us to get out of our comfy ”here and now time bubble”. Nowadays we are very well aware of what date and what day in the week it is and in a way it feels like the journey is over even when we still have more than a month to go.

We hope we can be able to publish our plans for our arrival to Thailand and Bangkok on this blog within a week and then get back into the time bubble while traveling through south China and Laos.

We have lost three dear friends….
Don’t be afraid – nobody has died…
We submitted our applications for extension of visa when the visa office opened after the one week holiday. One day later we got our passports back with a new sticker attached telling that we can stay until November 10th. It was a great relief and we went back to the hotel to pack our bags to be able to leave early the next morning.

When we had cycled less than 500 meters the following morning Wej complained that her rear wheel was wobbleing. Luckily we were just outside a bikeshop and we asked the mechanic to take a look at the bearings. It turned out that the the cone we got replaced in Hami some 1500 km ago was worn out. This was far too early and has caused us a lot of concern. The shop didn’t have any replacement cones to sell so the mechanic jumped up on his bike and guided us to the city’s sport stadium where there were at least 10 bikeshops side by side.

We got our bikes washed and another mechanic dissembled Wejs hub, cleaned the bearings and replaced her cone. It took a while and when we left we had lost our first friend that day, but we didn’t notice it until the following morning.

It took a long while to repair Wejs hub and clean our bikes and when we were ready we decided to not go on cycling that day but to go back to our hotel and check in for another night. We then went out to have dinner at the simple restaurant that we had visited a few times already and when we returned to the hotel we realized we had lost friend number two.

A few days later we lost the third friend right in front of the entrance to a tunnel. I had got a flat tyre a kilometer earlier and quickly changed to a new innertube but when I started to cycle I could hear a loud nosie for every turn of my newly fixed front wheel. I stopped to investigate what it was and realized friend number three was lost.

So who are these lost friends?

Lost friend number one is Wej’s dear green cap that she has had for many years and on this trip she has worn it under her helmet every day. It has served her well and protected her face and head from the strong sun during many many hours of outdoor activities not only on this journey. Its military dark green colour had faded and the cap had got a very nice patina, but now it is lost forever. Wej is sad to have lost her friend but is also happy for its long and loyal service.

Lost friend number two is a souvenir soft toy from the Turkish football association that we got as a present when we fixed a flat tyre on the main square in Trabzon where the football association was having an event. We actually got one each but we gave away one of them to a kid we met somewhere in Georgia. The other one has been our mascot and has been riding with us over mountains and through deserts hanging on Wejs handlebar bag. We had hoped we could bring this friend with us to Bangkok and we are sad to have lost her, but we hope she will continue traveling happily on her own.

We have had warm feelings for friend one and two, but unfortunately the same can’t be said about friend number three. Although we have had no feelings for each other, friend number three has played a crucial role during this trip, but now time caught up with him and he died in front of that tunnel after a 16.000 km long and dutiful service. It has happened that we have yelled at our friend and been disappointed of his performance, but he has never complained. He has just kept rolling and rolling until he was punctured so severely that a pen could be put through his thick black skin.

The cycling
If you didn’t already know it I can tell you that this trip between Göteborg and Bangkok is carried out by bicycle and I will take the opportunity to mention a few words about the last two weeks cycling experience.

The ride from Chengdu to Leshan was very different from the previous weeks on the east tibetan plateu. Chengdu is located in the lowlands below the mountains and this area is very densely populated. We took a small road the 160 km from Chengdu to Leshan where we would apply for extension of our visas. This small road passed a village – yes you read it correctly A village…. Although being on a small road on the countryside we hardly saw any fields or forests. There were buildings along the road all the way from Chengdu to Leshan and it felt like we were riding through the world’s longest village. Of course it was many villages that had grown together and behind the single row of houses that lined the road we could see the fields of rice and corn. Seeing so much people, houses and activity was very different from our experience during our ride through the east tibetan areas.

Being on the east tibetan plateu was a cold and sometimes wet experience. In the lowland between Chengdu and Leshan we could finally cycle dressed only in shorts and T-shirts again. We had looked forward to it and enjoyed every second of it.

We have followed road 213 for a couple of weeks now. It’s a long road that seems to cross central China from north to south. We have been on and off it since we bypassed Lanzhou. We left it somewhere outside Chengdu but south of Leshan we joined it again.

Road 213 is a good road with a perfect surface and it has been a joy to cycle on it.

Two days after leaving Leshan we arrived to a small town outside the city of Nananzhen that is located where two tributaries to the Yangtze river merge. The good old road 213 was in a poor condition here due to being severly damaged in the Sichuan earthquake a few years ago.

We stayed one night at a hotel in the unlit village outside Nananzhen. When we went out to find somewhere to have dinner it was a compact darkness and a very dense fog. It was foggy in the morning too, but at least it wasn’t dark and road 213 had been repaired so we could make some quick progress until we would start a 1500 meter climb over a mountain.

We had checked both our printed map and online maps and road 213 was now going to take us up on the mountain and when we arrived to a T-shaped intersection in a town before the switchbacks we were a bit unsure about which way to go so we asked a police officer for help. He spoke no english but his body language told us that he thought it was a really bad idea to go on road 213. We soon understood why…..

After that T-intersection road 213 turned into a very poor dirt road with big potholes and lots of loose rocks on the surface. We were surprised to say the least. On the map the road looked like it had looked all the time with the same size, colour and number, but here it turned into what could best be described as a dirt road for tractors in a forest.

First we thought that the condition of the road was temporary and it would get better later on, but after a while we realized that road 213 has a complex and split personality with different charachteristics….. When we realized that the road wasn’t going to get any better and we would be slowed down significantly we were disappointed for about 30 minutes before starting to enjoy the unexpected adventure that fate had brought upon us.

We passed small villages and met many groups of curious kids on their way to school. Just like the kids in central asia they ran after us trying to talk to us using the few words in English they know. Being followed by curious kids is something we got used to in central asia but had yet to experience in China.

In the late afternoon we understood we wouldn’t make it over the mountain to the next town so we decided find somehwere to pitch our tent. To find a place to camp is difficult in an area that is so steep that people have to make terraces on the hillsides to get some land to grow rice on, build their houses or park their cars.

When we camp we have a security related rule that is that either nobody sees us or knows where we are or lots of people are aware of our presence. We try to avoid being seen by only one or two people.

So what to do when there is nowhere to pitch a tent and there are people around, but too few to be called ”many”? We found two spots immediately beside the road that could serve as a far from perfect tent spot and then we waited to pitch the tent until it got completely dark.

Our tent was next to some big boulders less than 3 meters from the road and although some cars, motorcycles and even pedestrians passed us nobody noticed the tent. One man walked along the road talking loudly on his cell phone and pointed his torch light right to our tent, but didn’t seem to see it.

A very good indicator of how bad condition a mountain road is in is when it isn’t possible to cycle faster downhill than uphill. Our average speed up the mountain was about 7-8 km/h and it wasn’t faster on the way down….. Both of us got blisters on our hands from all the breaking on the way down.

A few hours later on the second day on the mountain we got a glimpse of a good looking road in the far distance. After a quick look on the map and we realised that it must be our road… 🙂 It was an adventure on the mountain but we also looked forward to get back on a nice road again. When we had descended to the road we realized one problem and that was that the good road was missing on maps and seemed to go to the east instead of south towards the next set of switchbacks.

We soon came to a 4 km long tunnel that was neither on the printed map, nor on the online map. We thought this tunnel was a new one and that it would bypass the next steep climb by going through rather than over the mountain before re-joining road 213 after the mountain pass. We entered the tunnel that was downhill and after speeding through we took a look at the GPS that told us we were not on any road, but indicated we were far off where we had planned to go.

Not very tempted at going back uphill through a long tunnel we stopped to re-plan our route. The road we were on was too new to be on any map but it seemed it would take us straight east to a motorway that is parallell to the road we planned to ride. We have had enough of motorways and decided to go on a smaller road parallell to the motorway. There were two major towns on this small road and there was a lot of traffic on the 20 km between them.

After passing the first town we witnessed a very chaotic situation. Two trucks traveling in opposite directions had crashed into each others side and blocked the road completely. It wasn’t a serious crash and the damages were minor, but they had to be removed before the traffic could flow freely again. The line of cars waiting behind both trucks grew quickly and were soon several kilometers long. Instead of lining up properly behind each other and leaving the lane for the traffic in the opposite direction free, the cars and trucks waiting on both sides started to overtake each other to get to the front of the line. This meant that the road was completely blocked on both lanes in both directions and rescue vehicles had big difficulties to access the two trucks. The road looked like a giant car park and we had to go zig zag between cars that had parked on our side of the road.

Once past the last cars waiting we speeded on trying to get as far as possible before the traffic was let on again, but only a few cars came. We think that they still may be parked on that road trying to sort out who to back out first….

This situation was interesting from a cultural perspective. Nobody seemed to think the thought that if I overtake the car in front of me there won’t be any space for me to get back in again and I will be left blocking the opposite lane causing everyone to get stuck, but since everyone is doing this I can do it as well. To me this was a real life example of the philosophical terms ”tragedy of the commons” and ”prisoners dilemma” (google if you don’t know them).

An hour or so after the chaotic situation we entered Yanjim which probably is the world’s most narrow town….

The town is located along a river that flows between high mountains with very steep sides. Yinjin has two parts, one on each bank of the river and there is no flat area since the town is literally built onto the mountain sides. The side we stayed at had two long major streets with steep alleys or staircases leading towards the apartment blocks where people live. Parking on the street was impossible and many buildings had a garage on the street level. We had to squeeze our bikes under a stairway in the combined hotel and apartment block that we were staying at.

Although the city had so little flat area the two main streets were very busy with fancy boutiques, restaurants and shops side by side. Yinjim is probably not known for anything but I’m glad we came here and I will remember it for its very unlikely location.

It had been good weather with nice temperatures but with some haze all the way from Chengdu to Yinjam. When we left Yinjam the temperatures dropped and we could see how dark clouds got into attack position. We got one more day with a grey sky but then we had rain most of the time all the way into Kunming. Since it rained and the beautiful views were blocked we decided to go on the motorway to get some kilometers done.

Chinese people like to refer to Kunming as the city of eternal spring. It is located at 1900 meters altitude and being only 250 km from the tropic of cancer which is where the tropical zone of the world starts it is supposed to never be really cold but have a pleasant weather throughout the year. Not so when we visit though – the temperature has ranged between 7-13 during three last days into Kunming and now when we have been in the city for three days already we feel like we are back in Göteborg. This kind of weather is what we are used to back home at this time of the year and never did I expect to experience the same weather conditions only three cycling days before crossing into the tropics.

For more photos of our trip from Chengdu to Kunming, take a look at Wej’s most recent blog post. She has put in a lot of photos there.

A few weeks ago we asked all of you who follow this blog about advice for which route to take when entering Thailand. We got many interesting opinions both as e-mails and as comments directly on the blog. 

After having put the question on the blog we started to discuss the issue intensively among ourselves and it seemed that both of us were more interested in going west after Luang Prabang and enter Thailand in the northern province of Nan. That route is more rough, not very populated and certainly less traveled. We felt that going this way would be the last stretch of adventure we would get before entering Thailand where we will have a comfortable ride on good roads with friends accompanying us most of the way to the finish line. 

Entering Thailand in the north would also mean that we could pass Chiang Mai where we know a lot of people. It is also Loy Krathong festival on November 17th and it would have been interesting to celebrate it there.

However, the decision is now made to take the route straight south from Luang Prabang and enter Thailand by crossing the Mekhong river on the Friendship bridge between Laos’ capital Vientienne and the city of Nong Khai on the Thai side of the river. 

It is not an active decision to take this route, it is an effect of bureaucrazy…..

When we learnt that China changed its visa laws we heard rumours that it would be increasingly difficult to get an extension. We have two Swedish passports each and quickly developed plan A and B. 

Plan A was to apply for extension as usual and hope for the best. Plan B was to get a new visa outside China. The new chinese legislation is that one has to apply for a visa at the chinese embassy in the home country, in our case in Sweden. We prepared all required documents and sent them home to Göteborg together with the passport we currently don’t use. If the extension wasn’t granted, we would quickly leave for Hong Kong while an application for a new visa was being processed back home and then delivered to Hong Kong by courier.

It would have been a costly and 10 day long detour but we were prepared for it. When we applied for extension we were a bit nervous and extremely happy when our applications for extension were granted.

Wej will use her Thai passport when entering Laos and Thailand and doesn’t need any visas for these countries, but the passport I currently travel on has too short remaining validity to be able to use for an application of a visa to Thailand at the Thai consulate here in Kunming. The passport that I sent back to Sweden is valid for another four years and since it is already in Sweden I thought I could just as well apply for a Thai visa at the consulate in Göteborg.

This has now been proven to be extremely complicated. Both the Thai Embassy and consulate in Sweden requires paid (not only booked) air tickets (bus tickets won’t do…) in and out of the country. Having cycled this far we are certainly not interested in getting even a 5 minutes flight (there is no such flight anyway) across the Mekhong river and we don’t know yet what day we will return and thus haven’t bought any return tickets.

I have e-mailed the embassy and the consulate to ask for an exception but only got a polite answer that they have to stick to their rules. Fortunately, Thailand doesn’t have a uniform visa application procedure for its embassies and the embassy in Vientienne in Laos doesn’t need anything else than the usual application form, photo, passport copy and payment to be able to grant a visa.

My passport that is in Sweden will be delivered to me next weekend and now when it has proven impossible to get a Thai visa in Sweden for crossing the land border, I will have to go to Vientienne in Laos to try my luck there and this means that the route west from Luang Prabang towards Chiang Mai is not an option anymore and we will have to enter at Nong Khai whether we like it or not.

The struggle to get a visa has been a recurrent issue during this trip. Getting visas to the ex-soviet countries in central asia is known among travelers to be extremely complicated since it costs a lot of money and a lot of patience is needed. Getting a visa to Thailand is supposed to be very simple but unfortunately it wasn’t in my case. As a friend and warm supporter of Thailand since almost 30 years I must say that it saddens me to note that getting a visa from Sweden to enter and exit the Kingdom across its land borders is more complicated and expensive (need to buy air tickets that won’t be used) than it was to get my visas for Azerbaijan, Kazakstan, Uzbekistan and even China.

However, one of the things I like with Thailand is that things are never too serious and life is a bit ad hoc. If the Thai embassy in Sweden has very formal rules, it seems that the Thai embassy in Laos is much more relaxed and getting a visa there will most likely not be any problem.

We expect to get my visa for Thailand on Friday November 15th and cross the bridge into Thailand in the morning on November 16. The plan is to finish this long journey in Bangkok on Saturday November 30 and now we only have to decide which route to take from Nong Khai to Bangkok. We are working hard on this issue and hope to publish an update about the route through Thailand within a few days. If you do have any suggestion, please leave a comment.

We are now in the city of Huize some 200 km north of Kunming where we plan to arrive on Saturday.

The cycling from Leshan, where we extended our visas, to this city has been very interesting but also complicated with very cold and rainy weather and some technical breakdowns that has caused delays.

We have been to proper hotels a few times with access to the internet, but then there has been no time to update this blog. Instead we have had to get out of the time bubble we have lived in the last 7 months to use the few available hours after the daily cycling to plan our entry to Thailand. It is very pleasant to live a life that is “here and now” and once we have got out of that bubble in order to start planning for the future, a bit of the adventure seems to be lost in the process.

Most things are now set for our arrival and we will try to do our best to get back into the bubble for a few more weeks.

If the weather and the hills permit we will be in Kunming on Saturday and then there will be stories and photos on the blog on Sunday. We hope you can cope for another few days…. 🙂

We are now in the town of Yinjam which is a place we didn’t know existed until just before noon today. The town is located in a deep river valley and the reason why we are in this narrow valley and not up in the mountains where we planned to go is a navigational mistake…. 😉

Both of us are too tired to make any blog update now, but since it is a while since the last update we thought it could be a good idea to make a short statement that we are well and have no problems (apart from the lost navigation skills…)

We have about 500-600 km left to Kunming which is the capital city of Yunnan. Hopefully we will be able to update the blog before we arrive Kunming with the story from our unexpected trip on a very bad road through China’s mountainous backyard. Meanwhile, please enjoy these photos as a teaser…. 😉

Chengdu is nicknamed the City of Hibiscus but is maybe more known for being the home to lots of cute pandas. Being one of China’s biggest cities Chengdu has a lot to offer for a visiting cycle tourist.

Our first day was spent by riding 10 km through the center of the city to a bicycle shop where we hoped to get our drive trains cleansed and my rear wheel trued. Since it was holiday time, the staff in the shop were very busy and only had time to assist in trueing the wheel, which is something we hardly can do successfully by ourselves.

The second day we didn’t do anything but sleeping.

The third day we made an excursion to the shopping areas south of the city. We need to buy a mosquito net to use during our trip through Laos and Thailand and we firmly believed that this could be found at Decathlon which is a French sports and outdoor retail chain with stores all over the world. Opposite to Decathlon there is an Ikea store and although legally Dutch its products, appearance and feel still is 150% Swedish and best of all it sells Swedish sweets and other foodstuff to the joy of a bypassing cycle tourist.

Visiting Ikea a rainy Saturday after payday in Sweden is a bad idea if you want to be alone. The same goes for visiting an Ikea store in China during the ”golden week”, i.e. the week long break during the autumn – you will never be on your own and there will be waiting lines to everything.

We had a cup of Swedish style coffee and some cakes at the restaurant, but didn’t bother to go in to the store itself. Decathlon was slightly less crowded and we spent about two hours walking around and checking sportswear, cycle components and outdoor equipment. Unfortunately we never found any mosquito net, but we ended up with a bungy strap and a mirror for my bicycle.

We then walked back to Ikea to make a few important purchases and left the shop with Norrlands Guld (Swedish beer), Blueberry jam, Swedish crisp bread and some candy.

In Sweden the national language is Swedish and English is the first second language we learn. Swedes often get compliments for speaking good English while the opposite usually is said about the French. When looking for mosquito nets at Decathlon we had to ask the staff and all four people we talked to spoke good English. When shopping at Ikea we talked to three people who didn’t know a word of English until a fourth person arrived and helped us with our queries.

Hmmmm – it doesn’t feel good to be beaten by 4-1 in English as a second language by the French… Maybe it is because Ikea is owned by a Dutch foundation, but then again, the Dutch are supposedly better at English as a second language than the Swedes are….. 😉 😉

Anyway, the beer tasted wonderfully and some Swedish travelers at the guesthouse got very jealous when they saw us having crisp bread with blueberry jam…. so thank you Ikea…. 🙂

We bring a GoPro video camera along this trip and once we stop cycling in Thailand we will sit down and edit the material and make some short films about this journey. The GoPro comes with lots of mounts that can be used to attach it to almost anything. In a small shop in Russe in Bulgaria we bought some more mounts and now we wanted to buy a head strap or a helmet mount. Off we went to Chengdu’s center for electronics which is two large buildings with seven floors each packed with small and large electronic shops.

We walked around for two hours and to our surprise we found nothing. Nobody even seemed to know about GoPro, which is the leading brand in the market for action cameras.

I still contemplate what is worst, a Swedish company being beaten by a French when it comes to knowledge of English, or two chinese skyscrapers filled with electronics being beaten by a small shop in an unknown galleria in a town in Bulgaria…..

It has been nice for our bodies to get almost a week off the saddle and rest from the cycling. Yesterday we thought we should give them a special treat and went to get some massage. I wasn’t very impressed by the massage, but when the masseur towards the end of the session showed me a glass cup and indicated if I wanted it I thought that a cup of tea could be a good way to end a mediocre massage session.

The masseur then set fire to a piece of cotton at the end of a long stick and held it in the cup for a few seconds. I thought it was strange, but in a country where many people wear face masks in the streets to protect themselves from germs, I thought it was yet another way of making sure that the tea cup was clean. One second later I got a surprise when she put the cup upside down on my naked back. I could feel how the cup got stuck and then it suck my flesh into it as it cooled down. I thought it was a very strange way to serve tea and soon I had a dozen such cups on my back.

Back at the guesthouse I had to google what I had been through and found out that cup therapy is a classic treatment in China that is supposed to cure all sorts of ailments. I can’t say that I feel any better now than before I was turned into a kitchen shelf, but one thing is for sure and that is that getting a massage in the city of Pandas made me look like a leopard.

Day 131 Langmusi – Zoige
Day 132 Zoige – Songpan
Day 133 Songpan – Taipingxiang
Day 134 Taipingxiang – Maoxian
Day 135 Duhiangyan – Chengdu

I have got a new and interesting experience….. For the first time since we left Sweden I have got a writer’s block and I have kept pushing the writing of this blog post forward day after day. This post will probably not be a literarary work that will get any awards, which has never been the purpose anyway. I write to tell you reader & follower about what we do along the way, how we feel and about meetings we have had. The purpose is to keep you informed about our whereabouts but also to help me remember what we actually did once this trip is concluded.

So here comes the story….

Langmusi is a small mountain town that sits at 3300 meters altitude. It has a very scenic locaction as it is squeezed between tall mountains and has two major tibetan temples and lots of other traditional buildings. When staying in Langmusi we had one day of sunshine, one cloudy day and one day with both snow and rain, but the common factor for all days was that it was cold, even when the sun was shining.

When it was time to leave it was still cold, but our aim was to only ride the 80 km to the next town (Zoige) which would take us across a plateu on 3500 meters altitude. Since the distance was short we could allow ourselves to pay a visit at one of the tibetan temples in town before our late departure from Langmusi.

The plateu was interesting. We have climbed up and down a lot of mountains the last weeks and all of sudden one climb didn’t end at a pass with a nice downhill ride on the other side. The climb just faded and a we could see how the road went across a very large plain encircled by tall mountains.

We were going to spend two days and around 200 km to cross this plain and our legs really liked to not have to put in so much effort as when climbing. A light tailwind helped to make it to an easy ride. Even if the cycling was easy it was still only between 5-8 degrees during the day and a cloudy sky.

The plateu is home to tibetan nomads. Herds of yaks and sheep could be seen everywhere and several times we cycled past camps with traditional tibetan symbols in the middle and a number of party tents with traditional decorations surrounding the camp. We think the tibetans living in this harsh environment would use better tents then party tents when taking their yaks to the summer pastures so we never understood what this was. There were many such camps and there were lots of activity at some of them. When we later saw tourist buses parked outside some of the camps we started to believe that all theses camps were some sort of activity centers set up for the upcoming holiday week.

It has happened many times that we believe a dot on the map is a small town, but when we arrive it turn out to be a big city. When we came to Zoige we expected a small city, but it turned out to be a rather small town in the middle of the plateu. We didn’t find any ordinary hotel which need license to host foreign tourists. Instead we found a small and cheap local hotel and those usually don’t care about registrations or licenses – they simply want to earn some money.

Before agreeing to the room we asked if there was heating and hot water and the answer was yes. This was true, but not at the time of our arrival (5 PM). The heaters and the hot water would be turned on at 8 PM and the only source of heating was the electrically heated mattress in our room….

The sky was clear the next morning. It feels like the higher altitude amplifies the weather conditions. When the weather is nasty, it gets really ugly, but when the sky is clear it can be amazingly beatiful with a very deep blue sky. We could enjoy this clear sky for a few hours before the clouds were back again.

Zoige is located at 3500 meter and the following 100 km would slowly take us up to 3850 meters before the start of a long descent towards the lowlands below. Our plan was to camp after about 80-100 km but since we had a steady tailwind we arrived early to the highest point and with the wind on our backs we couldn’t resist to continue doing the remaining 60 km downhill to the town of Songpan.

Just like Langmusi, Songpan is a center for various outdoor activities and everywhere we found chinese tourists dressed in outdoor clothes who had come to enjoy mountaineering, horseback riding, trekking or white water rafting.

The downhill continued the following day but now the wind had changed direction. The valley was deep and the wind got compressed created a strong headwind and we couldn’t roll down without pedalling 🙁 Why does it always feel like the wind is stronger when it is against us…. 😉
We met lots of chinese cyclists on the way up towards the mountains and it looked like they were traveling faster uphill than we did downhill…

In Songpan we heard about long and scary tunnels further on and when we stopped and talked to the chinese cyclists we got different messages. Some said the tunnels were unlit, while others said they were lit. One group told us that there were road works going on and the traffic in both directions would go in one tunnel while the other was being repaired. The diverging info was probably due to the language barrier but it still made us very concerned.

We only cycled 70 km out of Songpan before we thought it was time to camp. Being to lazy to cook ourselves we stopped outside an restaurant in a village to have dinner before finding somehwere to camp. Soon we understood that this wasn’t only a restaurant but also a hotel. After a bit of haggling about the price we checked in to a very cheap but nice looking room and went down to have dinner.

With a menu only in chinese and after a moment of total confusion the waiter called someone and 3 minutes later a young lady came over. She spoke good English and helped us to order the food. It turned out that she was the english teacher at the a boarding school for kids from the mountains that was located next door to the restaurant. While we waited for the food she took us over to the school to visit a class with 35 curious kids.

After a good nights sleep in the hotel room above the restaurant we continued downhill. The road was still in a very deep valley and kept following the meandering river. The intensity of the traffic had increased significantly since it was the day before the official start of the ”Golden Week” when China takes a week off to celebrate its national day.

An endless number of buses drove up towards the mountains, and in between them there were trucks and cars and everyone was overtaking everyone else even at sharp turns of the road. We have passed through countries and regions where the traffic standard is far from good but this was probably the worst so far and we didn’t feel completely safe.

In the city of Maoxian we had to make a decision. We knew there would be 10 tunnels with a length of between 2-7 km and crazy traffic. Safety is always the most important aspect to consider and we didn’t have to think long to decide to get past the tunnels by bus. The decision was made easier by getting back to the purpose of this journey – to discover what is between Göteborg and Bangkok and who the people who live there are. There is nothing to discover inside a tunnel and there certainly ain’t any people living there…..

Sitting on the bus we could conclude that we had made the right decision. Most of the tunnels were twin tunnels with one tube going in each direction, but some of them were under renovation and the traffic in both directions had to share one tunnel. And there were plenty of other buses and trucks in the tunnels too.

The tunnels were also long, veeery loooong. The longest was 7 km and it would have taken us around 25 very stressing minutes to pass so we were happy to be onboard a bus.

When we arrived to the bus terminal in the city of Dujiangyan we found a cheap hotel on top of the terminal building, but unfortunately it had no license to host foreigners. We ended up at the much more expensive hotel next to the bus station. Preparations for a wedding with lots of dressed up people were going on as we stepped in to the lobby dressed in our very dirty outdoor clothes…..

The next day into Chengdu would be the first day of the holiday and we expected the worst in terms of traffic. We decided to go on the small local road the 70 km into Chengdu. That small local road turned out to be a three lane highway with a separate lane for cyclists and scooters. It was slightly downhill all the way and there were hardly any cars at all – they were probably already up in the mountains.

Chengdu with its suburbs has around 10 million people and could sound like a hard city to enter by bike. This couldn’t be more wrong since all roads in chinese cities have a very wide lane for cyclists and electric scooters which is even protected by a little fence. I wish we could have this kind of infrastructure back in Göteborg, not to mention Bamgkok.

Since it is a holiday time in China we have prebooked a room at a guesthouse. There are lots of mainly young chinese who spend their vacation week to visit Chengdu. Some of them are cyclists too…..

The day after we arrived to Chengdu we got accompanied by our polish friend Bartek, who made an navigational error and had to take another road. It was great to meet again and share stories. We don’t cycle together but since he is going to Singapore we expect to meet again and again in Kunming and Laos and hopefully in Bangkok.