SW China Gallery

We’ve posted a first batch of pictures from North Yunnan and West Sichuan in a gallery over here, which we’ll be adding to – and captioning – as we work our way through the various memory cards. I hope you enjoy them.

Here’s a sample…

The mountains around Litang were fresh with snow from a storm that we’d been caught in the day before. Cara was all layered up; only her nose peeped out.

It was so cold as we descended, that spray from the road froze in a coating of ice around the bikes. We had to keep breaking, or ice jammed our discs.

At times, the landscape had a Scottish feel to it. Scotland at 4000m, that is.

Cara tucks into a typical steamed dumpling breakfast, washed down with a bowl of rice porridge and piping hot tea.

A nomad boy in West Sichuan sees us and comes running over from his yak tending duties.

Tattered prayer flags snap in the wind, sending prayers whooshing across the mountains.

After a tough week in the saddle, we treated ourselves to a ‘luxury’ room, complete with attached bathroom and hot shower. A bedside console powered lights and the TV (the only English language channel was Propaganda News 24). But my favourite switch turned off the Bother. If only there was a switch like that in life…

Want to see more? Head to the Pbase gallery. When you open an image, click on ‘original’. All subsequent images will then default to the best version.

Indian Himalaya Tours 2008 – and dancing hairdressers…

A brief glimpse of HH Dalai Lama, summer 2007.

Update on our tour schedule for 2008:

At the moment, it’s looking like we’ll be running two mtb-inspired Spiti and Lahaul rides and one mammoth, pass- crunching Manali-Leh via Wari La trip, from mid July through to the end of August. It would be nice to squeeze in a Leh-Manali self-supported journey too, if there is enough interest. We’re just waiting to hear confirmation from a group enquiry, then will post more details and dates.

In the meantime, I’ve updated one of our last blog entry in China with some photos, back from when we were riding with our German friend Christof. Don’t miss the new action shots of the Wonderful Dancing Hairdressers…

Read all about them here:

En route to Leh 2007.

Pics from our first weeks in China

Here’s a few pics we resized in our first couple of weeks on the road, but never managed to post in China – or rather, were blocked by the Great Firewall… Loads more to sift through when we get home!

The road to Dechen is said to offer some of the best views on the Yunnan-Tibet highway…

Dropping down towards Zhongdian – I mean Shangri La, as it has been officially renamed, a marketing gimmick for the hordes of Chinese tourists… There’s an ‘eco-village’ nearby – cue convoys of tour buses.

Every day in China was a banquet. The parents of this little fellow ran one of our favourite finds.

Peckish? Dumplings don’t get better than these. Steaming hot. Just 3 Yuan a plate – that’s 20p.

It’s a concrete jungle out there…

The road out of Simao takes us past villages where coffee beans are being sorted before roasting, and tea leaves are drying on tarpaulin in the sun; then we’re funneled down alleyways of banana plantations and papaya trees. The tea terraces are the most impressive though. Kilometre after kilometre of low, thick and neat hedgerows, curling round the land in tiers like an enormous Roman amphitheatre. Picking tea leaves must seem an endless, thankless task. Harvested througout the year, the pickers, with their wicker hats and baskets, are mere blips within the huge magnitude of the landscape. And they work late too. As the last golden light of day retreats across the land, a head pops up and looks around – it must be a disheartening to forever see these terraces wrapping round the hills.

Sweeping up the coffee beans.

The natural rhythm of cycling, eating and resting is a satisfying one, and Christof and I chat away, swapping stories about our travels. Towards the end of the day, we turn up a red dirt track that climbs steeply towards the terraces. We’re camping tonight, and the search for somewhere to pitch the tent is always an enjoyable challenge – the last lingering minutes of light our stopwatch. Luckily, we find the perfect abandoned house and pitch the inner tent in the porch. Come morning, the mist has rolled in and the surrounding hills rise out like headlands at sea. Breakfast is in a quiet roadside restaurant, where a lady hurriedly fries up some delicious eggs, tomatos and garlic, as well as a plate of fresh runner beans. A bowl of rice fills us up nicely for just a couple of yuan more. As the saying goes in China: rice eats no money. Meanwhile, a puppy gnaws at my feet for attention then attacks the bicycle wheels. Unfortunately, like all the rest of the flea-infested dogs round here, he’s destined for life chained to a post, barking rabidly at anyone who passes. Not that many people travel through these parts. The villages are mostly forgotten, now that the new expressway nearby has taken away their much of their trade. Lonely curls of smoke rise up from chimneys, spiraling amongst the folded palm leaves.

It was when Christof started chatting to this girl that I realised he’d been on the road alone for too long.

The search for the perfect camping spot…

Goodbye Simao, Hello Puer City

A day off in dusty Puer is about all we can handle, even though Cara barely stirs from our hotel room – surrounded as she is by a pile of snotty and phlemy tissues, and nursing a pounding headache. We decide to leapfrog onto Simao on the more direct highway rather than the sinewy backroad, as a widespread diesel shortage means fewer trucks are prowling the roads. There, a fellow cyclist is nursing his own wounds. We first crossed paths with Christof, a mathematics teacher taking a year’s leave from his school in Germany, on the road to Litang in West Sichuan. Just the other day, he emailed to tell us he fell of his bike, split open his head and badly bruised some ribs – and is now resting up in Simao.When we meet up, Christof tells us more about his accident. He was working his way down a muddy, potholed descent when his bike slipped out from under him. Judging by the thick, uneven stitches in his head, it must have been pretty serious – “a fountain of blood was coming out”, as he put it in his deadpan, Germanic way. A few cars stopped and their drivers watched events unfold through their windows. But when this muddy, bloody figure walked over to them, they hurriedly sped off – as did a police car that he tried to flag down! There was nothing else to do but get back on the bike and ride to the nearest city. There he found a hospital. But again, no one wanted to get involved. Communication is always a problem here and this unwillingness to get embroiled in an uncomfortable, potentially confusing situation seems quite typical – perhaps it’s an issue of losing ‘face’. Even the nurses refused to deal with him, until he had a rant in German, cajoling them into action. Not the kind of story a cyclist (or any parent reading this blog) likes to hear…