Project VELAIA

Yes, yes, yes! I have arrived in Beijing after a bit more than 200 days and nearly 20.000km. Yesterday at 1pm local time Sebastien and me took our pictures in front of the famous Mao picture at the Tiananmen square!

I am in the process of putting the latest pictures online right now and will extend this posting during the next few hours.

Update:

After the night in the police station I had two more passes over 3000m to climb, one being about 3600m, the other 3800m high. But I wasn’t so lucky concerning the accomodation any more – no, I was even thrown out once in the middle of the night because I didn’t want to pay 5 times the normal price (which I had been told by locals before).

But as a compensation for that I could ride a few more days along the beautiful mountain scenery of the Tibetan plateau to always to my right.

It was here that I saw some of the last yaks in China: at the Qinghai lake. And on the way down to the lake I nearly crashed into a queue of waiting trucks – what was the reason for the queue? One crane truck helping his brother to get on the road again

And even here, more than 1500km away from Lhasa I found some Tibetan pilgrims again doing their up and down gymnastics all day long.

After a small town the LANXI EXPRWY started to bring me in a long long downhill into the city of Xining which I crossed in nearly no time on a nearly totally empty highway just to spend the night under a bridge outside because I couldn’t escape the highway any more All along the Chinese expressways there are these fences made of barbwire and therefore they seem like a prison for cyclists: if you are inside you can’t escape and if you are sick of the continuous up and down on the G110 you can’t get on the highway.

But sometimes there are holes in the fence or you manage to go through a toll gate without being stopped.

The G110 together with this expressway went through a sometimes very narrow but also very populated valley and at other times through very rural places with the smell of cabbage being omnipresent.

 

Just before the metropolis Lanzhou I turned north and went through less crowded areas through the cities of Jingtai, Zhongwei to Yinchuan.

(MY apples!)

Often I found quite funny English slogans which made the sometimes quite uninteresting (flat, smoggy, straight) days and the “always the same” conversations with locals a bit more diverse:

When cycling on the highway I got stopped up to 3 times a day by (traffic) police and I had to explain them that my life was much more in danger on the countryside road than on the highway with 3 lanes and nearly no traffic at all – I showed them photos I had taken of workers cycling on the highway and played ferocious dogs and after a few minutes they nearly always let me go.

As the days were getting shorter and shorter and the temperatures fell down I sometimes didn’t manage to do more than 80 to 90 km and was quite frustrated in the evenings.

Additionally I was running out of Yuan and for 3 days I tried without success to get either A) Dollars changed to Yuan (RMB) or B) Yuan from an ATM. 20 Banks couldn’t help me and I found myself in a pretty bad situation as a Chinese man working for a Spanish wind turbine company helped me out by changing 40$ to 300 Yuan – enough to get to a ATM that worked for me or even to Beijing.

But there was still the pain in my heels! The first two hours in the morning were filled with pain and even in the nights I often felt pain in my feet. I had to do something! Between the horny skin that had been built blood came out of the skin and so I decided to make two cuts on every shoe – and suddenly the riding was painfree! I could enjoy cycling and the more and more hilly landscape again. Two minutes, four cuts, so easy, so painfree!

Now the only problem were the low temperatures which cost a lot of energy and often I was exhausted like a TdF cyclist in the evenings.

One evening I had only 150 Yuan left – not too bad but also not a amount where you could pay a hotel room for 128 Yuan. So I told them my problem in about half an hour (as they couldn’t understand English) and after another 30 minutes the price was down at 30 Yuan! But then a friend of the owner of the hotel came and said “Chinese are friendly people – you can stay in this hotel for free, for free! And we even invite you for dinner because Chinese are friendly people!” OK, I thought – he was already a bit drunken I guess, but it would have helped to meet some more of these extremely friendly people a few days before when I had no Yuan left – what does it help that they are friendly if I can’t survive?!

So I went to dinner and made an experience that changed my picture of Chinese people quite a lot as they were drinking and smoking without end. But friendly they were and we had a big dinner together.

And the next morning something totally unexpected and very unlikely happened: I met Sebastien again, the French cyclist who I’d been cycling with when entering China for 2 days until arrival in Kasghar.

We decided to arrive together in Beijing on Friday. There were quite some hills to do now, we saw some parts of the Chinese wall and came through a big coal area where they were sorting the coal depending on the size. Everything was black here: The street, the trees, the cars and sometimes even the people!

We experienced the privacy understanding of some Chinese when going to toilet, we went along a 5km traffic jam consisting only of trucks (3 lanes) and got a hotel room that looked more like a washing room just the evening before Beijing. The restaurant we went to served me rice with egg when I showed them that I want rice, egg, potatoes and tofu – what a meal. I was lucky to have some tofu from a nearby supermarket in a plastic bag with me

And then we woke up and it was the final day, the day of the arrival in Beijing, the finish of our journey. Both of us had started in April and now, 7 months later we should end this tour which sometimes seemed to last forever – what a strange mood we’ve been in at this morning. But we still had at least 70 to 80km to do and we didn’t know too much about the terrain in front of us.

But it was easier than expected as parts of the G110 had just been rebuild and were still closed for the general traffic. We went through many new built tunnels on a 3 laned road, raced over bridges at 60 to 70km/h and within half an hour we found ourselves 400m further down.

As we arrived even before noon at the border of the city the decision to go directly into the center was quite easy. So after another hour we took some pictures in front of the forbidden city, in front of the Olympia 2008 countdown clock but we were not allowed to enter the Tiananmen square. So we just went around that one.

As the previous 24/7 McDonald’s was somehow closed (China!) we were still hungry, so we went to a restaurant together before we visited the French friends of Sebastien.

In the evening I left them to get to Marcus Grahl, a member of the de-hpv recumbent mailinglist who had invited me to stay at his appartment already before I had left home

Yesterday evening I somehow managed to get a cold and so I try to step back and relax a bit during the 3 days that I have left in Beijing. I hope that I will be able to see the Forbidden City while I am here. I already have a kind of visa for Australia and the ticket for a flight on November 28.

All the best from a relieved touring cyclist in Beijing,

Daniel

BTW: The picture at the end of the article has been taken in Iran. It shows where I’ll go next