As mentioned in the last post, a cyclist Doug Warner is doing perhaps the best long distance bicycle trip and blog I've seen yet. He works in Suzhou which is close to here, and he somehow managed to get 3 months off. Jealous!!! With that time, he has managed an incredible trip, entitled "Rolling West Through China". For the past 2 months or so he simply got on a bike and pedalled west.
He is now at the Sichuan / Tibet border.
How he managed to get so far in such a short time is a mystery to me. He has taken plenty of days off and is enjoying the trip more than you'd think for something of that magnitude. Part of his success is what I should be doing for the next trip: bringing along a local. This is the ingenious idea, that a local friend can eliminate nearly 90% of the hassles that would go along with China travel, and the hassles I have often complaind about in past blogs. For example, Doug has always gotten the cheap local hotel digs, and has rarely paid more than 60RMB for a hotel room. With one exception, the police have never harassed him or bothered him in hotel rooms. He always manages to find internet cafes to update the blog, and of course, he gets the local perspective on all things China along the way.
Of course, it's not easy to FIND a local partner who would want to do such a cycling trip, and it would take a lot of work and planning to coordinate this with a Chinese person. In my case, I often op for traveling along as it's just easier and requires less work. However, the hassles on the road of traveling alone in China are a real bitch. I have long suspected that cycling with a local friend is the way to make these work. Such people do exist and it's a win/win situation for both Doug and Peter who are enjoyig the trip of a lifetime.
Due to time constraints, and the onset of winter, they had to change their plan and can't go all the way to Lhasa. Instead they have reached the far western point of their trip in historical Tibet (still in Sichuan province) and will then loop south towards Yunnan province and Kunming where it's warmer.
Even so, there are some incredible Himalayan passes they have gone across. One of them he described as Narnia and it is just making me itch to go !!!! This trip has also given me a ton of ideas, that if I can't actually make it into Tibet autonomous region, then the historical Tibet is a nice backup plan.
Anyways, here's the blog.
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