Back on the Road

After spending some wonderful time with friends in Seattle and Tacoma we are back on the road again.  We left Tacoma on Wednesday for Quilcene, on the Hood Canal.  Taking the long way around we arrived at John & Shelly's after 158 km.  We spent a nice evening visiting with them, last visit was 3 years ago when we rode our bikes from Tacoma to Anchorage.

Next day was a hilly 85km to Sequim to see Scott Erikson, a friend and also a member of the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group.  He has a great spot just north and west of Sequim near the ocean.  Early yesterday, Friday, morning he took us to Port Angeles and we took the ferry to Victoria, BC.  120 km later we were at Doug & Evelyn's in Nanaimo - a much hiller ride (at least the first 50km) than I remembered.

We'll spend the next week or so here on Vancouver Island visiting friends before we leave for the mainland.  Plan right now is to ride east in Canda along the US border and drop down into western Idaho, thru McCall and then work our way back to Tacoma.  All in all a 2000 mile wind-down from Asia.

It is sooo refreshing to be able to ride and enjoy the clean air, clean water, blue skies, the absence of honking horns and often just enjoy the quiet. We are happy with our decision to return home when we did and are looking forward to the late summer/fall of 2013 when we hope to ride Central Asia.  Short trip and small geographical area.

Sally's rack repair!

Stan's rack repair!

One of the last hills on the trip with beautiful  snow capped mountains behind us.

Dust storm on the 18 hr bus ride thru the Hexi Corridor on the way to Urumqi.

Desolate place to live in the wind in the Hexi Corridor.

Desert and peaks in the "Corridor:.

And then every once in awhile the wind would quite, they sky would clear and the stark beauty of the Hexi Corridor became visible.

Small park on a hill in downtown Urumqi.

Urumqi airport.

More of the continual road construction.  Takes all your concentration to stay upright so not much sightseeing going on!

Chicken coup!

Split wheel rim.  Fortunately it lasted for a few more hundred kilometers.

When the wind doesn't blow it's possible to get a great campsite in the open!

Greenhouse and more plastic.  Veggies, mushrooms, flowers all grown in these structures.  Many are 200-300 ft. long.

Old cemetary up on the hillside in Ganzu province.

Fresh snow on the mountains.  We elected to ride out in the valley and not get too close to the snow and just ended up in more road construction.  Maybe we should have opted for the other road....!

Bus stop in backyard of the hotel

Actually at steam heat in the room so we're trying to warm our hands!

Terraced hillsides ready for planting and plastic!

Cool ride up high on my birthday.  Chinese sign language for "61".

Sally giving a local lady at a campsite some lotion on her hands.  Soon many of the village ladies came by!!

Fashion Queen trying to stay warm!

Bicycle recycling

Plastic, plastic, plastic!!  While this helps the crops, potatoes here, get started it doesn't take long for the wind to rip it off the ground.   Thousands of acres of plastic that eventually is blown all over the country.  We saw shreds of plastic for weeks on trees, powerlines,  everywhere!!

Bicycle recycling!

Not everyone in China enjoys the big luxury cars or trucks  for transport.

We rode for three days in Ganzu and none of the farmers had a mechanized equipment!

Group of Chinese tourers we met - they had motorcycle sag support!

View down the valley after a nice gradual one hour climb!

Happy to be on top of the climb, note hole in the rock wall behind Sally!

Down the other side of the pass!

Terraced hillside and farming on any piece of land that may remotely grown anything!

And then there are the big open valley's.

Nice quiet seclued campsite in a local cemetary

Campsite down by the river!!

Nice quiet campsite overlooking a lake.

Mile signs: had to match the character to the character on our maps that were in both Chinese & English

Note the high water quality in the construction zone!

Group of Chinese bike tourers:  motorcycles support vehicles.  Why didn't we think of that!

Sally going thru a remote village on a big "downhill run" in Northern Sichuan.

FINALLY: back home in North America. After the tribulations of the airport experience in Urumqi we expected things to go smoothly in Beijing, well we hoped they would anyway. I had discovered the day before we left the hotel in Urumqi when I tried to check-in online that we were booked each for two flights from Urumqi to Bejing and one flight from Seattle to Vancouver, BC. No flights from Beijing to Seattle however. After more emails between Jack & myself he confirmed with Expedia and Delta that we were going to Seattle from Beijing and NOT to Vancouver at all. Confirmation code is correct. However Delta in Beijing didn't have that information handy. Fortunately I did have a printout of the confirmation showing the flights and they eventually found them. Then their system wouldn't recognize Sally's valid passport. Then they couldn't figure out how many bags we could check or the weight limit: can economy class really be so difficult!! Finally, after an hour at the counter, they were complete and we had our boarding passes. From there on everything was like it should be: straightforward with no problems. Until we landed. Somehow we made up an hour on the 11.5 hr flight and landed at 4:30am. Since immigration doesn't open till 5:30am we got to sit on the airplane at the gate for an hour. At least that gave the baggage people time to get the bags to baggage claim before we got there!! So you claim you bags, go thru customs, put bags back on another conveyor and pick them up at the main baggage claim in the main terminal. Only they forgot to send the bike boxes to the main terminal baggage claim so we ended up waiting another 30 minutes for the bikes. However, trusty Marlin was there to pick us up. We spent yesterday doing laundry and taking it easy and more of that today. Tomorrow we'll go down to Tacoma and see college rowing buddies for a few days, put the bikes back together and hit the road again. We have 6-8 weeks before getting to Anchorage so will ride Vancouver Island visiting more friends and then ride somewhere in the greater Pacific Northwest before heading home to Alaska. As usual it's good to be home where things are familiar, the air and water is clean, no trash (minimal at best), a healthy change in diet, beer with flavor, ice-cream, butter and all the simple joys of life that we take so much for granted. It was a wonderful trip; as I said earlier not necessarily life changing. But as a friend wrote me it was "life enhancing"! We are looking forward to the next ride, we hope that to be Central Asia in the late summer/fall of 2013. We've heard so much so positive about the area from Marlin & Christine and others that we want to get there ASAP before there are too many changes. The world, and the developing countries in particular, are changing so fast in their rush to "catchup" that a lot of the "charm" of these areas is being lost to rapid development and the inevitable changes that result from "oil revenues" or foreign influences. I don't deny the people their opportunity to improve their lives and standard of living but I don't like to see that development at the expense of the environment and their individual freedoms from oppressive regimes. China and Vietnam in particular where exciting places to visit and the local peoples we met were wonderful but the oppression and lack of basic freedoms that we take for granted in our Bill of Rights were a sobering reminder that most of the world is not as fortunate as we are. We are grateful to live where we do and to enjoy our freedoms, despite all the problems we have with our political systems in the west. Enjoy your privileges and get out and see the world - by bicycle if all possible! Stan

Airport Woes!

So here we are in Bejing awaiting the plane to seattle....and nothing is ever simple. We left our hotel at noon yesterday and the only day in sometime it happened to be raining, cold and windy. Undettered we headed towards the airport stopping off at the "Giant" bicycle store to pick up 2 boxes. Stan was able to bend them in half and tie them onto his rear carrier. The ride the rest of the way was fortuantely uneventful except for one man that Stan almost took out with his wide load. At the airport we spent a few horus packaging up the bikes and gear. Much to our dismay Stan said "where are the bike boxes?" The empty boxes that were with all of our stuff and ourselves had just vaporized..gone!! I had what they call a kinipshin? or something like that and of course "no one" speaks English. We had suspected the house cleaning staff had whisked them away. After much wailing , arm flapping, workers trying to get us to buy the small boxes that they had we were able to flag down someone that spoke english. A young man from Singapore and his chinese friend were able to help figure out where they were. They were found in the room across from us, hidden in the back even though I had gone in there and asked for the boxes. Airport Check in at Urumqi, another painful episode. The guy at the counter was clueless about bikes, didn't speak English etc. Annoyingly there are the ones that do speak English and instead of taking over and solving dilemmas they dont really seem to do anything. He wanted us to have our boxes repackaged??? We are not sure why but basically refused. Stan had only spent he past 1-2hrs packaging them. Next, instead of our bags being checked through to Seattle they were only checked to Bejing and we got dinged 100 dollars apiece for the bikes. Bejing wasnt much better, thought he english had improved. We spent a whole hour at the ticket counter as Delta had us flying to Vancouver, not seattle , then they couldnt get my passport numbers to work, and then they said we could only check one piece of luggage(though it was 2) and then and then and then! They also dinged us for 150 dollars apiece for the bikes. Supposedly these were partner airlines and the tickets were purchased as one ticket...but no use arguing about it in Bejing. Finally we got on the plane and off to Seattle....America here we come. Digen(goodbye ) China.