Steve's Cycling Blog

I realised that calling them ‘day one’ and ‘day two’ was going to get confusing because tomorrow is a day, but not a stage as it’s a rest day – so, today was stage 2 and day 2…! Here are the notes for today’s ride:

Not easy to spot is the absence of the ‘Turn Left’ instruction at km 100.3 which proved to be somewhat crucial…!

Another early start this morning, with a Chinese breakfast of congee (thankfully no shrimps), steamed buns (yum) and boiled eggs – which I thought was perfect 🙂

Once on the road the first 18km were really lovely – it was still cool (less than 10° C), but the sun was up and the scenery was quite spectacular.

(Hopefully) here’s a video of the early part of the ride when it was still scenic. It ends slightly abruptly, and with my finger in there too, because we arrived at the next junction and I needed to steer!

Then we passed under the railway line and it was like going to another country – we were on a fairly narrow and very busy road with endless trucks thundering past. The next 30km weren’t that much fun, particularly as we headed up quite a lengthy climb, with dust and pollution being blown into our faces.

We did have an amusing time (Rob, Paul, Edgar and myself who cycled together for most of the day) in a town we passed through negotiating the market-day traffic – there are no photos of that, keeping my hands on the bars and the brakes was way more important!

Once we had negotiated that hill, and a couple of laneways it was time for lunch – at 0945…! that said, having left the hotel at shortly after 0630, and having cycled just shy of 72km we were well and truly ready for ‘lunch’.

Setting off after lunch we had a couple of detours to account for new roads and subdivisions which had been constructed since Andreas was scouting this part of the route late last year. Then it was into the second of the long climbs for the day – Rob and I set off together, but then he stopped to take some photos while I continued on (I’m not a fan of stopping on the ‘up’ side of a hill!)

Again, a very scenic part of China, but then we were back on the ‘big’ and ‘industrial’ roads, and when Andreas said this was a ‘grim area’ he wasn’t kidding – coal mines, fertiliser factories, power stations, cement works, the whole lot and all ugly as sin…!

Coming into the south of Shalingzizhen helped to relieve that – it’s a relatively nice looking town, and all business and bustle. I was on my own at this stage, and made the right hand turn at 99.3km, but then found myself at the toll plaza for a major motorway, with seemingly a further 2km to go before I should be passing through the city walls and turning right.

Seemed like I was lost, so decided to head back and see if I could find out where I’d gone wrong, or at least see if I could find someone else…! I met Rob 1km back and we compared notes and decided that I had been in the right place, heading in the right direction, so back we went.

Once there were two of us there it made no difference – still seemed totally wrong…! As we tried to look at maps and see if we could figure out what to do Erwin and Paul arrived – now there were four of us sure we were doing the right thing, so we figured maybe we were allowed to continue through the toll both.

That would be no…! The woman there was very polite, but made it quite clear that we were not permitted to go any further.

At this point Erwin suggested ‘phone a friend’, so Paul found Andreas’ number and I gave him a call. We figured out that we’d done the right thing at 99.3km, but missed the left turn at 100.3km. Well that would be fine – if we’d known about it…! At the intersection in question (see photo below) our primary consideration had been staying alive, and not expecting a left turn none of us had been looking for any flagging tape.

About turn, and make the 1.5km trip back to the intersection (by which time I’d ridden most of that piece of road three times ;-). Once we were there, and knew what we were looking for we could see the tape on the intersection exit, but it later turns out that some super-efficient street cleaner had removed the tape leading in, so not only wasn’t the turn on the notes, it wasn’t flagged either – no wonder I missed it…!

Back on track, we found the city walls – these are proper impressive (see photos below) and stopped for a few photos before getting back on the road.

Shalingzizhen city walls

The final ride from Shalingzizhen was a bit dull – 20km of (at least) flat tarmac, through nothing-much sort of countryside, and just uphill enough to slow you down when all you wanted was a cold beer and a hot shower…!

Based on the trouble we’d had Andreas and a couple of the other crew headed to ‘the corner’ and provided later riders with the much-needed ‘turn left now’ instruction which prevented others from getting lost too.

After a shower a second lunch of ice-cream and beer went down mighty well 🙂

One of the advantages of having been with faster riders today was that we were off the road by 1300 and so avoided the worst of today’s heat – it got to 32° later in the afternoon and the people coming in then were looking decidedly hot and bothered.

This evening a few of us went to a local restaurant (on night-before-rest-day and rest days dinner isn’t included’/organised) where the off-line version of Google translate came in very handy as we ordered dinner from a menu with nothing but Chinese. In the end it was a great meal, and for five of us came to a grand total of 212 Yuan (about £23) including beer…!

I’m really pleased with the way the last couple of days have gone – I’m still somewhat apprehensive about the upcoming six days of riding, particularly with the later days after the 163km on Thursday, but based on today less so than I was.

Despite the fact that there’s no early start tomorrow it’s still going to be an early night, so, good night!

Today’s ride