Steve's Cycling Blog

Not a lot happened yesterday…! I tried to sleep in, but that didn’t work out so well – particularly since breakfast ended at the hotel at 0900.

So then it was time for a look round town. Wandered down to the river – clearly they get a massive amount of water through there at times – I presume snow-melt because it’s hugely wide and has relatively high bridges. Right now however there’s not a lot of water flowing. This doesn’t stop the locals from lining up on the bridge to fish.

Next stop was the Giant (brand) bike store – I wanted some way to carry my camera on my bike and having looked at what other riders have, figured that something which sat on my top tube was the best option. They didn’t have exactly that, but had something which looks like small saddle bags to hang over the top tube. Seems to be working so far!

A bit more drifting round and I found a bakery with Hong Kong (Portuguese) egg tarts, which I love, so they made an excellent lunch.

Heading back toward the hotel and I found a really great little park – the ‘blocks’ seem really odd – on all the main streets are relatively new buildings, either offices / shops or apartments, but then ‘inside’ of those tend to be much older lanes and alleyways with homes, gardens, markets etc – it’s almost like capsules of ‘old’ China, but inside the walls of ‘new’ China.

After some sitting round and chatting I headed out to explore another part of town, which included a stop at Tesco. A huge Tesco at that… in the middle of rural China… in a completely random way…!

Next up was getting bags organised. We’re allowed two bags, one of which is known as our ‘permanent’ bag, the other as our ‘daily’ bag. As the names suggest we get our daily bag at the end of each day, but our permanent bag we only get on rest days. Because we have our first night camping later in this section (before another rest day), I needed to shuffle things round so that my daily bag had everything needed for camping in it.

I understand the system, and it works pretty well, but I think that it would work better as a three-bag system. Right now between rest days we have six days riding, of which only one is camping, so it means that we’re limited in what other things we can have in our daily bag, and we’re constantly lugging all our camping kit (tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat etc etc) in and out of hotels. If we had a ‘permanent’ bag, a ‘daily’ bag, and a ‘camping’ bag, then things would work out easier for all.

I’ve been pretty snotty the last couple of days and have been trying to avoid the cold which Adam managed to find in China, so despite the fact that it was a later start, I was well ready for bed by 8pm, so that was what I did…!