Steve's Cycling Blog

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Today was always going to be a short day so we had the luxury of a ‘late’ start – with rider meeting and breakfast at 0700. It also meant that there was plenty of time for sightseeing along the way.

Heading out the traffic was as crazy as one would expect for a week day in a large Chinese city. Fortunately we were heading out relatively directly which soon got us out of the crazy.

Soon after we left we passed the Dajing Gate – apparently one of the most impressive of the gates in the various Great Walls, so a number of us stopped to have a look. Nice gate 🙂

One of the more amusing things at the gate was the group of woman doing Jazercise Tai Chi (for want of a better name).

Back on the road and continuing gradually uphill we turned off the tarmac and hit the first gravel of the trip. That stretch wasn’t too bad and didn’t last too long, but there was more to come. The road here was a lovely tree-lined avenue, though for reasons not entirely clear many of the trees have been recently felled, including one which Rob and I were stopped on the road to allow them to drop it right across the road.

Making our way up the valley was fascinating – lots of agriculture of all different types with people plowing by hand, by horse, and in some cases by tractor.

There’s also a large, though currently dry, river in the valley bottom – again I presume that it floods during spring with snow melt, which clearly brings huge amounts of gravel down, and there were many places where the river bed was being dug and graded into sand, and various sizes of agrigate, presumably to feed the constant construction.

Once we got to the top of the valley there was no option left but to go up. At this point the road had deteriorated significantly, mostly due to the huge trucks carrying sand and gravel out of the valley. I ended up catching up with two trucks which had overtaken me on the flatter valley floor, and the road was sufficiently narrow, steep and poor condition that I wasn’t able to get past them, so spent about 6km having to periodically stop to let them get ahead again.

I did finally manage to get past them – because another truck heading the other way had broken down blocking the road. As I passed that was being dragged off the road by a huge front-end loader which was lifting the rear wheels of the truck off the road, then reversing with the truck hanging from the bucket (you’ll have to see the photos below to fully understand I expect).

And that was lunch (at 1030). Because we had so much time I went for a wander up the hill to look back into the valley and take a few photos of the countryside and the wind turbines stretching as far as I could see in both directions along the ridge line.

From there to the end of the day was less than 20km and mostly downhill on a beautiful new concrete road – I was wondering where all the concrete came from until I passed a massive concrete plant which I presume is where the trucks I’d been following were headed with their loads of sand.

As I came down into Zhangbei I noticed some interesting looking buildings off to the left so made a detour to discover a really lovely Buddhist monastery in it’s own walled compound. There were signs saying that I needed to be ‘appropriately dressed’ to go in (and I figure bike kit doesn’t quite cut it) but as there was nobody around I snuck in the front gate and took a couple of photos.

One more stop to take a photo of a park entrance and I leant my bike against a low wall at the side of the road. While I was taking my photo a large truck went past and the wind knocked my bike over. At the time I thought nothing of it, but as I changed gears to ride up the slope into the hotel my rear derailleur caught in the spokes of my bike and I broke the small aluminium hanger which it is attached to!

Luckily I had a spare with me, but to have broken this on stage three is very annoying as it’s a custom part only available in the UK – I think I see a trip to the post office in Adam’s future 😉

Zhangbei is the smallest of the towns we’ve been in so far, and they clearly don’t often see Western visitors as we’ve been a real ‘point of interest’ as we’ve wandered the town.

Dinner’s done, and though it’s only just gone 1930 people are drifting off to bed – it’s an early start (bags by 0545) and we’ve 165km to cover tomorrow, and while relatively flat it’s going to be a long day!

I’ve got loads more photos to upload from today, but the internet connection is being flakey, so they will have to wait for another day – as will putting the ones which are already there in a sensible order and providing captions.

Riding data