Steve's Cycling Blog

The most interesting thing in town…? Us…! Xianghaungyi is a pretty small city, and the clearly don’t see a lot of westerners – certainly not arriving 30 at a time and wandering round their streets in a mix of cycling clothing and shorts!

After I’d written yesterday’s post I went out for a wander and definitely attracted a lot of interest from the locals. The other interesting thing is that all the signage you see is now a mix of Chinese and Mongolian.

Stage Five

Stage five rider notes – we like the length of them 🙂

So after yesterday we were looking forward to the shorter distances and the relatively flat road. The reality was somewhat different…!!

Over night the wind had continued to blow, but it had also swing round so that it was coming from the north west. We were of course heading… north west…! so it turned into a pretty tough day.

I set out shortly after breakfast and rode briefly with Erwin and Paul before we started up hill, at which point I pulled ahead, catching up with Grant and Jacqui, and continuing on with Rob in the distance. For a while it looked like I was going to catch him too, but then the long steady hill we’d been climbing ended and he began to pull away from me again.

It turns out I’m pretty good at hill climbing – might have something to do with my tree-trunk sized thighs!

As it turned out, being on my own wasn’t much fun – the wind got stronger and we were riding right into it, which on your own gets pretty tiring and pretty demoralising!

The turn at 58km provided some relief as it took me out of the direct head wind, and provided the first downhill which I was actually able to coast down – everywhere else I’d been having to pedal even downhill just to maintain momentum!

The lunch stop was a welcome break from the wind – the guys had done a great job of finding a relatively sheltered spot, and setting up the van to block the rest.

Lunch truck doing good business. I also thought it provided an indication of the scale of the landscape we’re riding through.

After lunch I hooked up with Paul and Erwin and we rode together for the remainder of the day, taking 2km turns at the front to give the other two something of a break from the wind. The difference between being the guy at the front, and the guy at the back was incredible 🙂

So what should have been a relatively enjoyable day ended up being much more of a mission than yesterday and took quite a bit longer to cover quite a bit less distance.

The countryside has changed again – it’s still agricultural land, but much more sheep (and to a lesser extent cattle) farming and is pretty barren and ‘gently rolling’.

It also sounds like I’m going to have to wait till another border to ride from one country to another. Apparently the Chinese are very particular about how you cross the border – it’s either in a single occupancy vehicle, or a bus. At present the strategy is going to involve two busses, one to carry us and half our bags, the other to carry our bikes and the other half of our bags. If nothing else it should be interesting.

That’s the day after tomorrow – we’ve got a further 121km to ride to the town closest to the border tomorrow – let’s hope the wind drops over night!

Riding data

Moving average: 21.2 km/h

Update

So I took a wander round town between posting and now, and there’s not a lot to see. One thing I did notice is that fuel is super cheap here, per litpetrol is 5.85 RMB, diesel 5.05 RMB, which makes them about 60p for petrol and 55p for diesel.

But if we thought we were having a hard time earlier in the day, it’s good not to be riding now as there’s a dust-storm blowing through town. It’s only just gone 1920, and the sun’s not due to set for another 30 min yet you can’t see from one end of the street to the other and most vehicles have their lights on.

The dust storm blowing through town.