China Cycling Travelogues

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Roz Beste

Crossing China on One Wheel

Hi Peter,

I told you I would write a bit of a travelogue for you from my China unicycling trip. I got back in February but I've only just got round to finishing it. I was inspired by some of the stories in your travelogue which gave me the confidence to finally decide to go in the first place even if I had to ride alone (something which luckily I didn't have to do in the end). So I'd be happy to try to inspire some other people.

Roz Beste, May 2005

Introduction

Having decided to uproot myself from my home of the last eight years in Hong Kong and emigrate down under, I thought I deserved a bit of a holiday. I thought about chilling out on a beach and a few other kinds of conventional vacations but they didn't really enthuse me - I prefer holidays where I can get fit, hang out with some interesting people and do something different. And so it was that I came up with the idea of unicycling across China. That seemed to fit the bill much better. I speak a bit of Mandarin and I'd done a similar trip before (on 2 wheels) and I wanted to improve my unicycling so this would be the perfect way to do that. I thought six weeks sounded like a good time to be away so I studied my diary and came up with some dates.

Being less organised than most people I only made this decision 4 months in advance so I had a bit of work cut out to arrange everything. The most difficult being finding some willing souls to accompany me on this journey.
I told everyone I knew about it and advertised in various newsgroups and was somewhat surprised that I wasn't overwhelmed by people who wanted to come along. Hey, if I'd have seen this advertised I would have wanted to go.... But I guess not everyone is like me (which is probably a good thing, in perspective). And of course reality always bites - money, time...fear of the unknown and all those other excuses people have (OK, they don't usually admit the last one but I'm sure it's in there too.)

I did eventually manage to find people to come along for every section of the trip -A total of nine people joined me at different times for anything from 1 day to 3 weeks, on either bicycles or unicycles. This made it seem like lots of different holidays which fitted in with the change of weather and scenery as I made my way across the country from East to West.

The trip was excellent fun and the logistics of so many people coming to meet me at different times worked surprisingly well considering the potential for difficulties- you gotta luv mobile phones and the internet.
The most challenging parts of the trip were (in no particular order)?

- lack of contour maps (or actually very accurate maps of any sort). Roads are being built very fast in this booming country and even buying the latest maps doesn't seem to guarantee that they will be very realistic. I had about 5 different brands of maps and used to consult all of them to get a consensus on the likely route. We could travel 80+ km in a day if the route was flat but if it was mountainous - 30-40km might be all we could do so it would have been good to be able to plan better. Asking the locals didn't really help as they always thought we were crazy to be cycling that kind of distance when the bus was so cheap and would point us to the bus station (being mostly peasant farmers, they don't really understand the concept of recreational sports such as cycling or hiking) and give us conflicting information about the gradients of the roads (I think they must have always slept through the journey, if they had done it at all!)

- lack of tourist information. We were staying in hotels, not camping. It was difficult to know which towns would have accommodation. We found that any town of a certain size would have something (which may be very basic). However, our only method of knowing the size of towns was the font size on the maps and there was not always a good differentiation between a hamlet of a few houses (if you could find it at all) or a town of 10,000 people. So there were one or 2 occasions when we got it wrong. However, buses would nearly always take us and the unicycles (and/or bikes) so we could easily get to the next town if necessary, even if we didn't have the strength/motivation to cycle any further that day. (And in addition, buses can be flagged down anywhere - no need to wait for a 'bus stop' or town)

- luggage transport. On the first part of the trip, I was the only unicyclist and I had at least one person on a bicycle with me who carried my luggage which worked very well. But later more unicyclists joined me and we no longer had the bicycle backups. We tried various types of systems including taxis, buses and private mini-buses. But sometimes had to resort to getting on a bus at the end of the day and picking up the luggage ourselves. Or staying in a town for a few days and cycling out in different directions from it and/or doubling back.

The most memorable of the trip:

- On our first day, in a fairly crowded area near a bus station, someone spotted me unicycling and ran to side of the road and with a big smile put his hand out 'high-five' style for me to slap as I came past. Other people
seeing him do this, decided to do the same - so I cycled all along that road high-fiving people as I came past.

- About half way through the trip we had a security issue where Zoe who was riding a bicycle got ahead of us, was pushed off her bike and her money, camera and passport stolen. I usually think of China as being an extremely safe place so this incident really affected my confidence for a while and was certainly a more sobering part of the journey. It also led to adventures at the police station and learning about bureaucracy in China. (The official franking machine at the police station was broken so they couldn't stamp the robbery report and initially suggested that we would have to wait around for a week until it was fixed. Jeff offered to buy them a new machine - but in the end a way was found....)

- Being persuaded by an English teacher in a small rural town to come in and talk to some of his students...and then on arriving at the school, discovering we were actually giving a speech to 250 students! (They asked us questions like "Can you tell us about farming in your country" .... " Er,...actually, no..." - We tried to stick to subjects we knew more about like unicycling).

- The stunning scenery. China's countryside has some incredible scenery that is not promoted as a tourist attraction and therefore most tourists never see. I'm sure their tourist industry will wake up to the fact soon but until then you can experience it without any other camera-toting tourists getting in your way.

Cycling is a fantastic way to see China and unicycling guarantees smiles from everyone you pass. If you ever get the opportunity to do some long distance cycling in Asia - do it!! I highly recommend it.

If you would like to read this in detail, it starts here!

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