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On the road now for six days, we’ve had ample opportunity to speak with a great variety of people. Whether it’s the five foreigners with heavily loaded bikes and blaze orange traffic-management vests that attract crowds of people, or just my delectable posterior as featured in biking shorts, remain unclear. In any case, there are many people who want to talk with us, so talk we do. The conversations usually fail to cover new ground, or even escape the geographical/anatomical realm: where are you from? where did you start biking? where are you going? how tall is that tall guy? (with the latter question of course referring to the six foot six Peter).

In order to simplify things we’ve been telling most people that we simply intend to bike to Hong Kong. Even with this conservative estimate of our trip, reactions to the idea of our journey usually vary between incredulous and amazed. During the tense period on the 16th when we weren’t sure if we would be able to leave Beijing, we scrambled to secure the guitars to Drew’s bike outside our apartment building. A young girl and her father stopped by to monitor our progress. Upon learning we hoped to go as far as Hong Kong, the girl cross her arms over her chest and shook her head emphatically. “I don’t believe you,” she said. Her father tried to convince her we were for real, but to no avail.

Another man we talked to in Hebei claimed biking to Hong Kong was impossible. “That can’t be true,” he claimed. I tried to give him our website for evidence, but he said, “I’m aware such a thing exists, but I’ve never used it myself.” Oh well. After unsuccessfully trying to get his son to talk with us he left.

During longer stops, we venture more detailed explanations about the reasoning behind our trip: our intention of advocating bicycle rather than car travel, our effort to raise awareness of global warming, our hope that more personal connections between cultures will lead to a more secure world peace. People usually nod and agree when we say these things, but we have yet to have a generally great global warming round table in any of the villages in which we’ve stopped. Sometimes even basic communication is a problem. The other day, after explaining reduced pollution (wuran in Chinese) someone thought I had merely said we were going to Wuhan (the capital of Hubei Province). I’ll practice my pronunciation, and in the meantime we will hopefully come up with a solid platform from which to advocate the environmental side of our trip.

Precisely one day after I arrived in China, 0708.fueledbyrice.org and the site of our server provider both became impossible to access. It seems more likely at this point that it is not our site specifically that has been blocked, but all sites hosted by our server, Hostmonster.com. In any case, it is difficult to access our website in China, and nearly impossible to modify it. Hence the lack of updates or new photos or anything at all happening.

For those with technical knowledge, it is actually quite easy to defeat Chinese internet censorship. You can use one of many free systems that “anonymize” your IP address. This means most importantly that your physical location cannot be traced by someone electronically eavesdropping on your surfing. It also gets you past the f*rew*lls and censors that normally decide who can look at what sites in China. The only problem is that most secure logins (like the ones needed to login to this blog and our website) do not allow anonymous IPs for security reasons.

The only way I’m able to post this is that I have a trial version of an anonymizer that is specially set up to allow users to login to secure accounts. We now have to decide to do one of two things. We can buy the services of this anonymizer, which for a small fee allows us to modify our site with anonymous IPs, but still leaves the site blocked for most folks in China. On the other hand, because the problem is with our server and not with our site (we think) we can simply transfer our site to another company, one who’s servers aren’t blocked in China. This is easy to do, only slightly more expensive than buying the secure anonymizer, and would allow everyone in China to look at our site. We’ll see. The good news for anyone checking this site and hoping for more frequent updates is that either of these options will hopefully be in place by later today, and all of us will be able to once again be able to post blogs and pics.

Here we are. Three short weeks away from taking off and still lists and lists of undone tasks litter my house, desk, work, and dreams. No matter how simple the task, it seems that it must needs complicate itself according to those inscrutable principles known as Murphy’s laws. Did he ever develop any bike-trip specific theories? I’d probably just as soon not know. Wheels take longer than promised to be made and are weaker than the ones I ordered. Seats and seat posts are stolen. Finding seat posts requires multiple trips to different bike shops and then somehow I choose one that’s too long. Taking a bike on a plane as extra luggage costs as much as buying a cheap domestic ticket. The visa company gives us sixty instead of ninety day visas. Brakes don’t. Web sites fail to cooperate. And we haven’t even started yet!

But, I have a bike. I have a ticket. I have a visa. I’m going to China. I can’t wait to dispense with the worrying, the scurrying, the errand running and sand blast all of those lists out of my head with a healthy dose of Chinese road dust. My previous bike trip in China offered a similar planning experience. Everything is extremely hectic until you leave, and then you’re out on the road and the only thing you have to worry about is the burning in your legs and the numbness in other places. Give me numbness over visa woes any day. Well, almost any day.