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We are now in Shu Yang City, Jiangsu Province.  We crossed the provincial border yesturday (Oct 4 2007) between Shangdong and Jiangsu.  Counting Beijing municipality, we’ve now biked in 4 provinces, with the next one being Shanghai municipality to the far south of Jiangsu.  We hope to arrive in Shanghai in 7-10 days, where we’ll be visiting a friend of Nakia’s for a few days.  Our ultimate China destinations are Guangzhou City for a friend’s wedding reception at the end of November, and then a short break in Hong Kong before pushing on to Southeast Asia.

We’re not the only one’s biking this route.  Several days ago we ran into a man in his early 30s under the shelter of a toll booth who works for one of the Olympic Committees and is also biking from Beijing to Shanghai with one other person.  They’re biking atleast 100km a day and at a faster pace than our 20km/hr to make the 1200km journey.  Perhaps he’s in better shape than us, but his lack of luggage (beyond a small plastic bag on his back rack) no doubt improves his mileage…or kilometerage.  He knew of a group of Chinese students biking also, but so far we have not bumped into other foreign bikers.

Another first yesturday was biking our day’s worth of 70-80km before lunch (1pm).  After previously arriving in towns between 4 and 6pm, we’ve decided that an earlier start with an earlier finish is preferrable, so as to allow afternoon free time to do such activities as music, writing, wandering and chatting with locals, photography and what not - the important stuff - though I cannot completely discount the importance of biking during a bike trip…  

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Pete's Posts, Group Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.