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Dump Truck.  ughgh. I’ve come to hate this word in recent weeks, or rather the concept it represents.  And with it - Horn - deafening loud dump truck and long distance bus horns. A short tappy tap on the horn never seems to be enough. Long repeated blasts are the only way people will hear loud disel trucks coming up behind them, or so I imagine the Chinese drivers’ “logic” to go. 

5 or 6 days ago, when ever it was that we were biking into Zhu Zhou city near Changsha - the latter being the capital of Hunan province - I had listened to alot of dump truck horns, eaten alot of dump truck dust, and on top of it, was unusually tired due to a few days bout with diareha and nearly a whole day on the worst road of the trip thus far - a 1 on a 1-10 scale-, busy and ripped up with construction, add hills the whole way as the cherry on top and well, you get the picture.

Shoot. Is biking really fantastic? Is this trip….

I got disappointed with my whaning optimism, so I began singing one of our original songs to myself, Something Good (listen to it on this website under “Music” if you haven’t already) “The heavy world is crushing you; just wait on your turn, don’t skip past the moments of your life; something good is on its way…” And then…

Up ahead in the distance, through the shimmering light, saw the guys stopped by the road, wait, what’s that an extra bike?

Like manna from heaven, at the perfect time, two fellow travelers came into our lives, right in front of us, pedaling on the same terribly busy road in the same direction, also with a bicycle trailer and a loaded back rack with saddle bags! I couldn’t belive it. But wait, oh! Not two bikes but one, a sweet high quality tandem touring bicycle. It turns out, pure coinsidence or gift from God, that Kuang Sub and Su Ji (from South Korea) are also biking to Europe, and are planning on taking a very similar route to ours, with the addition of Tibet and Nepal, going a bit slower, and adding South and North America to make for a 3 year tour total world tour. They also happened to start at about the same time we did (early Sept 2007), not from Beijing like us, but from Qingdao city (home of the famous Tsingtao beer), not too far south of Beijing.

Since we were going the same direction, we biked into Zhuzhou and Changsha together, and spent our 3 rest days there together, visiting with Adam’s and Jim’s old friends and students and making new ones every time we’d walk on Hot Street, a winding narrow road with countless food stalls and packs of students milling about.
Kuang Sub and Su Ji are wonderful people, also in their 20s, Kuang Sub quit his job in the TV broadcasting industry and Su Ji quit college to do their 3 year world tour. They are both kind and funny, as their website is titled (in Korean) - see the “links” page of this website. It was such an affirmation meeting them and sharing our goals, and experiences from the first 1.5 months and our thoughts about where our journeys will take us, with all the uncertainties ripening our two adventures.

We parted company today after a break from our regular diet of 家堂菜 - “Home style Chinese cooking” - with a delicious Korean lunch, treated by Sub and Ji in Heng Yang city, Hunan (湖南，衡阳). They are heading southwest to Guilin, and we are heading straight south to 广州 Guangzhou for Kevin’s wedding. However, we didn’t say goodbye, just “see you later.” They will also be going through Southeast Asia, and we all hope that our paths will again cross in Thailand this Feburary.
I’m inspired by Kuang Sub and Su Ji, and am even more stolked for tandem bike riding with my future significant other. Another of the many blessings along the way.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 8:58 am 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.