Blog

We often blog about past experiences, personal insight, and meeting people.  For those of you who are wondering about more specific details of the trip this blog is meant as an update of our current status and foreseeable plans in the future.

Right now we are in northern Guangdong province and are working our way south towards Guangzhou.  This weekend we will be attending Kevin Clancy’s wedding reception in Guangzhou, Kevin is a fellow St. John’s alumni and currently works in Hong Kong.  From there we will be heading to Hong Kong for approximately one week, we will take care of a number of things such as obtaining visas, purchasing some much needed supplies, and resting.  

We are currently holding to our plan of biking around 75 km a day with a rest day every 5 days or so.  Lately we have been going through some pretty mountainous terrain and have been getting both large up hills and down hills.  There are a lot of forested areas with a good mix of both deciduous and coniferous trees.  We began to come out of the mountains today and are quickly finding it more sub-tropical.  Bannana trees and sugar cane fields are becoming much more abundant.    

From Hong Kong we plan on heading west towards Vietnam.  A number of our Chinese Visas will expire soon after the new year so we will have to make it to the Vietnam border by then.  

Our plan is then to continue west to Laos, south to Cambodia, then west to Thailand rounding out our SE Asia tour.  After researching many different sources, talking with officials, fellow bikers, and posting questions on online forums we have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to cross any borders into Myanmar.  We will however continue to monitor the situation and highlight issues that we think are important once we are in the region. 

We aren’t quite sure what Thanksgiving will be like for us, most likely biking towards Guangzhou to get there in time for the wedding.  We are thinking of our families and loved ones however, along with the food we are missing out on.  Turkeys, or huo ji 火鸡 are relatively uncommon in China, maybe a chicken or a duck will have to suffice.  We are thinking maybe we will celebrate it in Hong Kong when we have access to an oven.

We have been mixing in more camping lately instead of just staying in LuGuans.  We have found the reception in China very warm to camping and people allow us to camp pretty much anywhere we ask.  We attempt to find secluded places, usually away from towns and busy roads.  Sometimes locals come to chat and see what is going on, but no one seems to have the same attachment to personal property in China as people do in America.  In a country where most things are either shared or communal  it is not surprising and really comforting.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 8:53 am and is filed under 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.