One of the things I like most about traveling by bike is noticing my surroundings.\u00a0 You can’t help it.\u00a0 On a bicycle a person feels the heat or the cold of the air, the stillness or the breeze, the sunshine or the mist.\u00a0 When the road rises into a hill, the muscles swell with the strain of meeting the incline.\u00a0 You notice, and are grateful for,\u00a0the shade trees lining the pavement or the natural coolness of passing by a field of clover.\u00a0 And people have time to notice you, and stare, and smile or make a comment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the biggest differences from traveling in a high-speed machine (car, train, plane) is that in the course of a few days a cyclist can see the gradual changes in the landscape.\u00a0 Early on in our trip we began\u00a0to speculate on where we would be when saw our first palm tree or water buffalo.\u00a0 These would be to us measurements of our progress southward.\u00a0 From Beijing until now, here is a brief history as we see it:<\/p>\n
Out of Beijing the road is flat with farmland, fields, and factories.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soon we see orchards of pinggua (apples), peaches, and pears,\u00a0 with piles peddled peripherally for a few pence.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Yellow corn covers concrete, drying, we dodge it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soon we hit hills and huff.<\/p>\n
Pomegranites and persimmons hang on hillsides as we wind windily up and whirring, wizz down.<\/p>\n
We come to rice and rivers, boats and buffalo, palms.\u00a0 Check point.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Shanghai shakes our senses, sending us spiraling back into city luxuries and lifestyle.<\/p>\n
Now we\u00a0move toward mountains in the mist, beginning to see bamboo and banana trees.<\/p>\n
The surrounding peaks are lush and green as the road channels smoothly through, now up, now back down.\u00a0 And sometimes you can’t even tell with your eyes, but your legs let you know.\u00a0 We are approaching Yellow Mountain.\u00a0 We continue westward…<\/p>\n
It is very near the end of October, but we seem to be on pace with the weather pretty well; as the warmth moves southward, so do we.\u00a0 The days have been sixties and seventies, mild\u00a0but crisp in the morning.\u00a0 Barring a few rainy ones, each day seems to be a good day for biking.\u00a0 And so it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things I like most about traveling by bike is noticing my surroundings.\u00a0 You can’t help it.\u00a0 On a bicycle a person feels the heat or the cold of the air, the stillness or the breeze, the sunshine or the mist.\u00a0 When the road rises into a hill, the muscles swell with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drews-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}