Re: Update on the progress of The Great Ride of China
Hey everybody,
Just a quick update, this morning we've now put our total distance past the 20,000 mile mark and only a have few days left before it's all over! In Shandong province now with only Tianjin as our last remaining province to bring our final count to 33.
For any forum members that are in the Beijing area our planned finish date is this coming Wednesday the 11th and we're going to have a little get together to celebrate. Great Leap Brewery has generously offered to host for us at their taproom location at #12 Xinzhongjie (新中街）right near Chunxiulu 春秀路 and workers stadium north road. Furthermore, for that night they have generously offered to donate ¥10 for every pint of Pale Ale #6 sold to our partner charity Free Lunch For Children. That means that for every one beer you drink, that's 3 lunches for an underprivileged child in rural China.
Festivities start at 8. Hope to see you all there!
p.s. Thanks for the congrats you guys! Hard to believe its almost over. Was great to have the opportunity to ride with a couple Zhejiang Moto veterans!
Re: Update on the progress of The Great Ride of China
Hi Bucko!
I followed your Blog with great interest - what an adventure...!
Congratulations!
I am planning a big trip myself and right now we are trying to figure out routes.
One way would be to leave china trough Nepal via Tibet.
The only thing I could fine regarding Tibet are Tour groups that cost a shitload of money - mainly because they do tours for riders outside of china.
How did you do it? Where did you get the guide and how much did the whole tibet thing cost you?
Would be very thankful for a contact ...
keep it up!
Re: Update on the progress of The Great Ride of China
Hey Golden Boy,
Thanks for following along. Glad you enjoyed it! Unfortunately, the expensive tour guides is pretty much the only way you can do Tibet. The regulations can change from month to month, even blocking whole sections of Tibet off to foreigners (the eastern section, east of Lhasa, was closed to us apparently) but the need for a guide has been pretty consistent during the time that we were preparing. You don't have to do it in a big group but it helps to bring down the cost of the trip as you can split the cost of the guide, driver, car, and permits among the group. The company that helped us was Tibet Travel. They were super helpful, gave us a great guide, and were the most affordable option we found. I'm pretty sure we were their first motorcycle trip though. I think there are others based out of Nepal too though as we met up with a group of about 4 foreigners that were riding from Nepal when we were in our last day into Lhasa.
Hope that helps! Best of luck with your trip.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Golden boy
Hi Bucko!
I followed your Blog with great interest - what an adventure...!
Congratulations!
I am planning a big trip myself and right now we are trying to figure out routes.
One way would be to leave china trough Nepal via Tibet.
The only thing I could fine regarding Tibet are Tour groups that cost a shitload of money - mainly because they do tours for riders outside of china.
How did you do it? Where did you get the guide and how much did the whole tibet thing cost you?
Would be very thankful for a contact ...
keep it up!
1 Attachment(s)
Our trip through China accepted for Guinness World Record!
Just wanted to share with everyone that our 146 day, 34,157km long trip through every province in China has officially been accepted by Guinness World Records for the longest motorcycle trip within a single country!
The record can be found on Guinness' website here. Below is the description from the site:
Quote:
The longest journey by motorcycle in a single country is 33,357.15 km (20,727.13 miles) and was achieved by Buck Perley (USA) and Amy Mathieson (UK) who rode throughout China from 19 July to 11 December 2013.
The duo's journey took 146 days and took them through all of China's provinces. The motorcycle used was a Chinese CFMOTO CF650-TR.
Note: Discrepancy between the record distance and our recorded distance is due to the difference between our GPS recorded distances and that reported by our odometer. Guinness only accepted the GPS distance (which was affected by tunnels, malfunctions, etc.)
You can read more about the record and our trip including our trip diary and GPS track from our site: The Great Ride of China
Attachment 14806
Re: Our trip through China accepted for Guinness World Record!
Congrats man, I was following your progress on weibo, that was an amazing ride!
I'm trying to do the same thing, but I have to break it into chunks that fit into my summer vacations. What kind of visa did you have? I saw you had to do a run to kyrgyzstan, were you just on a tourist visa? How many times did you have to leave the country?
Also, when I was in western China I ended up camping almost every night, since they had a bunch of outdated rules about foreigners and hotels, how did you deal with that? Did you find a way around that or just camp?
Re: Our trip through China accepted for Guinness World Record!
Thanks Steve!
Breaking it into junks would be a nice way to do it. One regret we had was that there was just not enough time to see everything that we wanted to see.
Yes, I had a travel visa and Amy (my girlfriend) had a work visa left over from her work in Beijing. The visa was multi-entry good for 6 months (I had 6 months to enter and could enter as many times as I wanted before that) and I needed to cross a border every 90 days. Kyrgyzstan was the most troublesome border crossing. Later on we went to HK and Macau which also counted and were much easier. You can do a trip like this on any visa though. They don't really care as long as you're legal.
We did run into issues with the hotels but it was more or less manageable. A couple times we were forced to stay in pretty much the biggest hotel in town, but when you convert that to USD and realize it's only $50/night still not that bad (nice to get a shower too!). Another strategy is to get membership cards at all the chain hotels like 7 days inn and Home Inns. As it turns out, it's not so much that the hotels aren't allowed to take foreigners, but sometimes they just don't want to take you because it's too much work to fill out the paperwork. Also, in bigger cities you can sometimes find international youth hostels (there was a good one in Kashgar), cheap and usually pretty clean. Aside from that, camping works too!
Re: Update on the progress of The Great Ride of China
Hey Bucko,
Thanks for the info, i contacted them but they didnt reply yet,
Can you give a rough number on how many days you stayed in tibet and how much the cost where?- guide and all
Thanks!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bucko
Hey Golden Boy,
Thanks for following along. Glad you enjoyed it! Unfortunately, the expensive tour guides is pretty much the only way you can do Tibet. The regulations can change from month to month, even blocking whole sections of Tibet off to foreigners (the eastern section, east of Lhasa, was closed to us apparently) but the need for a guide has been pretty consistent during the time that we were preparing. You don't have to do it in a big group but it helps to bring down the cost of the trip as you can split the cost of the guide, driver, car, and permits among the group. The company that helped us was
Tibet Travel. They were super helpful, gave us a great guide, and were the most affordable option we found. I'm pretty sure we were their first motorcycle trip though. I think there are others based out of Nepal too though as we met up with a group of about 4 foreigners that were riding from Nepal when we were in our last day into Lhasa.
Hope that helps! Best of luck with your trip.
Re: Update on the progress of The Great Ride of China
Can give you better than a rough number. It cost us ¥50k for up to 30 days (but we only were in for 20 days) for everything (but we paid for meals and lodgings on the road, which was relatively cheap).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Golden boy
Hey Bucko,
Thanks for the info, i contacted them but they didnt reply yet,
Can you give a rough number on how many days you stayed in tibet and how much the cost where?- guide and all
Thanks!
1 Attachment(s)
Video of 146 Day Motorcycle Ride Through 33 Provinces
We finally got a video together of our trip around China that we finished this past December. Took nearly 5 months worth footage cut down to a 5:30 minute teaser/trailer. We were very fortunate to see all the amazing things (as well as some of the not so amazing) around this country. Also, forgot to mention that late last month we officially got the certificate from Guinness! The official final distance recognized for the record was 33,357km.Links to the video:YouTube link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0kuUkNRFQ8Youku link: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNjc0ODczNjky.html
