The Great Ride of China- Attempting to ride through every province in China

Hello My China Moto members!

I just wanted let everyone know about a trip my girlfriend Amy and I have just recently set out on a little over a week ago that we are calling The Great Ride of China.

On July 19th, we left from Beijing on a CFMOTO 650TR to travel in a counter-clockwise direction, up towards Harbin, across through inner mongolia, towards Xinjiang, into Tibet, up north towards Qinghai (the east of Tibet is closed to foreigners) and then down and around the southern provinces. We're looking covering around 25k-30k kilometers on the trip and it should take us a little over 4 months.

At the moment, we've covered about 2000km and gone through 5 provinces as we arrived in Harbin yesterday, our eastern most point on the trip. Tomorrow we'll be turning north west towards Inner Mongolia and the Russian border before moving west. Really looking forward to the grass plains of inner mongolia!

If there are any riders here in the Dongbei area and you haven't ridden much around Liaoning, I highly recommend it. The roads are probably the nicest I've seen in China so far, and much of the time they were lined with sunflowers which made the air extremely fresh smelling! (A nice change from Beijing smog). Two routes I would recommend in particular are the G305 that cuts across the Dalian peninsula and then the 319 east out of Dalian which winds around the Yalu river and borders North Korea for a good bit of time. It eventually meets up the G201 which parallels the expressway and is really spectacular riding including some great mountain twisties.

I'll be trying to post updates here, but time is scarce of course, so it'll probably be closer to every 2 weeks. We do try and post pretty regularly on our weibo and other social accounts (weibo is @骑行中国爱心之旅）and we also have a website www.thegreatrideofchina.com. We are having some page load issues at the moment so please excuse any lag while we get that figured out! On the site though we have pictures updated regularly, a GPS track that we update daily as well as trip stats such as mileage, days, provinces, etc.

Finally, if there are any riders out there who we may happen to cross paths with, would be great to try and meet up on the road!


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Got hit with quite a bit of rain, but not enough to dampen the spirits!
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A sobering reminder to not take the twisties too fast
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Another motorcycle traveler from Guizhou with a 摩托迷 group
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View of North Korea near Dandong
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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bucko

I just wanted let everyone know about a trip my girlfriend Amy and I have just recently set out on a little over a week ago that we are calling The Great Ride of China.

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Best of luck to you - looking forward to your updates!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bucko

If there are any riders here in the Dongbei area and you haven't ridden much around Liaoning, I highly recommend it. The roads are probably the nicest I've seen in China so far, and much of the time they were lined with sunflowers which made the air extremely fresh smelling! (A nice change from Beijing smog). Two routes I would recommend in particular are the G305 that cuts across the Dalian peninsula and then the 319 east out of Dalian which winds around the Yalu river and borders North Korea for a good bit of time. It eventually meets up the G201 which parallels the expressway and is really spectacular riding including some great mountain twisties.

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Totally agree with this. The peninsula is very nice, and the NK border ride is interesting, as are some of the routes North through Liaoning. Jilin & central Heilongjiang (i.e., around Harbin, not so nice).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bucko

View of North Korea near Dandong
Attachment 12940

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Are those the empty "display houses" that were built about 10 years ago, just outside Dandong by the Great Wall? My trip along the border route made me uncomfortable more than once, accentuated when a Chinese border guard warned us not to stop in certain locations, as the NK border guards have been known to take random pot shots across the river. Nevertheless, a great experience that I try to encourage other riders to enjoy.

Again, best wishes on your great journey!

:thumbsup:

Glad to hear others have enjoyed this ride! Those houses were ones we saw on one of the boat rides "into" North Korea. Apparently they are barracks for the navy around there.

We actually had no problems with security or anything like that on our road. Maybe things have lightened up a bit recently for whatever reason. When we went on the boat too one of the other passengers brought along a carton of cigarettes to throw on to shore to some of the local NK military personnel. So maybe the cigarettes are working to pacify them!

Read about these exploits and coming RR a week ago on CFMotoClub. There is additional coverage about this also on CFMotoClub as well as Motofans

Looking forward to another group of riders giving both themselves, the 650TR, and Ch!na a good workout.

'scribed...

:popcorn:

Thanks bikerdoc! and thanks for following along :riding:

Good luck on the ride Bucko, sounds sick! I'm also working my way round all the provinces, albeit much more slowly, by the end of the year I should only have Tibet and Taiwan left to do. I'm especially looking forward to hearing about your Tibetan experience and would love any tips and advice you may have on permits etc. happy riding!

Bucko, just thought that you might be interested to know that it is possible to alter the angle of the screen several cm's to direct the wind blast up and over ones helmet thereby avoiding getting ones helmet visor (or eyes) covered by all and sundry road grime et al. I prefer riding where possible with visor open so long as I have a screen directing the air flow over my helmet.

What I did on my 650TR was to replace the standard 6mm Allen headed coach bolts that secure the screen with much longer coach bolts and some rubber sleeve 'inserts' that act as buffers between the underside of the screen and the top side of the fairing. I had to mill out the four holes on the screen that the bolts fit through, as the angles of the bolts secured to the fairing had to be taken into consideration. Had to replace all bolts with bolts of different lengths for the top of the screen versus those on the bottom of the screen, just to adjust the angle of the screen to the rider. Resulting in the top edge of the screen raised by around 4-5cm.

This provides a nice gap between the screen and the top side of the dash display, so I'm planning to add a universal GPS/Mobile phone holder at that point as I have done on my other rides. This allows me to have my device protected by the screen from the elements, and is more line of sight when used as a GPS. I'm not a fan of the other alternative mounting methods e.g. RAM mounts etc. since these often expose the device to the elements (principally, rain) and often require more lateral movement of riders head to view the device, meaning significant change to field of view.

Works well. Have made several other mods too (louder horns etc.)

Hey bikerdoc,

Thanks for the mod suggestions. Wish we had had some time before starting out to get them sorted as I too like riding with my visor open. Not sure if I'd be able to manage to explain what I'd like to do to a mechanic along the way so as to be able to borrow his tools, but might be worth a try! Would love to try and get a louder horn as well but it seems to be a bit tough while we're on the road. Actually had a problem where the screw on the horn came loose and so stopped functioning. I thought the horn was shot but a local mechanic along the way stuck his screwdriver in the side and managed to tighten it back up.

Hi All,

Just wanted to give a quick update on our progress so far on the ride. Unfortunately we are somewhat limited in how often we can post updates, but we've been trying to stay pretty regular on facebook (facebook.com/thegreatrideofchina) as well as weibo (@骑行中国爱心之旅）. And of course we have our own blog on our website.

We have currently made to our 8th province, Shaanxi, taking a day off in Xi'an. We've just surpassed 6,000km on the trip which puts us 20% through with our goal.

Overall the past 2 weeks have been pretty spectacular, in particular Inner Mongolia. We changed our original route which was to start going west from Harbin and diverted north up towards Manzhouli next to the Russian border. Very happy we did as the scenery was beautiful, and the roads, for the most part, were very high quality. Afterwards we went south, avoiding Route 303 as we were told that the condition made it impossible to go much faster than 20km/h. We visited Pingyao County before making our way to Xi'an.

Here's a summary of some of the posts:

First accident and closed roads

20km of construction at Inner Mongolian border

Beautiful plains of inner mongolia and stay at a Yurt camp

Flooded camp

Pingyao Visit

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Hope you enjoy the posts! And if anyone has any road suggestions as we start making our way west through Gansu (towards Jiayuguan) and into Xinjiang, please let us know!

Well, it's been quite a while now since the last update on our ride here on mychinamoto but a lot has happened since the last update which left us at Xi'an.

We've now ridden through 11 provinces (1/3 of the way done!) and have passed 10,000km.

We are currently in Xinjiang province, at our most western point in Kashgar.

We visited the western end of the Great Wall in Jiayuguan

Hiked the sand dunes in Dunhuang and visited the ancient Buddha grottoes (Some beautiful desert roads on the approach to the city)

We went to one of the lowest points in earth in the Turpan Depression getting stuck in a massive sandstorm while visiting the monument at Aiding Lake

Went up a gorgeous mountain climb south of Urumqi but required 100km of riding on unpaved road climbing up to 4,600m (highest point of the trip so far).

Taking some days off now in Kashgar while we wait for our Tibet tour guide and permits. Had to go on a pretty eventful visa run to Kyrgyzstan though while we waited!

Just some quick road and riding tips:

The guys at the CFMOTO (and also Shineray) shop in Urumqi are top notch. Best of the trip so far and highly recommend if you're there and having any troubles.

Both approach roads to Dunhuang make for some beautiful riding. Empty, flat stretches of desert highway lined the whole way with melon stands

There is a lakeside road at Bositeng Lake in Xinjiang that is really nice as well but a bit windy.

The route between Turpan and Urumqi has an area that is susceptible to extremely high winds and they have a pretty famous wind farm there. Check before leaving what the wind speeds are because on good days you have to drive at 60-80km, meaning bad days are almost unrideable.

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Really long time now since my last update. So much going on on the road now that it's been hard to keep up on posts and what not online. I have been relatively good at keeping our blog updated with photos, stats, and trip updates though, but I still thought I'd share some of the highlights of the trip so far from the nearly two months now since the last time I posted.

We are currently now in Shenzhen. Having gone to Macau and Hong Kong, we have now visited 25 of the 33 provincial level regions throughout China, including Tibet, Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Guangxi.

Since the last update in Urumqi, we spent some time in Kashgar (from where I had a crazy visa related border run to Kyrgyzstan), entered Tibet on the G219 with snowstorms there to greet us, road the CF650TR up to Everest Base Camp, visited the Leshan Giant Buddha (largest stone Buddha in the world), ate some pig brains in Chengdu, and much more!

The big news for us at the moment is that as we start making our way up the coast and back up towards Beijing, we are less than 2,000km away from the official Guinness World Record for longest motorcycle journey in a single country! We hope to pass the record in the next week or so with our next stop being Fujian province and then up towards Shanghai. If there are any riders around these areas, it would be great to try and meet up and maybe even ride for a section.

Also, one of our goals for The Great Ride is not only to break a record but also to help raise money and awareness for our partner charity, China based Free Lunch for Children. You can learn more about the charity and how you can help on the donate page of our website. All proceeds go to the charity as the trip is self-funded with the support of our sponsors.

And now, some pics! Unfortunately there's a limit on number of photos we can upload here, but we've got dozens (hundreds?) more on the site if you want to check them out!

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Hey Buck (& Amy), been following along the journey etc via the great ride of Ch!na website. All great stuff. If you get this in the coming week, I have a very good m/c fanatic friend down in the lower reaches of Fujian province (near DongShan Dao). I'm sure that he'd be more than welcoming provided he hasn't done one of his fortnightly trips back up this way, so PM me if you'd like his details etc., and I'll put you two in touch. By the same token when you head up this way (NingBo, ZheJiang), give me a shout.
Shiny side up... BD

It's been great having you following along. Always nice to have the comments to contribute to the conversation and experience. That would be great to meet up when we pass through Ningbo and ditto for your friend in Fujian!

OK, got your PM. I'll send you an email shortly with both contact information... When do you expect that you might hit the border into Fujian then Zhejiang?

Ok great! Actually we're hoping to get to Fujian tomorrow actually! Want to visit the Tulou area (earth buildings). Then down to Xiamen the next day. I imagine it shouldn't be too much longer after that until we are into Zhejiang

Looks like a great ride so far. I just caught up on your trip report. Looks great so far, keep the updates coming! I'm just living through all of these posts as i'm stuck in my cubicle at work hahah.

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Originally Posted by ahernandez74

Looks like a great ride so far. I just caught up on your trip report. Looks great so far, keep the updates coming! I'm just living through all of these posts as i'm stuck in my cubicle at work hahah.

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Glad you're enjoying the stories ahernandez! It's nice to be able to share the experience with other riders. Just I hope I'm doing it justice!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bucko

Well, it's been quite a while now since the last update on our ride here on mychinamoto but a lot has happened since the last update which left us at Xi'an.

We've now ridden through 11 provinces (1/3 of the way done!) and have passed 10,000km.

We are currently in Xinjiang province, at our most western point in Kashgar.

We visited the western end of the Great Wall in Jiayuguan

Hiked the sand dunes in Dunhuang and visited the ancient Buddha grottoes (Some beautiful desert roads on the approach to the city)

We went to one of the lowest points in earth in the Turpan Depression getting stuck in a massive sandstorm while visiting the monument at Aiding Lake

Went up a gorgeous mountain climb south of Urumqi but required 100km of riding on unpaved road climbing up to 4,600m (highest point of the trip so far).

Taking some days off now in Kashgar while we wait for our Tibet tour guide and permits. Had to go on a pretty eventful visa run to Kyrgyzstan though while we waited!

Just some quick road and riding tips:

The guys at the CFMOTO (and also Shineray) shop in Urumqi are top notch. Best of the trip so far and highly recommend if you're there and having any troubles.

Both approach roads to Dunhuang make for some beautiful riding. Empty, flat stretches of desert highway lined the whole way with melon stands

There is a lakeside road at Bositeng Lake in Xinjiang that is really nice as well but a bit windy.

The route between Turpan and Urumqi has an area that is susceptible to extremely high winds and they have a pretty famous wind farm there. Check before leaving what the wind speeds are because on good days you have to drive at 60-80km, meaning bad days are almost unrideable.

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Nice! Look at the Wind Mills... beautiful. Thats something youdon't really expect to see in China too much.

Public Service Announcement...

Have just spent two days at CFMoto factory Hangzhou, with Jon, in support of Buck and Amy:the Great Ride of China who have broken the world record with more than 25000km completed (and counting) being the longest distance ridden by motorcycle start-finish in one country. With six more provinces, another several thousand kilometres and some cold conditions to contend with...
Congratulations Buck and Amy...
:kumbaya:


Anyway I'm sure when the two get a moment they'll be updating this thread with more accurate information etc.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bikerdoc

Congratulations Buck and Amy...
:kumbaya:

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Absolutely!! This is a MAJOR accomplishment, and I wish them well, with additional success for their last part of the journey. Really great to see this done!

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!

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!

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:

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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!

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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:

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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.

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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

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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?

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!

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:

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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.

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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:

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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!

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If you want to know anything about Tibet visas and travelling check out http://www.thelandofsnows.com and he responds to emails promptly.... Cost me 3 years ago for 30 days including lodging guides and private vehicle about 45000 rmb
Forgot to add ... That was between 3 of us.

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