Fantastic Fujian Adventure
As we all know, the Universiade is happening in Shenzhen at the moment.. and that makes Shenzhen the last place anyone wants to be... sooo
Captain Pikey (Tom) and Maverick AH (Winston) took a little time off to do a daring dash from Shenzhen through Guangdong, Fujian and even a little foray into Zhejiang or Jiangxi (will know in a day or two as we're still on the trip).
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Maverick AH
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Captain Pikey
The main focus was to see what Fujian was all about, we picked out a well known scenic spot (Wu Yi Shan) as our destination and homebase, it would take us 3 days of riding to reach our destinantion, we'd set up camp and go play in the surrounding mountains before heading back to Shenzhen.
First let's look at the bikes:
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My bike, China's most proven and toughest bike, the old QM200 (seen above in the MCM logo) all the power of this 200cc air-cooled monster still there, even after years of abuse.
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Captian Pikey's brand new Yingang 250cc water-cooled dual front disc monster (which sucks offroad as you'll find out later)
Fantastic Fujian Adventure
Now that we've seen the bikes I'll let you know how the trip has gone so far...
Friday night we hired a van to take us out past Xiao Mei Sha beach (since that area was swarming with traffic police due to it being the opening day of the Universiade), we arrived at about 9:30 in the evening and cracked on for about 2 hours to Huizhou where we found a dodgey little hotel for the night and had a few cold ones.
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Beers
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Awful looking Chicken... I do not like my food staring me down
We decided to get a move on, so we planned to leave 8am and try to cover as much distance as possible
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Early morning in grotty Huizhou
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We rode on till about 12pm and stopped for some noodles and an Ice-cream somewhere in Guangdong, we'd covered some good solid kms and so pressed on.
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Stopping only for the occasional fuel top up, we sped through non-descript urban and industrial wasteland towns until finally arriving in Jiaoling, Meizhou at about 3:30
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We had covered about 400kms and were right on the border of Guangdong and Fujian...
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View from our hotel window.. for some reason the hotels were quite expensive and so we decided to try and share a dual room... Big, big, big mistake since Captain Pikey snores like a drowning bilge rat with a throat infection, at least that put an end to any ideas of sharing rooms for the rest of the trip...
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Locals... they just seem to have so much time (and tatoos) on their hands..
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we went out to do some minor bike repairs and murder a few dozen beers
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Captain Pikey gets his name from his Pikey bike mods, like this lovely GPS mount shade fashioned from bits of steel, plastic a grinder, drill and some paint
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The next day was to be another 400+- km haul, we once again left at 8am... although as we were starting up I noticed that my oil was a bit low so we quickly found a bike shop (that was amazingly open at 8am) and got an oil-change, before 8:30 we were on the road again.....
Re: Fantastic Fujian Adventure
We'd crossed the border and entered into Fujian quite early in the morning, the roads were starting to look pretty good, ChinaV had warned us that the roads in Fujian were really bad.. but we had no idea what he was on about (after asking some locals we found out that all the roads we were riding on were new and only completed last year)..
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Doing self-portrait shots one handed at 90km/h is stupid.. but looks cool
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Some sort of typical communist momument thing
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Take a look at the expression on the local grandpa's face as he eyes out Tom
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Things started to look pretty, there was some awesome scenery and lucky me some dirt road to scream through on my QM :)
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Tom was just about to find out how good his new dual disc brakes were...
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While I was taking this photo waiting for Captain Pikey to catch up (I'm much faster on the dirt), Captain Pikey was dropping his bike, finding out just how good his new brakes vs. just how loose the dirt was... not a bad fall, nothing broken or bent, just a few scratches that should buff out.
Next up on the Fantastic Fujian Adventure... We arrive in Jianning, get horribly drunk on local firewater, see some awesome things... stick around for the next installment, coming to a computer near you.
Re: Fantastic Fujian Adventure
Nice keep it coming. Fujian must be the only eastern province which isnīt so much industrialized and still good for riding on and offroad
Re: Fantastic Fujian Adventure
i could definitely go go a TsingTao :naughty: right now thanks for the ride report and the dry throat LoL
Re: Fantastic Fujian Adventure
Great - this is at least a 3-bagger!
:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:
Re: Fantastic Fujian Adventure
Good stuff so far, please do go on! I was in wuyishan earlier this year but not on a bike (it was a work trip, with the matching hats and guides with flags and everything. Never again.) and the whole time i was just wishing for a pair of wheels and a motor. Enjoy it guys!
By the way, is there anyone in guangdong who's not riding one of chinaV's ex bikes?
Fantastic Fujian Adventure Continued
Where we last left off, Capt. Pikey had just taken a tumble in the dirt and we'd started to hit some nice looking roads...
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Some of the nice stuff we were riding through.
We pushed on without incident until arriving in Jianning
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After checking in and taking a shower, we hopped into some local transport and asked the driver to take us to a "good tasting" restaurant.. unfortunately being the Chinese Hungry Ghost festival, all the nice places were closed.
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We walked around until we found a reasonable place and set into drinking (tonight was going to be probably the biggest bender of the trip).
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We finised quite a few local beers and also a bottle of disgusting tasting local firewater, we then hit the shops looking to try all sorts of different local drinks, we came across this brand with a silly looking foreign guy on it... but we didn't buy that one..
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The big river winding through the center of town looked seriously inviting, so Tom and I found our way down to the river
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Tom, testing the waters
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It's really awesome to sit with your feet in the water drinking as the sun starts to set, the perfect ending to long ride.
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Capt. Pikey with some more of the local horrible booze (that tasted like medicine mixed with sherry).
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Since we'd covered good ground, we decided that we'd leave at about 10am the next morning instead of the usual 8am.
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So far, only issues with the bike were the tightening of Tom's chain and a slightly iffy starter on my QM.
Things were however going to get a lot more interesting on this trip, we'd barely hit the tip of the ice-berg.
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We had more than quite a few more drinks, checked out some local bbq stalls and then hit the sack.
Re: Fantastic Fujian Adventure Continued
Nice thread! Keep it coming.
By the way, that goofy foreigner....
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...is none other than Bora Milutinović, the Serbian football coach and former player who coached China's World Cup squad during the 2002 round. Though "Milu" was the first coach to take four different national teams beyond the first round (in different years, of course), he failed to do so with China, which was no surprise.
I do remember him doing lots of advertising back in the day. Nice to know he's found himself a boozy legacy in the People's Republic. Somehow I doubt he's getting any royalties, though.
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Fantastic Fujian Adventure
Right, so next morning we were both hungover as all hell, I arrived downstairs at the appointed time, but Capt. Pikey was no where to be found, I pottered around the area buying hangover cures in the form of water, ice-cream, tea-eggs etc and sent a message and eventually phoned Capt. Pikey to wake him up, he shortly appeared looking like hell, but then again that's pretty much how I felt, we both sweat out several pints of sweat as we tied our luggage onto our bikes in the hot 38degree C heat.
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Wearing full riding gear in the hot sun and extreme humidity is not a lot of fun... but taking it off is a mission and then you'd just have to put it back on again... safety first!
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Searching for hangover cures...
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Soon we were back on the road, flying fast taking corners and being cooled by the air (much like my QM's engine).
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Capt. Pikey had his jacket open for cooling effect, but got pretty badly sunburnt in the process.
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We couldn't have asked for better weather (actually we could.. about 15 degrees cooler would have been nice), it was sunshine and heat every day of the trip.
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There were some incredible roads through valleys, huge open spaces where we could really open up the bikes and fly through...
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... a full throttle moment... one handed (since I was taking the picture)
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Our usual thing was to stop after the first 100~150kms for a quick break, fill up my Qingqi (since it only gets +-200kms on a tank) and get a cold drink.
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We stopped at a little shop which sold these brilliant Chili eggs and dirty sausages (the owner explaining to us how the dog roaming around his store was going to be winter food at some point), right next door was a mechanic with surprisingly good equipment fixing up an old 3 wheeled truck/car thing that had a 200cc motorbike engine powering it.. that was awesome, hangovers almost completely sweat out, we hit the road again.
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Captain Pikey's brake oil well mount had cracked so he had to stop and pikey the thing, as he did that I went to fill up, now here's the thing, Tom had been insisting on putting 97 octane fuel in his Yingang which is way more expensive, and well to be honest pointless since it's only a 250cc engine, basically the same fuel with some additives to boost the octane is not a cleaner fuel in my opinion, but each to his own, I stuck to 93 the whole time (and later Tom would change his mind too.. but there's a story to that).
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The locals had lost their pool balls and substituted rocks instead.
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After fixing his bike, we head out, we were getting close to Wuyishan, in fact about 70~80kms out the roads started to really become amazingly beautiful.. clean new, tree-lined and surrounded by pink flowers...
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Nice....
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Relaxing and pretty...
That is until a farmer on a tractor emerged from behind all those nice flowers and trees directly in front of Tom who was really gunning it through the nice scenery, he reacted quick enough to avoid it, but it was the closest call of the trip (there were plenty others), I thought I'd be scraping him off the road, but we made it through that one... always have to be awake when riding in China.
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As we started pulling into Wuyishan, you could start to see the tea plantations (evidently the local specialty), we were almost there... it had been a long day and my arse was killing me (that Qingqi is not comfortable to ride over long distance).
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As you near the city, things start to get very touristy, lots of "scenic spots" and tour busses etc.. thank goodness both Tom and I don't go for that sort of thing.
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After getting sorted at a nice hotel called the "friendship hotel" (this would be our home for the next three days), we set out to get a few things fixed, namely tank bags, riding pants and bags etc that had been torn and needed to be stitched up again.
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After a stupidly expensive meal (don't order local mushrooms without asking the price.. one stupid fried mushroom dish was 68rmb) and drinking the really crap tasting local beer (stay away from Sedrin and Icool...) we called it an early night, we had earned it.. long day over the next day would have us seeing some of the best scenery I've ever seen in China, and some of the best roads on this trip.