As I announced a while back, I’ll be moving from Shanghai to Xi’an at the end of this year. This weekend I went out there for two days to meet up with a future colleague and go do a bit of biking around the countryside. I’d spent a fair bit of time on google earth lately finding roads and tracks through the mountains that you can’t find on the maps, and most of it turned out to be a lot of fun! What a great age we live in that you can explore any place on earth before even getting there. Of course the real thing is still much better.
First impressions on the way into town from the airport were a little disappointing. I was hoping to leave the shanghai pollution behind me. I knew xi’an wasn’t going to be clean, but I was hoping for a bit better than this. Maybe it was a bad day…
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I meet up with my buddy who already had a CJ waiting for us and we head out into the plateau just at the southeast of the city. We start climbing immediately after the ring road and soon leave the dirty air behind us. We drive down the side of the mountains through an abandoned village with old cave dwellings to either side of it. I’d love to know the story of this place.
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Our path is soon interrupted by a river, luckily it hasn’t rained for a couple of weeks and a local tells us it’s ok to cross so we go for it. Good fun!
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This region is called a loess plateau, it’s made of a fine and easily eroded silt that forms all these little canyons. Very pretty scenery, but pretty dirty too. These cave dwellings are everywhere, but we didn’t find any that were still inhabited. I’m told that some still are, so I’ll have to keep looking next time I’m out there.
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This bike has ‘earl’ forks rather than the typical telescopic forks. They were great fun in dirt but handled like a boat on road.
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A nice, traffic-free road that wound through the mountains for 80km on our way east to Weinan.
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Some nice sights to see along this road. Unfortunately there’s also a lot of apiculture along it, meaning you keep getting hit in the face by unhappy bees. Helmet recommended.
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Nearing Weinan we found a road leading up to what looked like an old temple. Turned out it was actually a very fancy cemetery.
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In Weinan.
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About 20km east of Weinan, and after much searching, we arrived at a very special place. This house is the home of an ex Red Army soldier, the ones who were responsible for the destruction of much of china’s heritage during the Cultural Revolution. Later on he became a tour guide and realized what a great loss the revolution was so he started scouring the countryside looking for remains of china’s past, collecting them on his bicycle over a period of ten years. He had this house built in the last decade with old doors, windows, walls, furniture and other gems he gathered. It’s a real treasure. It’s a private house that we were lucky be invited to through a common friend, so I won’t give any more details on the whereabouts, sorry!
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This is also where we met up with some of the shanghai bikers, who had just arrived from shanghai. Those guys are on a 4 month journey back to france on CJs, lucky bastards. You can read about their journey here if you want:
http://www.projectsidebyside.com/
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During the cultural revolution, orders were given to destroy all old vases. Some peasants found that by painting them over with quotes from Chairman Mao’s red book, the soldiers were reluctant to smash them!
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That night we stayed in the neighbors’ house, which was a really nice experience. The people out there are so generous and friendly it’s humbling.
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The boys fixing their bikes. Not the first night spent doing that and certainly not the last… Best of luck to them!
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