October Holidays: Suzhou - Fuzhou - Suzhou

**felix** · 10-07-2010, 06:10 AM

Quick update to say we both got back safe with two working bikes and not covered in puke. I have a pile of work to get through so will post a report in the next few days, or as soon as i can get the pics off my buddy Daofei.

**euphonius** · 10-07-2010, 04:31 PM

Felix, when you see Daofei, please ask him about his riding suit. I like it and hope he didn't make that himself too. Is it available "off the shelf"?

Looking forward to your pukeless RR, and meeting you in about 3 weeks.

Here's to puke-free riding!

cheers!

**ChinaV** · 10-07-2010, 11:10 PM

Originally Posted by euphonius

Felix, when you see Daofei, please ask him about his riding suit. I like it and hope he didn't make that himself too. Is it available "off the shelf"?

The suit is the Akito Desert and you can find it in a few Taobao shops for 1200-1500 Yuan.

The wife and I have them.

It's a low grade riding suit, as the material is polyester, not cordura. It comes with two liners, one for rain and one for cold. The knox armor is very good. My main beef with the suit is the zippers and snaps are very low quality and eventually the vents end up permanently open. It has no water resistance at all, even after I treated it, so you have to use the rain liner, even in a brief shower.

On the plus side, it's comfortable, and it saved my bacon when I crashed in Yunnan. On the negative, the stitching came apart, so I consider it a disposable one crash suit.

Cheers!
ChinaV

**felix** · 10-19-2010, 05:20 AM

Sorry to all for taking so long with this. Pictures and other excuses… let’s go!

You've seen the route in post 1, we managed to stick to it fairly closely and kept it all within the planned 6 days. Daofei and i met up at 8am on the outskirts of Suzhou, ready and itching to go.

Daofei’s beast.

I arrived slightly late due to “previous evening hotpot” emergency.

Daofei had brought with him two walkie talkies with headsets which would enable us to communicate during the trip. 10 minutes of fiddling later we couldn't get them to work, so we packed them away and said we'd figure it out later. We never did, as one turned out to be broken. We set off south to clear the necessary 150km of same-grey-everywhere before reaching the first mountains. The first bit of nice stuff on our route was the S205 from Anji to Linan, a twisty mountain road which we both know very well. Three corners in and i come face to face with a car coming my way, on my side of the road, and surprise it's a BMW! I brake too hard, the back slides out a bit, i aim for the ditch and just about make it as he flies by beeping and flashing his lights, with just enough clearance between us for a prayer and two driving lessons. The first of many...

Few pics of this day, a lot of it was known territory so we didn’t stop much.

A quick stop for a blown fuse and back on our way!

The rest of the day went smoothly, the great thing about moving south from Jiangsu into Zhejiang is that the landscape gets nicer, the air gets cleaner, the traffic gets thinner and the roads get better! Zhejiang is also full of dams everywhere and driving through mountains, you inevitably pass by all these beautiful alpine lakes with (relatively) clear blue water. We rode a satisfying 420km to the small town of Lanxi and found a small inn (30RMB for two) to get some good sleep.

Day 2, we wake up at 6 to leave at 7. We immediately hit constructions and spend the first hour working our way through 50km of roughness, but are both happy as larry nonetheless.

Then the road got a bit better…

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… and then we arrived in heaven.

I’m talking about the S227 from Suichang to Longquan. I’ll just go ahead and claim it: this may well be THE best road in China for sheer riding pleasure. It’s a full 100km of immaculately smooth, super-grippy black tarmac, relentlessly winding its way through the mountains, hairpin after corner after hairpin. And I mean relentless; it really doesn’t stop for 100km. This is Zhejiang so needless to say all the traffic has been rerouted somewhere else, we passed about 4 cars. I cannot praise this road enough, it was the most thrilling 100km of our whole trip.

Stopping for a second to take it all in. The scenery is lost on us while we are driving.

It wasn’t only a thrilling road, it was flanked full of pretty villages too.

But mostly we were here for this!

The rest of the day was more lovely mountains as we made our way into Fujian, ecstatic at the thought that ChinaV would we waiting for us in Jian’ou, having driven north from Dongguan. He wasn’t, but we only waited 10 minutes and forgave him quickly. That night we festooned with (in order of increasing goodness) fried stuff, beer stuff and conversation stuff. Good to see you MasterV, my happiness was well worth the 4 days of horror you went through! Parallel (and much more interesting) report from ChinaV can be found here.

A couple of pics from the afternoon.

Waiting for ChinaV

**felix** · 10-19-2010, 05:23 AM

Day 3, rendezvous downstairs at 6.30, but I wake up at 7. Daofei has not yet learned that a kick in the head is the very minimum to wake me up. We ride the first couple of hundred km all together before parting ways.

The state of the road finally gives me a chance to pass ChinaV, just on time to catch him doing his middle finger exercises.

And terrorising some chickens.

The road gets good again and we can open the throttle!

ChinaV showing us who’s boss

The G312 starts off lovely and follows the river before the valley opens up and gets greyer nearing Fuzhou.

ChinaV speeds ahead on his big V twin to our parting point, some km further on I look at my phone and find out we passed him already and won’t get to say goodbye! A deep sadness fills my heart, but seconds later it is forgotten and we press on towards Fuzhou. We avoid the big city, stopping only at a supermarket for Daofei to buy a toy from Fujian to bring home for his kid. It is only lunchtime, which means we made it to our half way point in two and a half days. This is great news, we have three and a half days left to get home and will have time to take some detours I had planned.

Another session of twisty concrete starts off our afternoon and we reach the Pacific ocean soon enough. It’s quite a change of scenery, so we stop in a little fishing village for some flied lice.

I decide to walk out behind a peer and take a well earned piss in the ocean, but as soon as I get all the bits out of my gear a wall of water comes crashing all over me and my man bits get wet, as do my shoes and everything else. Luckily it started raining shortly after. We finish the day in the rain, slightly anxious as night has fallen and we still can’t find a place to stay. We eventually do though, in the little town of Luoyuan near Ningde, and are happy get some dry clothes on. Later ChinaV calls me and puts things in perspective with his epic tale of puke covered, mud wrestling, upside-down hanging odysseys. No better way to cheer me up!

Day 4, the sun is back, the bikes are running well and we start off the day with an unexpectedly adorable little road, only 20km long, but like a condensed version of our trip so far. It had alternating sections of concrete, tarmac and cobble stones; and swept through diverse scenery from big boulders, fields and terraces to steep valleys.

Wrong finger but right attitude!

The cutest dam in the world

The cutest road in the world

The cutest valley in the world

And a nice water hole too

Unfortunately that was the last picture I took. My camera decided to take an early retirement so for the rest of the trip we would rely on Daofei’s SLR, which he kept packed in his luggage and wasn’t extracted so often.

Continuing north, along more concrete paved mountains, we reach a Y in my route and stop for lunch to discuss which road to take. Googlemaps says the small roads don’t connect but the locals beg to differ, though they cannot understand why we would want to go that. We do anyway and are rewarded with 150km of tiny roads, passing through little villages where the people seem unaffected by the civilisation of the east coast and go about their lives drying wheat on the road, making piles of sticks and beating their dogs. We know exactly when we cross the border from Fujian back into Zhejiang as the road turns to tarmac and the potholes are gone! That evening we make it to Lishui, find another little inn for 50RMB, have a few beers and call it a night.

**felix** · 10-19-2010, 05:27 AM

Day 5. Lishui to Suzhou would be doable in a day, but we have two days left and intend to use every minute. We head out east towards a 200km detour that I really had been hoping we’d have time for. On google earth it looks like this:

And in real life it was even better, this proved to be another of the memorable roads from this trip. I mentioned earlier how these unused X roads hide little villages where the inhabitants seem unaffected by civilization, this was another dose of that but somehow even quainter. The mountain passes turned into valleys, and we then a followed a river from its birth downwards as it was widened by tributaries. This is a rare kind of place in the east of China; an area of scenic beauty that is mostly untouched by civilisation and still completely unspoiled by tourism. The traffic is only the few locals and the wildlife is more than cockroaches and mosquitoes. When we turn off our engines for a cigarette break, all we hear is a cricket far away…

An unnecessary but very fun river crossing. We first scout it,

Then I run it,

And then Daofei goes for it.

By lunchtime we make it to Yongkang , time to rethink the route again. We have a day and a half left and arriving home early tomorrow is simply out of the question, so we decide to end the trip nicely and head off west to the 1000 islands lake. The rest of the day is spent covering 200km of G roads to get there. We stop only briefly to shed some weight.

That night we meet up in qiandaohu with some other Suzhou bikers who are on their way back from yellow mountain. More stories are swapped, more beer is had, but Daofei and I head to bed early as we are planning a longer route home tomorrow.

Day 6, the route home from Qianadaohu is the same that did earlier this year and raved about in this report. It’s more little X roads that take us briefly to Anhui province, then back into Zhejiang and stays mountainous for 300km before hitting the 150km of G roads to get back to Suzhou. It was another good day of riding, with lots of corners and few pictures taken.

Two fingers is offensive where I come from, so we’ll count that one

20km from Suzhou, one last heart-stopper to finish the trip off properly as a van swerves left just as I am overtaking. Another classic moment that makes you value each second you are able to stay alive in this country. After a tear-jerking goodbye we head our own ways home, exhausted and deeply satisfied. It’s been a good one; 6 days, 4 provinces, 2550km, 8million corners and 2 happy riders.

Here's the route on googleditu (satellite imagery is aligned)

Thanks for reading!
Felix

**ChinaV** · 10-19-2010, 06:35 AM

Nice report Mr. Felix, quite enjoyed that. Puke stories and toilet picks… no one can ever say we lack class here at MCM. I really like the humor and your writing style, next time we ride together, you get to do the report

.

I'm really blown away with the quality of the road surface in Zhejiang. It's so rare to find black pavement down here in Guangdong, and it seems you have an abundance of it in that area

. It also looks like north Fujian was in much better shape than south Fujian. Oh well, I'm sure another year of mega-construction will fix that.

Now, if I could just figure out a good way to get to Zhejiang without getting puked on in Fujian, I would love to give those twisty's on S227 from Suichang to Longquana a go

.

Cheers!
ChinaV

**felix** · 10-20-2010, 01:42 PM

Why thank you mister V, i enjoy a good compliment as much as i do a good crap.

I was not joking when i said that Zhejiang roads are the dog's appendage. They really really are. Now what you need is a nice wormhole from Dongguan straight to Wenzhou, quick and easy. Of course if such a thing existed it would no doubt only be open to cars...

**jape** · 10-21-2010, 07:29 PM

Another great report Felix, and compliments to Daofei for the pics. Of course that means we got to see a lot of Felix but we can't have everything. Nice villages and scenery in that part of the country. I shall certainly head in that direction when I get over there to start off with some good roads to setup and test me and the bike.

**Fred** · 10-22-2010, 01:39 AM

Excellent report, thanks a lot Felix ! Exactly what I'm looking for and what we discussed on the forum about ride maps sharing.

I have a bike trip in mind for a long time (Shanghai-Moganshan-Anji-Lin'An-Tonglu) and this clearly helps ! I may try to go as far as Fuzhou too seeing how beautiful the roads and lanscapes are.
Thanks again for sharing !