National Day Ride 2010 (Anhui + SW Zhejiang)

[MotoKai]

After bad weather reports over Mid-Autumn Festival sent me to Shaoxing rather than the planned Anhui ride http://www.mychinamoto.com/forums/sh...hlight=motokai, I finally got out west of Shanghai over National Day with 5 days of flawless riding weather.



My route took me west of Shanghai on the G318 thru Zhejiang and into Anhui. There was about 200km of decent tarmac passing Huzhou and onto Guangde - well not quite onto Guangde. About 20km east of there I found the road disappearing from under my front tire. It was packed, dry, hard road with lots of potholes. With mostly highway mileage logged onto the JH600 in Shanghai and Zhejiang this was her first test of crap roads, and I thought it would be fun as well. And for how long could it last? 10km perhaps?

This was my "hard" lesson in how Chinese repair a road. They don't do it in small sections, but instead take a mad length of anywhere from 50km to 200km and tear the the whole thing apart. In this case it was 100km of dirt, mammoth holes, dust and yes...mud and more mud.

While riding thru this (and deluding myself that the bad roads were going to end just around the next bend) I intellectualized the need for some notification system on how to avoid vanishing roads when trip planning - because Google Maps doesn't yet offer this. Thanks to ChinaV, there's now a thread discussing this topic: http://www.mychinamoto.com/forums/sh...ghlight=chinav

I pushed on closing off Day-1 in Xuancheng:
Distance: 326km
Riding Duration: 6hrs
Avg Speed: 54.4kph

Motokai's First China Mudbath