This is the first time Shenzhen's unofficial motorcycle club went for a proper bike trip.


CIMG4869 by SerpentZA, on Flickr


The plan: Leave Shenzhen early morning on the 1st of May, take the most scenic and twisty route possible to a town located on the border of Hunan, set up base camp (hopefully meet up with ChinaV and Rich) and from there we would spend a few days riding through the mountains enjoying the scenery before heading back to Shenzhen (okay so it wasn't really that well planned, but that was the gist of it).

First we needed a route, and who better to ask than ChinaV, the man with all the answers :)

Here's the route we got:


ggdamap by SerpentZA, on Flickr

We bodged together a gps mount and a few usb chargers with some late night drunken soldering and last minute fitment, but it did the job, we all met the day before up at our mountain lockup and set about checking the bikes and readying them for the trip.


CIMG4735 by SerpentZA, on Flickr


a bike trip in China (or anywhere for that matter) is all about preparation, you need plenty of spares and plenty of tools.

You have to expect that things will go wrong, so you must prepare for any possible eventuality.

It's much easier when travelling in a group as you can spread the load between however many bikes there are (tools and spares are heavy and take up a lot of space). Here are the bikes:


CIMG4745 by SerpentZA, on Flickr

From left to right:
My QM200GY (seen in the MCM logo) which has been ridden through China umpteen times, still going strong after a little TLC was ready to hit the road again, Martin's beast, the 250cc made to order over the internet no name brand bike which was quite the monster (size wise), Tom's Qingi Zhongshen Hybrid 125cc with a 250cc engine welded into the frame using dodgey engine mounts (one of which almost fell off), surprisingly the quickest of the three.

We left Sunday morning at 6:30am (mainly to avoid any run ins with traffic police, the streets are swarming with them due to the Universiade). Once outside Shenzhen (we went out via yantian past dameisha) we stopped for breakfast.



A lot of Southern China is unfortunately an urban wasteland, dull, dusty, busy, dirty and dangerous with people, trucks, cars and bikes everywhere. We would have to endure these conditions for a few hours before we broke free into the countryside.


CIMG4740 by SerpentZA, on Flickr

All of a sudden it was like we'd stepped into motorcycle paradise, long twisty treelined roads with almost no traffic, beautiful green rice paddies and mountains surrounding us as we opened up our engines, Tom in the lead with his GPS and street tyres (helps on the twisties), Me on the QM200 in the middle (carrying a passenger and lots of luggage), growing ever more confident and familiar with the bike (this is the first time I've ridden it any distance other than to the local bike shop and back), and Martin wrestling with the beast bringing up the rear (he's on tiptoes riding that thing, but somehow manages to control and tame it).


CIMG4788 by SerpentZA, on Flickr

Here's a picture we took on the side of a mountain around about the halfway mark.

Left to right: Tom, Winston, Martin

Coming soon: Paradise didn't last long, the weather and roads didn't quite play nice...