Fantastic Fujian Adventure

[Serpentza]

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).


Maverick AH


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:

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.


Captian Pikey's brand new Yingang 250cc water-cooled dual front disc monster (which sucks offroad as you'll find out later)

[Serpentza]

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.


Beers


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

Early morning in grotty Huizhou


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.


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


We had covered about 400kms and were right on the border of Guangdong and Fujian...


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...


Locals... they just seem to have so much time (and tatoos) on their hands..


we went out to do some minor bike repairs and murder a few dozen beers


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


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.....

[Serpentza]

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)..


Doing self-portrait shots one handed at 90km/h is stupid.. but looks cool


Some sort of typical communist momument thing


Take a look at the expression on the local grandpa's face as he eyes out Tom


Things started to look pretty, there was some awesome scenery and lucky me some dirt road to scream through on my QM :)


Tom was just about to find out how good his new dual disc brakes were...


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.

[bigmonkey]

Nice keep it coming. Fujian must be the only eastern province which isn´t so much industrialized and still good for riding on and offroad

[Gardo]

i could definitely go go a TsingTao right now thanks for the ride report and the dry throat LoL

[Lao Jia Hou]

Great - this is at least a 3-bagger!