Fantastic Fujian Adventure

[Serpentza]

Get ready for a lot of green... since what we were to see on this day was pretty much... well green..

We'd plotted out a small route which was to take us through some crazy looking twisties and mountains, it wasn't a very long trip, but seemed to come to a dead end somewhere in the mountains, so we decided to just head out and see where it led. (P.S I'll share all the maps once I've renamed them nicely on my server at the end of the report).

Getting out of Wuyishan took a while, we had quite a bit of traffic to get through (and fake police cars.. pic coming later), anyway once out of the city things started to really take shape.


Sometimes you just have to stop and take a pic.


We finally got off the bigger roads and started climbing up these awesome little mountain roads through a forest.


We occasionally stopped for a photo or two and let the bikes cool down, Tom was way up ahead enjoying what he likes best, twisties.


Green, green and more green.. P.S Tom had accidently switched on the heated grips on his Yingang.. and was wondering why his hands were getting so hot.


Some of this stuff just makes you say wow.. I personally can't stand Chinese architecture old or new since it's always in a state of disrepair, but this, this is true man made beauty, the shaping of the land over hundreds of years.. hang on this isn't the discovery channel, back to the ride.



bikes..


After hitting a few dead ends, we finally reached the final dead end at the top of the mountain, there was a farm house built into a cliff and we climbed up onto a hill to take some photos.


Sorry.. flickr doesn't like the big panorama shots, will try get a better photo host.


It was really stunning up there, almost no sound at all.


Could have spent a long time up there, but pictures were taken and it was time to get back on the bikes.


Some farmer with a dodgey hat..


So we turned back down and really enjoyed the hell out of the ride back into town, tomorrow would be our longest single ride on this trip... we'd be going all the way into Jaingxi province... we had to get back, drink beer and get ready for the day ahead.



Yes, I do take photos of myself, yes it's lame, that's just the way I am ;)

Coming up next in the Fantastic Fujian adventure... I take a tumble, we drink cheap red wine and turn a biscuit into a cake... stay tuned

[corporal_clegg]

Seems like your having fun. We just got back ourselves from a few days out. Im on a qingqi also. Same iffy starter, especially when it's hot. Iv given it some (heavy duty ->) abuse but it held up great.

Just wondering tho... ive been thinkin about changin the tires myself but i thought those off road tyres were a bit shyte on road, my stock tyres have been pretty good off and on road so far. What do you reckon? Is it worth the change over?

[Serpentza]

Seems like your having fun. We just got back ourselves from a few days out. Im on a qingqi also. Same iffy starter, especially when it's hot. Iv given it some (heavy duty ->) abuse but it held up great.

Just wondering tho... ive been thinkin about changin the tires myself but i thought those off road tyres were a bit shyte on road, my stock tyres have been pretty good off and on road so far. What do you reckon? Is it worth the change over?

The tyres I had on were the "Eternal Rise" brand, they were excellent tyres but yes shyte for the road really, kept me upright (They wore out pretty quick as you'll see later, basically we rode 3060kms and it was about time to put on a new rear tyre after that), make the bike look good and well they weren't actually bad at all around the corners, and wonderful on the dirt. What a lot of people do is put on the Super Motard wheels for bike trips, it makes sense, buy a new set of motard wheels with they tyres on, swap over the wheels for your trip (Motard wheels are way more comfortable and better for corners.. better in the wet too), then you can swap back to your other wheels if you want to do some offroad etc.

[Serpentza]

This is what we were seeing the day before.. our landscape was to change drastically...

[Serpentza]

Today was going to be our biggest outride of the trip, we therefore thought it'd be a good idea to leave at 7am, which we did, we were quite close to the Jaingxi border and so we did our usual Fuel stop and cracked on into Jiangxi.


As soon as we left Fujian the roads started to turn to shyte, more traffic, worse roads... but there were still some good roads out there.


Here's an example of one of the better roads.. but still Jiangxi was quite a dissapointment in comparison to Fujian... at least at first.


The locals in Jaingxi were really friendly, truck drivers actually pulled over to let you past on small roads, they'd smile and wave as you drove by.. all in all very nice.

For some reason our map led us onto a Highway, which is the last place you want to be, you see you sometimes come across toll booths on smaller roads which let bikes through for free, so we just assumed this was one of those and next minute we were going full speed on a scary highway with big trucks screaming past buffeting us with their slipstreams.. it was rather hairy since A) You're not supposed to be there B) It's boring.. just ride straight and throttle pinned C) Dangerous as all hell with cars speeding past at much higher speeds than our bikes could handle.

After getting through the highway (sneaking past the booth on the other side), negotiating some rather dull roads, we came to a small village (that picture above with Tom chatting with the locals), from there we went up a hill and found this:




I'd say the best riding was around this lake, the roads were small but fun with the occasional truck.


Back on the road again, there was some nice scenery, some rivers etc, but still in my opinion nothing like what we'd seen the day before.


Tom up ahead on his Yingang

... something was about to happen...

Coffee break! More when I get back, stay tuned!

[Serpentza]

Coffee break is over, lunch has been had and now it's time to continue...

Alright so now we had hit some very nice little roads (like in the picture above) rather quiet, almost no traffic, just the kind I enjoy riding on the QM, especially since the corners were tight but not too tight, lots of nice straights and bends.

Anyway, before I continue on about the roads let's get back to what happened first, and one of the many excuses I'm going to try and concoct for what happened next.


We stopped in a small village to take a break and also to get a cold drink, usually a coke or in my case the occasional Wang Lao ji.


In this particular village we bought some "coke" but after drinking it realised that it was fake coke with "中国人自己的可乐" (Chinese people's own cola) Proudly written on the label, so I guess there were lots of chemicals and too much caffine in that drink Excuse no.1


My front shock oil seals had ruptured the day before, leaking shock oil all over the place and occasionally onto my front tyre Excuse no.2 also, I hadn't realised it yet, but I had five broken spokes on my rear wheel Excuse no.3


Getting into the zone on those small roads I started to get a little overzealous, taking the corners at full speed, laying the bike down a little too low (especially since it's a crosser), but really having a blast.. that is until I hit an S bend, tight left, tight right and then OMG loose sand and big rocks and a bridge thing... I braked hard and tried to still take the corner and the front wheel slipped out and my knee took the full impact of the fall.. right on a nice big pebble rock thing...


Here you can see some instant coffee that fell out of my backpack, that's where I landed.. lovely soft surface...

Anyway, I could make up all the excuses in the world, but the truth is, I was just overdoing it. Luckily I was wearing riding pants with knee pads built in, my knee still got buggered, swollen and ached for the rest of the trip, but at least I didn't break anything... After bending the front wheel straight and dusting myself off I was back in the saddle, and as Captain. Pikey will attest then went and did the complete opposite of what most people would, I rode even faster..


Basically my knee was hurting so much that by riding aggressively and focusing on the road it took my mind off the pain, so I whizzed along and actually other than the pain really enjoyed the next part of the ride.. (above is a fake cop that made me chuckle.. this province is filled with fake cops and cop cars.. quite cool, I prefer them to the real thing).


We stopped about 100km-+ out from our destination, we were having trouble with our GPS phones charging, basically it was so hot (38deg C) and a combination of the heat/sun and the fact that we were charging our phones from the bikes built in chargers were causing the batteries in our phones to reach critical heat levels and actually do the opposite of charge and discharge instead... we were GPS less, so we pulled into a petrol station, pulled the batteries from the phones, let them cool then started a charge without turning the phones back on, we would from now on be using a ladder system, one person would lead for the morning whilst the other would keep his phone off, then the other person would turn his phone on whilst the first person would turn their phone off and let it charge etc.


We finally got back into town after riding 460kms, it was my birthday so we decided to first go and try fix my broken spokes and then go out and have dinner/drinks, while waiting for the bike mechanic to come back from somewhere we had dinner no.1 and beers no.1, in the end no one could fix the spokes and so we simply went back to the hotel, dumped the bikes and went to the food street right next to our hotel, Tom with a bottle of cheap red wine stuffed into his shorts.


I took plenty of videos on this trip and will have them up on youtube eventually, but basically we drank, stuck a candle onto a buscuit (well tried) and had BBQ until we were pretty much catatonic, head back to the hotel and planned to leave at about 10am, we were to start our journey back.. but not the same way we came, we were going to go down the Eastern side of Fujian.


P.S why the hell would anyone want to eat bee grubs?

Next on the Fantastic Fujian adventure... my QM mysteriously transforms, Tom gets clawed by a dinosaur and we meet an interesting biker gang.

Stay tuned

[Serpentza]

Alright, so drinking cheap red wine and lots of beer usually results in a bad hangover, and this was no exception... however today we had a plan... I was worried that riding with 5 broken spokes wasn't exactly the safest thing to do, so we'd push on in the morning to a city called Nanping, a sort of halfway city between us and our destination of Minqing, it was a rather uneventful morning, some awesome roads leading out of Wuyishan, and all in all a pretty good ride..


Here you can see one of the fake police cars, this one had solar cells to keep the lights flashing, others were parked directly next to power lines with cables going in through the windows powering the lights :)


I imagine these things would be rather convincing at night and may cause tourists to slow down thinking there really are police cars there

Anyway, we made really good time, we didn't stop at all, just rode directly to Nanping... much to the discomfort of our arses.. damn it can get uncomfortable riding long distance after a few days.

Our mission was to 1) Fix my spokes 2) Try to see about removing a nail that was stuck in Tom's rear tyre 3) See if I could fix my iffy starter.

Arriving in town we stopped at quite a few little bike shops, but none of them had any spokes, Tom had a good idea and we searched for "Yamaha" on google maps, as there is usually a big bike area in these sorts of cities, and I did indeed find a "yamaha service center" not to far off, so we set out to find it.

Once arriving we were once again told that there were no spokes but I should ask next door... sure enough the guy in this little shop had some old second hand rusty spokes... but I was pretty much willing to accept anything so asked him to go ahead and also fix my starter issue.



He did a great job on the starter by replacing the wires and corroded connections on the coil... the spokes however... I've never seen a more shyte job in my life, in order to replace the spokes he didn't take off the wheel.. simply used a pair of tongs to force the tyre open, then tried to thread the pokes through by bending them in several places... I couldn't stand watching this massacre so we went off to get lunch.


We had a great lunch in a great little place.. I must add that we'd been sweating pints of sweat the whole time trying to get the bikes sorted in the horrible humid heat, so a lunch break with cold orange juice an aircon and a fan was much needed.


The shop next door had sprayed some water onto the nail sticking out of Tom's rear tyre and air was indeed escaping, so we thought now would be a good time to learn how to repair a tubeless tyre (since Tom had bought a really nice little kit), however these guys didn't exactly do a great job.. in fact they did an appauling job (as you'll see later)...


While all this was going on, some dodgey guy selling snakes, mushrooms, frogs and one of those freaky dinosaur crocodile turtle things came by trying to sell the stuff as food.. he wanted 1600 for that turtle thing.. must be a real specialty, anyway Tom decided to pick it up and got clawed twice by the bugger ;)

Okay.. so back to the spokes... I've never seen a worse job in my life, all the spokes he installed were bent and zig-zagged, the incorrect length, graunched, rusty and well just shyte... the wheel was now wonky... but what the hell, at least there was something holding the wheel together, so we hit the road again on the way to Minqing....


Stopping for fuel just out of Nanping I noticed that the nut on the top of my triple clamp was missing.... this is never a good thing, this bike was starting to show its age, just about everything that can go wrong was starting to do so.. (luckily in China you can basically make a new bike out of parts for almost no cost). We spotted a shop selling 3wheeler cars and bikes and 5rmb later I had a new nut fitted...

When we return, the fun really starts as things go awry in Longyan!

Stay tuned

[Serpentza]

... okay, when last we left off, we'd undergone some suspect repairs, been attacked by a prehistoric beast and well it was hot, our arses were hurting like baby faced prison inmates and we needed to get to our destination..


Whizzing on through to Minqing...


While there was some pretty okay scenery along the way, to be honest we were in such a rush I didn't even have time to whip out the camera one handed to take a good shot.. only one or two flimsy shots.


Warning, objects in the rear-view mirror are way too bloody close.


The city was pretty big compared to what we'd been staying in recently.. even had a KFC and a small local burger knock off thing called "My choice" where you could buy a beef burger for 5RMB (it tasted like it was worth 5RMB)..

anyway my junk food yearning quenched.. we strolled around a bit, had a few beers and hit the sack really early... our next day was going to take us all the way to longyan.. and this is where the fun would start.

But first we had a day of dirt ahead of us (well at least a good couple of hours.. YAY)...


We left early.. very early, I think we got out the city at about 7am and stopped about an hour or so later in a little village to fill up with petrol.. what I didn't realise is that this was one of the last times I'd be filling the old Qingqi up..

ChinaV had told us that the roads leading up to Zhanping (if completed by now) would be great... well they weren't yet completed, but to be honest that's what I was hoping for.. some real dirt to play around in on the Qingqi.

Stay tuned.. while I upload more pics!

[corporal_clegg]

that big cloud up there before coffee looks like a big angry duck face... kindof

[Serpentza]

The roads we were taking were pretty awesome, nice mountainous, very little traffic.. after a while we stopped for a drink and asked the locals how far it was to Zhanping, they told us we should go back the way we came as the road from here to Zhanping was a "红土路" Hong tu lu (red dirt road), well Captain. Pikey has a "Slow and steady on the dirt, lots of engine braking" motto which is perfect and sound avdice for the type of bike he was riding.. for me my dirt motto is "drive like a maniac and enjoy the hell out of it" which is what I did... :)


Basically the road was still under construction, so there were sections where you could ride on one side of the concrete, but most of the time you were riding on the dirt, gravel and mud next to the roads being made.


Some nice scenery along the way :)


These tractor thingies have been jury rigged to pour water all over the engines as a cooling method (much like the trucks do with their brakes).. making lots of mud all over the place.


The Yingang looking pretty


Tom, taking it slow and steady...


The Qingqi, soaking up the view.


I was really having fun on the dirt (but what I didn't realise is that by riding the way I was I was going to break a further 6 rear spokes).


Not sure what's going on here, camoflage? Sun protection? Art?


More scenery..


Tom on his Yingang... (take note of the state of the rear tyre)


We'd hit a fork, we could continue along the dirt construction, or go down some nice finished roads, we decided to stick with our original route and continued down the dirt and construction.. it wouldn't last all that much longer and we'd soon be in Zhanping.