Hohhot - Harbin

[futianshenzhen]

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The very nice 2 cylinder suzuki 250. The owner's mates were teasing him that my bike was able to out perform it even though it's a lot cheaper! That have something to do with the pigheadedness of a certain yingang rider though

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KTM adventure


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DR200 djebel


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Stop and chat

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Xunke at night

[milton]

As any of my friends will tell you I'm the classiest and most sophisticated English gentleman you’re ever likely to meet. Today's lunch - pour monsieur - sardines au sauce tomat, servez vous avec les deux twigs

C'est dégoûtant !!

Seriously, would you do Dongbei 东北 again if you got the chance to revisit after this trip? How would you rate it against all the other provinces you have travelled so far?

It seems that you are awfully close in completing your bucket list for China.

Cheers!

[futianshenzhen]

Hi Milton,

No I probably wouldn't revisit Dongbei, Inner Mongolia or even Xinjiang. There's just too many straight roads and while the scenery can be amazing it doesn't quite make up for the dull riding, I went 2 days in Xinjiang without turning a corner and this trip wasn't much better! The grasslands also got old pretty quickly for me but as I mentioned I think i'm getting a little spoilt now! After my 'bucket list' is completed i'm planning on doing much more shipping for bike trips to reach the parts I really want to get to, which would basically be anywhere close to the Tibetan plateau and Yunnan. Although i'd love to do the southern silk road at some point as well.

The next ride for me is going to be Harbin - Shanghai next month so hopefully see you then.

[futianshenzhen]

1

Left at 6.30 there were some nice twisties but sod’s law it rained on and off all day. I found some clear spots to enjoy the first non straight roads between the heavy showers but was pretty pissed off with my bad luck.

Had another great lunch of tinned food. Thank you mother Russia!!


Followed the Heilongjiang through Jiayin, nice road. Then took the ferry across river to Tongjiang which was a surprise, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn down this muddy track but google was spot on much to the amazement of the locals. The whole ferry experience wasted an hour in total with the captain getting stuck briefly on a sandbar. I fielded the usual 20 questions on the boat, most of the guys showing genuine interest in a nice way but there’s always one tool trying to be the big man and throwing his weight around. I just clam up in that situation and suddenly lose the ability to understand or speak Chinese, he started going on about Taiwan after I told him my phone was from Taiwan not America so I was very glad when the boat docked and I was first off that ferry.
Further down the road my chain snapped again, at the same mileage as the last time in Xinjiang. This time however I was carrying a spare split link so I was on my way in no time. I arrived in Fuyuan at 7 pm, 800 kms, 4800 total.

There are many Russians in Fuyuan and everyone was showing off their best Russian to me which was quite amusing. The restaurant I went to was excellent but they almost refused to believe I couldn’t speak Russian. After we eventually established that I was English I was given an extra special welcome and the waitress came and sat with me for most of the meal, she didn’t like Russians apparently, they are too ‘shui bian’! She had other gems too, England and France are clean countries and Americans are warmongers!


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This lunch included both major food groups - the meat group and the chocolate group

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The S312 was a nice road but unfortunately it rained most of the day

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The Tongjiang ferry

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The Heilongjiang and Russia in the distance


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You need to click on this a couple of times to view it

[futianshenzhen]

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I pulled of the 312 here for lunch


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It really was a nice road I just wish it had been drier


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Then my chain snapped on the far side of Tongjiang


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Fuyuan


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Fuyuan

[futianshenzhen]

2

Left at 6.45 and my chain snapped again after 150 kms near Tongjiang. I flagged down a pick up and asked to put the bike in the back to take it into town but it would’ve been almost impossible to lift it up that high, so the driver took me the 8 kms to a small village where I bought a lump hammer, 2 punches and some nuts before getting a taxi back to the bike. The driver kindly stayed to help and two guys on a bike also pulled over. I’m getting very good at fixing chains now so the job didn’t take long at all but the sidestand broke while I was kicking the rear wheel to its most forward position. Anyway the bike was rolling now so I rode to the village and had it welded up, the welder was very interested in how many beers I was capable of drinking and even invited me to stay and go fishing!

The next 50 kms were the same boring as hell roads I’d done the previous day but after Tongjiang I got on a dirt road (running parallel to the gaosu) and to make matters worse it started raining and didn’t stop for the rest of the day. The road had those deep, steep sided potholes that really bang the bike around, ba bam, ba bam etc but after 50 kms of getting the shite beat out of me I found a way to sneak on the gaosu, some sweetheart had cut the fence and filled in the drainage ditch, if he’d been there I’d have kissed him! I was running low on fuel and the road next to the gaosu looked like it was paved so I came off and filled up but as the town ended the road did to and I was back on the dirt. It got bad, very very bad. The road was a deserted stretch through forests and was now flooded due to the rain. There were muddy lakes across the road and some of them were very deep, water was being thrown up right over my head and the bike got stuck a couple of times and I couldn’t pull her out backwards because of the water and mud. Thankfully she always started straight up and we were able to keep going forwards although she was more of a submarine at that point! During all of this I was repeating a chain mantra to myself, ‘please don’t snap, please don’t snap’. If it had have broken again there was no way of fixing it as the wheel was already at the most forward position and with almost no traffic on the road I’d have been up shit creek. I could see on the map that up ahead the dirt track crossed the gaosu and I made the decision that I was getting the bike down onto the road even if it meant throwing it off a cliff! When I reached the bridge there was a footpath/cowpath that went down the siding, it was pretty vertical but it looked doable, the drainage ditch running beside the road actually looked like being the most challenging part. For me there wasn’t really a choice to be made, the dirt road was incredibly dangerous and I was risking a night sleeping rough in the woods if anything went wrong. By now it was dusk and tackling those lakes in the dark would’ve a big ask so I put the bike in first, turned off the engine and used the clutch as a brake. I made it down the path ok but bottomed out on the drainage on my first 2 attempts. In the end I rode along the bottom and built up enough speed so momentum took me over the lip. In the process I broke the nub off the sidestand that the spring attaches to but I just cable tied it up and was now good to go on the gaosu.

It was now pretty much dark and I was very disappointed to see there were still 180 kms to go to Harbin, could I make it? I really wanted to keep going as the chain was being lubricated by all the water but if it sat overnight and dried out then I didn’t trust it to make it. I decided to push on and what followed was probably the scariest gaosu ride of my life. I reduced my cruising speed to 100 from 120 and went for it, the rain and the spray from trucks as I overtook reduced visibility considerably but the real bugger was the glare from oncoming traffic which pretty much blinded me to anything further than 10 metres in front of me. I’m not embarrassed to say that I was crying for my Mummy and when I finally made it to Harbin at 9.45 having rode 935 kms I was as close to becoming religious as I ever will be. The only positive thing was that my arse was completely numb due to the potholes which meant riding was pretty comfortable for the first time in days.

The total trip ended up being 5635.


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Second chain snapping - more serious this time because no spare link


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My helpers - the taxi driver and 2 passing motorcyclists

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Welding up the sidestand and nearly going fishing

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This was outside a police station as a warning

[futianshenzhen]

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Memorial on the way to Harbin



3

I woke early ish to enjoy the hotel breakfast then rode in the pissing rain to the yingang shop. It was on the 2nd floor of an industrial estate and the staff looked at me like I was crazy. Finally someone arrived who knew who I was and I placed a large order for parts and left the bike with them. I’ll be up next month to hopefully pick up a reconditioned bike!

With the hard work now all behind me I set about my other hobby, binge drinking. I started off with 5 beers in restaurant near the industrial estate all for 15 quai! Then got a taxi to Stalin park, it was still absolutely slashing it down so I found another restaurant and had 4 more beers and tried and failed to eat some rubbery shellfish. It was now approaching 5.30 when they start serving dinner at my favourite establishment - golden Hans. I hopped in a taxi and had 3 more excellent beers over dinner before doing some pikey drinking near the hotel. That’s when the memory stops and I can’t remember getting back to the hotel, the next the I do remember is my phone ringing at about 12.30 am. It’s my mate from Shenzhen who only speaks 3 words of English, ‘drink, cheers, happy’. I explained that I was in Harbin and had been drinking, cheersing and happying all day! I was now wide awake and decided to head back out into the oriental Paris of the north, I hopped in a cab and told him I wanted to go to an outside drinking area and he duly obliged. I was still 3 sheets to the wind and settled down at a restaurant with a large variety of animals outside in cages. Now I’ve spent the best part of a decade here and am no stranger to this arrangement, nor do I usually give a shit, but for some reason I ended up befriending a rabbit and saving him from his stir-fried fate. Now I’m in a strange city with a little white rabbit, what a twat I am. In the end I gave him to the hotel receptionist so all was well, I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned from all this but I’m not sure what yet!

Here’s the list of yingang parts I ordered:


Sidestand
Fr r tyres
Sprocket cover
Chain guard
Chain guide
Chain
Split links
Mileage knob
Spark plug
Gear selector
Exhaust bracket
Rear shock adjustment
Steering bearings
Headlight



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Yingang shop where I left my bike


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Harbin has lots of these outside bbq and beer places


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The river by Stalin park


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This was pretty much all I saw of Stalin park, it was too wet and beer was calling

[futianshenzhen]

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Restaurant #1


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Restaurant #2


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Gold Hans I love you, when will you open in Shenzhen?


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My BFF


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If he'd eaten my oysters i'd have stir-fried the little bastard

[futianshenzhen]

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The morning after the night before, my first time waking up with a rodent!


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I took my new BFF for a slap up hotel breakfast


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Then gave him to a delighted receptionist


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I had another day In Harbin and saw this from a taxi window


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And then having sampled enough culture I reverted to type

[Barry]

You missed this spot, if I remember correctly it was somewhere west off the main road (west of Hulun hu) leading to Manzhouli.

https://fxmkeg.dm1.livefilestore.com...004.JPG?psid=1


Too bad you didn't take the detour to Bei'er hu, which is the lake in the north east corner for Mongolia. You can visit it from the north side, the border to Mongolia is about 3 km into the water.

https://fxmkeg.dm1.livefilestore.com...208.JPG?psid=1

Couldn't get the images displayed as I hoped to, so changed them into links!