Shanghai, Anhui, Jiangxi and Zhejang, or how I spent 1300km on my new X5

[Snev313]

Hi all,

Sorry it took me a while, but as I promised … a small travel report from my October holiday which took me through (I believe

Shangai
Anhui
Jiangxi
Zhejang

First of all, the link to the Google Maps where you can see my trip.

https://www.google.de/maps?saddr=%E5...,8,11&t=m&z=12

Day (1)
I have to say at this moment of time my bike (Shineray X5) was 102km old and I haven’t been riding a proper motorbike for the last 3 years… So I was quite exited getting back on the bike… also curios what is going to happen the next ~1300km to the bike and me. But to this later The first day I set of towards Moganshan an area I knew from the year before as I explored it with the bicycle.

I like Moganshan, it’s a peaceful area.

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Small roads and nearly no traffic… but also great scenery….

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I stopped in a small town called Anji behind Moganshan where I stayed for the night… so far so good… bike behaved well, only about 60km in 3rd gear it started to shake a bit on the front wheel… which I checked earlier the day and found out that the tire and the rim are not 100% made for each other… maybe this caused it…


Day (2)

The next day I set of gen Huangshan following my aim for this trip…. to find all the little roads less traveled by others. The funny thing is, I didn’t imagine how little this could be ;)

I stopped in a small village to have lunch where I was immediately the attraction of the day and people asked me the usual questions… where are you from, how much is the bike, where do you go, etc.

After I asked them if I can continue this road to the next city I wanted to drive to they told me, it may be better to turn back and go via the big road… they told me it could be a small road and more or less a gravel road…. Well I thought… A) Chinese may have a different definition of small compared to me and B) perfect first test for my X5 if it should be really small…. So I convinced them that I want to drive on the small road, even gravel roads and they showed me the way to continue… so I came to this part….

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Well I though… that’s fine… I can handle that… After a while the gravel road turned into a trail leading up the mountain, mmmh… ok I can handle this…

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…till I got here….

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Dead end… for me and all the lumberjacks… ok, lesson 1 learned….! Listen to the locals… i.e. back to the main road ;)

This forth and back took me a while so I didn’t make quite as much progress as I hoped, also keeping in mind that the bike now was ~500km old and I still needed to control my right arm to stay under 4000rpm.

... please see next post for day 3-5 !!!

[zhu]

snev you need to host the pics on a site like flickr or photobucket and link to here. Thanks for posting and i'm sure many are interested what was the problem with the bike. Anyway seems like you had a nice ride

[bikerdoc]

Great RR, have ridden pretty much all the areas you've reported on, and then some. Yes, you have found the limitations with MCM, only 5 photos per post. My suggestion, is split your original RR into multiple parts, spanning several posts with the relevant photos added, that way everything ties together. What I do for posts where I know "off the bat" that I want or intend to add more than 5 photos, is, make the first post etc. Then once the first post is "posted/published" on MCM, I then add more posts one after the other with the words "place holder" or similar so that there's continuity to the original thread. One has to wait 60 seconds between posts though... Just one idea for you to consider. You then can always go back and edit the posts removing the "place holder" text with whatever you intend, and any further photos etc.

[Snev313]

Day (3)
As I didn’t make so much progress the day before I actually was forced to stay in the middle of the mountains between Moganshan and Huangshan (roughly around mark “D” on Google Maps).

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But I was lucky… I bumped into a really nice family and we spent the evening together talking planning the rout for the next day as it turned out that I ran into a BMW GS owner, just being here with his family now.

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This morning turned to be out to be discovering the dream of every motorcyclist…. Turns en mass ….!

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The rest of the day went by fast and pretty unspectacular… but still great scenery seeing all the different harvesting processes going along on the roadside…

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…ending up in a small town close to Huangshan…. And I found out my tire and the rim getting better friends, i.e. the shaking got less, but was still there…

.... see more from day 4 and 5 on the next posts !!!

[Snev313]

Day (4)
On this day I planned to drive to the One Thousand Island Lake, which again was very nice scenery… just completing my third oil change and getting over the 1000km made me very happy not being forced any more to control the desire to go faster or with higher rpm… though I still tried to be around 4000-6000 and not over….

But before I got to the lake I followed the river coming from Huangsan and found something very interesting on the way… beekeepers…

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Tasting the honey I decided to buy 1L … The rest of the way to the lake was quite nice with the road close to the river turning left, right and empty enough to relax or go a bit faster as I wanted…

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Arriving the lake showed me quite significantly that I was back to civilization, i.e. packed streets, traffic jam, etc. Originally I wanted to stay there and relax on the lake the rest of the day but seeing the millions in front of me I decided to get out of there as fast as possible heading towards Hangzhou…

Well the journey didn’t take long… on a nice curvy stretch through the mountains my bike decided to have black out while driving… great ;)

Nobody here, nor reception on the phone… ok only option I had was to walk back to the small restaurant I saw 5 minutes ago and ask for help… luckily there was a very nice family helping me to translate and we even found the mobile number of mechanic (written on the bus station ;)

20 Minutes later he was there, checking the bike… ok 1st check the fuse, result = burned… so he replaced it and turned the ACC on the bike… here we go… I looked like an idiot…

Ok, trying to start the bike … no reaction… checking the electric start motor… no spark… mmmh. Ok lets try to push run and start while running in 3rd gear… we tried this very hard… honestly… after 30 min we gave up… the bike just didn’t want to start...

So he told me that he can’t fix this here and we need to go into a proper garage… ok… her you’ll see the outcome of the conversation…

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So I made it finally back to the lake. Just not in the way I thought of....

...see more from day 5 in the next post ...!!!

[Snev313]

Day (5)

To make the following hours of stripping down my bike a bit shorter and less oily and dirty …

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Yes, this is the starter… So we stripped down the starter and took that stuff out which stopped it from spinning.... (the black stuff around the starter...)

Please don’t ask me what the black solid stuff is what was coming out there… it felt like lava stone/rock. We still have no idea what it was...

Anyway… the short story was that the bike still didn’t start and I had to push run to start in 3rd gear… running the engine under 3500rpm killed it… so I had to deal with this for the last 300km back to Shanghai which I did as I was not willing to pay 2000 RMB for the transporter to SH…

Luckily I made it after several push runs and a lot of water (thank you Fiow and Haikui) back to Shanghai… at least I know now that I need to seal my fuel tank from the top as it rained so much that I got water into the tank while driving…

Happy holiday … no, honestly 3 weeks after that I still say I had a really good time…

(special thx to zhu and bikerdoc with the help about my pics )

[bikerdoc]

Great, that you found accommodating people willing to give you a hand. So the black stuff you never worked out what it was from the starter? May have the material been something that got into the starter from elsewhere? Besides that, what was the final determination as to what was causing the bike not to start (was it the starter in the end?) and why the bike engine would cut out above 3500 RPM?

[Jonny_cc]

Thanks a Lot for that great report!

[ShuBen]

Great Report.
I also want to now what was the final root cause for the trouble you faced.

However the great ride/pics compensate some sh..t

[felix]

Well done and nice ride!

So did that black shit get in there whilst riding, or was it 'original from the factory'? If it's the former, i'm guessing it could be rocky bits of sticky tarmac. Did you go through road works where they were laying down fresh tarmac? I find that shit stuck on my bikes sometimes.


Funnily, my first trip around anji ended up with my bike on a truck too. Exploded front hub...