I want to bore you with yet another report from the area North of Beijing

GE images have been updated to higher resolution early 2008 for Beijing and surrounding areas - maybe because of the Olympic Games.

During one of my daily GE "browsing the neighborhood sessions" I found the following, which for my taste looked like a very promising dirt road pass.
As you can see there are tracks (red lines) recorded by me on the left and right side of the picture.


How I find out where good stuff is - click to enlarge


I marked the two ends of the pass as place mark in GE and transferred them to my GPS, to be sure to find the entrance. Then I went for

I decided to go from East and thanks to the GPS point, I found the entrance. If you would ride there without this info or without knowing that there is a road somewhere, you'd never find the concealed entrance.

Some locals were standing there, obviously waiting for the bus, with eyes wide open when the saw the foreigner unerringly turning in the small opening between the 2 meter tall corn plants

Right after I turned into this road, it started to climb. A very narrow dirt road, just to my taste lay ahead. There was little traffic - only some small trucks carrying bricks crawling down.


Brick - truck


From where I came





brick - truck from high above


I stopped several times to take some pictures and eventually reached the summit, where I had a longer break. Some more brick trucks came up the mountain and stopped atop. The drivers took exactly three bricks off every truck and put them somewhere between the bushes. Some of the guys came to see me and the bike and when I asked them they said that three missing bricks wouldn't be recognized by the recipients of the goods


The brick - smuggler gang


The path across the pass - click to enlarge


I went down the other side and back home without taking more pics, but passing several Olympic checkpoints.

Andy