Yo, I'm looking for advice and potential partners on a trip from Beijing to Qinghai, Northwest China/Northern Tibet. I'm departing Beijing around July 23. The basic route will follow national highway 109 out of Beijing and through Hebei and Shanxi provinces. From Datong on, I plan on switching to smaller roads with a route that roughly heads through the Ordos region of inner Mongolia and then south into eastern Gansu Province. The idea is to travel between Beijing and Lanzhou, Gansu, in under a week and then head up onto the plateau in a more leisurely fashion.

My current travel companion is a small white Beijing street dog, Foniyo, who will ride in the crate strapped to the back seat of my GS 1150. So I'm looking for a human travel companion, someone who's up for camping and frequent dog walks.

I've lived in northwest China on and off since 2001 (Gansu province motorcycle license, 2002), and speak a bit of Tibetan and Uyghur in addition to Chinese, so I've got lots of ideas for points west of Shaanxi. I'm planning on spending all of August looping around Qinghai.

I just returned from a trip to Wutaishan in Shanxi where I got stuck in a line of 10,000 plus coal trucks on national highway 108. Moved 29 km in 5 hours. Any advice on how to avoid coal trucking in Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Inner Mongolia? Which roads are an absolute gridlock?

Thanks.