ChinaV,

Thanks for the invite man. We're still trying to nail down our dates. Right now I'm trying to convince a couple of friends (married couple) to come over with us when we go this time. We're also trying to figure out what we need to do about my wife's Green Card. Her original 2 year card expires in May of next year and we have to get the renewal completed before we leave for China. Of course, the process is clearly spelled out step-by-step by USCIS. (That's sarcasm by the way).

I took a quick look at your trip post. Without consulting my GPS log I can only say for certain that we had WuZhou in common. However, the thing that turned our car trip into an "interesting" one was that a Typhoon blew through the area about 4 days before we headed up toward YangShuo and when we got to WuZhou the kindly policemen told us it was closed and pointed his finger in another direction.

From that point we had to improvise our route. At the time all I had was Garmin's World Map with a ton of waypoints that I created for this trip. As you might know, World Map sucks for two major reasons: Lack of detail and no "stay on road" function for the car icon. All I could do was drive in the general direction NW and use my waypoints as reference. Of course, the towns and cities shown on World Map were not on either of the two paper maps that I had, and vice-versa!

I went through a few landslide areas where the car could barely fit through, a ton of unmarked construction zones, bomb crater-like sections, you name it. Of course, it got dark and rained heavily on-and-off and the wonderful penchant of Chinese drivers to use every light they have available to blind the on-coming traffic only added to the fun.

We finally arrived in YangShuo at about 2am and spent another hour trying to find our reserved hotel. I sure slept good that night.

I was hoping that if we come out in late Spring that we could make a road trip down to HaiNan. I spent a week there in 2006 and loved it, but didn't have a chance to really explore the interior of the island. I think it would make a great few days of riding if I can dig up a bike there.

If we come out later, I don't want to go south (Love that heat and humidity). I still haven't seen the Great Wall, so we might base out of BeiJing (Have a friend with an apartment near Tain'an Men) and explore more up there.

What are you doing in China?

Cheers,

Dan K.