Alright, so drinking cheap red wine and lots of beer usually results in a bad hangover, and this was no exception... however today we had a plan... I was worried that riding with 5 broken spokes wasn't exactly the safest thing to do, so we'd push on in the morning to a city called Nanping, a sort of halfway city between us and our destination of Minqing, it was a rather uneventful morning, some awesome roads leading out of Wuyishan, and all in all a pretty good ride..


Here you can see one of the fake police cars, this one had solar cells to keep the lights flashing, others were parked directly next to power lines with cables going in through the windows powering the lights :)


I imagine these things would be rather convincing at night and may cause tourists to slow down thinking there really are police cars there

Anyway, we made really good time, we didn't stop at all, just rode directly to Nanping... much to the discomfort of our arses.. damn it can get uncomfortable riding long distance after a few days.

Our mission was to 1) Fix my spokes 2) Try to see about removing a nail that was stuck in Tom's rear tyre 3) See if I could fix my iffy starter.

Arriving in town we stopped at quite a few little bike shops, but none of them had any spokes, Tom had a good idea and we searched for "Yamaha" on google maps, as there is usually a big bike area in these sorts of cities, and I did indeed find a "yamaha service center" not to far off, so we set out to find it.

Once arriving we were once again told that there were no spokes but I should ask next door... sure enough the guy in this little shop had some old second hand rusty spokes... but I was pretty much willing to accept anything so asked him to go ahead and also fix my starter issue.



He did a great job on the starter by replacing the wires and corroded connections on the coil... the spokes however... I've never seen a more shyte job in my life, in order to replace the spokes he didn't take off the wheel.. simply used a pair of tongs to force the tyre open, then tried to thread the pokes through by bending them in several places... I couldn't stand watching this massacre so we went off to get lunch.


We had a great lunch in a great little place.. I must add that we'd been sweating pints of sweat the whole time trying to get the bikes sorted in the horrible humid heat, so a lunch break with cold orange juice an aircon and a fan was much needed.


The shop next door had sprayed some water onto the nail sticking out of Tom's rear tyre and air was indeed escaping, so we thought now would be a good time to learn how to repair a tubeless tyre (since Tom had bought a really nice little kit), however these guys didn't exactly do a great job.. in fact they did an appauling job (as you'll see later)...


While all this was going on, some dodgey guy selling snakes, mushrooms, frogs and one of those freaky dinosaur crocodile turtle things came by trying to sell the stuff as food.. he wanted 1600 for that turtle thing.. must be a real specialty, anyway Tom decided to pick it up and got clawed twice by the bugger ;)

Okay.. so back to the spokes... I've never seen a worse job in my life, all the spokes he installed were bent and zig-zagged, the incorrect length, graunched, rusty and well just shyte... the wheel was now wonky... but what the hell, at least there was something holding the wheel together, so we hit the road again on the way to Minqing....


Stopping for fuel just out of Nanping I noticed that the nut on the top of my triple clamp was missing.... this is never a good thing, this bike was starting to show its age, just about everything that can go wrong was starting to do so.. (luckily in China you can basically make a new bike out of parts for almost no cost). We spotted a shop selling 3wheeler cars and bikes and 5rmb later I had a new nut fitted...

When we return, the fun really starts as things go awry in Longyan!

Stay tuned