Nia hao :-)

I would have to admit that yesterday morning I was nervous although also incredibly excited. With the bikes loaded up in our hotel room I looked at mine rather dauntingly and wondered whether I had bitten off more than I could chew. I tried to lift the back end and found my transverse abdominal tugging back and my shoulders dropping under the strain. I was now worried about getting the bike onto the ground floor and into the hotel lobby let alone pedalling it with all of it's weight amongst the rush hour traffic of Beijing. Then my thoughts followed that even if we did make it to Beijing station we had to carry all of our luggage to the platform (after deciphering which one to go to) AND hope that we could get the bikes onto the train. The only experience that I have had of riding a bike heavily loaded is when I was younger and used to ride home from the supermarket with the weekly shopping swinging in carrier bags from my handlebars and a heavy army surplus rucksack full of vegetables and tins hanging just above the rear wheel from my back. I have ridden the coast to coast (west - east) in the UK but that was light touring with a rack trunk and a small rucksack. I thought for a while and eventually I came up with this nice little formula from my experience in life so far to fill me with confidence:

Experienced cyclist + Experienced tourist = Experienced cycling tourist.

Hoorah, I had nothing to worry about, I am practically an expert :-)

As it turned out, it was easy to fit the fully laden bikes into the hotel lift and I had no problem maneuvering mine out of the lobby. Pedalling the bike was in fact easier than trying to walk and push it. Those first few moments riding the bike was exhilarating because I realised that we were going to be fine. I really did feel as though we were setting forth on the most challenging leg of the tour, not only because of the physical demands that we will put our bodies through but also the process of developing our language skills and trying to find our way.

The bikes loaded....



K and I worked really well as a team and got the bikes packed down quickly outside the station.

The bikes packed for the train....



I had already found which platform we needed and we made our into the station. The bikes had to go through an x-ray machine along with all of our other luggage which was fairly amusing. We drank some coffee to kill some time then went to the platform.

Waiting for the train... whilst we drank coffee

... this monk meditated.


People were interested in our luggage - we had a lot of it and it was mostly of a strange shape. We found our train carriage but the walkway was so narrow that K had to take everything in one by one whilst I stayed put and guarded our property. It was kind of obvious that we were taking bikes on the train, especially with our helmets swinging from our backpacks. Whilst K was inside with the first bike the train guard (there is one at the entrance of each carriage) started shouting at me "zixingche" and shaking his head. Eeek! I knew that this was the word for bicycle but decided to pretend that I did not know. He started pushing imaginary handlebars up and down, left and right and pedalling with his hands. I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders and animatedly drew the shape of a box with my hands over and over again. I did not know what else to do so decided to behave as though I was confused thus confusing him in the process. Luckily K came out and grabbed the other bike bag and ran in and I still motioning to the guard eventually snatched the rest of the luggage and clumsily made my way in. You are supposed to book your bikes into trains - we did have a sleeper seat (which gave us space) and we did theoretically have luggage and not bikes so I did not feel too bad. I saw other people with much more luggage than we had and it was in even odder shapes :-)

We got away with it but I don't think that luck will be on our side next time.

The train journey was great, although the train was incredibly slow - we were on the second fastest train type too.

K enjoying some relaxation on the hard sleeper.


I took some time to reminisce over our time in Beijing as a way of saying goodbye to it. K and I have spent much time in Beijing in fits of laughter and one of the funniest moments was when I managed to block the toilet in our hotel room. We had not realised that you could not dispose of the tissue in the bowl because the badly designed system had a really tight U bend and very soon when it was flushed it would take minutes for the water to subside. We went through the language book trying to find words to explain the situation to the receptionist. We found roadblock but not block, there was toilet and flush, so we worked out no flush and we also found the word plumber (maybe this was going a little bit too far), we were in hysterics as we strung these words together in different ways. I being British and particularly prudish about such things, eventually plucked up the courage to leave the room to find somebody to rectify the problem. Luckily for me the cleaner was in the hallway and all I had to do was say the word toilet in Mandarin and then went about making a plunging sound and action. It was hilarious because I did think for a moment that they may think of me as being slightly insane :-) Anyway, the cleaner understood immediately and soon returned with a young man complete with plunger in hand. The matter was over with in minutes and no further embarrassment on my part ensued :-)

Another funny moment was when we went to a Chinese tea house for dinner. As we walked through the entrance, all of the waiters shouted out our arrival in a chorus. Naturally all the other diners turned their heads towards us and we were greeted with unknown words and 10 staring faces. The waiters were dressed traditionally and upon their heads they wore a hat complete with a fake Que. They gave us a menu in Chinese and even with the help of our menu reading page of our translation book we still had difficulty deciphering it. As is the norm, we explained that I was a vegetarian and laid myself open to accepting any dish that they bought out for me. It turned out to be noodles with tomato and egg, K said that she wanted pork so she got noodles with pork :-) We were given as much tea as we could drink and every time our little cup was drank dry one of the waiters would spring out as if from the very walls themselves and would give us a refill. The cups were as big as eggcups so you can imagine how frequently this happened :-)

Oh, I better get back to the train....

It took a long time to leave the sprawl of Beijing and when we did we eventually found ourselves travelling in a landscape of large brown hills shaped liked giant tree roots. A book that we read said that the landscape was like a lunar landscape as it becomes more barren with single storied houses rising up with the same mud coloured walls, this was an accurate description.



As the train climbed higher we saw a light dusting of snow on the ground. Some of the slopes became terraced and I imagined them to be covered with crops later in the year. Much of the landscape had been quarried too, leaving ugly scars upon once beautiful terrain. We also passed small grey towns and villages which seemed empty of any residents although signs such as bicycles and smoke from chimneys proved that they were not entirely derelict, perhaps everybody was working laboriously somewhere.



I saw another train with a cargo of coal, it snaked it's way around a hill then dissapeared into a tunnel only to expose itself again and continue to entwine around the foot of another hill. We saw many of these trains as we made our way towards Datong - the coal city.

Just before we arrived in Datong we moved the luggage into the end of the carriage so that we could make a quick escape when the train made it's 6 minute scheduled stop. As we waited I ended up in another impromptu language lesson with a stranger as a result of my getting out the Mandarin - English phrasebook. He could read English very well and with the help of the Chinese characters he understood what he was reading. In fact we spent most of our time together with him teaching me how to pronounce my numbers in Mandarin. I learnt quickly that in order to say words correctly I had to be more of a contortionist with my mouth. He was pleased with my number 2 and 10 in particular - these are hard sounds to make but to my ears the I sounded aggressive and not at all how I would normally speak. It was great fun and since then I break out every now and then with these numbers quite suddenly when I feel a need to practice :-)

When we put the bikes back together in front of the station we again drew a crowd, we had another disjointed conversation with pigeon English, Mandarin and hand movements, explaining where we are from, what we are doing besides a little about the bikes. We found our hotel across from the train station no problem and easily booked us and the bikes in for two nights.

So here we are - Datong. Today we took our first ride out of town but that is another story.

Thanks for reading :-)