On to the ride to Wutai Shan...

We left our nice cushy hotel in Yingxian and headed back towards Heng Shan, but only for a few kms before we took the right turn south towards Wutai Shan. We had ridden into a headwind the whole ride the day before so we expected a bit of tailwind (ok, a lot, if the wind was blowing the same way :) for the start of our ride and we were sadly disappointed - we had a bit of a headwind AGAIN! Oh, well....we are gluttons for punishment :)

This is the day when the lack of good route information and decent maps was going to slap us in the face. We bought 2 maps - a small one that had some geographical feature into and the road map that had no geographical information - only the small one had both English and Chinese, the big map is all in Chinese, which helps with the road signs :). When the road follows a river it does make you think you are riding in a valley, right? Well we rode the road next to the river and soon we were quite a ways up above the river that was running down the valley - the up started a lot sooner than we expected! So much for an easy start to our day. But the scenery was good and though we were tired from the two previous days of riding (and A kept teasing me about my "easy days" that turned into hard days :) we were happy campers. It did level off after a while and gave us some rolling terrain for nearly 10 kms (which we enjoyed just for the change in the relentless climbing :). When we finally made it to the top of the climb we were grinning like idiots and snapping photos. We did stop pretty frequently to eat (once an hour) and to take the occasional photo or to rest our tired legs, so we were not pushing it. The ride down the far side was a ripper and we had to stay on the brakes to keep it under control - the bags are a drag when climbing, but they give some amazing gravity assist on the descents!!!! We even passed a few trucks and three wheeler cars :)

When we got into the town we stopped for a Coke (which was a coffee cola) and a pointer to Wutai Shan. Again it was up from the first pedal stroke (this was not supposed to happen!!!!). My mood was not pretty - we had just done 65kms and we had 50 more to do and there was nothing but up! We slogged another 15kms and realized that we were not going to make it to Wutai Shan by out own leg power - it was 4:30 and we were running out of daylight and my my reckoning we had 30kms and another 500-600 meters climbing to do (we had already done nearly 1200 so far that day). So we pulled over and asked someone about getting a bus and we were told "mei you" - no buses to Wutai Shan. Hmmm. A got a brilliant spark of an idea and looked up taxi in the dictionary and the guy directed us just down the road to the next town back - excellent! :) We headed back down (woohoo!!!! we were going downhill!!! :) and we saw a group of people we had passed just a few minutes earlier...and there was a van parked there. We decided to ask them about a taxi and A's question prompted a huge discussion among the 6 people there. We got the impression that they might be the ones willing to give us a ride, so A asked who the driver was (her Chinese is getting really good :) and then we determined that the guy only wanted to go to the top, not all the way down into the town...A and I quickly discussed it and that was fine with us, we don't mind riding down hill. So we agreed to that and then A had to ask the magic question about cost....and we bargained as best we could (they were holding out and we needed to get a move on as it was getting late) and we struck a deal. We quickly took the bikes apart and loaded them, the luggage and us into the van and headed up the hill.

Wow. Yes, we had been riding up hill for 15kms, but now we were REALLY going up hill - the road was all the sudden really steep and really twisty! We suddenly realized that this was no pussy cat of a ride this was a tigress!!!!! We would never have made it. We started to see snow at the roadside, then snow on the road and then we hit a huge patch of ice, with wheel channels cut into it, and went sliding around a bit and then we were at the top. We quickly unloaded and then even more quickly dug out some warmer clothes to put on before we froze to death! The guys in the van were amazingly helpful with loading and unloading and making sure the bikes were put together and packed up so we could be on our way as soon as possible. Again, the people we met were so nice and so helpful it was a bit unreal. We headed down one way as the van headed down the other and we soon realized why they didn't want to head down into the valley...it was a long way down and very steep. We stopped quickly so I could pull on my jeans over my tights and put on a second pair of gloves (it was FRIGID!!!! probably about 20 degrees F) and then we headed down down down. We dropped about 600 meters to the toll booth where we bought our tickets into the mountain area and then headed down another couple of hundred meters to find our hotel. It was 14kms down from where we were dropped off, so it was a 93km ride plus about 25 kms in the van - 130kms, just like the sign said when we left Yingxian and about 20kms farther than the little numbers on my map added up to!

As for the climbing, we did a bit over 600 meters of climbing on the first pass and then dropped back down that same amount and then climbed nearly up to that level again (about 1900 meters on my altimeter watch) - that's a lot of climbing with loaded bikes! When we reached the top of the pass in the van we were looking at 2800 meters and where we are at the hotel has been showing 2000 on my watch since we arrived down. We know now (I just bought a new map today - with contour lines!!!! :):):) that the height of the pass is just over 2600 meters, so my watch is off by a couple of hundred meters (no surprise there :) and that the southern pass out of the valley (we came in from the north) is only about 2000 meters, so we only have about 500 meters to climb to get out of here on our way out of town (the valley drops another hundred from our hotel to the point where we start to climb out) so we know that is no problem for the old legs, especially with 2 days of rest in them :) It's going to be rolling, too, and there are hairpins, so it's not going to be a relentless climb, and I can also tell from the contour map that we have quite a few kms of pure downhill...ah, bliss, I love maps :):):)

Anyway, when we arrived - frozen to the core and tired, but alive and starving :) We checked in to the hotel and then went right into the hotel restaurant, neither of us taking off our jackets until the food arrived :) We were too tired for a shower and we spent a little while talking about the ride and then we were sound asleep - A gave me orders I was not to wake her up the next morning, even if I had made coffee :)

Next update will be our 2 days in Wutai Shan learning about Buddhism from a local Lama....