Last trip in China and summary of the past 12 months
N 22°30'32.7'' E 103°57'34.5''
Date:
25.05.2016 until 30.05.2016
Day: 333 – 338
Country:
China
Province:
Yunnan
Location:
Hekou
Latitude N:
22°30’32.7”
Longitude E:
103°57’34.5”
Daily kilometers:
102 km
Total kilometers:
17,345 km
As the crow flies:
59.86 km
Average speed:
21.3 km/h
Maximum speed:
57.6 km/h
Travel time:
04:30 hrs.
Soil condition:
Asphalt
Maximum height:
1.550 m
Total altitude meters:
42.235 m
Altitude meters for the day:
686 m
Maximum depth:
20 m
Sunrise:
06:20 a.m.
Sunset:
7:41 pm
Temperature day max:
30°C
Temperature day min:
21°C
Departure:
09:0 a.m.
Arrival time:
4:30 pm
(Photos of the diary entry can be found at the end of the text).
Yesterday’s weather forecast was perfect. It is raining cats and dogs. “Stay another day. You’ll get all wet,” says a Chinese woman at reception, her brow furrowed. “Tomorrow we’ll be just as wet as today,” Tanja replies kindly.
As soon as we sit on our trestles, the heavy rain of the night subsides and turns into a light drizzle. “Great weather!” I cheer. “That’s right, we really have to be careful not to catch sunburn!” jokes Tanja. As soon as we leave the village behind us, we follow a narrow mountain road. After a few kilometers it goes slightly downhill. Heavy clouds swallow up entire mountain ranges from time to time, forcing us to switch on our headlights and taillights. Sometimes visibility is so limited that we are forced to drive at walking pace. Suddenly I see a barely perceptible dark silhouette in front of me. “Wow, a water buffalo! There’s a water buffalo in the middle of the road!” I shout in horror, because I’m sure that trucks and cars don’t drive as slowly as we do and the buffalo will take them by the horns, with fatal consequences for both sides. A rice farmer in ragged clothing runs about 10 meters behind his animal and drives it up the pass road with loud shouts. A few kilometers further on, the clouds break and reveal a view of subtropical vegetation. The deeper we get, the warmer and more humid it becomes. The roads are wet but so far we have been spared heavy showers. Huge banana plantations stretch across the mountain ridges shrouded in mist. Deep in the valley, the yellow-brown water of a river rushes over rough rocks. The lush green of the fascinating world of the tropics seems to explode in all its nuances. Poor farmers live in simple houses. In the corner of my eye I catch a man playing a strange flute. A plaintive sound joins the chirping of the birds. It looks as if he is conjuring up a giant snake that is writhing across the wet ground at his feet. Then I recognize the large brown tree root in front of which he is sitting. In some of the houses, men squat together to smoke water pipes. A woman sings a song, children scream and play with a broken tire. We can’t stop being amazed. Once again, China presents itself from a different perspective, as we have not yet been able to experience the tropics on our previous trip.
I become a little melancholy as the endless descent continues. I look at my speedometer. It’s already 50 km downhill and another 52 km lie ahead of us until we reach the border town of Hekou. I realize that we have the last few kilometers in China ahead of us. I don’t really want to leave this fascinating country just yet. A country where we already crossed the desert of death, the Taklamakan, 1,000 km by camel 20 years ago. Back then, the population was not very open to individual travelers. We had had one or two bad experiences and therefore had respect and even a little fear of this country. Well, crossing the country by e-bike was undoubtedly one of the best ideas we’ve had in recent years. It was exhausting but absolutely worthwhile. More than worthwhile. The friendliness and helpfulness of the Chinese surprised us. The land of contrasts, of unspeakable diversity, of millennia-old culture and rapid progress has captured our hearts. No two days were the same. The nature is simply fabulous and often breathtakingly beautiful. We have now spent 9 months intensively traveling through the land of the dragon, the land of the middle, and now we actually have the last few kilometers ahead of us, although we have only seen a fraction of it. “I just don’t believe it,” I find myself saying to myself. “There is still so much to discover here and now our trip to China is supposed to be over in just a few days?”
Suddenly my mind wanders to the beginning of this journey, to a time that feels like it belongs to another life. I remember how skeptical I was at first about the whole enterprise of an e-bike expedition. Electric motor, batteries, on-board computer don’t sound like they belong in a bicycle at first. Above all, nobody knew whether this technology would withstand the rigors of everyday expedition life. Nevertheless, Tanja and I were confident about embarking on this completely new route, a round-the-world trip on e-bikes. There was no experience of such a company and it was not possible to research it online. We were entering uncharted territory, so to speak, and the associated challenges appealed to me immensely.
Having already ridden 15,000 km on normal bikes from Germany to Mongolia in the past few years, crossing 11 countries in the process, we wanted to continue where we left off last time. Because we really liked Siberia, we started the trip there again. Over the past 12 months, we have covered around 10,000 km on the Trans-Siberian Railway, cycled 300 km through Siberia, 1,200 km through Mongolia and the Gobi Desert to the Chinese border. From there, we cycled approx. 5,500 km through China, passing through the provinces of Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Yunnan, covering approx. 44,000 meters in altitude (approx. 5 times up Mount Everest) and approx. 7,000 km.
Doing everything without support or a support vehicle, i.e. “by fair means”, was already a basic requirement on my first expedition to the Auca Indians in the Amazon source region in Ecuador. In the broadest sense, the original idea was to travel in the same way as the early explorers and discoverers did. An expedition trip, during which you have to take care of almost everything yourself, has a completely different dimension. One of the things we are interested in is whether you can look in the mirror at the end of a successful journey and say: “Yes, we did it under our own steam.” Of course, every trip has to be viewed from different angles. There is a big difference between crossing a desert on a camel and crossing a country on an e-bike.
Touring the world by e-bike, i.e. as ecologically as possible, without accompanying vehicles requires clean energy management. This means that every day we have to take into account the kilometers ahead of us, the elevation gain, the road conditions and the weather. The most important factor here is how far you can get with the available battery power under the conditions, or whether there is a possibility of recharging on the way if there is no sunlight from our solar panels to charge our batteries due to bad weather. But even with the best advance planning, mistakes can be made and not everything in life is predictable. There is always an unknown, but that in turn can make up the adventure and charm of such a journey. If something goes wrong during such an undertaking, then action is always required. Burying your head in the sand doesn’t help. Only a cool head can bring to light the constructive ideas you need in such situations. There is always a solution for everything. We learned that during our expedition trips.
But even if we refuse an escort vehicle or outside help, we adapt to the rapid pace of progress, by which I mean that from time to time we have wearing parts sent to an agreed location by modern post or courier service. We also use a GPS system to determine our location and a map program to find the right road. Sometimes we use the internet to find accommodation for our bikes and our dog, so that when we arrive in a town late at night we don’t get turned away.
When we explore countries by e-bike, as we did on our current trip, we use travel guides, the internet and tips from the public to find highlights and sights that we then head for. This way we don’t accidentally drive past a world sensation, although this has already happened in the course of our travels.
One important point is the language. If we stay in a country for a longer period of time, we try to learn it, at least rudimentarily, before we start our journey. We studied Russian and Chinese for a few semesters during our stays in Germany. A few spoken sentences and phrases always help and open doors to the public.
Now, sitting on my trestle, I can smile about when the Russians threw us off the train at the German-Polish border because we didn’t have a transit visa for Belarus and so we made a real false start for the first time during our expedition trips. However, it worked out at the second attempt and I think back with pleasure to my first week on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The drive through the forests of the endless taiga was an unforgettable experience. When we got on the saddles not far from Lake Baikal, everything went perfectly for the first few hundred kilometers, even though it was about 40 degrees in the shade in Siberia and we had to overcome many mountain ranges.
And then Mongolia with its vastness, the eternal blue sky, the huge herds of horses, the wandering nomads who catapulted us into a bygone age. But the merciless Gobi desert with its heat, the herds of camels and the nights in the yurts will always remain a wonderful memory. The real adventure began there, as we had to cover distances of up to 130 km in a monkey heat and a headwind of force 7 (approx. 50 km/h) in order to get drinking water. Our survival suddenly depended on the reliability of the Bosch drive. In a situation like this, the fun stops. It’s all about bare skin. Thankfully, the drives purred along reliably and took us safely through the dry Gobi Desert.
But that was just the beginning. The weather changed in the fall, so we were exposed to freezing cold storms. Then winter held northern China in its iron grip. Would the batteries still work at all at minus 20 degrees? That gave me a serious headache. And yes, we got through without the lithium-ion battery letting us down even once. From this point on, I was completely convinced by this technology. But now the mountains were becoming increasingly relentless. Up to 3,300 meters altitude lay in our path. Not a single day went by without us having to cross mountain ranges, ridges and icy rivers. A superlative challenge for people and technology. Who wants to freeze to death on a mountain pass at minus 20 degrees because the technology lets you down? Well, she hasn’t let us down.
The last 1,000 km in southern China also stretched across alpine landscapes. Many of the pass roads were under construction at the time of our trip and had nothing in common with a road. There were gravel and clay tracks, some of which were reminiscent of plowed fields. Steering our heavily loaded bikes with trailers over tracks soaked by heavy rain, through countless deep potholes and 10 to 20 m long and deep puddles was a tough and dangerous undertaking. Above all because of the traffic, the heavily loaded trucks that hardly left any room for a cyclist. When a thunderstorm turned the ground into a slide because the tire tread became clogged with clay in a matter of seconds, such rides were almost like a suicide mission.
But these were not the only dangerous situations. I will never forget how a car took my right of way as I was driving down a wide asphalt pass road at about 45 or 50 km/h and a car turned from the parking lot onto the road without paying attention to me. In China, as in the whole of Asia, the bigger one always has the right of way. In this case, I didn’t have the slightest chance of avoiding the collision. The consequences would certainly have been dire. Maybe I missed the impact by braking hard? Maybe because I let go of the brake just before the impact and a slight movement to the left allowed me to pass the bumper? Maybe it was just luck or a divine ray? In the end I remained unharmed, which was nothing short of a miracle. I am still grateful for that today.
One of the biggest threats for us was the huge amount of truck traffic in Shanxi Province. In winter, thousands and thousands of trucks loaded with coal drive on these roads. We were in the middle of it for weeks. The only thing that helped us was to keep calm and draw attention to ourselves with front and rear lights, even during the day. When the stress level became too high for us, we took short breaks to regain our strength and maintain the necessary ability to concentrate.
Another major challenge was the icy pass roads. Especially when we had to drive from a pass into the valley. We tried not to take descents in the early morning, as it was particularly cold then. At particularly critical points, we were forced to push our bikes over the dangerous icy surfaces, although even pushing was not always a solution because the tires simply slipped off when braking. In the end, however, we were very lucky, just as we were on the unlit tunnel journeys of up to four kilometers, of which there were countless. The challenges of the journey so far have been great and the associated adventure unforgettable. Even if it wasn’t easy at times, I wouldn’t want to miss a single day. Above all, the mode of transportation gives us tremendous pleasure and freedom. We can stop where we want and stay where we want. We travel relatively slowly and in this way get into the depths of each country. We breathe Mother Earth, we are part of her in wind, cold and sunshine. This brings us into close contact with the population. Understand their way of life, sometimes even share their lives, are gifted with hospitality and friendship. Traveling with the Delite has become very important to us. Although we are assisted by an electric motor, we have to exert our bodies, especially on the countless meters of altitude. By which I mean that we get a physical workout that is very important for us as extreme athletes. The e-bike has simply pushed our limits upwards. Especially when you consider that we move about 150 kg per person, including bike, trailer and load, because of the live coverage and all seasons.
Since we have already covered the distance from Germany on normal bikes, i.e. without drive assistance, we know what we are talking about. We can definitely compare. We know that without the support of DriveUnits we would never have been able to take our big dog with us. We would also never have been able to carry the heavy equipment (cameras, laptop, power supply, winter and summer clothing, camping equipment, etc.) over 43,000 meters of altitude with muscle power alone. Not even a giant could have done that.
For years we have been using the bicycle and now the e-bike to discover the world without airplanes, i.e. as ecologically as possible.
“Denis! Denis? We can take off our rain gear!” Tanja startles me out of my deep thoughts. “Phew, it’s really very warm,” I say, pulling the brakes. “Why haven’t you answered? I’ve already called you a few times.” “Kind of completely lost it. The past 12 months have been racing through my head. I realized that we have to say goodbye to China in a few days,” I reply, a little depressed. “Be happy about the great time we had in this country.” “I am, but I would still prefer to stay here.” “I think nine months is enough. We got a fantastic impression of China. Besides, our journey is not over. Now Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand lie ahead of us.” “You’re right about that. We humans are strange sometimes. At first I was afraid of this country and now that it has welcomed us and I’ve got used to the culture, I’d like to stay. There are new adventures waiting for us on the other side of the border…”
If you would like to find out more about our adventures, you can find our books under this link.
The live coverage is supported by the companies Gesat GmbH: www.gesat.com and roda computer GmbH http://roda-computer.com/ The satellite telephone Explorer 300 from Gesat and the rugged notebook Pegasus RP9 from Roda are the pillars of the transmission.
