Houmea to Baoding

Houmea to Baoding

We continued on good roads after Houmea, wide with tree plantations along the side all the way to Lingshi.  Like Houmea, we had some difficulty finding accommodation at Lingshi,  more than we had ever had before, but we eventually found a hotel, overpriced, but they could accommodate the bikes and this is always a priority.

The next morning we came across 9 cyclist from the Over 60s Cycling Club of Shanghai and we rode with them all day. They invited us to lunch at a restaurant in an ancient city where we saw buildings

dating back to the Yang Dynasty. The food was great, things are so easy when we are with Chinese people. Only one man spoke English, a retired professor from Shanghai University, so he translated for us all. They were on their way to Beijing but we were going a different way preferring to stay on the minor roads.  We had an enjoyable day in their company on a hot and windy day and were sad to say goodbye to them.

The pollution was awful as we rode to Qi’Yuan.  It had rained overnight and puddles were black sooty water, the towns we pass by were grimey with coal dust and depressing, sheep feeding the side of the road are black with the dust. Just as we approached Qi’Yuan we found a truckies stop so we booked in for the night and also enjoyed a lovely dinner, sweet and sour pork with stir fried vegetables and rice. People here were very friendly.  The next day we continued on the 180 highway and again found people very welcoming, when we stopped for a roadside breakfast the bank manager came out and filled our water bottles with boiled water and later when we stopped at a garage to buy an icecream and cold water the manager refused to take our money and took us to his office to show us photos of his new bike. We found the turn off to Shouyang which would take us off the busy highway to a lesser road but there were large hills and a head wind to conquer before we reached our destination.  It was late when we got in and once again we were assisted by two young men who worked at the bank and spoke very good English.  They helped us find accommodation and acted as our translators and negotiated a good price for us.

We had a great ride the next day to Yangquan, downhill most of the way through beautiful countryside so we were in early. Yangquan is a large, busy city with all the western takeaways available so we ate McDonalds for lunch, something we never do at home but it was nice to eat food we were familiar with and we had Pizza Hut for dinner.  We found a lovely small place to stay, immaculate with our own toilet but a communal shower.  When we went for a shower it was a big room with many showers, again immaculate and lots of hot streaming water but with benches where people we being rubbed down, not quite sure what was going on and no one spoke English so just had a quick shower and fled. While we were here we needed to buy a pen and went to Walmarts – the biggest, noisiest shop we had ever seen,

everything was sold here, food, clothes, electrical goods.

As we left Yangquan the road was very bad and trucks were queued up to get through, it was uphill for make matters worse.  Here we met four young men from South Korea, the first non Chinese riders we have seen in China, they had been on the road for only a week and all their gear was new and clean, they were missing their mum’s cooking already.  They were on their way to Tibet then taking a similar path to ours, hoping to reach England in 12 months.  There were many old trucks on the road all day, at times they would be about 80 to 120 lined up waiting for police checks, billowing out pollution.   After the long ascent we had a long descent and as we swept down the hill we could see over walls into old villages still being lived in, we had a great view of stone houses and cobblestone streets.

We left the hills and rode the next couple of days on fairly flat and good roads, the pollution was even worse than we had experienced before, at one stage all the cars had their lights on because it was like driving in the dusk, no sun could get through.  The scenery was not very interesting, small dusty towns and larger farms now, no small holdings, they look like viable commercial crops of wheat unlike the subsistence farming we had seen further south. We reached Baoding late in the day and found a very nice place to stay but before we could unpack the police arrived telling us that the hotel was not registered to take foreigners, he wanted us to stay at the large hotel nearby.  We explained to the policeman that it was too expensive and we would ride on further until we found something else. But he insisted and rang the hotel and bargained a cheaper price for us – he just wanted us sorted and out of his hair.  We found an outdoor restaurant and ate there, the evenings are lovely and warm and the staff were very friendly as we ate our chicken cooked on skewers over charcoal with salad.  The hotel was luxurious but as we left at 5.30 the next morning it seemed a waste and we would have preferred to stay in the small hotel which was very comfortable. Baoding is a large place, we were leaving the Chinese countryside behind and we were very close to Beijing.