Today’s ride was epic! The sun was out, it was hot, there were some fantastic hills without any traffic, we were in the midst of limestone karst country, the Li River for was visible from many vantage points, the surface on much of today’s road was absolutely smooth, I don’t think you could’ve had a better cycling day! Well, except that I broke my chain for the third time. I’ve never broken a chain in my entire cycling career, so to break one three times on this bike is unusual. I will talk about the day in chronological order of course, but finishing with the evening discussion at the table for dinner, Chu told me that they have had the same problem with this bike before, breaking a chain on the prior trip. Tells me that I was using a repaired chain. When you push the pins out of the links, they’re never quite the same and that’s what I attribute my break issues, not my riding style. They finally put on the new chain today, no problems since! In fact, somehow today I got 40 minutes ahead of the group, they all said they wanted my old chain back on the bike to slow me down! Funny, but made me a little proud of myself too…! On arrival here, I got to sit under a shady banyan tree for half an hour sipping a very cold Coca-Cola waiting for the other folks to arrive…

These karsts are a sight to behold! I’ve seen them before, in Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and here. Yet they are always somewhat breathtaking, give you a sense of the magnitude of something that is very unusual, steep nearly vertical mountains rising out of the water to a relatively sharp point. Being around them makes you feel differently about your life perspective… They are calming.

After our fantastic cycling day up and down through the karst mountains, we arrived in Xing Ping (shin ping) for a late lunch. The food was great, and after lunch we had to take a boat across the Li river to the other side where our nice but modest hotel was. We loaded all the bikes, our luggage, ourselves, among 50 locals across the river. I have a great video of it… But I cannot post a video to the blog. Got to the hotel, since it was the end of the riding day I had a cold beer, grabbed a shower, did laundry, hung all the laundry up on the roof in the hot sun to dry.

Then I walked down to the river, just a short two or three minute walk from where we are staying, and saw a lot of activity there. Most interesting are the cormorant fisherman. What these guys do is they have two cormorants tethered to their small bamboo boats, in the evening and at sunrise they will take the boat out, the cormorant will find a fish, grab it in its beak, the fisherman will pull the cormorant back to the boat and essentially steals the fish from him. This is a unique method of fishing, it is said this is only practiced in China but who knows for sure if that’s actually true… But it’s a good idea!

One other interesting thing I saw is a grandmother walking down to the waters edge with a grandkid on her back. She started throwing rocks at 5 ducks that were in the water, as it turns out she was throwing the rocks near them to turn them back up to her house which is where they live, not out on the water. She probably wanted them to come in to their coop tonight, or whatever you call it for ducks, so they would lay eggs for the morning breakfast!

It is very common to see grandkids on grandmothers and grandfathers back here. It is very traditional but when people Mary, parents are moving to the same house.

Paul and Rebecca and Bill all left in early, they always seem to need more sleep. Ian and I stayed and chatted with Chu for quite a while. It is interesting to hear things from the China perspective that we often hear about in the west. For example, the one child rule is much more complicated than people would make it seem. For Han Chinese which is the most common, they are in fact limited to only one child. If they decide to have a second child, it cost them a $10,000 fine, which is a huge amount of money for this economy. But other ethnic minorities, the Dong people for example which Chu is, is permitted have two children because they make up such a small percentage of the entire Chinese population, and China wants to ensure that all of the minorities flourish. When you think of it that way, the one child rule is not some weird communist oppression plot, it’s a very well thought out societal plan. Another interesting thing we learned is that people are not permitted to be married until they are 20 years old here, and generally are not permitted to have children until they are at least 24 years old.

Talking with Chu tonight, I also learned much more about what is involved in managing the trip like this. For example, I didn’t know there was a food budget, when we say we want more food, he always provides it, but he almost always a over spends the food budget and he certainly did it with us. Large Western cyclists need more food then Chinese people do since they are much smaller. Tonight was technically our last dinner together, although we will also have lunch together tomorrow with the guides. Then we will say farewell to them even though our trip actually runs another day.

Fading fast here after a very long hot day in the saddle. Will post the some photos now…