Nine million bicycles

Hi! Sorry for my short absence and lack of blogs for the past couple of weeks. The wife and I were away for part 2 of our honeymoon. The picture above might have led you to guess that we were away in China and Hong Kong!


On route to London, my wife SJ said I mustn't think bike whilst on honeymoon. Other motorists were telling me different....

To be fair, SJ was areal sport and we had a few opportunities to cycle whilst away. Our first cycle adventure was in Beijing. We didn't actually cycle ourselves on our first trip. We took a Hutong Rickshaw tour along Beijing's old quarter 'Hutongs' as passive cyclists (i.e. passengers).


Our next adventure was truly awesome and took place in Xi'an. We cycled tandem style along the Ancient City Walls. This was the first time either of us had been on a tandem and it was great fun. Cycling a tandem was initially quite difficult ... until SJ started to pedal! We both cycled the complete City Wall square - a distance of 9 miles! I think SJ would have liked to have run around it 3 times - complete marathon distance.

We had a further cycling trip in Yangshuo, Guilin. This time we were both on mountain bikes and took a trek along flat back roads passing through farmland. We saw barefoot farmers with their water buffalo and bamboo rafts on the river. Amazing.

Spent a little time in Shanghai. SJ let me go off with a couple of my buddies and we practiced bike balancing tricks on the skyscrapers there. I'm the guy in the middle on the picture below...

SJ and I both had a great time in China. The little exercise we did was all good fun (cycled about 15 miles in past 2 weeks). Now we are back in the UK, we both hope to start training soon. We will need to do something as we have both increased in size and have a 1/2 marathon to run next month.