The Situ

Not until now, for some reason, are these stinky loud, drunk male teenage ridden internet bars letting me not only connect to blogger, myspace, and flickr, BUT I also get to use my USB cable, thus I get to slowly upload my photos and tell my tales. Although I haven't really gotten any emails from anybody, so I guess no one was worried. Although, maybe you should be a little. This was a hardcore mountain China week of unknown turns and grimy, misty, grummy, decripit, but bustling, and lively, and other not so bad things. Its only these little pit-stop mountain cities that make me feel like I am in a real other-world. The countryside, despite being the most beautiful and most-cultivated and trechorous I have ever seen, is comfortably familiar, maybe because I have seen it in pictures. But it has been a week of just crawling up mountains and inching somewhere between 10-20 miles a day, and that's cycling for 5-6 hours!

Feb 27: Congjiang
That is until today. That's not to say that it was flat, but the hills were manageable. I didn't have to walk my bike up one. I made some real milage by cycling 84 km, and all of it really really pleasant. I would pay for this ride, I guess that's why its included in the Bike Asia itinerary that I am now kinda following. I rode along a somewhat wide clean river in the vally of some high hills. Perched along the road and the sides of the river were the villages of the Dong minority. These people carry everything on their backs, or donkeys, or in little sampans in the river. There timber homes are on stilts and the women all wear traditional smocks and head-wraps. So it was 40 or so miles of these lovely villages, they are so much cleaner looking than the Han chinese dwellings along the road. It's really getting unbearable here, and I am exhausted, so I will finish all this at some other point. Tomorrow I am on the bike going up to a remote village, I think there are hairpin turns or something. Eek.