The First Four Days -- Just Training!

 The two days leading up to our trip in Kunming were beautiful and even departing the city on the 9th the weather was gorgeous, probably peaking around 70 degrees. We had a great morning ceremony were the Mayor of Kunming sent us off and there were plenty of journalists, photographers, and interviews. Here's a picture of our group on the first day. There's seven of us, the ones with the bags on our bikes. The first morning we had plenty of supporters who accompanied us till lunch including some good friends from www.gokunming.com who are reporting our adventures as well. After that we were on our own and maybe for the best, as the road conditions and the weather turned to the worst.

Here's a photo of one of our team members David Heibaum from Austria. He used to work in Kunming, and now works in Shanghai and Beijing designing webpages. Check his blog out at http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/dawey/1/tpod.html

Here's my bike! all suited up. Its a hefty but should last the trip!

The road turned to dust as soon as our entourage left us the first day and we made our way slowly toward Yuxi.

Passing a local taxi, horse drawn carraige.

A slow morning of photoshoots meant a late arrival. Plus it started to rain which lasted for three days! (and it's been cold as hell too...It snowed in Kunming brieflyy yesterday, a rare occurance)

It was all good the first day though! As every room in the hotel we stayed in had a personal natural hotsping!

Fei Bao on the second day passing a factory. Again the road conditions were poor.

To say the least! We had about a 5km of sliding and slopping through the mud!
So today was our fourth day and definately the hardest. We biked about 100 kilometers, average so far, but about 75% of the time we were climbing. You would think that cycling from Kunming, a city of 1890 meters to the sea at Singapore it would all be down hill. Unfortunately there a few huge mountain ranges in between. Today we passed one. starting at 300 meters and rising to 1600 meters in one climb, about 35 Km long. And that was only the first climb.  Here's a video while climbing. Please excuse my bad language.

Tonight we arrived in MuJiang, a city on the Tropic of Cancer, where the rice wine that sponsors Fei Bao is produced. Needless to say we were well welcomed with a delicious dinner, wonderful hotel (hot water!!), and of course lots of rice wine to numb the legs!

So we've had sun and rain, dust and mud, big climbs and bigger descents, as well as some minor ailments, but it's only been four days, and I can only say that this has been some great training!