Silkriders Diary

In order for it to happen an expedition like this gets assistance from a lot of people along the way. We have been very fortunate in getting our party through on time and without any significant mishaps to people or machines. For us that provides a tremendous sense of satisfaction and confidence to proceed with next year’s expedition.

We would like firstly to thank our sponsoring partners, led by BMW,Vodafone, Fairydown,and Lufthansa and including Icebreaker, Metzler, Scottoilers, Staintune, John Baker Insurance, and Pacsafe,. These firms were all staunch in their faith in us and we have enjoyed working with them all tremendously. The excellence of their commitment was demonstrated no btter than BMW who helped us in New Zealand (Grant Clegg), Munich (Franz Geisenhoffer), Tashkent (Mirmahdi Makhumudov) and Beijing (Roman Schabada). The culture of this company was a demonstration of excellence that we were enamoured with.

As well as the sponsoring partners, the support of New Zealand’s ambassador to China Tony Browne, China’s ambassador to New Zaland, New Zealand’s ambassador to Iran, Iran’s ambassador to New Zealand and Wellington’s Mayor Kerry Prendergast was both very useful and very much appreciated. Thank you Tony for the wonderful reception in Beijing and the delightful evening with the visiting St Peter’s school band.

The New Zealand China Friendship Society were also very helpful arranging visits to the Rewi Alley school and the Lanzhou Foreign Language school - both thoroughly enjoyable as well as educational for us. UNICEF New Zealand also provided us with opportunities to learn about their work in Krgyrzstan.

There are many others who assisted, and we are all very grateful for the hand you have given us.

Beijing, or as Kublai Khan named it, Cambaluc, is our final destination and there are a few significant sites for us to cover off before packing and shipping the bikes and winging our way home.

Firstly there is of course the ‘great’ part of the Great Wall - that part which has been fully restored, which crawls its way atop the bush clad rideges of the mountains just nort of Beijing and which all the tourists have as a ‘must see’ on a visit to this huge, modernised metropolis. We drove the bikes to its bases - afterall we have traversed the wall from west to east - and next morning at dawn got up on to it before the hordes arrived (tourists this time, not Mongolian) and the smog ruined the vistas totally. Very nice.

Next there was the wall of Kublai Khan’s winter palace in the city itself. Not much left of this but what there is is now protected so worth standing on. Also still making it through to 2005 are the Hutong or narrow streets of old Beijing that Genghis set up after demolishing the place during his conquest. But the Hutong are rapidly disappearing in clouds of dust as demolition makes way for wider strets and expressways.

Finally where we virtually started in Venice; the Marco Polo Bridge (in Beijing this time) described in his book because of the 500 statues of lions that span it. Well worth a walk over and for us anyway providing a sense of completeness. The bridge is also very significant to the Chinese as it was on the south side of this that the Japanese invaders in 1931 launchd their final assault on Beijing.

Pictures of all these visits are in the album, The Great Wall and Beijing

On the evening of our arrival in Beijing on Friday 8th July the New Zealand Ambassador to China, Tony Browne hosted a reception for us at the NZ Embassy in Beijing. Present were members of the local BMW owners club, together with other invited guests from the local and expatriate community. There was also a band from St Peters College in Auckland who were visiting Beijing to perform at a number of concerts. The band performed a number of big band “standards” to thunderous applause from all those present. The local BMW agent generously fitted all the Silkriders with BMW tee shirts, and the chef and staff at the Embassy provided stunning food and wine.

It was an outstanding night, but it was about to be upstaged!!

At about 11pm we made our way out on to the road to flag down a couple of taxis to head back to our hotel, when the tranquility of the quiet, tree lined street was shattered by the unmuffled exhaust of a motor cycle! This wasn’t just any motorcycle, and it wasn’t being riden by just anyone.

The bike appeared from down the road, being ridden with great style and skill by a bare foot young lady with her white summer coat blowing in the slip stream and a female passenger hanging on in the side car. There was not a crash helmet in sight, nor any protective motor cycle clothing, but what a sight it was. She braked hard with tires smoking, outside the embassy, Dave and Brendan didn’t need much encouragment to add themselves to the outfit, one on the pillion seat and the other in the side car, then it was clutch out and she was off, summer coat flying .

We didn’t expect to see Brendan and David again that night fully expecting the police to take exception to both the noise of the exhaust and the fact there were four people on a motor cycle designed for two people. However about five minutes later the bike and all occupants appeared at the end of the embassy road and once again it blasted down the road, screeching to a halt to let Dave and Brendan off and then disappearing up the road with the open exhaust again shattering the silence of the street, the bike turned the corner and was gone.

“Who was that?” I asked the ambassador
“Never seen her before”
” Well she and the young lady in the sidecar were at the reception” I said.
” Well they weren’t invited!!”

A few days later the mystery motor cycle rider and motor cycle were identified.

Rebecca had gate crashed the party with the BMW riders who had been invited. We never did find out the young ladies name who was in the sidecar, she had gatecrashed too!!

And the Bike, a Chinese made Chang Jiang which is a copy of the Russian Ural, which is a prewar BMW passed to Russia as part of the World War 2 reparations!! It has a side valve, 750cc, horizontally opposed twin engine and shaft drive and is still made in China. Price around NZ$4500.

We susequently found out that Rebecca is a legend in Beijing, she rides her immaculate black Chang Jiang outfit dressed in her white summer coat, always fast and always at night.

It certainly was a grand finale to our evening with the Ambassador, he thought so too!!

On this trip we have experienced a wide variety of riding surfaces .Everything from sandy tracks, gravel tracks , gravel roads , “sealed roads” where the pot holes took more of the road than the seal , roads under repair and nice new sealed roads . The longest stretch of road under repair was a track through part of the Taklamakan Desert where 400 kms was being repaired and upgraded at the same time. This meant there were small sections of seal and large sections of unbelievably rough sand and gravel road , huge numbers of trucks and choking dust.

Well the road we were on today made up for all the rough roads we have experienced on our trip. Soon after leaving ” false Xanadu” for ” true Xanadu” we were able to get on a magnificent 4 lane motorway . We are normally banned from these motor ways but as this road is in the final stages of being completed the toll gates were not operational so we simply rode on to the the motorway .

What an experience ,a great view of the surrounding rolling grassland ,as the motorway is elevated above the surrounding countryside, a smooth riding surface and no traffic.

For the next 200kms we counted 8 cars , although there were a anumber of those three wheeled ,single cylinder truck s I have referred to in a recent blog and workers putting the final touches to the stonework on all the motorway cuttings .This stone work is all beautifully done with each stone cut to size and then placed by hand, once the wall is in place then the plasterers come in and point around each stone .The affect is one of a giant stone jigsaw really quite a sight.

We are not sure where the motorway ends , but summise it is part of the nationwide infrastructure upgrade that is evident all through China . Inner Mongolia is about to experience an increase in economic activity and I suspect a change to the village life based on agriculture . We observed these small villages today, frequently no more than 30 houses clustered together spaced about every 5 kmns along the motorway. Nearby the sheep and cattle grazing, and the crops planted in adjacent fields.This motorway will play a major role in this transition . It is interesting to ask the locals why are all the roads and motorways being built ?tTheir reply is often ” getting ready for the 2008 Olympic games”, there could be something in that too.

Today we moved into the Mongolian area. Great open spaces and a far more traditional feel with people walking their cows and sheep for grazing alongside the road.

We passed through a little town with a market day on in the main through road, driving between the stalls and causing chaos. We stopped at the outside of town and Dave and I wandered back to get some fresh apricots and apples and discovered a chinese wailing concert with an audience of a few hundred who we joined. Suddenly the whole audience was looking at us and the singers lost the plot as they tried to see us too. Obviously there have been no tourists here before. Total amazement was all over the faces of the locals.

We have met many people who have studied English for many years and have never seen a tourist let alone talked English to one. This is a very isolated area of the world with such friendly people. Wish I could stay longer.
Love Jojo

By far the most common configuration for commercial vehicles in China is three wheels, one steering wheel at the front and two driving wheels at the rear.

It would be fair to say that most Kiwis would not have seen a three wheeled vehicle unless of course they were fans of Rowan Atkinson’s wonderful TV character Mr Bean. In many of the episodes Mr Bean’s Mini comes in to gentle contact with a three wheeled Reliant ,this contact always leads to the Reliant quietly trundling off the road and gently tipping over, all very amusing.

Three wheeled vehicles have never made it in big numbers in the UK and in fact were probably only manufactured at all because of a taxation advantage over conventional four wheeled vehicles.

In NZ, apart from a few BMW Issetta ’s and other German ‘bubble cars now in collectors hands, three wheeled vehicles are not seen.

In China they are everywhere, in all shapes, sizes ,carrying capacities and engine capacities. Theyare pedal-powered, petrol-powered and diesel-powered . The pedal-powered ones are manned by lean but very strong farmers and are used to transport farm goods and occasionally the whole family including farm animals and pets.

The petrol-powered versions are powered by small 125 cc to 150 cc Chinese-made Honda or Yamaha engines. They are very quiet and in the form of a three wheeled taxi can carry 4 passengers plus the driver: quite remarkable for such tiny engines . Their top speed fully loaded is about 30 kms per hour. There have been thousands of these little taxi’s in the cities we have passed through over the last 4 weeks as we have made our way across China.

But by far the most destinctive three wheelers are the diesel powered versions .These are all powered by a single cylinder diesel engine with varying capacities from 500 cc to giant single cylinders of upto 2000 cc

They carry loads of farm produce, building material - in fact any load you can think of - and are always grossly overloaded. With a top speed of 40 kms per hour any increase in gradient causes the already over-worked engines to billow clouds of black smoke and the engine revs drop so that individual firing strokes can easily be counted !! Following them is not good for one’s health!

These amazing vehicles are still being made , are all painted” Mao Tse Tung blue” and have a reputation of lasting forever. It is easy to see why they are so popular and so much part of the Chinese landscape in both the countryside and the cities.

We have captured a picture and a sound byte of these remarkable machines. Make sure you listen to it.

Expedition motorcycling is different to any other form - whether it be cappuchino canters on the road, adventure rides, trail riding or touring. The requisite motorcycling skill is necessary of course but beyond a certain competency that factor becomes irrelevant. In self-organised expeditions like the one we’ve nearly completed everybody has to bring something to the table - to take responsibility for some aspect of the organisation - whether it be logistics, medical, mechanical or maintenance. That too is taken for granted.

By far the most important attribute (and difficult to find) in a rider though is they must be selfless. In other words on the road they must always be looking out for the welfare of the others. This, beyond anything else is what differeniates expedition riding from normal touring, where self-preservation (and typical of motorcyclists self-interest) is all that matters. The reason is obvious. An expedition ride is long, covering several months, often with a number of countries and the achievement is to get everyone to the end of it. If one bike goes down excluding its rider from completing, then the expedition fails. For this reason especially, ensuring that help is not far away is of primary importance.

On a less dramatic but still important scale, there’s the cost to the itinerary of a rider or machine being taken out, the delays in getting both repaired so as the trip can continue. Unlike a normal tour you can’t just call up the local dealer to fix the bike, or send the rider to the nearest hospital and continue on. So the quicker support arrives from other team members the quicker the trip can resume.

For these reasons an expedition ride really only works if each member takes responsibility for the one behind them, making sure they are continually in touch with them. The rider in front of one is pretty well irrelevant (so long as they stay upright!), it’s care of the one behind that matters. Under this approach, when a bike stops with a problem, before long all bikes have regrouped at that spot - and the full assistance capability of the group is at work.

But if one rider ignores that simple rule and rides as though they’re on a cappuchino canter around NZ say, looking out simply for themseleves, then the expedition team is weakened markedly. Others may try to compensate for the recalcitrant but this becomes a distant second-best approach. Long delays and huge doublebacks to trouble spots will ensue.

As a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, an expedition team’s on-the-road efficiency is constrained by the unreliability of its weakest link. I’d estimate that the cost to a group of having a single member unreliable in this regard, is that traveling time is raised by about 40%. The reason is you never know whether the guy behind you is the unreliable one and that you should therefore be ignoring them. Each time you determine it is him, you then have to stop and determine that the rider behind him is intact - that’s the hassle, the pain that unreliability instils.

It’s hard to get the perfect team. It would be glib not to acknowledge that the Silkriders have had our problems on the road. On the five expedition rides I’ve done abroad, this particular trip has come closest to perfection - easily. But perfection we have not attained - despite the fact that as yet we haven’t (touch wood) had a major casualty go unattended as a consequence of that imperfection. We have though been facing longer transit times per section as the trip nears its conclusion. I’d say we’re down to 30% below what we could be now.

The thing about continual improvement is that there’s always another expedition awaiting to make that next step up!

Today we again experienced the inflexibility of the Chinese toll-gate manager. We are farm machinery and as such can’t use the motorway. We were therfore relegated to the lanes and muddy tracks that wind under this wonderful construction and travelled 25 km in two hours. we wouldn’t have had a show of getting out of town with-out local assistance, and were eventually shown a sandy track that lead to a decent road cicumventing the toll gates.

Lots of rain today and several tunnels. The tunnels are one of the scariest things I have encountered, as they are often very dark, many have huge uncovered drains down the side or raised but un-marked footpaths.
Some of us stop to change out of sunglasses or try to follow a vehicle with tail lights. The biggest hazzard is the oncoming vehicle (no lights) on your side of the road. A truck stopped in the middle with no lights nearly got me but I got revenge as I also just missed a cyclist on the wrong side. I didn’t see the pedestrians but the others did, I must have missed them or maybe that big bump wasn’t a pot-hole.

All well we are all talking and drinking together still so team is holding together.
Love Jojo

The food on our ride has been varied in quality and taste ,but there has been one vegetable that has been consistently outstanding and that has been the tomato .We have all agreed that the flavour of the tomato’s, particulary those we have sampled through Central Asia and China reminds us of the wonderful but now virtually unobtainable in New Zealand “beef steak” tomato of our younger days.

We have discussed what gives particularly the tomato’s we are eating in China their wonderful flavour. We were discussing this last night when the discussion suddenly ceased and we all looked at each other .

“No it couldn’t be ,could it?” ,said Gareth

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well” he said ,”with out spelling it out ,you remember the joke about the two ladies in Remuera talking about what they put on their strawberries ,one said she put horse manure on hers and the other looks mystified and said she put cream on hers?”

” Well” he goes on.” there are one point three billion Chinese.”

I blanch, I will continue to put salt on mine!

We arrived in Luochuan after an easy but wet ride from Xian. Easy in the sense that it was only a little over 200ks however there were still the challenges of avoiding trucks passing on blind corners ,cars cutting in when they find that there is oncoming traffic and the wonderful slow farming machinery that use the roads and highways. But none of this is new and dare I say it we are getting pretty adept at staying up right in these conditions.

What was new, was, when we arrived at our accommodation the lady manager was concerned about the security of the bikes if left parked at the front of the hotel, Dave jokingly said, using his unique sign language what about we park them inside in the lobby, with only a moments hesitation she indicated yes ,so it was up the slippery marble ramp (it was still raining) and into the lobby this caused huge interest to a large group of locals who had gathered.

We got some great photos and video and the bikes are tucked up warm and dry in the hotel lobby and not a word of English was used to achieve this just Dave with his wonderful sign language and Rick our Chinese guide translating!!