Sixspinninglegs

Sixspinninglegs We are a family of three. We like to discover the world at the rhythm of our pedals.

Panda Land, and the Great Drone Escape: Our Last Day in China 🐼 It is the 22nd of August, and we wake at 6:30, because t...
23/08/2026

Panda Land, and the Great Drone Escape: Our Last Day in China 🐼

It is the 22nd of August, and we wake at 6:30, because today we are going not only to make our way back to London, but also to visit the Panda Research Base of Chengdu (成都大熊猫繁育研究基地), as a very last activity before flying. Yesterday was a lovely chilled day. We went around the city looking for bike boxes, did some shopping, and more importantly we cycled through Chengdu without any particular goal but to see it. We rolled through parks and followed the rivers, ran alongside massive three lane roads hemmed in by skyscrapers, and always felt safe, because the bike lanes here are quite wonderful. We even ended up at the Giant store, where we had all three bikes serviced before carrying on with our spin. It was great.

And so today was Panda Land! 🐼

The research base is enormous. It was hot and busy, with far too many people, even though we arrived just as the gates opened. The forest was beautiful, intricate stands of bamboo blanketing huge stretches of it, a rainforest kind of world all around, humid and green and hilly. We wandered more or less at random to the giant panda nursery and managed to see some of these huge, fluffy, faintly clumsy looking animals. One of them was ambling past a pond, swaggering his body from side to side, as though showing off his strength the way bad boys do. 😄

Later we reached the nursery proper and watched baby giant pandas draped in the trees or lying lazily on the platforms built for them. So cute! Around us, thousands of Chinese and European tourists could not help yelling out their delight the instant one of the cubs so much as twitched, which to us felt oddly childish, but you have to go with the flow.

Further on we came across some red pandas. They are far smaller than the giant pandas, a good deal larger than a house cat but not by a huge margin, and they too are impossibly cute. Interestingly, we learned that they are not even related to the bear family the way giant pandas are, and yet the red panda is the only other animal we call by this name. In fact the red panda is in a family entirely of its own, the Ailuridae, of which it is the sole living member, more closely related to raccoons, weasels and skunks than to any bear. In short, there is no small version of the black and white giant panda we all know so well. Instead, the “other” panda is red and looks more like a cross between a fox, a raccoon and a skunk. And that, we had no idea of until today.
We picked up other facts too. The giant panda has a surprisingly powerful bite for an animal that lives almost entirely on bamboo. One study of 151 carnivores placed it around fifth for bite strength, and pound for pound, relative to its skull and body size, its jaws are among the most formidable of all, even if in raw force the polar bear and the brown bear still bite harder. Pandas are classified as carnivores, and they still carry the canines handed down from their meat eating ancestors, even though these days they eat almost nothing but bamboo and a few other grasses.

The red pandas were a joy to watch. Some were eating, being fed by the staff, some were dozing in the trees, one was hanging here, another slowly making its way to a different part of the forest, not on the ground but moving from branch to branch, tree to tree, like a small flame drifting through the canopy. 🔥

At some point Azur and I lost RoPu. We looked for her, doubled back on ourselves a few times, pushing against the tide of people like salmon labouring upstream, but we only found her much later at the exit, a little upset that we had not managed to see it all together, and yet laughing that she had turned out more elusive than the pandas themselves.

The panda base was a fine outing, but to us not quite as thrilling as the size of the crowd promised it would be. And most likely, to us at least, the crowd was the problem. Pandas are and always will be among the most beloved animals on earth, and simply knowing the remarkable work this centre does to protect these two vulnerable species was enough to make a good morning of it, especially when we saw the tiny, recently born cubs being cared for by the staff with such dedication and attention.
Then we came back to the hotel. I had woken around 5 in the morning with one of those crushing migraines yet again, and the pain and dizziness were at their peak by the time we got back to the room. I crashed for a few hours. I took more medicine, but the throbbing in my neck and left temple was still debilitating. I could barely swallow any food either, so I stood under a long, boiling hot shower, using the pressure to knead my neck and try somehow to ease the pain. It helped a little, but there is no magic cure for a migraine. Only time and rest can do the work. Luckily we had spent the previous evening packing the bikes, so everything was ready for the journey home, and I had little to do but get to the airport and check in.

Well, that is what we thought!
We had booked a van to bring the bikes to the airport, and it all went smoothly, that is, right up until security. There, at the oversized baggage check, things began to turn crazy, then ridiculous, and then frankly absurd.

At first it looked like everything was fine. Then, on the scanner, the security man spotted a few items inside a couple of the bike boxes. We had to open them up again and again, because a light was still clipped to the handlebars, or a lighter was tucked in a bag, and so on, and so on, until at last they found the drone, which this time I had decided to check in rather than carry on me, knowing full well it would be trouble in Beijing, where we had a connecting flight to London and had already been through the ordeal on the way in.

And yes, exactly as I had feared, the drone was a problem. After a long inspection of the drone itself, RoPu was marched off to the airport police station, where she spent the best part of an hour surrounded by officers trying to find the serial number of this tiny toy of a drone (a DJI Neo), checking whether it was registered under Chinese flight regulations (it was not), questioning her as though she were a criminal, even filming her, and finally making her sign a document with her own fingerprint, before being told that, regardless of all this, she might still be fined for possessing an illegal item once we reached Beijing, and this despite holding a form that proved her good faith.

The migraine, for its part, had not let up for a moment, leaving me weak and impatient, cranky and short tempered. But you know, here in China you do not argue with authority. Or rather, you can, if you are prepared to end up in a cell. So I took it upon myself, on edge and aching, to open and reseal the bike boxes, once, then a second time when they turned up other irrelevant bits and pieces in my tool bag that had to be left behind. It took three hours to clear the first security check. Then came the second. I was searched again from head to toe, had to run my bags through the X-ray machine twice, my shoes, my hair, my feet, all scrutinised with a zeal that would make anyone feel guilty even with nothing whatsoever to hide.

A moment later we were sitting on the plane. I did not even see it take off, for I dropped straight into a deep, drooling sleep, away from the physical pain and, for a little while, away from the eyes of the police.

Back in Chengdu the police had made it clear, over and over, that it would be far better to carry the drone with us than to pack it in the checked luggage. So that is what we did. And little did we know that when the first flight landed in Beijing, security would be waiting for us on arrival. The plane touched down, and soon after, while everyone else was pulling out their suitcases and starting to queue for the doors, we heard RoPu’s name called over the aircraft’s speakers, and we were made to disembark ahead of the entire plane, because the police were there and wanted to inspect the drone. How mad is that!

Off the plane, we handed over the drone, and were told that unfortunately, because we had not checked it in with the bikes, they now had to confiscate it. We explained that we had been told to keep it on us, so none of this made any sense, since it had been checked in and they themselves had forced us to take it out in Chengdu. And the thing looks so utterly harmless, and we had all the paperwork to prove our good faith. The officer seemed to take it all in while staying completely impassive. He made a call, and we followed him as he led us toward the international transfer, carrying the drone himself, silent and grave, as though his whole career hung on this small piece of plastic.

We made our way through to the transfer section of the airport with barely any time to spare, and once the four of us were in the shuttle, our officer was swapped for yet another, who took it upon himself to carry the little lump of plastic, the source of all our embarrassment and trouble. Other travellers looked at us with fear in their eyes to see us es**rted by police. It was so upsetting, and, as always, so ridiculously absurd that it almost became comical. And more to the point, it also became useful. Being with the police opened doors faster than for anyone else. We skipped queues that let us reach our connecting flight in time, and as we walked we came to understand that the officers were simply making sure we would board with the drone, and not slip out of the airport with this forbidden object still in our hands.

So as we boarded, the policeman handed the drone back to RoPu, and that was the end of the story. The rules these robot men usually follow to the letter, with their blank faces and ramrod postures, as though life itself depended on their serving the power of the system, had, for once, been bent. The power of the mind had won out over the RULE, and they had somehow agreed not to confiscate the thing, but to es**rt us to the plane, where they could then hand it back. I was astonished that so rigid an institution had actually softened, because for a while it looked more than likely that the drone was lost for good to the stupidity of the system, and yet in the end it was not. Hooray! 🙏

So please, be warned. No drones allowed, even on a transfer flight through Beijing. We ran the experiment for you, so you will not have to go through it yourselves. And no lighters either. You can get seven days in jail for trying to sneak a lighter through security. And no battery packs, no power banks, no lights, none of the things they have decided you should not have.
The police state is truly something out of this world in China. I waited until I was out of the country to talk about it, for fear of criticising the government and landing myself in trouble. Here, whether you are Chinese or a foreigner, your ID card or passport is your life. You must register to buy a ticket for a tourist site, or simply to board a train. You must register to check into a hotel, or to book a cab. There is no dodging security, not even to get into the metro, where you pass through scanners and get swabbed in case, who knows, you are carrying a pocket knife or planning to blow yourself up in some terrorist attack. I have no idea what it is they fear, but with so much security in place, the fear of other people seems to melt away, and all that is left is a wariness of the authoritarian regime you are living inside.

Passports here are what you scan to board trains, to visit the pandas or the terracotta soldiers, to cycle through the many police checkpoints. Your every move is traced, analysed, matched to your face, controlled. I had never been anywhere like it, a place where freedom is not a word you say lightly, and where, honestly, it does not really exist. When we passed our final immigration check in Beijing, the officer scanned our passports, and from behind her we could see on her screen all the photographs the police had taken of us over the course of the journey, and there were many. Even the hotels were forever photographing our passports, some of them refusing to let us stay at all, put off by the hassle of registering foreign travellers. Facial recognition is no myth here. It is a well developed technology that the system uses everywhere, every single day. And it is coming our way in Europe. The authoritarian regime seems to be inspiring our own governments. I hope we will not end up under so much control, but I fear it is already creeping in, just not as openly as in China or the other dictatorships, but quietly, in a more hidden way, under the guise of human rights and freedom of speech laws, insinuating itself into our societies.

Let us always keep our eyes open, always, and claim what is undeniably ours to keep, our freedom to think, to move, to speak, and to choose what is best for us, not only as individuals, but as a people.

The Terracotta Army, a Fitting End to Our JourneyI did not write for a few days, because we have not been cycling since ...
19/08/2026

The Terracotta Army, a Fitting End to Our Journey

I did not write for a few days, because we have not been cycling since we reached Ya Jiang, choosing to stop short of our original plan in order to go and visit some of China’s most famous sites.

First we had to find a way back to Chengdu, and that in itself was quite an epic. While the journey is only about 400 km, it took us two cars and over 12 hours. We started at 10:30 in the morning, hiring a minibus to reach Kangding, and from there we had to find yet another means of transport to carry us all the way back to Chengdu, the city we will fly home to London from.

Once in Kangding we wanted to take a coach, but it proved more difficult than planned to fit the bikes into the luggage compartment. It could have held them, but there would have been no room left for the other travellers’ suitcases. So we had to find another way, and, as always, luck was on our side. As we walked out of the bus station we found a car straight away. Packing the bikes into it was fiddly, but we managed it in time, and then we set off for Chengdu under a torrential rain.

And rain it did. From the moment we woke that day, and for the next three days, the rain barely stopped falling, which at least gave us a reason not to feel too guilty about skipping the last 150 km or so of the ride back to Kangding. In Chengdu we found a hotel and crashed for a short night, knowing that the next day we wanted to head to Xi’an (西安) with the firm intention of visiting the Terracotta Army. Yet we had another problem to solve first, which was where to store the bikes.

It was still early the next morning, and we were about to head deeper into the centre of Chengdu, to a hotel we had been told might let us leave the bikes, when one of the cooks from our own hotel saw us packing and started asking about our journey. When he understood that we were trying to find somewhere to store the bikes, he simply opened a back room and told us, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, that we could leave them there safely. What a relief! The lady at the reception desk had assured us there was no way to keep the bikes, and here was our saviour, telling us it was completely fine. 🙏

We took a few clothes and went to the train station, boarding the express train to Xi’an, about three hours to cover something like 1,000 km! The trains here are so comfortable and so fast that they put to shame the TGV that is France’s pride.

We spent a full day wandering around the city. We saw temples and galleries dating from the Tang Dynasty, and we walked along the fortifications of the old town, on top of a magnificent wall that dominates the rooftops and lets you follow the whole perimeter of the ancient city from above. We went to the Muslim quarter, where we saw a couple of mosques and a bazaar so vast that we could easily have got lost in it, a warren of stalls, steam, spices and noise.

And today, well, today we finally reached the holy grail of Chinese tourist attractions, the Terracotta Army, and it did not disappoint. At first we were lost and trapped among a million other tourists, like ants swarming over a piece of fruit, but soon the crowd thinned and we were able to breathe again, and, almost as importantly (lol), to actually see the army.

It was breathtaking. There is a weight to a place like this, the weight of more than two thousand years pressing down quietly on that great pit, and it settles on you as you stand at the railing and look down at rank upon rank of soldiers standing in the earth where they have waited since long before Rome was an empire. This is the funerary army of Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), the first emperor of China, the man who took the seven warring states that had been tearing each other apart for centuries and welded them, through conquest and iron will, into a single country.

What struck us most was the detail. These are not rough, repeated figures stamped out of one mould, they are individuals. You lean over and you see the folds of the tunics, the plates of the armour tied with little cords, the topknots and braided hair each dressed in its own fashion, the moustaches, the set of a mouth, the calm or the tension in a face, so that you begin to feel you are looking not at statues but at men, each one modelled as though a real soldier had stood there and lent his face for the day. And beyond the infantry there are the horses, muscular and alert, ears pricked, harnessed to war chariots, and the crouching archers, the officers in their longer robes, the kneeling crossbowmen, the bronze birds, swans and cranes and geese, found by a river of the tomb complex, and the weapons, real bronze blades and triggers that came out of the ground still sharp after twenty-two centuries in the dark. A whole world, buried, so that a dead king would want for nothing.

Qin Shi Huang was born in 259 BCE and died in 210 BCE. He became king of the state of Qin as a boy of thirteen, and from 230 BCE he set about swallowing his rivals one by one, until by 221 BCE, in barely a decade of relentless campaigning, the last of the six other kingdoms had fallen and China was, for the first time, one. He gave himself a brand new title, huangdi, first emperor, judging that “king” was no longer grand enough for what he had become. In the few years that followed he standardised the written script, the currency, the weights and measures, even the axle widths of carts so that every wagon would run in the same ruts on the same roads, and he linked older frontier walls into the first Great Wall. All of this in a reign that lasted only about eleven years as emperor.

The story of his life is a long one to tell, and it is not known with certainty. Beyond the archaeological finds, which are many, almost everything we know comes from a single written account, the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, written by Sima Qian (司马迁) roughly a century after the emperor’s death. And even that must not be taken entirely at face value, because Sima Qian was writing under a later emperor of the Han Dynasty, a ruler he could not safely criticise, and some believe that in painting Qin Shi Huang as a bloody tyrant he was also, quietly, holding up a mirror to his own master. It is worth remembering, too, that Sima Qian was a man who had suffered terribly at that court, and who finished his great history at enormous personal cost, so his words are never quite as neutral as they first appear.

Either way, Qin Shi Huang seems to have been a ruthless and often bloody ruler, and at the same time a visionary whose legacy, through what he built in that short reign and through the astonishing journey he prepared for himself into death, is unparalleled, standing comparison even with the pharaohs and all the other kings who raised pyramids over their tombs.

We hope you will enjoy the few photos we are sharing with you today. It meant a great deal to witness the real thing with our own eyes, a perfect conclusion to the wonderful journey we undertook this year across Tibet and China. ⛰️

16/08/2026

Azur filmed and edited this movie to tell the story of our 800km loop in western Sichuan and Tibet. He spent hours perfecting it, so that you guys could see why we rerouted off the famous G318 that 100’s of Chinese cyclists choose to ride on their way to Lhasa every year

Day 18, Xi’Eluoxiang to Ya Jiang (雅江), 60.6 km, 910 m climbingToday was a straightforward day. We climbed the 900 m up t...
15/08/2026

Day 18, Xi’Eluoxiang to Ya Jiang (雅江), 60.6 km, 910 m climbing

Today was a straightforward day. We climbed the 900 m up to the top of the pass at 4,350 m before joining the G318, which promised to drop us all the way down to Ya Jiang, a town that sits so low, at roughly 2,500 m only. The only hiccup was RoPu showing signs of altitude sickness on the way up, but a little oxygen and some paracetamol soon set her right again, and we knew we would be losing height so quickly that she would be safe and well in no time.

Now, can you imagine the descent we had. I bet you cannot. Forty km of uninterrupted downhill, a paradise for the three of us, a trophy, a reward for all the hard work of spinning our pedals one inch at a time, climbing so often towards the sky to reach the clouds.

Despite being on the busy G318, this descent was magnificent. It began with a gentle gradient, but soon enough we were carrying so much speed that we felt perfectly safe in the traffic, because the cars and trucks could not really go much faster than us on those bends. Far from being trapped behind them, we almost felt alone on the road, flying downhill under our own momentum.

The last few hundred metres of the climb had already put us on the G318, and when you are grinding slowly upward the trucks and cars are a real nuisance to a cyclist. But on the way down, oh boy, what fun we had.
We dropped through a series of tight hairpins just after crossing a tunnel of about two and a half km. Those hairpins were a joy, especially when you never have to pedal at all and simply have to manage your speed, feathering the brakes into each curve and holding your line to stay safely in your lane. One hairpin at a time we came down to where the gradient steepened further, Azur right behind me and RoPu bringing up the rear, and there we let go and sped as never before.

And I mean it. Our bikes went so fast that in that moment nothing existed anymore but the pull of the speed. The mountains around us were nothing special. The town we passed through was not especially pretty. There was nothing to distract us, so we simply went for it. And speed, my friends, is addictive!

Our bikes went wild. The sound the tyres and the spinning wheels made as they gathered pace was both smooth and loud at once, a hiss that climbed higher and higher in pitch as we broke record after record, all the way up to 73.5 km/h, like a plane on the point of taking off. We tucked ourselves low over the bars to cut through the air, chins near the stem, and every time we did the bike surged forward as if it had been waiting for permission. We were actually travelling faster than the traffic ahead of us, so now and then Azur and I had to ease off and wait, catching our breath and grinning like fools, while RoPu caught up. And she was flying too, genuinely impressive, though even at her pace she could not quite keep up with her two crazy boys once we folded ourselves down small and gave the mountain everything.

Oh, that descent. Oh, that speed! The thrill and the adrenaline, the fusion of man and machine, when bike and rider become one and form the most beautiful pairing, a harmony that sings on the paved road and swells into a symphony. It was grand. It was without doubt the finest descent we have ever ridden, and we will remember it forever, of that there is no doubt. 🚵

Arriving down in Ya Jiang, we came upon a few cyclists heading the opposite way. Poor souls. You could read the pain on their faces as they ground upward on the very road we were cascading down. We got talking to two of these riders, and one of them had a chain problem. He had fitted a new chainring, but the new chain apparently did not fit it properly, and he had neither the tools nor the know how to swap back to his old chain, which was what he wanted to do.
Luckily I had exactly what was needed, and although I am not much of a mechanic, I put my hands in the grease and got on with it. First I found a way to free a quick link that was seized so tight it was a real struggle to part, then I shortened his old chain to the correct length and fitted it back cleanly and securely onto his bike. He was delighted, and when he took it for a test spin the bike behaved exactly as he had hoped. 🔧

After that we headed into town, found a place to stay, and went to eat. Over dinner we were debating whether to carry on riding the busy G318 or to head straight for Chengdu by car, but it has proved harder than expected to find a driver and a vehicle that could take three loaded bikes. So as we wake up this morning we still have no definite plan for the day. If we can get to Chengdu, we will. Otherwise we may have to ride our way up to Xinduqiao (新都桥) instead, if there is no car or bus to be found today. As always, we will see what the road decides for us.

Day 17, Jiefangcun to Xi’Eluoxiang (西俄洛乡), 37.1 km, 530 m climbingFirst let me start by telling you that the meal we ate...
14/08/2026

Day 17, Jiefangcun to Xi’Eluoxiang (西俄洛乡), 37.1 km, 530 m climbing

First let me start by telling you that the meal we ate last night was probably the best we have had since we arrived in China and Tibet. She had prepared an omelette with tomatoes and garlic, as well as an amazing dish of green peppers and yak meat, spicy but really delicious. As soon as our bowls were empty, she would refill them with rice and urge us to eat more and more, until our bellies were about to burst.

We did not stay up long after eating and went to sleep in one of the big rooms, one bed for each of us. Despite the mattresses, which were rather hard, we all slept well. I did wake up quite early, around six, when I heard the lady praying in the other room. She had put on a tape and was reciting along with it, prostrating herself full length on the floor, sliding two wooden blocks forward along the boards with her hands, then rising to her feet and repeating the movement over and over. It went on for probably an hour.

Before praying, the lady had lit the fire and set out seven kettles of water and one of milk tea. As soon as she had finished and saw that I was awake, she took some tsampa and prepared that earthy roasted barley meal so typical of Tibet. So I woke Azur and RoPu, and we all ate and drank tea together.

Soon the daughter arrived, her arm bandaged, explaining that she had come off her motorbike in the early hours of the morning. She is a nurse, but every evening she comes back to mind her mother’s shop, which is also a kind of pub where people come to play pool and eat, staying up very late and keeping the young nurse busy well into the night. She must have been so exhausted that she had the accident. Her brother, a very handsome and modern young man, came to help take her to Litang, where she wanted to have herself checked at the hospital.

Despite all these family worries, they still went on taking care of us. The lady filled our bags with cookies and water so that we could carry them for the day’s ride. She also boiled about fifteen eggs and packed them in a bag, worried that we would find nothing to eat on the way. We did make a dent in the cookies and the eggs, but she had given us such a big bag of provisions that we could never have finished it, nor carried it all with us anyway.

This encounter was by far the warmest anyone could hope for. Before we left, they wanted to take photos with us, and then we all hugged, and once we were ready we spun our pedals out of the village, our hearts filled with gratitude and faith in humankind. 🙏

The way out of the village was epic: a 400 m climb over a distance of less than 10 km. The gradients were brutal, so steep that we had to zigzag our way up, looking forward and back to take in the landscape unfolding before our eyes, hairpin after hairpin, slowly slowly, one turn of the pedal at a time. When we finally reached the top we stood at 4,362 metres, and from there we could see the village we had left two hours earlier, tiny now and utterly transformed by the height and the distance.

That side of the mountain was covered in places with farms of solar panels. But once on top we could see over the far side of the pass, and again the landscape was completely different. The mountains we had left behind were grassland, bare and rounded, while on this side they were clothed in forest, not only pine but many other beautiful trees, a deep and living green that ran down the slopes as far as the eye could follow. Layer upon layer of lush green ridges folded away into the distance, and behind them all, floating above the last of the trees, stood high rocky peaks, pale and sharp against the sky.

Then came the reward. If the ascent had been an inch by inch battle, dragging ourselves up gradient by gradient, the descent was pure silk. The road was pristine tarmac, so we had no potholes to dodge and no fear of sliding out on gravel, and it unspooled beneath us in a series of tight, clean hairpins that begged to be ridden. It would have made the perfect fast descent, and yet we were in no hurry at all. We stopped again and again, here and there, unable to stop ourselves from pausing just to stand and admire the view. In some spots we could see so far that we spotted those high rocky peaks standing behind layer after layer of green and forested mountains, the whole world opening out in front of us.

Somewhere on that descent we realised that being above 4,000 m had become second nature. None of us had any trouble with our breathing or any headaches, and as we rolled down and down towards what we had started calling the lowlands, we burst out laughing when we understood that these lowlands of ours were still above 3,500 m. 😄

We stopped for a meal by the river around half past twelve, enjoying the sound of the stream and a few prayer flags fluttering in the wind. We were quite relaxed, because we knew we did not have far to go. We were simply finishing the ride we had begun the day before but had cut short, not having managed it in a single day.

By three o’clock we had reached the village where we wanted to stay, and found this amazing Tibetan hotel where every single wall has been painted by hand, showing all manner of patterns, animals, and scenes from nature. Not only the corridors were decorated, but each room as well had been carefully painted.

If there is one thing that is truly striking here, compared with the West, it is that craftsmanship has not been abandoned for the plain and the merely practical. Every lamppost, fence, roof, and window frame is made to look like a work of art. Every wall, every door is embellished, colourful, sometimes carved, and at the very least decorated and painted. Nothing is plain. Everything is warm. We, unfortunately, have lost this taste for craft and beauty in our everyday lives back home. Being here makes it all the more obvious that progress can be, in some respects, a kind of regression. That we have let convenience quietly replace beauty, and mass production replace the work of the hand, until the ordinary objects that surround us have nothing left to say. A door here is not just a way to close a room, it is somebody’s patience and pride made visible, a small daily act of care passed down through generations. Somewhere on our road to efficiency we decided that this was a luxury we could no longer afford, and we called that progress. Standing in a hallway painted lovingly from floor to ceiling by hands that expected no praise for it, you begin to wonder whether we gave up something we did not know how to value, that very human need to make even the humblest thing beautiful. ✨

We are still off our planned route, having reached today the destination we should have made yesterday. Tomorrow we rejoin the G318, but only after climbing 800 or 900 m to haul ourselves back up to around 4,400 m. And I will be honest with you, we are in no hurry to leave these quiet roads behind. Out here we can ride side by side, talk as we pedal, stop wherever we please, and feel completely free. The thought of the traffic and the tunnels again does not thrill us at all. We are even starting to wonder whether we might cut the tour a little short once we reach Ya Jiang (雅江), if we find we simply cannot bear the busy roads. We shall see. For tonight, we are exactly where we want to be.

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