1. Intro
2. Recap of week 111 to 116 and 122 to 125
3. The Assy Plateau and the way to China
4. Getting into the Chinese tech vibe with WeChat, Alipay and Baidu Maps
5. Dealing with police checkpoints and controls in Xinjiang
6. Lonely days in the outskirts of the Great Gobi desert before reaching the Mongolian border
7. Welcome back to China, The Great Wall and Forbidden City of Beijing
8. Long nights on the road, the challenge with Chinese-only hotels and the race to Qingdao
9. Catching the ferry from Qingdao to South Korea

From the autonomous region of Xinjiang in the far west to Beijing and Qingdao in the far east. I cycled across North Asia with a rather long skip into Mongolia. China was a challenging country to be a foreigner in with the Great Firewall of China blocking the internet and a whole ecosystem of smartphone apps to get familiar with. Locals-only-hotels and never ending convoys of trucks on busy roads. However, the friendly Chinese people cheered me up and visiting the great sights of China like The Forbidden City in Beijing and tasting locally brewed beer in Qingdao made this biketour into an experience for the books.

Last journal entry ended with a successful Chinese visa application in my hometown of Copenhagen in Denmark. It was a week of joyful and emotional reunions with people I haven’t seen for a very long time. I returned to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan fully motivated to cross North Asia via China and Mongolia. With no hesitation I started pedaling east.

First up was a stretch in Kazakhstan towards the nearest Chinese border. I spent week 113 doing the amazing Assy Plateau and week 114 to reach the border town of Zharkent. Border crossing was only possible by bus so I hopped a bus and arrived in Khorgas, China.

My option to cross into Mongolia from China was at the Takeshiken Port a fair bit of milage through the Xinjiang region. My Chinese visa was valid for 3 months and even with an ambitious plan it was going to be a tight squeeze making it in due time for the Mongolian-China border after traversing the great steppes of Mongolia. That’s why I did my first voluntary skip. I took a bus to Ürümqi and saved a much needed week of cycling.

From Ürümqi I plotted a course north towards the Mongolian border. It did not take long before I was in the outskirts of the Great Gobi deserts and had some wonderfully lonely days not seeing other signs of life than the few cars and trucks that passed me. This was going to be but a tiny taste of what was lying ahead of me - the great rolling steppes of Mongolia. I had reached the Chinese border city of Takeshiken.

I spent weeks 116 to 122 crossing Mongolia. Tune in to my separate journal entry for Mongolia to catch up on my adventures in this remote country.

With a week left before my Chinese visa expired, I entered China and was ready to tackle my second part of my bike touring route through this immense country. It was going to be a race towards Qingdao as I needed to do it all in three weeks.

I kept to my daily mileage plan and cycled via Beijing to Qingdao. I walked the Great Wall of China and spent some action packed days in Beijing visiting the massive Forbidden City, the historically important Tiananmen Square and the mesmerizing Summer Palace. In Qingdao I was very happy to get my ferry ticket to South Korea with two days left on my visa. With a sigh of relief I took time to visit the legendary Tsingtao Brewery and sampled my fair share of this local beer brand.

I returned to Bishkek with a Chinese visa in my pocket and a whole lot of re-confirmed belief in my ambitions to reach the far away coast of East Asia. Just the mere idea of cycling overland from one major ocean to the other, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was mind boggling to me. It was also a daunting task to be honest.

I’d come far and wide and I’d managed well. The confidence level was sky high. Even so, I remembered the story about Icarus who flew too close to the sun. His wings melted and he fell into the sea where he met his end. I had to be determined yet humble in my approach. Huge amount of miles was waiting ahead of me. There was going to be a visa deadline hard on my wheels. A fast approaching Siberian winter in Mongolia was lurking on the horizon which, just thinking about it, sends teeth chattering freezing shivers down my spine.

As I do with so many other goals and objectives that seem too big to comprehend as a whole, I just divy them up in smaller pieces and think about them one at a time. Now, it was time to say hello to Kazakhstan. I had one very good reason to return and that was the Assy Plateau.

Perched high up on a plateau 2600 meters above sea level, you find a stunning flat, boundless and green valley landscape. During summer local herders come up here to live a traditional lifestyle in their yurts while tending to their animals. I entered from the Almaty side and I soon realized that I was not the only one who had heard about the magical tales of this natural wonderland. There’s an entrance gate where you have to pay a park fee and in front of the gate was a kilometer long line of cars.

After the entrance gate, there is a long climb until you reach an observatory and the actual plateau. 4WDs were passing me on the narrow dirt road in a never ending stream slowing my pace a lot as I often had to get off the road. It was not the picture I had in mind when I decided to go. It turns out that on the top of the climb there was what I best can describe as a wild nature theme park with a big camp of yurts, horse rentals, playgrounds, music on loudspeakers, quad racers and so on and so on. That’s where all the cars and people were headed. I reached this place early on my second day and I was grateful to realize that this was the stop for most of the cars going up.

Up ahead, on top of a hill, I could see the star gazing observatory and the last climb before I was on the actual plateau. I was happy to leave the disco blasting quad racers behind me and as I reached the top I got what I was coming for. My eyes gazed upon a vast green flat plateau enveloped in misty green hills dotted with pine trees. All in a dozen shades of green. Magnificent. Several yurts were spread around the plateau and herds of grazing animals were munching on an abundance of lush grass. I could even at times switch up the gravel roads with a smooth compact grass surface.

Cycling the plateau is doable in one day. There were some challenging river crossings where I had to carry my bicycle and panniers over in turn. The water was icy cold and knee deep with a strong current so keeping my balance was tricky. For each round I had to take some minutes getting rid of the painful cold numbness in my feet and legs. The Assy Plateau experience doesn’t come for free. Once over the last river and well done with the grasslands the wind was picking up and I could hear the wind howling fiercely in the valley creeks making the pine tree branches hold on for dear life. With cold feet and darkness coming closer it was time to pitch my tent. It’s a good thing I have a lot of practice from the Norwegian mountains pitching tent in stormy weather. The last thing you want to happen is a tent going parachuting off the mountain. I found a picturesque spot on a cliff edge and it was a blissful feeling getting inside my comfy sleeping bag warming up while the wind was jolting my tent. I ate some food and slowly fell asleep watching out on the landscape from my safe trustworthy mountain shelter.

Next day I battled my way down steep gravel roads with icy cold hands and carried my bike over stony horse paths. I reached Bartogay Lake and was thrilled to see the asphalt road again. From here on it was some flat easy days of cycling to Zharkent. Rather uneventful actually but I didn’t mind. The plateau was my highlight and I was satisfied. Zharkent is the border city with China. Apparently, you are not allowed to cross the border other than in a vehicle so I loaded my bicycle in the under belly of the bus and did a time consuming but straight forward border crossing. First I reached the Kazakh side of the border. The entire bus and luggage including my bicycle had to be offloaded. I got my panniers scanned and passport stamped. When everybody in the bus was done, I had to get onto the bus again just to drive a very short distance to the Chinese border control. Off again with all my stuff. Panniers scanned again and passport stamped. Cumbersome but still easy peasy lemon squeezy. From the Chinese side I was allowed to cycle out and into Khorgas. Welcome to China, Dani. You made it!

Now China is a whole different world on its own. I knew that before coming. Being a foreigner in this country is not straightforward at times. International credit cards only work in certain ATMs. On the internet, if it is not Chinese there’s a good chance it is blocked. Most VPN providers are blocked but some do get past the great Chinese Firewall. Your list of working VPN servers is very dynamic. As one server gets blocked a new one pops up instead in a constant cat and mouse game. You may have to search for a while for a shop selling SIM cards to foreigners. When you do get a SIM card with mobile data or when you do get WiFi, it’s like the Chinese know you are a foreigner and limits the data speed to such a degree that it is nearly impossible to browse or perform any action on the internet. Just loading your online banking apps on your phone can be frustrating as the connection keeps timing out. This certainly is a challenge but also one that is manageable. Also, it motivates you to jump straight into the ecosystem of Chinese apps.

I’m an app lover so I embraced the opportunity to get into this part of the techy side of Chinese culture. Before crossing the border I had already set up WeChat Pay, also called Weixin Pay. This is the mother app of all super apps. It practically does everything even though at first glance it just looks to be your standard chat and communication app. However, as a foreigner I was only interested in the payment feature. You can load an international credit card in the app and use it to pay everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Even the smallest of shops have a QR code you can scan to pay. If you get this to work you are more than good. An alternative to WeChat Pay is Alipay. It works the same way and supports international credit cards.

On top of the payment apps you will be very happy to get Baidu Maps and Baidu Translate. It should come as no surprise that Google Maps is blocked and if you want to navigate and search for stuff online then Baidu Maps is the way to go. You can of course download offline maps and use those but so many times I had good use of Baidu Maps when I needed to get directions to a hotel or find my way to a restaurant recommended to me by a local. Also, Baidu Translate was a life saver. Take a screenshot of a menu in a restaurant and you get it translated to English. Very convenient if you want to know what you are going to eat (of course this feature exists in Google Translate but it is obviously also blocked).

So on my first day in China I went around town in Khorgas scanning QR codes and testing out Baidu translations in restaurants. And you get oh so happy when all of this just works. When I went to a shop and scanned the QR code to pay, getting a big smile and an approving nod from the shop owner, I felt accomplished. It’s part of the cultural immersion in this age of rapid technological advancements. At least it was for me. To be on the safe side I cashed out in an ATM. Because sometimes you just run out of battery on your phone. Feeling all locked and loaded on Chinese super apps, I was ready to do some biketouring.

From Khorgas I was supposed to cycle to Ürümqi and then head north to Mongolia. But I felt the pressure of the visa deadline. My Chinese visa was only valid for three months and I started to count up weeks needed to get to the border and the weeks needed to cross Mongolia. I came up short with a week even with my most ambitious plan. So I decided to skip the distance to Ürümqi by taking a bus. First I actually tried to take the train but it turned out that this particular train did not allow bicycles. So I ended up cycling 80 km to the next town and taking a night bus. It all worked out well and with some tired eyes I got out of the bus next morning to the views of busy and hectic Ürümqi.

Ürümqi is the capital of the autonomous region of Xinjian and holds the record as the most remote city from any sea in the world. You could say this sort of marked the halfway point of my overland journey to the east. It’s a busy city with millions of people and it has seen rapid economical development over the last decades. It’s also the city which had the largest eruption of ethnic violence in China in decades. Han Chinese and Uyghurs clashed together in 2009 and ever since the government has enforced strict control, even by Chinese standards, over the city and region.

When I was walking around the city I saw frequent armored vehicles with a pair of soldiers standing back to back by the turret, holding their rifles, almost unreal static in their posture. Going into a shopping mall, the subway or even the hotel, I had to scan my bag and go through a metal detector. There are cameras everywhere and I’m sure that the first instant of any sign of unrest will be dealt with swiftly and with great authority. This was on another level of anything I’ve experienced so far. I didn’t feel uncomfortable with this at all. If anything, I felt very safe and I believe the Chinese government has greatly exacerbated the threat of new attacks and unrest. Their strategy must be a show of force working as an efficient deterrent. After all, China is currently the most peaceful superpower.

As I started cycling north towards the Mongolian border, I passed several police checkpoints daily. They were mostly empty and I could cycle straight through. A couple of times I was stopped. After having my passport checked for a few minutes I was free to continue.

Xinjian is a sensitive area for China and they do not like foreign interference. They do keep a close eye on travelers in this region. It was only my second day after leaving Ürümqi. I was cycling along a busy main road and wanted to escape some heavy traffic. I consulted my navigation app and found a more quiet road to follow. Shortly after leaving the main road, a police car passed by and waved me over. I came to a stop at the side of the road and 4 police officers quickly surrounded me. Even though they act in a very calm and respectful manner, I couldn’t help feeling a bit anxious. Not by the fact that they are a police authority but I just don’t like being surrounded by people watching me from behind where I can’t see them. However, I must say they were very friendly. They even smiled and asked politely if they could ask me some questions. I guess that was just a rhetorical question. Anyways, I didn’t mind. The police officer translated from Chinese to English on his phone and I did the same in reverse on my phone. There were a lot of questions. I mean a lot. It went on for 20 minutes and we got so far down into the details that they wanted me to confirm when I got up that morning. And the surprising thing was that they knew! They had the exact minute I woke up. Or rather when I went online on my phone that morning. Yeah, that’s information control. In the end they thanked me for my time and for answering all their questions. Then they gave me water and snacks for the road.

I think the questioning was not enough. Soon after I noticed a white civilian car behind me. The car tried to keep its distance in order to disguise that it was following me. But come on, when a car drives slower than I’m cycling and doesn’t pass me on the road for hours it is quite obvious that I’m being followed. When I turned a corner and was out of sight I stopped and waited for him to catch up. I wanted to test out his response. When he came around the corner he had the most surprised look on his face and made the fastest U-turn I’ve ever seen and drove 100 meters down the road and waited in front of a small convenience store. As I started to cycle again, he slowly followed me again. I assume they wanted me to know I was being followed. This continued for two days straight with a new car for each day. At times I considered waving him over asking if he wanted to carry my panniers so we both could get our days of work done more quickly.

When I entered Jimsar, two civilian dressed police officers were waiting for me and wanted to make sure I was checked into a hotel before they would let me go. This all seems very intrusive but they did it with such a kind and helpful attitude that it was not a hassle at all. It was actually kind of nice having a smiling welcoming committee escorting me safely in traffic and helping me with translations at hotels. In particular I remember that evening in Jimsar. I went out for dinner at a night market which was located on the same street as my hotel and immediately got the attention of the locals. They came over to say hi and take selfies. Some even said they had never seen a white westerner in person before. Wow! That really made me feel like a traveling pioneer.

North of Jimsar the desert of the outer parts of the Great Gobi begins. I had been cycling in an urban environment ever since coming to China and I looked forward to some desolate scenery. My first day of cycling after Jimsar I had been sharing the road with a convoy of trucks and lorries making their way to a very big mine further ahead. I had eaten so much dust and all my clothes had changed color into a light brownish shade. The idea of a shower motivated me to continue until the dark hours of the day when I reached a large truck stop with hotels. With a bit of work I found a hotel that accepted foreigners. I just managed to get my shower before a unit of police officers were standing outside my door. I knew the drill. It took 30 minutes to finish up with the questions and I happily and patiently answered all of them. Their last question was: Thank you for your time. We know it takes a long time and we truly appreciate your cooperation. Can we invite you out for dinner? Yeah, that’s right. The friendly police invited me out for dinner. That night I was dining barbeque food and sharing laughs with friendly people. The next day, they waited for me outside the hotel with water and snacks to wish me a safe journey through the desert. Xinjian has the friendliest police I’ve ever met. And I think it’s important to stress that I don’t respect them as an authority any less because they are friendly. If anything, they just gain more of my respect. They are still the police and I will follow their command regardless. It’s just so very nice that they manage to do their job while being respectful and kind at the same time. Perhaps other countries could learn from this.

After I waved goodbye to the police and the dusty truck stop, I ventured into the empty desert plains bordering the Great Gobi in Mongolia’s southwest. It’s very empty there. The silence of nature was all around me. Now it was only a slow trickle of trucks passing. All the heavy traffic was diverted to the mine I had passed. Millions of shades of red and orange were covering the stony desert in wavy curves. No cell phone coverage. The perfect opportunity to log off and shut down any brain clutter. To be alone. I really love that state of mind. Being in the zone. Losing track of time. The only thing dragging me back to reality was the need to resupply water at a gas station.

I cycled for almost a day and saw nothing. Up ahead was a structure. It looked like a military fortress with a high fence with barbed wire on the top. The small concrete square block in the middle only had a few tiny windows that were cladded with thick metal bars. At the entrance was a gate and a guardhouse. Inside two men with helmets and bulletproof vests. I was running out of water so I figured I had to ask for some as my alternatives seemed bleak. I was granted entry through the gate on the condition that I parked my bicycle outside the fenced area. As I walked in I saw the gas pumps and then it struck me. It’s a gas station! A very heavily fortified gas station. This is actually how many gas stations look like in the area I had cycled through. I had passed many of those but it was first now that I realized these were gas stations and not military fortified buildings.

I managed to get my water bottles filled up and I was good for the next day. I wanted to continue until sunset. Since this was empty land I could cycle until the sun dipped below the horizon and then pitch my tent. It was getting late in the afternoon and a police checkpoint appeared up the road. I passed through, they checked my passport and then they asked where I planned to sleep that night because the next city was far away. I answered in my tent along the road. They didn’t say I was not allowed to but they also didn’t let me cycle any more that day. Apparently wolves were roaming the landscape and they were dangerous I was told. I didn’t really believe that but OK. They showed me into a building where I was given a free room to sleep in. They brought me food and said goodnight.

Next day I managed to reach a town. It was empty of people. Only one small restaurant was open. I checked my calendar. It was a normal weekday. I ordered a double lunch. In this remote area I’d better eat and fill up when I have the chance to. There were no hotels in town as I could see and I also wanted to continue. At this pace I could reach the border tomorrow night. I pushed on for a while more. The area was strangely empty. I saw farm fields but no people working them. Sun was beginning to hang low in the sky. The desert landscape had been swapped for farmlands and even though there were no people around I didn’t want to camp next to a cultivated field. I cycled a bit more and to my left I saw a huge industrial complex. It looked like a bigger town but there were no houses. Just heavy industry. I guess this is where all the people are. So they are probably going to come flushing out when their shift is over.

I didn’t want to be swamped with curious people around my tent. And I also didn’t want to cycle in the dark. Good camping spots were nowhere to be found. I was pressed for good advice. I looked around and then looked around some more. Then I crouched over my bicycle in a brief moment of despair. Then I saw a big drainage tunnel under the road. Big enough to fit my tent and my bicycle. Weather forecast promised no rain. I had sworn never to crawl into one of those drainage tunnels to sleep but I forfeited. I carried my bicycle off the road and peeked inside the tunnel. It was surprisingly clean. I had to make a quick decision before some curious eyes would spot me. Ok, let’s do it, I said to myself with an encouraging voice. I pushed my bicycle in and then my panniers and then myself. The tent got pitched and I put myself inside. I fell asleep thinking that it better not rain.

Several magical and eventful days after leaving Jimisar, I reached the border zone between China and Mongolia. To enter the toll free zone, I had to pass a police checkpoint and on the other side was a small settlement of hotels and restaurants. I spent the night at a hotel getting ready to cross into Mongolia the next day.

Click here to read my tales from my biketour across the Mongolian rolling steppes. In the next chapter of this journal I have crossed back into China after spending a couple of months in the remote land of the herding nomads.

Getting back into east China was very different from the west. The police presence was gone and there were hardly any police checks. It all seemed more relaxed. After being in remote Mongolia with all their empty land it was going to be an abrupt change coming back to densely populated eastern China.

However, I was going to ease into getting back to crowds of people. I had to cross Inner Mongolia before reaching the outskirts of Beijing. It was some long days in a flat arid desert landscape which gave way to green steppes and farmlands. It continued like this for days until the hills north of Beijing started to rise up. Here you’ll find lengthy restored sections of the Great Wall. Ever since being a child I heard the tale about astronauts being able to see the Great Wall of China from outer space. If this is actually true or not, I don’t know. Actually, I think it was my dad telling the story of the great ancient Chinese and their feats of engineering. He always liked to add a dramatic touch. Nevertheless, as a young kiddo, I was impressed boundlessly. Just as with the great pyramids of Egypt, I was convinced that aliens had constructed these giant structures because surely no human would ever be able to create something so amazing with their bare hands and no machinery.

The childish amazement hadn’t left me as I first spotted a section of the Great Wall from my bicycle. I lodged myself in a hotel and spent the entire day walking as much of the wall as possible. It looked so much taller and bigger on photos and when you are a kid the grandeur of everything is just more inflated. Still it was the length of it and the impossible location of it on ridge tops that made me as impressed as I was back then as a young kiddo. It truly is a wonder of the ancient world.

The Great Wall is strategically located north of Beijing. I guess back then, the main idea was to fend off any threats from the Mongolians which once was the greatest empire of the world. It was only a short downhill ride before I entered the mega metropolis of Beijing. You can spend hours on a bicycle just crossing it. It’s wonderfully chaotic and busy. One of many good things about Chinese cities are their wide bicycle lanes. They are actually as wide as a car road and it makes it very easy to cycle through cities like Beijing which otherwise would have been a nightmare. The bicycle lanes are still heavily packed with traffic but they are mainly made up of local Chinese scooting around on their electric bikes that look like a mix between a moped and a bicycle. I was relieved to learn that cycling through this mega city was pretty easy and with a quaint smile I rolled my bike into my downtown hostel and got myself ready for some sightseeing.

I’ve seen the epic biographical drama titled The Last Emperor which was the first time I heard about the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square was well known for other more negative reasons and together with the Summer Palace, the old imperial garden of the Qing dynasty, I had my top sights laid out in front of me. I managed to pre-book tickets for The Forbidden City. I was surprised to learn that you were not allowed to enter Tiananmen Square without a free but booked entry ticket which allows you entry for a few hours in given time periods of the day. With a bit of hassle I managed to book the Tiananmen Square ticket via WeChat and I managed to see the flag ceremony. I spent a whole day at the Summer Palace being utterly amazed about all the ancient architecture. All my boxes for Beijing got a tick and it certainly was some action packed days.

I was not done with the city at all but I had a long way to go to Qingdao and my visa days were running out. Someday I really hope that I will be allowed a longer duration on my visa but for now I had to settle with what I got and since I wanted to cycle all the way to my end destination in China, I’d better get going.

I laid out a daily mileage plan. At least 100 km per day. The terrain was flat as a pancake so it was certainly doable. I was not going to spend any time looking for camping spots but I would instead head straight for a pre-booked hotel. I would set a goal at the beginning of the day and I would reach it. The area between Beijing and Qingdao is incredibly densely populated. You cycle from city to city and in between there are suburbs. Every inch of the land is either occupied by a house or farmland. My strategy of doing hotels every night made good sense. Hotels are cheap and plentiful so finding a place to sleep every night would be a piece of cake. Or so I thought.

Finding a hotel was actually a pain. Everyday I would look on online booking platforms like Trip.com and find a hotel in the lower price class. Of course I would double check that the hotel I booked would be marked as accepting foreigners. At night I would show up and then four out of five times they would tell me that they didn't accept foreigners. Apparently, hotels in China need to be registered and given permission to have foreign guests. The cheaper hotels tend not to be able to do just that.

The thing about Trip.com is that they would relocate you to a different hotel free of charge or give a full refund plus compensation since they had marked the hotel as accepting foreigners but were wrong. It was a sweet deal as I often got upgraded to a really fancy and expensive hotel or got a refund. Some nights I could easily pick 3 hotels that didn’t accept foreigners and then receive refund and compensation for all of them before being upgraded in the end. I actually ended up earning money instead of paying money to stay at hotels. The downside was that it could take hours before I finally was in a hotel room.

Some cities would not have that many hotels accommodating foreigners and other cities would have none at all. It happened a couple of times that I was stranded at 9PM in a city without a hotel to stay at. I would then cycle an hour to the next city and start booking hotels all over again. Needless to say, it was a tiresome exercise and I would actually have preferred it differently. Some nights I got a room close to midnight and just went straight to bed in order to get up early the next day to complete my daily mileage goal.

Chinese cities are really colorful. They are masters at putting up light decorations which come to life after dark. I really wanted to explore the cities I arrived at by night but instead I ended up chasing foreign enabled hotels. I was thinking about extending my visa in Qingdao and travel around the country by train and bus but this hotel thing completely killed any joy of traveling.

So my days from Beijing to Qingdao were just one long hotel booking exercise. Sure I thought about camping in my tent but since this area was so densely populated my only chance of finding a camping spot was in city parks and they were busy and noisy and finding a hidden corner was difficult.

So my last week of cycling in China was not the best experience. I basically only cycled in urban environments. The natural beauty was lost and the roads were super busy with heavy traffic. I’ve never seen so many trucks in my life. Every minute a truck blasted my ears with the deafening sounding horn. I never got a quiet moment and I guess this was too much to bear for me after the complete opposite in Mongolia. I’m sure there are plenty of good places to tour around in China but Beijing to Qingdao was not for me. When I think back on this part of my trip it would always be the stressful and joyless race to Qingdao.

I perhaps should have gone for the visa extension in Beijing to give me a bit of a breather so I could have avoided racing to Qingdao. It’s always easy being all the wiser in hindsight. But now I was at the end and I’ve reached the other ocean. On my first night in Qingdao I walked down to Huilan Pavilion that stands at the end of Zhanqiao Pier. For the first time in almost a half year I could sense the salty ocean breeze and hear the sound of the ocean crashing into the coastal barrier. Three months ago or so, in Ürümqi, I was in the most remote city from any ocean in the world. Crazy to think about.

That night at the Zhanqiao Pier was a special one. I sat there next to the pavilion for hours and it actually turns out that it’s a quite famous pavilion. It’s depicted as the logo on the Tsingtao beer brand label. Tsingtao is another way of spelling Qingdao and the city is home to this international and famous beer brewery. That was a fun fact to learn. And since I was in the city of beers I knew what I was going to do the last day in China. Beer museum.

I sampled my fair share of beers. The beer museum of Tsingtao was a highlight of the city. They actually have a whole street aptly named Beer Street that runs along the original brewery which is very much still in operation. It was a very good last day soaking myself in beer and being in a very relaxed and satisfied mood. What an accomplishment getting so far.

In Qingdao I stayed at the Wheat Hostel. The owner is remarkable and his family is very kind and friendly. If you ever swing by Qingdao, pay this hostel a visit. He’s a seasoned traveler. In his younger days he walked around China for years and also did a tour all the way to Tibet on a one geared bicycle. He has so many stories to tell and he has dedicated an entire floor of the hostel to showcase all his amazing photos. He even threw a goodbye party for me and another biketourer with a banquet of food and drinks.

My Chinese biketour ended well. What a way to spend my last days and it was time to get myself onto the Weidong Ferry to Incheon and South Korea. A new country and new adventures awaits.

• journal china biketouring

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