Tales of the 'ANGRY GINGER'

Yep, travelling with a bike is never short of an adventure when it comes to logistics and last night and today in Beijing has supplied an endless amount of challenges.

Example No 1.  Arrive at 1am to the taxi rank after 2 long flights with 6 of you and six bikes plus bags.  Taxi que is 40+ deep in front of you.  You get offered that for 600 Yuan (small fortune over here) they can take you and all your luggage in one vehicle.  Up rolls a standard van....  Yeah no way is that fitting all of us and bikes and vans.  In fact it was a pretty tight squeeze to fit all the bikes.  So for just another 400 Yuan you get another vehicle for 4 of us with the bags that don’t fit...  Going price we later find out for taxi from airport is 100 Yuan.  Let me also mention the driver of that 2^nd car couldn’t find the hotel for over an hour...  Yep arrive something like 3am – 5am melb time.  Just a tad bit tired.

So today we thought we just had to pick up our train tickets.  Turned out after walking about 4kms to get there that we had to take our bikes to a luggage office today.   So walk 4kms back and try to get vehicles to get now 7 of us there...... Nope no luck.    We walk the 2+kms with bikes along the roads to try and find this office.  The address we had given to us written in Chinese though lead us down some back street behind the station but we found nothing there.  So that’s another 1.54kms of walking with bike boxes.  Damn glad I had those wheels. 

Eventually we found it some 4hrs later.  Yep 4 hrs. 

We still had to find a camping store to buy camping matts for a few and then a bike store to try and get Air canisters for a few.  So another 5kms+ of walking.  Lets just say we all enjoyed a few beers with our dumpling dinner.  

But hey, it was an adventure and through all that you enjoy the challenge. At least we did. 

7 happy aussies will board the Trans Mongolian Railway tomorrow for the next part of our adventure.