After 5 month (!?!) of not cycling it is time to hit the road again. Since my arrival in Lhasa Xmas 2007 many things happened.

January and February I was laying down dead sick recovering from a severe pneumonia that stroke hard on me (and other cyclists in Lhasa too). March to mid April I was out mountaineering most of the time, just interrupted by the Lhasa riots that messed up all planing. Since April 13th (the day I was expelled from Lhasa/Tibet after some “nice” meetings with the authorities and trying to turn down a lot of strange accusations) I was basically dashing around to apply for a new passport in Beijing and meet my brother Boris. So Lhasa was off the list and the next meeting point in Golmud had to be canceled due to new travel restrictions. Finally we managed to meet in Xian, just right in time to celebrate Boris’ birthday. By this time I had already been to Beijing and left my gear in Golmud that needed to be collected- a nice task if you are not allowed to go there anymore;-) With the growing xenophobia before the Olympics that resulted in a 30 day only visa for Boris and me hitting the 10.000km mark riding on the train it was time to shuffle our ideas: were to go next? First to Beijing due to visa and power shopping (gear and bicycle), but then? Not an easy task if you dreams go wild looking on the Asia reference map that basically covers Lisboa (Portugal) to Darwin (Australia) We decided to trade in tropical climate of South East Asia for continental climate. Today we will head up north to Mongolia and south Siberia until mid October. Then Boris will fly to India and I will return to China via Vladivostok and South Korea in order to follow up on the job search.

So finally we have a new plan for the next month that feels good, even if organising the visa to both countries is a pain in the ass.

Bambitee

PS: I just realized that some entries on the homepage are corrupted due to database upgrades. This will be fixed in the next weeks together with the last pics starting March 2008…