Location: Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Day 804
Miles on the clock: 19,910


I clambered onto my nearly-nine-months vacant saddle and began a mad race westwards across Mongolia with my visa close to expiry. Old Geoff (my rusty, long-suffering bicycle) had been neglected while I worked in Beijing, walked to Mongolia and then horse-trekked. The muscles required to drive him had suffered neglect too. 

Location: Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia
Day 709
Miles on foot: 910

I stood at dawn eyballing the chillingly indifferent portrait of Chiarman Mao and pondering the paths ahead. The man himself lay (dead) a hundred yards south of me with an already long queue of fans waiting to pay homage to his preserved corpse. The People's Liberation Army soldiers had just finished their daily flag hoisting ceremony over Tiananmen Square.  

Location: Beijing, China
Day 663

Following five months in Beijing, my bank account is a few pounds richer and my body a few pounds fatter. I arrived just as winter was setting in and made the decision to work and save for the season instead of immediately continuing north to Mongolia where the weather is significantly colder (Ulaan Baatar is the world’s coldest capital).

Many things have struck me during my time in Beijing. One of the most pleasantly surprising things is the ease with which a foreigner can arrive and quickly build a life. Admittedly, I did have one contact which helped but it took just two weeks of dabbling with part time English teaching/tutoring before I found a full-time, salaried job.

Location: Beijing, China
Day 516
Miles on the clock: 18,115  

Delving into rural China again; Guanxi Province; the G322 road from Nanning to Yangshuo; countless conical limestone karsts with lush skins of greenery serrating the horizon; the glowing emerald carpet of flat farmland connecting the karsts in the golden late-afternoon light; tidy little sheaves leaning together in freshly harvested fields; a long stretch of hopelessly pot-holed road; a meal of boiled starfish skin with an indifferent “chef” smoking, hocking and spitting a couple of yards away; a village woman spying from behind a tree as I perform my morning defecation al fresco; the northerly headwind which I was to battle most days on the ride to Beijing; a ten minute conversation with a women using online translation that ended in her asking if I speak Chinese for a third time; a road over rolling hills, loosely tracing a river, that brought me to Yangshuo.

Location: Nanning, Guanxi Province, China
Day 461
Miles on the clock: 16,265

Leaving Bangkok. Leaving crowds. Leaving chaotic streets. The small back roads to Cambodia were rutted and quiet. One last night in a Thai monastery. I was left to my own devices and shared a simple rice breakfast with the monks while two cats, both bald in patches, and one limping, stalked each other around a heap of laundry.

Day 279
Location: Luang Nam Tha, Laos
Miles on the clock: 11,305

The train arrived in Kunming carrying a significantly heavier and healthier me than when I arrived in Beijing almost a fortnight before. I spend a couple of days in the calm, leafy provincial capital visiting a museum about the province’s numerous ethnic minorities, meeting other travellers, and tinkering with my bike which contracted its first snap in the frame while riding around the city. In a market I snacked on street food, trying not to be nauseated by the extensive tables of pig heads, pig tails, pig balls, pig penises, fatty sheep buttocks, buckets of squirming eels, eggs with half-developed foetuses and many other unidentifiable “delicacies”. 

Having successfully slipped past my first checkpoint, I rode on in the darkness. By sunrise I was 10 miles on and snaking up switchbacks towards a 4980m pass near which I camped; insulating my tent by sealing any gaps between the canvas and the ground with snow. A vividly red Chinese flag imposingly marked the pass and I climbed a little way by for a view of K2 (the world’s second tallest mountain at 8,611m) straddling the border with Pakistan. 

Day 249
Location: Beijing, China
Miles on the clock: 10,610

My typical winter’s morning in Tibet: my watch is tucked under my hat so I can hear the alarm which wakes me with a groan. The sun hasn’t yet risen but it is light enough to see in the tent without a torch. I stare with resignation at the glistening few millimetres of frost that have formed on the tent’s inner sheet. Vainly, I try to avoid knocking it off while wrestling with the three drawstrings and two zips that lock me tightly inside my two sleeping bags. I retrieve the warm pair of gloves from the crotch of my thermal leggings and put them on.