Happy Christmas from Bangkok. We’ll celebrate by crossing the International Date Line on Christmas Day.
Bob and Claire Rogers prepare to return home from their adventurous tandem bicycle tour from Tibet to Bangkok.
Claire and Bob Rogers Read the rest of this article…
We took Zippy the tandem bicycle to ride yesterday go some place said Angkor Wat. Claire told it was a important. It is made of rocks people carved and piled up to make temples to a bunch of gods.
They have scary demons for gods to fight, or something. There is big snakes, elephants, and too, a crocodile carved into walls, and other stuff too.
There are whole armies fighting and different of their big important gods, including Buddha. I’m can’t know how they remember all these gods, but they must have been important for them to do hard work.
Oh, there are 1876 dancing nymphs carved there too, and Bob took a lot of pictures of them.
We went to several other temples that were just as interesting. Claire says we’re going to more today and tomorrow. I’m getting tired, and Bob wants a nap, but Claire says we’ll only be here once, so we gotta keep up to go.
Zippy and me liked the ride back best. It being dark and we no lights. Bob and Claire pedaled fast. We passed bicycles and tuk tuks and even cars. Then me and Bob talked to a little girl selling postcards while Claire got food.
Bob says they’ll put up some more pictures when he finds something called bandwidth. I don’t know what is, but he always grouches about it.
I having fun!
bye,
We saw the Yangtze overwhelm our aquamarine river, with a hard line of flood brown. With the load of sediment being carried by the Yangtze, here in the mountains with little agricultural land to contribute to the load, I wonder how long the impoundments behind the Three Gorges Dam, will last before filling up the impoundment? About a week ago we were within 100 kilometers of the true headwaters, much higher in the Himalayas.
We were in a spectacular gorge all day. This is a land of precipitous mountains, still thousands of meters high, and rushing rivers cutting deeply, quickly. We expect to see the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge in a few days, but I can’t imagine it being more spectacular than the ones we have already seen. Read the rest of this article…
So many things go on during our days of pedaling that we thought it would be good to post a video of what we see in an average day so far. This is combined from three days, with lots left out!
Lucky is enjoying his ride in my front pannier, though he is beginning to get gray, just like our clothes and bodies are from the pollution and dust. He is frustrated with the language as well as we are. I’ve asked him to do a post, but he says he’s not ready to pass judgement on this bicycle touring thing, or China.
We had some hills today and the locals of Ya’an make steep up angles and raise their eyebrows, sometimes exclaim loudly, when we tell them were we are going. One man went to great lengths to pantomime that we should take a bus.
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Near a street market, we stopped for a meal of baozi, and met a nice family group and a regular customer. Lots of language issues, but lots of fun communication and laughter. The regular customer bought our dinner! We presented the family with business cards. Stopped for pastries to eat on the way back to the binguan. One was filled with sweetened squash! Wonderful.
Claire: I’m trying to eat more adventurously on this trip and so far, the spicy Sichuan food is very tolerable. Good thing Bob has had me in training for the last few weeks. Tonight, we had mapo doufu, a regional tofu dish that is very spicy. We also actually did get green beans this time: wonderful crispy fried and salty. I’m sure our restaurant hosts thought we were out of our gourd for not wanting rice, but it was already more than we could eat and we hate wasting food, after all, there are starving children in America. Read the rest of this article…
A video of Bob and Claire Rogers riding their tandem, Zippy in the Chinese city of Chengdu, in preparation for their journey to Shangri-la Read the rest of this article…
What a day. My cousin pandas are big, even the babies are big, and they are always eating something called bamboo. I hear my friends P-bear, Foster and Lai Lai talk about it, but they don’t eat either. The Chinese people are proud of their pandas. There were lots of Chineese there making flashes with little cameras and getting into the pictures. I got into Bob and Claire’s pictures too. I think I’m prettier than those pandas. The old ones just laid on their backs and ate bamboo, but the young ones wrestled and pretended to bite and rolled around. One even slept in a tree. I guess they really are bears. Claire liked the babys est. I’m jealous. She coooed over me, but nothing like she did with the baby pandas! Read the rest of this article…