Me and my moto

So, having gone through the tortuous process of getting a Chinese driving licence, buying a motorbike was relatively easy. (Of course it still took me about ten times as long as anyone else in this city - except my boyfriend!)

I went for a similar one to Rick's, but Haojue, a Chinese brand, rather than a Suzuki. I suspect things might drop off more easily than with his bike. I've taken it out to practise on a couple of weekends now. The first weekend we did two day trips, the second one quite long. I was absolutely exhausted!!! All went well except for dropping the bike a couple of times...

The first was in a small town / village where we'd stopped for lunch. I'd come to a halt behind Rick's bike and he was busy ordering some lunch. I went to put my stand down and thought that I'd been successful, so I let go of the weight of the bike. Sadly, the stand had obviously flipped back up again and so of course the bike started falling over. I hadn't expected this in the slightest and certainly couldn't support the weight of the bike myself!!! Rick was otherwise engaged and didn't realise at first what had happened, so it was actually some random Chinese man that helped me.

I was OK, apart from a developing bruise and lump on one ankle. My strongest feeling was one of embarrassment, but this also quickly gave way to pain and a bit of shock!!! Poor me.

Then, we took a short-cut which involved me doing my first bit of off-roading, something that I hadn't even thought about doing. It was fine, but at one point I had to go through a muddy bit, got a bit scared and suddenly the bike was on its side in the mud. Fortunately I was ready for it that time and got out of the way.

So, after that baptism of fire, I felt a bit more confident as we set off last weekend for Jinggangshan, home of revolutionary action. It was the May 1st holiday, so we took three days for the trip - one to go, one staying there and then another to come back. It was pretty successful, I think, though again I felt very tired. One reason is simply getting used to driving again and also getting used to riding a motorbike. Another is a feature of the roads here. Physically, lots of the roads are in bad repair - potholes etc. In addition, there are always hazards - people and / or animals drifting into the road, other drivers doing crazy and just plain dangerous things. It is certainly not for the faint-hearted.

This time I only dropped my bike once - going through a muddy puddle, skidding out the other side and drifting periliously close to a bushy hillside!! But I did refuse to go on the same short-cut on the way back...

Jinggangshan was nice, though much busier than last time. We didn't do that much while we were there, though we did visit the revolutionary museum, which had some captions in English. We also heard 'laowai' and 'waiguoren' [both words for 'foreigner'] about a million times. Lucky us! Not many foreigners make it to Jinggangshan - though we did spot a couple. Amazement on both sides there.

Last week I took my bike into the garage for its first service and oil-change. The people there were quite curious and (I like to think) impressed by where we'd been.