Bikes, bikes, and we meet Ben and Sarah 

Jinghong was great. We had a horrible time checking in, but after that things went fine. We walked around town and found an excellent juice bar, a brewery, and a breakfast place that served pancakes. We found excellent dumplings across the street. The food was so great compared to northern Laos.

Jinghong had a lot of Chinese tourists. We haven't been many places where we see people from that country on vacation. It was a good change. We also saw workers walking around swinging glass mason jars of green tea, leaves and all. The sidewalks kind of sucked. Sometimes you'd step on a brick that looked solid, but sank under weight, causing mud to shoot up from below. After the first day we only walked around town in hiking boots.

The ride had totally covered our bikes with mud and caked dirt. While we were moving the bikes to our new room (in a different building on the hotel grounds), I saw a carwash. There were some hoses and a couple of guys playing a game, cards, I think. I waked up and asked if I could use the hose when they all sprang into action! They didn't seem to think it was weird at all to bring a bike to a carwash. They totally scrubbed down both bikes with soap and then used a high-pressure hose to rinse them off. It was free. I guess it came with our hotel room.

We tried in vain to find an ATM that would take our card (We never were able to use our ATM card in Laos, China, Tibet, and as I type this, we can't find an ATM in Kathmandu). Turns out our card works nowhere in China. So we had to take out a cash advance on a credit card--a difficult feat since we had written "SEE ID" instead of our signature on all our cards. (That's a great antitheft measure in the US, but it confuses most merchants in Asia, mo matter how much explaining we do). Our first cash advance, In Vientiane, Eric had to sign SEE ID next to his name, and they gave him grief because he wrote SEE ID on the cash form differently than he had on the card. In China, we prepared ourselves by signing our signatures over the SEE ID.

Eric went up to do it. They gave him a hard time and he got mad. But they gave him the money. Flustered, he walked away from the counter with the money held in front of him in both hands, like a fanned deck of cards. We counted it out and put it away in a special money pouch and went back to our hotel. Half an hour later Eric realized his wallet was gone! We took a rickshaw back to the bank and his wallet was laying open where he had left it, on the counter. It was lunchtime (kind of like Siesta, from noon till 2 p.m.) and no one had noticed it, not even the staff. Eric is so lucky.

We planned to fly to Chengdu instead of ride because Chengdu is a long way off and we only had 30-day visas. We figured we could get only a 30-day extension, most of which we'd need for our planned ride on the Friendship Highway, from Lhasa to Kathmandu. So we went to the air ticket office, where I got a taste of what it's like to stand in line.

I went up to the counter and stood behind the woman in front of me. Then another woman came up and stood belly up to the counter, in front of me. That pissed me off. I tapped her on the shoulder and smiled and pointed to myself and the other woman. She understood but turned away. I did this three times, trying to be annoying as possible. Each time she turned away. Finally, I stepped over her shopping bag, shoved myself up the counter, and pushed her aside with my elbow. She kept waving a form in the clerk's face, so I took out my pen and used my pen to bat it away. It got very physical. Finally the clerk recognized me and gave me a form to fill out, so I had to step out of line. It was disappointing.

Eric and I filled them out and I was fed up with lines so I asked Eric to try. (More bad news: Right then, I tried to use the Newton and it didn't work. It started working again a day later, but I was really panicked).

I looked up to see if Eric was getting pushed out of line like I had been. To my surprise, he was right up there, belly to the counter. It turns out a woman who had just finished her business at the counter told Eric to take her space. People are so nice to him.

We flew to Chengdu on Aug. 11. When we landed we met an American guy named Jay who leads bike tours in northwestern Sichuan. He was very chatty but he had no clue where there was a good bike shop in Chengdu, where he lives. We agreed to meet for dinner sometime. He turned out to be a nice guy.

Although I didn't feel like riding, it was a lot easier than paying a ransom get to town from the airport. We rode about 20 flat kms to town and checked into the Traffic hotel, the main travelers' hangout, for 200 yuan a night (for a double with a great shower).

We spent a whole week walking around, trying out restaurants, and taking photos of the thousands of cyclists from huge pedestrian bridges. Each wide boulevard has a huge bike lane on each side, and some of the bike lanes were as wide as Hugo St. in San Francisco, where we used to live. Old people, young people, fat people, girls with miniskirts, guys with cell phones, middle-aged women with bonnets, everyone was out riding. The mains streets had huge valet bicycle parking lots. Many of the bikes had "Intel Inside" stickers on their fenders. I think the stickers were put on by paid agents of agents of Intel.

At one corner, I even saw a woman stuffing flyers into the baskets of bicycles that passed.

People sat in groups of four around low tables on the sidewalks, playing various games including Go, Chinese Chess, Mahjong (most common) or cards. We once saw a woman washing her long hair in a simple plastic basin right on the sidewalk.

The highlight of our stay in Chengdu was meeting Ben and Sara, some mergers-and-acqusitions lawyers who had just quit their posts in Tokyo and had six weeks off before starting new jobs back in their home of London. Like us, they were planning to fly to Lhasa to ride the Friendship Highway. We hung out with them in the hotel restaurant and had dinner with them somewhere else one night. We were really lucky to meet them because they ended up riding the highway before us and sent great road notes to us before we left.

Next: cycling from Chengdu to Chongqing.

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