Blast From the Past: This Same Trip in 2003 - Pandemic Purgatory - CycleBlaze

January 29, 2021

Blast From the Past: This Same Trip in 2003

What happened over the last couple of days was a huge bummer, but it pales in comparison to what happened during my first attempt at this in 2003.  At that time I got as far as Ningde from the same place I started and had to turn around.  The elusive goal of Fuzhou was out of reach at that time, and now, the question is will I make it?  I was hoping the whole thing would go without a hitch this time to make up for the former disaster, but clearly this area is a magnet for trouble and things going wrong. 

The tour back then was my first major one in China.  Aside from a few small tours near Shanghai, this was a big step out.  I had just finished a job teaching English at a training center, and left with over 15,000 rmb in cash savings.  The goal was to bike from Wenzhou to Fuzhou as a warmup, then take a train to Shenzhen and fly to Bangkok for the first time.  The idea would be to upgrade my teaching credentials and start a new life in Thailand. 

At that time, everything was in cash.  Not wanting to openly display all that cash at once when buying stuff etc... I put it in a wallet separately and used smaller amounts on the order of 1000 rmb or so each time.  Most of this smaller cash was kept inside the paper map book that I used, i.e. no electronic maps at that time of course.  Aside:  now touring has gotten a lot more convenient with the phone.  Maps, money, and health codes are all used with the phone.  But then you sure as hell wouldn't want to lose the phone now would you?  There's always something isn't there.

Anyways, much of the tour back then was done after SARS was ending.  Another aside, SARS was just a drop in the bucket compared to COVID.  Most of the cases were around April to May when by the time my trip started in June of that year, the epidemic was on its way out. 

So the cycle tour basically started out exactly as the one now did.  The area was picked because earlier I had made friends with my students who lived there, and they had shown me around, so it seemed like a good idea to bike to Fuzhou.  The first day was pretty much the same, except the bridge out of Rui'An only had two lanes and was manned by cops stopping bikes that I had to dodge successfully.  The second day over the mountains was such a killer in comparison to what I did this time, I only made it as far as Zhirong and then stopped for the night.  The third day I found a hotel in Fu'An.  Since it was summer, it was super hot and most of the winds were going in the other direction, i.e. strong headwinds from the south.  It made for very difficult cycling.

Once in Fu'An I made the fatal mistake of putting aside my wallet full of all the cash inside a hotel drawer and then forgot about it.  Seems silly now I've gotten so much better at touring, but as for why I did that at the time it doesn't seem logical. 

The problem wasn't discovered until a few days later.  I biked to Ningde, stayed in a hotel, and it was the day after while going up the first mountain pass towards Fuzhou that I reached into my bag to check for my cash stash and it was missing.  I was devastated!  Since I couldn't recall which hotel I had lost it in, the only thing to do was go back and try all three:   Ningde, Fu'An, and Zhirong.  To this day I can't remember what I did with the bike.  Most probably I parked it at the hotel in Ningde, then took minibuses on the same day to revisit all the hotels mentioned.  And of course, none of them had what I was looking for.  From that point on, somehow I made it back to Shanghai.  Whether I had the bike or not, I can't remember.  It wasn't a priority anyway.  Most probably I took minibuses back to the Ningde hotel then a sleeper bus back to Shanghai.  The brain can't remember details from so long ago.

Somehow life went on.  I sorted out my things for a week at a friend's house, and she was quite accomodating.  She reassured me I would look back at this thing later in life and laugh.  The thought of repeating this same route 18 years later wasn't remotely on the radar screen.  And even now, it had problems of its own such as tire failures. 

Make no mistake about it, cycling this route is a very difficult undertaking.  Then and now, there are so many things that could go wrong.  I wasn't the only one to run into a trouble, a buddy of mine did this on a scooter a few years ago or at least he tried.  Once somewhere out of Wenzhou (most likely the first series of mountain passes) he abandoned the scooter on the side of the road and took the bus to meet his girlfriend in Fuzhou.  

During this recovery time I got a phone call saying that someone had found the wallet in Fu'An.  So that solved the mystery of which hotel it was, and this jogged the memory of leaving the wallet in a drawer for 'safe keeping'.  Obviously there was nothing of value left in the wallet.  They must have found my number from a business card left behind.  

Eventually I got a direct flight to Bangkok and went ahead with the teaching credential upgrade.  But this was stalled.  The first time my grandfather passed away, and I had to do an emergency flight back to Canada to deal with the funeral.  Once back in Thailand I successfully finished the qualification and taught for a few months, had a few flings, then traveled around SE Asia.  Eventually I got back to Shanghai to teach a bit some more, but then my Mom passed away and it was rinse and repeat the above.

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