China

Exploring Ancient Xinchang Village

Fall weather is an excellent time to ride. The overcast skies and cooler temperatures typical for Mid-Autumn Festival make for pleasant cycling. It’s a great time to get out and it the road and spin those pedals, especially in China.

For Mid-Autumn Festival, our family celebrated the holiday with a family lunch and dinner. In the evening there was an all-nighter playing mahjong for those who could hang. I wasn’t one of them. Besides, I would be playing on scared money anyway. Always wanting to work a bit of adventure cycling in wherever possible, decided to make a couple days of it by riding out to the ancient water town village of Xinchang near where we would be staying.

Follow Your Dreams

by Johnny Isaak ·

When it comes down to it, there is nothing between you and your dreams but thin air and opportunity. And more times than not, it’s about working up the guts to go and just doing it.

As a child, I never thought it possible to have the opportunity to travel the world in search of adventure in exotic faraway lands. As with most kids in small town America, I grew up believing my life was about getting a job, paying a mortgage, and living a “normal” life that eventually led to a quiet retirement and old age.

[Read more…] about Follow Your Dreams

Going Local: Exploring the Watertown of Qibao

by Johnny Isaak ·

Adventure Close to Home

With commitments and obligations keeping me in the city for a few months before the next long adventure, I’d been yearning to get out on the bike again.

The milder and warmer spring weather around Shanghai was beginning to provide excellent opportunities to get out on the bike for local adventures.

It was time to get out the bike and explore some of the sights in around the city to “see what could be seen.” After all, in China, a country with over five thousand years of written history, surely there was something to be discovered and explored.

Practically anywhere you go in China, the Chinese people have a rich, robust culture foreign to Westerners, which makes for interesting places to see and experience. [Read more…] about Going Local: Exploring the Watertown of Qibao

Exploring China’s “Wild Wall”

by Johnny Isaak ·

Peering from atop of the ruined stone ramparts that once marked the edge of known civilization for the Han Chinese through the morning haze out across the vast and intimidating mountains to the north, one could not help but imagine life in the Chinese dynasties and the harrowing experiences imperial soldiers must have faced defending the Middle Kingdom against the savage marauding warrior trips of the Xiongnu sweeping down from the hinterlands of the Eurasian Steppe to visit havoc and destruction on the cultivated and ordered Han society.

Free of the thick, jaundiced air, congested streets, oppressive heat, and clogged tourist attractions of Beijing, rugged highlands to the north of China’s capital lend themselves to an unfettered exploration of the Great Wall of China and its ancient ruined ramparts ensconced atop of forbidding mountain ridges blocking hostile encroachment from the north.

Prizing authenticity over the highly commercialized “Disneyland” experience the more popular and overcrowded tourist destination Badaling has to offer, one can hire a car and head for the lesser traveled sections of the Great Wall that stand above the village of Mutianyu located about 70 some odd kilometers north of Beijing.

Escape the thickening jaundiced air, congested streets, oppressive heat, and clogged tourist attractions of Beijing. Search the ruined ramparts atop of forbidding mountains blocking the Eurasian Steppe to the north. Clamber among the scattered stones of the “wild walls” of the Changcheng or the Long Wall as the Chinese know it. [Read more…] about Exploring China’s “Wild Wall”

Go Your Own Way: Be Your Own Explorer

by Johnny Isaak ·

Just about wherever you go nowadays chances are someone’s already been there. You’d be challenged to find many places on this planet where humans haven’t already been. Virtually everywhere you go, someone’s been there before you. And worse yet, if it’s a really cool place, somebody’s probably put up a fence around it and is charging admission.

The world is changing. Adventure travel isn’t what it used to be a hundred, even fifty years ago. But that’s no reason you shouldn’t go. If you travel to where you never been, it will be your first time. The journey will still be a rewarding adventure if you approach it right. And in a sense, we are all explorers in our own right.

Mia’s Cycling Adventure

by Johnny Isaak ·

The Girl Wants to Ride

“Dad, I want to ride with you tomorrow,” Mia declared to me as I pumped up the tires on my Divide and readied it for the following day’s cruise out to Chongming Island. Now at the last minute, Mia suddenly expressed an interest in going.

Adventure Cycling in Taiwan (Part 2)

by Johnny Isaak ·

Journey of the Immortals

We began pedaling in the rain under gray dull low-hanging skies. Cycling from our hotel to a little noodle stall down the street for breakfast, the rain was light and misty but growing in intensity. By the time we’d sucked down two steaming bowls of piping hot mian xian (beef noodles) and chugged a couple of liters of orange juice, the precipitation had increased to a steady pour and threatened to make it a true “adventure” day.

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