water town

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.

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

Zhouzhuang “Venice of the East”

by Johnny Isaak ·

“Venice of the East”

Not far from the pulsing steel and concrete jungle of Shanghai lies an entirely different China. Away from the hectic nonstop traffic and revving engines of darting metallic Lamborghini and Ferrari sports cars is a land that harkens back across the ages to a simpler time, a time of dynasties, tea culture, and silk. Adventure cycling destination: Zhouzhuang.

Beyond the shadows of the shiny steel and glass ultramodern skyscrapers only a short jaunt across the Yangtze River delta through an intriguing jumbled mishmash of farms and factories and just about everything in between exists an ancient village of arching black tile roofs, aging whitewashed plaster walls, and centuries-old stone bridges spanning a labyrinthine network of narrow canals and waterways that is this ancient water town.