Route
China is absolutely humongous.
Where do you start riding?
Which roads are best?
Where to end up?
Easy: just follow someone else's route. In my case it's The First Army's aptly named Long March.
The Long March actually involved a few separate journeys (see above map), with different groups of Communist soldiers heading in various directions. My goal is to roughly trace part of the trek undertaken by Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong et al, as it's this First Army route which is the most famous, wiggling west from Jiangxi in the southeast and ending in Shaanxi, in China's far north.
Mao proclaimed that the surviving marchers covered 25,000 li, an old unit of measurement equal to half a kilometer, but which was elastic, the length of it depending on how arduous the journey felt: mine could easily end up being a million or more. However, using Google Maps to plot a pretty similar route, it's actually something like 6,000km. Even though this distance is significantly less, it's still quite a lot to do - and for me impossible within a 30-day period, this being the current length of a tourist visa.
A realistic goal is to get across to Zunyi, in Guizhou, before heading south to get a flight home from Guiyang. This requires me getting a 30-day visa extension while there. My fingers are crossed. So, factoring in rest days (one a week) and some leeway for unforeseen incidents, it means pedalling the bike an average of around 60km per day within a <50-day period to complete this roughly 2,500km leg.
As well as not having much time, The Long March route isn't as straightforward as following a set of road signs. Various books and Web sites give varying accounts of what happened where and when. The thing is, there were no paved roads across China's vast countryside back in the 1930s and the 80-odd-thousand marchers were sometimes spread out over 15 kilometers wide and a week often separated the front from the back. Then there were diversionary groups splitting away only to team up with the main group somewhere along the way. Basically, the marchers simply forded rivers, clambered over rocky mountains and meandered across rice paddies, not giving two hoots about posterity. It's confusing, to say the least. I've just done my best to join the dots.
The 'dots' are places where battles were fought and meetings held. Eighty years on, highways have been built, and cars and heavy vehicles now predominate. You might call that progress, yet the thought of cycling across the southern part of the country accompanied by a constant stream of honking, fume-spewing trucks doesn't appeal. My preference is to wind my way through villages, venture off the beaten track, and take things easy. That's the general idea. We'll just see how it all pans out.
The First Army started their exodus in October, while my plan is to begin riding at the start of February. It's not shown on the plotted route below, but my journey kicks off with an overnight boat trip from Taiwan to the island of Xiamen, which isn't a million miles from The Long March's departure point. This appeals because it saves messing about getting my bike on a plane. Various minor roads which I've highlighted as my intended beeline are prefixed with an X, so you can think of them as X-rated, suitable for adults only. On some mountainous sections I'm not even on those, but on basic trails, the kind the Reds could have trekked along. It's going to be a challenge.
Marian advised me to seek out maps published locally by Star Maps Press and in the end a friend based in China bought some for me and sent them over. They only cost around US$3 each, but the scale is 1:850 000, which isn't very detailed for cycle touring on back roads.
My plan is to supplement the Star Maps (copied pages) with a 7-inch tablet that has screen shots of the Google Maps highlighted route with some English notes added. This means I should be able to find my way while off the World Wide Web. Fingers crossed!
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3 years ago
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