The Summer of 2008, I was starting to get a hang of this whole 'being a translator thing'. Like so many other things in my life, I hadn't actually planned on being a translator. It just sort of happened to me while I was planning on doing other things. People kept insisting on giving me translation work to do in my free time and, owing to inconsistent and unstable work, even though I knew I was totally incompetent and shouldn't be asked to be a translator, I was starting to make more money off of the translation than I was at Having a Real Job.

I had a four month gap from the end of one Real Job to the beginning of another, and I didn't have anything part time especially lined up so I told my friends and family and the readers of my journal on crazyguy that I was biking from Hainan to Ulan Bataar. What I actually meant when I said that was "I'm going to try to bike to Guangzhou". Because, two and a bit years earlier, I'd tried to bike from Guangzhou to Haikou and, prior to being hit by a motorcycle and ending the trip, spent a fairly large amount of my time on buses. I'd also done a bike trip to Hanoi that was about 40% bus, and a few Round the Island trips with the bike club that were about 30% support vehicle, so I didn't think—not in my wildest imaginings—that I was actually going to make it to Ulan Bataar.

Fairly early on in the trip, I started telling random people who asked me where I'm going "I'm going to Beijing" because first of all, I would need to stop there to get a visa for Mongolia; and secondly, they got that, they understood that. The 2008 Olympics were about to happen and—even if they would never do it—they were reading in the newspapers and on the internet news about people doing crazy stuff like riding a bike to Beijing or running there. Even when I told people "Beijing" was my destination, I still didn't really think it was; I still thought I was going to give up some point much much earlier than that, but—in the end—I made it there. I barely took any buses and I made it to Beijing just in time to catch the opening ceremony of the Olympics and decide I'd rather do some hanging out in big cities for a while.

I was on the road for 77 days and I did somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 kilometers. The journal records 4,273 but it's missing a few days, the odometer read 5,142 but it had some extra riding around cities and pre- and post- tour riding numbers that got added on.

It was an amazing trip. And, with the pressures of the world insisting that having a job was important combined with my bad leg deciding that walking was far more effort than it was worth, it was not only my first great tour, it was probably going to be my last.