I thought I would repost a blog I wrote in 2019 about riding in the rain. It’s been raining nonstop here in So Cal for days. When I say nonstop, that’s what I mean. Ordinarily when you get caught in the rain, it lasts for a while and then stops, and then maybe starts again. With this atmospheric river (the meteorological term) we are experiencing, it has literally been constant rain. I’m staying warm and cozy with a cup of coffee here in my home, but looking out the window, I’m reminded of past rides in the rain…and with that intro, here’s our previous blog.
Wow, it has been pouring here for the last week, with little respite other than this past Sunday. Sunday was nice. Every other day this week and the tail end of last week has been nonstop rain. Big time. Buckets full. And my iPhone just started buzzing with a flash flood warning for this area. Wow again.
So I’m sitting here at the computer, enjoying a hot cup of coffee, looking out the window, and I’m thinking about what it’s like to ride in the rain. We’ve all had those rides. Those memories stick in my mind. I remember every one of those rides like they happened yesterday.
The first was the return leg of my first international motorcycle foray, when good buddy Keith Hediger and I rode up to Montreal and back. That was in the early ‘70s, and we didn’t call them adventure rides back then. They were just motorcycle rides. I was on a ’71 CB750 and Keith was on a Kawi 500cc triple. It rained the entire length of Vermont at about the same intensity you see in the video above. We had no rain gear. It wasn’t cold, but it sure was wet. We were soaked the entire day. Wouldn’t trade a minute of it. It was a great ride.
Another time was on the second ride I ever did in Baja with good buddy Baja John. It was pouring when we left at 4:00 a.m., and it didn’t let up for the entire day. I was on a Harley then, and we finally stopped somewhere around Colonet to checked into a cheap Baja hotel (a somewhat redundant term, which is becoming less redundant as Baja’s march in to the 21st century unfortunately continues). Leather, I found out on that trip, makes for lousy rain gear. I went hypothermic, and I had the shakes until 4:00 the following morning. It made for a good story, and the rest of that trip was epic. Down to Cabo, back up to La Paz, on the overnight ferry over to Mazatlan, out to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, back up to Nogales, and a thousand-mile one-day dash to make it home on New Year’s Eve. Wouldn’t trade a second of it.
Riding with Marty on the ’05 Three Flags Classic, we were caught in a downpour the second day out as we rode along the Dolores River in Colorado. It was a magnificent ride, with Marty on his K1200RS and me on my 1200cc Daytona. It wasn’t a drizzle. It was a downpour, just like you see in the video above. I remember it vividly, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Colombia had lots of rain, but it only hit us hard on the very first day. It was raining hard that first morning as we rode out of Medellin and into the Andes early on that fine Colombian morning, but it lightened up by breakfast. I had real rain gear and the only issues were visibility and passing 22-wheelers on blind curves, as my Colombian riders did with gleeful abandon. Exciting times. But good times, and certainly ones I remember. Colombia was an adventure for the ages. I wouldn’t trade a second of it for anything else.
I’d have to say the heaviest rains I ever rode through were in China, where it rains a lot. It probably rained 25% of the time on that trip, and the first few days were the worst. Imagine riding up into the Tibetan Plateau, in the dark, on dirt roads, in rain way heavier than what you see in the video above. That’s what it was like, and I loved every mile of that ride. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else on the planet.
You might be wondering…why no photos? Well, the simple truth is that my cameras on each trip were tightly wrapped in plastic bags, and I wasn’t about to break them out in the rain. That’s something I guess I forgot to mention in my earlier blog about what to bring on a Baja trip: Garbage bags. They take up almost no space when you’re not using them, and they work great for keeping stuff dry when you ride in the rain.
Yes, it really was like that. Somewhere along the Silk Road (the actual Silk Road) in China. I parked my RX3 when I saw the double rainbow, thinking someday I might use the shot in a blog about this adventure.
Almost 40 years ago, I saw my first Indiana Jones movie and it affected me profoundly. I started traveling the world stumbling upon lost empires. Things that have been swallowed by time, as they say. My motorcycle ride through Colombia had some of that. The Baja adventures have a bit of it, too. But none of the rides had more of an Indiana Jones flavor than did the ride across China. That ride was three years ago this month, and I still think about it every day. There were several things we saw in China that would have been right at home in an Indiana Jones movie. One was Liqian. I can best tell you about it with an excerpt from Riding China, the story of the ride with Joe Gresh across the Ancient Kingdom.
Gobi Gresh, aka Arjiu, stopping to smell the sunflowers in China.
The ride in the morning was just like yesterday. We rode the Silk Road at high speed, making great time in magnificent weather. I knew we were going to Wuwei (you could have a lot of fun with that name; it’s pronounced “woo wee”), but that was really all I knew about that day as we started out that morning. Boy, would this day ever be an interesting one!
It was to be a very full day, and Wuwei would be another one of those cities of several million people that seem to pop up in China every 50 to 100 miles. It was a huge city I had never heard of. China is an amazing place, and I was going to learn today it is more amazing than I could have imagined, and for a reason I would have never guessed. I’ve mentioned Indiana Jones movies a lot in this book. Today, we came upon something that could easily be…well, read on. This is going to be good.
After riding for a couple of hours, we left the freeway and entered a city called Yongchang. It seemed to be pretty much a regular Chinese city until we stopped. I needed to find a bathroom and Wong helped me. Wong is a big, imposing guy. He’s a corrections officer supervisor in Xi’an. He has a friendly look, but he can turn that off in a New York minute and become an extremely imposing figure. I saw him do that once on this trip, and I’ll tell you about that episode when we get to it.
Corrections Officer Supervisor Wong. He looks like a mischievous guy. This guy’s command presence was amazing. I saw him stop a car just by looking at it. Here, he’s enjoying the attention in Yongchang.
Anyway, I followed Wong through a couple of alleys and businesses until we came to an empty restaurant (it was mid-morning, and it had no customers). Wong spoke to the lady there, she nodded her head and smiled at me, and pointed to the bathroom. When I rejoined the guys back on the street, several women at a tailor shop (we had coincidentally stopped in front of a tailor shop) were fussing over Wong. He needed a button sewn on his jacket and it was obvious they were flirting with him. Wong seemed to be enjoying it. Like I said, Wong is a big guy, and I guess you could say he’s good looking. I think the women who were sewing his button on were thinking the same thing.
Beautiful young Chinese ladies. Mostly Chinese, anyway. The one on the left is entering my phone number in her contacts list.
Three teenage girls approached us and wanted to know about our bikes. Like many young Chinese, they spoke English (in China, you learn English as a second language in grade school; it is a strong advantage in Chinese society if you can speak English well). They wanted to practice with us. It was the routine stuff (“how are you?” “hello,” and things like that) until one of the teenaged girls looked directly at me and asked, “Can I have your phone number?” Gresh and I both had a good laugh over that. I actually gave her my phone number and she carefully entered it into her phone (and no, she hasn’t called me yet).
I was enjoying all of this immensely, taking photos of the girls, the seamstresses flirting with Wong, and the rest of China all around me. There was something different about one of those teenage girls. I couldn’t quite recognize what it was, but to me she definitely looked, well, different.
Yongchang statues. They don’t look as Chinese as you might think they should. There’s a reason for that.
It was at about that time that Sean approached me and said, “Dajiu, do you see those three statues over there?” He pointed to three tall statues that faced us, perhaps 300 yards away. I nodded yes. “If you look at their faces, you will see that they have Roman features.” Truth be told, I couldn’t really see it in the statues because they were too far away, but I grabbed a photo and later, on my computer, I could see something different. But before I looked at the photo, it all clicked for me. That’s what had my attention with that girl. We were literally in the middle of China and she didn’t look as Chinese as her two friends. She looked different.
All right, my friends, I need to go tangential here for a minute or two and share this story with you. Hang on, because this is real Indiana Jones stuff. No, scratch that. I’ve never seen an Indiana Jones movie with a story line this good (and I’ve seen all of them).
More than 2,000 years ago, before the birth of Christ, the two most powerful empires on the planet were the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty. These two superpowers of their time enjoyed a brisk trade relationship along the Silk Road. Yep, the very same trail we had been riding for the last few days. Between them (in what became Iran and its surrounding regions) lay a smaller empire called Parthia. For reasons only the Romans understood, Rome thought it would be a good idea to attack Parthia. They sent several Roman Legions to war (and to put this in perspective, a Roman Legion consisted of about 5,000 men). To everyone’s surprise (including, I would imagine, the Romans), the Parthians kicked Rome’s butt.
Wow, imagine that. Rome, defeated on the field of battle by the much smaller Parthian Empire. To put it mildly, things did not quite go the way the Romans thought they would.
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All of this severely disrupted trade between the Han Dynasty and the Romans, and nobody liked that. “Why the hell did you do that?” the Han Dynasty asked Rome. “We had a good thing going and you screwed it up.” At least that’s what I’m guessing the conversation went like. You get the idea.
Cooler minds prevailed and the Romans realized, yeah, that was a dumb move. The Romans told the Parthians, hey, it’s over, let’s be friends again. The war ended, the Chinese were happy, the Romans were happy, the Parthians were happy, and trade resumed. All’s well that ends well.
Well, sort of. There was still that matter of those pesky Roman legions that had invaded Parthia. They didn’t come back from that war, and for two thousand years, no one knew what happened to them. The Romans probably assumed their Legionnaires had all been slaughtered. No one knew until an Australian dude and a Chinese guy, both University archeologist types (starting to sound a little like Indiana Jones yet?) put a theory together in 1957. Hmmm, maybe those Romans had not been killed after all.
The Parthians, being bright enough to defeat the Romans, were not about to let the Legionnaires go home and perhaps attack them again in some future war. They didn’t want to kill the Romans, either. I guess they were kinder, gentler Parthians. Here’s where those two Aussie and Chinese archeologists enter the picture. They hypothesized that the Parthians told the errant Legionnaires, “Look, we don’t want to kill all you guys, but there’s no way we’re going to let you go back to Rome. And there’s no room for you here, either. Your only option is to keep heading east. Go to China. Maybe you crazy warmongering Italians will find nice Chinese girls and settle down.” With that, and as one might imagine, a hearty arrivederci, the Romans continued their eastward march straight into the middle of China.
And folks, the prevailing wisdom today is that is exactly what happened (although the prevailing wisdom evidently hasn’t prevailed very far, as I had never heard the story until that morning in Yongchang). In fact, prior to this theory surfacing, folks wondered why the Chinese referred to the area around Yongchang as Liqian. That’s not a Chinese word, and it’s unlike the name of any other Chinese town. The folks who know about these things tell me it is an unusual word in the Chinese language.
Liqian is pronounced “Lee Chee On.”
Get it yet?
Lee Chee On? Liqian?
Doesn’t it sound like “legion?” As in Roman legion?
A Chinese man in Liqian. This guy could be the Marlboro Man for a Chinese cigarette company!
I found all of this fascinating. I saw more than a few people around the Liqian area that had a distinct western appearance, and they all consented to my taking their photos when I asked. They recognize just how special their story is. The Chinese government is taking note of this area, too. They are developing a large theme park just outside of Yongchang with a Roman motif. We visited that theme park, and while we were there, Sergeant Zuo gave a book to me (printed in both English and Chinese) about the place. It is one of the two books I brought back from China, and that book is now one of my most prized possessions.
Imagine that: Roman legions, resettled in the middle of China, in a town called Liqian. And I rode there. On an RX3.
That photo at the top of this blog? All the gear, all the time?
Nah, it was nothing like that. One of the Zongshen guys had this idea about making a movie with a Roman Empire theme (you know, being as we were in Liqian and all that), and he bought along gladiator costumes. I’m not sure what Gresh and I were thinking (we’re not normally into gladiator movies) but we let those guys talk us into putting the costumes on and taking a few pics and videos. I guess you had to be there to understand it; it was all in the spirit of the ride.
Watch for our next Indiana Jones episode in China. It’s about the lost Buddhist grottos at Mo Gao in the Gobi Desert. There’s more good stuff coming your way. Stay tuned!
Want to read more about the ride across China? Pick up a copy of Riding China!
See that gap? That narrow space between the semi-truck hauling 20-foot long, 6-inch diameter solid aluminum rods and the BMW M6? I’m taking it, man, riding the horn button and twisting the throttle: zoom-zoom. See that intersection? The one with a whirlpool of scooters, three-wheeled single-cylinder diesel trucks and at least a hundred cars spinning left leaving eddys of pedestrians lapping at the edges? I’m a Hurricane Hunter riding straight into the maelstrom buffeted from side to side, tip-toeing around, swerving, cussing, sweating and focused, man, focused.
China’s city traffic requires all your intensity, taxes all your ability and is like nothing I have ever seen on the planet. There is no respite. There is no pause, You must lock on and track hundreds of individual trajectories from every point on the compass, constantly. Insane traffic scenarios unfold at a lightning pace, there’s no time to marvel at the stupidity. There’s only time to act.
The chaos is cultural: Chinese motorists drive like they’re riding a bicycle because they were only a few years ago. In less than one generation the Chinese have gone from pedals to 125cc Honda clones to driving millions of air-conditioned automobiles on surface streets designed for a sleepy agricultural nation. At any given moment dozens of traffic rules are being broken within 50 feet of your motorcycle. It’s a traffic cop’s dream.
Except that there aren’t any. For a Police State there are not many police in China. I’ve ridden entire days and not seen one Po-Po. My Chinese friends tell me the police show up for collisions but otherwise stay low-key. Because of this hands-off approach stop signs are ignored. Red lights mean slow down. You can make a left turn from the far right lane and no one bats an eye.
China uses the drive-on-the-right system but in reality left-side driving is popular with large trucks and speeding German sedans. Get out of the way or die, sucker. Painted lane-stripes are mere suggestions: Drive anywhere you like. Of course, sidewalks and breakdown lanes are fair game for cutting to the front of the cue.
China’s modernization process has happened so fast that the leap from two-wheeled utility vehicle to motorcycles as powersports fun never really occurred. In China there are millions of people riding motorcycles but relatively few motorcyclists.
If the cars don’t get you there are other strange rules that serve to dampen the popularity of Chinese motorcycling as a hobby. Motorcycles are banned on most major toll ways between cities. Law-abiding motorcyclists are shunted off to the old, meandering side roads. Which would be fun if they weren’t so infested with heavy, slow moving semi-trucks and near certain construction delays. In practice, since tollbooths have no ability to charge motorcyclists, Chinese riders blow through the far right lane, swerving to avoid the tollgate’s swinging arm. Ignore the bells, shouting and wild gestures of the toll-takers and roll the throttle on, brother.
Being banned from the highway is not a deal breaker, but being banned from entire cities is. In response to crimes committed by bad guys on motorcycles many cities remedied the problem by eliminating motorcycles altogether. Sales of new motorcycles in these forbidden cities is non-existent.
Rules designed to discourage motorcycling abound. Vehicles over 10 years old are not allowed to be registered, thus killing the used and vintage scene. Gasoline stations require motorcyclists to park far from the gas pumps and ferry fuel to their bikes in open-topped gas cans. Add to that the general opinion of the public that motorcycle riders are shifty losers too poor to afford a car.
So why do Chinese motorcyclists bother to ride at all? It’s not the thrill of speed; 250cc is considered a big bike in China and it’s really all you need to keep up with the slow moving traffic. I’ve spent a lot of time with Chinese riders and even with the language barrier I get that they ride for the same reasons we do: The road, the rain, the wind. After being cooped up in a high rise apartment (very few Chinese live in single-family homes) I imagine the wide-open spaces between crowded cities must seem like heaven. They did to me. Chinese motorcyclists and Low Riders ride a little slower, taking long breaks to smoke a cigarette, drink in the scenery or just nap. Every motorcyclist you meet is instantly your dear friend because we share this passion and despite all the minor regulatory hassles everybody knows love conquers all.
Other than good buddy Arjiu (that would be Joe Gresh), I’m guessing most of you have never been to Chongqing. Chongqing is home to China’s motorcycle industry and it was the starting point for your two blogmeisters’ putt across the Ancient Kingdom. I enjoyed that ride enormously. Gresh and I had some fantastic times.
I first visited Chongqing and Zongshen as a consultant to CSC when we used Zongshen’s 250cc engine in our Mustang replicas. One thing led to another, and before too long CSC was Zongshen’s exclusive North American importer, and CSC introduced the RX3 to the US. I was blown away by Chongqing, the people, the size of the city, the photo ops, the cuisine, and more. I’ve been there many times and I’d go back again in a heartbeat.
Good buddy Fan shared this video a few days ago, and I knew I had to share it on the blog. Pro tip: Hit the little button on the bottom right of the video (after you start it) to view it full screen. It’s impressive.
You can be a China hater all you want. I know more than a few people over there I call my friends. Yeah, the world is going through some shaky times right now, but that’s not the Chinese people and it’s for sure not the guys I know. I like the place.
If you want to know more about our trip across China, pick up a copy of Riding China. There’s a link here on the blog. And take a look at our Epic Rides page, where we have links to posts about that ride.
Timely, perhaps…with the reactions we received on our recent Nine Reasons You Should Ride A Chinese Motorcycle blog, I received a nice email from Sergeant Zuo, the man who led our ride across China a few short years ago.
How are you doing recently? I bought the Zongshen RX3S, which is an old version with a displacement of 380cc. The RX3 has been 96,000 kilometers in 8 years. Our country’s motor vehicles have mandatory scrapping regulations, so I’d better replace them with a motorcycle. Who makes me like it. No matter how much I like RX3, I have to sell it, because I can only apply for one parking space in our carport, so let’s find someone who likes RX3.
Is the epidemic situation here for good or bad? Is the epidemic situation there any better? Be sure to protect yourself.
A friend who knows that you and I are good friends once said: “The real Sino-US friendship is among the people.” I like this sentence very much and I give it to you.
Enclosed are some photos of my RX3S. (You can use the letter and photos I sent you anyway). Miss you very much, my friend! Say hello to your wife and family, especially your grandchildren.
——— Zuo Zhenyi 2021.10.16 China•Lanzhou
Here are a couple of additional photos that Zuo sent to us:
So there you have it. That “uncle” business…I used to be a secret agent, you know, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and…nah, just kidding. The Chinese named me Big Uncle and they called Gresh Little Uncle when we rode across China with them. The Chinese words are Da Jiu and Ar Jiu (Big Uncle and Little Uncle) and the “jiu” parts sounds a lot like Joe, so it was kind of a natural fit.
Don’t miss anything…get the latest as soon as it’s published!
Want to ride with us as we crossed China? Hey, it’s all right here!
We were somewhere in China approaching Aba after leaving the Tibetan Plateau, and somehow it was just Gresh, Sergeant Zuo, and me. I can’t remember why we were separated from the rest of our group. Honking along at a brisk pace and blitzing through one area after another, the photo ops were flying by and I wanted to capture at least some of them with my Nikon.
I finally caught up with Zuo and Gresh and flagged them over. I asked if I could go back a mile or two and they said they would wait. We had passed a Buddhist temple with a gold roof. The overcast skies, the green mountains, the asphalt, my orange and muddy RX3…all the colors clicked. I needed to commit that memory to the SD card.
When I turned around, I was surprised at how long it took to return to the spot you see above (I think we were on China’s G317 highway, but it might have been the G213). Then I felt fear: What if Gresh and Zuo didn’t wait for me? I don’t speak the language, I had no cell coverage, and I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to wherever. It was like being in outer space. It was just one of those crazy psycho unreasonable moments that sometimes hits when you realize you’re not in control of the situation. I snapped a few photos, they looked good enough on the camera’s display, and I wound out the RX3 to get back to my compañeros as quickly as possible. They had waited. I was in clover.
About a month later as we approached Beijing some of the street signs were in both Chinese and English, and it was obvious Beijing was directly ahead. Gresh told me he felt better because if we had to we could find our way home. I guess I wasn’t the only one having those “out in the boonies” feelings. It happens.
Earlier Phavorite Photos? You bet! Click on each to get their story.
It was the fourth or fifth day Joe and I had been on the road in China, and we were headed up to the Tibetan Plateau. I think I can safely say that Gresh and I were the only two Americans in Wenchuan that day based on the fact that we were taken to the city’s police department to fill out forms and let them know we were there (it was the only place in China we had to do that).
Wenchuan is a lively town, and the next morning we were enjoying what had already become a routine breakfast of hardboiled eggs and Chinese fry bread on the sidewalk when a bus stopped in front of us. The fellow you see above stepped off and looked at us quizzically (we didn’t quite look like Wenchuanians). I asked if I could take a photo by holding up my Nikon. He nodded his head, I shot the photo you see above, and he was gone. The entire encounter lasted maybe two seconds, but that photo is one of my China ride favorites. His expression could be used in a book on body language.
Three earlier favorite photos, one in Bangkok, one in Death Valley, and one in Guangzhou. Click on them to get to their story.
Another favorite photo, and as you can see, it’s a bit unusual. This was a young chimp in the Guangzhou zoo about a dozen years ago. I was there on a secret mission and we wanted to do something on the weekend. One of my Chinese contacts told me there were two zoos in Guangzhou…the big one and the little one. The big one was outside the city limits and the little one was in the center of town, so we opted to stay in town. I didn’t think the zoo was little at all (it was at least as big as the LA zoo), and I caught a lot of great photos there. This one was of a young chimp who seemed as interested in us as we were in him.
The photo makes it look like the chimp is just about to take something (or maybe give something) to the young lady reaching out to him. I had my old Nikon D200 and the similar-era Nikkor 24-120 lens (two boat anchors, to be sure, but they worked well), along with a cheap polarizer that eliminated reflections. There was a piece of inch-thick plexiglass between us and the chimp, and I took a bunch of photos playing with the polarizer and my position to get the angle right so the glass barrier would disappear. I think I succeeded.
Two earlier favorite photos, one in Bangkok and the other in Death Valley. You can click on either to get to the story that goes with each.
The RG3 is Zongshen’s newest motorcycle, and yesterday this video and its description showed up in my feed:
We are excited to share the epic journey of RG3 crew! Along the 318 national highway, our RG3 adventurers spent 12 days riding to reach Lhasa, Tibet from our factory in Chongqing. May the journey inspire you to start you own!
This is cool stuff and Zongshen (sold by CSC Motorcycles here in North America) is a cool company. I’ve been in the Zongshen plant a bunch of times along with good buddy Gobi Gresh, and we rode with Zongshen across China.
Gresh and I had a lot of fun with the Cult of the Zong, and we joked about the lines we’d be able to use after our 6,000-mile ride in the Ancient Kingdom. You know, little things we’d slip into a conversation like “as I was riding across the Gobi Desert” and “when we rode down off the Tibetan plateau” and others. We knew it would gave us the street cred we needed to converse with hardcore riders making the trek to Starbuck’s.
Zongshen puts together first class videos, and I always watch their new ones as they are released. One of my Zongshen favorites is the one they did on our China ride:
And another I enjoy is Joe Gresh’s video on that same ride:
There’s something about 3-wheeled utility vehicles that interfere with our brainwaves. They’re cool and most of us want one. Let me give you few quick examples.
When Gresh and I rode across China on RX3 250cc motorcycles, we started with a tour of the Zongshen plant in Chongqing. It was just the beginning of what was one of the grandest adventures of my life, and we met a lot of great guys over there, including Sergeant Zuo, a retired Chinese Army NCO who was to be our ride captain. That’s Sergeant Zuo in the video below.
Chongqing is exotic in many ways (think foreign city, 34 million people living in 80-story apartment buildings spread across a rolling and lush green landscape, incredible dining experiences, and one of the largest motorcycle manufacturers on the planet). More exotica? A tour of the Zongshen R&D facilities and a sneak preview of what was in the works (I rode the RX4 while it was still a concept, and we saw the new 400cc twin mocked up in clay). The vehicle that really lit Gresh’s candle, though, was a three-wheel 500cc diesel trike utility truck (it’s the one you see in the large photo above). “I have to get me one of these,” Gresh said, in tones that intimated an impending orgasm (that’s inference on my part, as I’ve never actually heard Gresh in such a situation, at least that I know of, and I’d like to keep it that way).
I mean, that yellow trike was nice, but Gresh’s reaction to it floored me. While I was still at CSC Motorcycles, Gresh was relentless in his full-court press to get me to get CSC to import the things. Go figure.
Next up? That would be a very recent Facebook post by good buddy Jackie showing a new passenger three-wheeler, no doubt intended to meet the pressing demand for tuk tuks (that’s what they’re called in the third world). I immediately asked Jackie what the powerplant would be (it’s an internal combustion engine for now, with an electric one slated for a follow-on version).
I shared the Zongshen post on my Facebook feed, and it drew an immediate response from good buddy Colorado Dan. He wants one. Maybe I could have predicted that…Dan is a guy who has an Enfield Bullet, a Ural, and a couple of Zongs in his garage. And a friendly moose or two in his backyard. Like the cannibals say, there’s no accounting for some people’s tastes, I guess.
I’ve sort of been bit by the bug, too. When Juan, Carlos, and I were assaulting the Andes in Colombia a few years ago, we stayed in a very rustic hotel on the outskirts of beautiful downtown Barichara (it’s pronounced Bah-de-chah-da, with the accent on the first syllable). Juan called a taxi to take us to dinner (it had been a long day on the bikes). I suppose I was expecting some sort of bright yellow sedan to appear, but nope, it was a little tuk tuk. All four of us squeezed in, and we all laughed like madmen on the ride down. It was a downhill ride and that little one-lunger didn’t have to work very hard (gravity is your friend going downhill), but while we were laughing, I was wondering how the thing would do bringing us back up that steep mountain. A couple of hours and an outstanding Italian dinner later, I found out. We could feel every stroke of that little tuk tuk’s motor on the climb up, and we laughed even harder. It was a fun evening.
Then there was Bangkok. Ah, Bangkok. It’s unquestionably one of the most exotic cities in the world. I’d seen these tuk tuks all over Bangkok, but I’d never been in one. It was a character flaw I aimed to correct. The video is a bit long at 16 minutes, but hey, you won’t have to suffer the 17-hour flight in a middle seat to get there (like I did). Just imagine 100-degree temps and humidity that’s off the charts, and you’ll have the compleat Thai tuk tuk travel experience.
