Olympic bicycle ride 2008

As indicated earlier in this blog, I needed to reconsider my resources and possibilities for this long bicycle tour and I now declare my resignation from BalticCycle 2008 Olympia-Beijing after 99 adventurous and wild days and more than six and a half thousand kilometres of cycling. I admit I do so with a certain sigh of relief. It has been a tightly scheduled, physically demanding tour but also a very rewarding time to literally feel the climate and landforms of the Peloponnesos, the Turkish Egean, the entire width of the Black Sea, the foothills of the Caucasus, the inhospitable Garagum desert, the Silk Road in Uzbekistan and finally the Mannerheim expedition trail over the Tien-Shan mountains between February and May of this year. Not really a relaxing holiday, but certainly an intensive study trip with numerous impressions of landscapes and local populations and besides a real survival exercise in many situations both on and off the road. So it is time to thank participants and organizers of this big project for letting me share in their experience, sometimes dragging me along and always being helpful.

So, many thanks to Sigitas ("Maybe!"), initiator and indefatigable organizer of this as well as all other previous BalticCycle trips, the splendid team of drivers and sleeping place hunters Adam and Marcin and to fietsmaat Mark ("Did you saw the van?"), who taught me a lot of Dutch language on the road and who is and will be the only person with whom to share boerenkool and rookworst at 3400 metres altitude in the middle of Asia.

Farewell in Kashgar. Bon voyage to Beijing, fietsmaat!

Besides these persons, let me wish all the best of luck for a safe and successful completion of the journey to Beijing to all cyclists of the Olympia-Beijing core team, namely Carlotta from Italy ("Incredibile!"), our physician and chief photographer Dr. Valentinas from Lithuania ("You must not drink Coca-Cola. You understand, yes?"), Monica ("No!", with very steep intonation drop), Andrzej and Ryszard from Poland ("Czesc!"), Vassileos ("F...", besides being a lover of polyphonic early chorale music he is the first and only Greek ever having cycled around the world) and Danae ("Are you alright?") from Greece. I deeply admire your perseverance and I will often think of you and the thirty or so other cyclists that have joined and still will join for longer and shorter parts of the route while you cycle the huge and hot Taklimakan desert and along the Great Wall of China for another 5,000 kilometres.

Here endeth my report on the Olympic Bike Ride. If you come back to this site in a few weeks time, you may find some mileage and altitude statistics, links to track recordings with height profiles and more photos and possibly some comments about useful and useless bicycle and camping gear (comment postings by other cyclists welcome). And please bookmark the following links if you want to follow up the progress of BalticCycle towards Beijing 2008:
http://www.bicycle.pl. For English, watch out for "Bob's reports".
http://www.pentacycle.com In English.
http://www.pageline.nl In Dutch.

As for myself, I both humbly and gladly remember the advice (was it a warning?) given to their former teacher of Geography by the kids of 9C in Kulosaari Secondary School in Helsinki earlier this year that

China is a wide and big country.
I wish to congratulate these bright young people on the occasion of their graduation on Saturday this week and I am sure that we will all enjoy a very relaxing summer holiday, many travelling, some at home...

Still snowy in Athens. I only now understand the mess caused by the airport closure yeserday which caused many BC members to arrive with great delay in Greece. It's a coincidence that that Sigitas (tour leader), the car crew and some other members decide to stay the night at the same hostel that I had chosen two days earlier.
After loading the van with all the extra luggage I departed with John from Ireland to the railway station and off to Pirgoson a six hour narrow gauge Pelopennesian train trip. Beautiful scenery along the cost and the many orange orchards along the way let us forget the snow and ice chaos of Athens quickly. I ride into paradise thus.

Arrived at Athens airport, assembled my bike (causing quite a bit of trash from my sophisticated plastic wrapping). Three attempts to exit the airport area, two unsuccessful ones and the third one illegal through permission restricted maintenance terrain. Probably not the last time to realize that modern transportation infrastructure can be fairly disregardful of cyclists.
Greece welcomed me at chilly temperatures, rain, a sky soon falling very dark and a very strong headwind in the direction of Loutsa where I decided to rent a room. No photo inspiration yet. Let's hope for a better day tomorrow.
Otherwise Greece is all TABEPNA, Souvlaki, Gyros, Pita and the rest of it. Still appreciate it!

Olympia-Beijing 2008 will take me into a challenging climatic environment as well as into most interesting regions of cultural exchange.
Although being a North German lowlander who has been appreciating the benefits of bicycles for transportation (less for sports though) since very young age, I started to take an interest in long distance biking only in 2004, when I joined the Baltic Cycle Tour North Cape - Olympia for an eight day section in Finland.

On a summer tour from Tallinn to Germany in 2005 I found the slow means of bike travel most useful to follow part of the Red Army's war memorial-paved "Road to Berlin" 60 years after the end of WWII and even had a chance to discover my German family roots in the low-lying lands on the river Vistula (former Western Prussia).

With the experiences acquired on my first large "own tour", I soon enhanced my bike equipment and in the following year (2006) designed a route from Tallinn to the Mediterranean Sea that would take me across the lands of the 19th century Russian (Baltic countries and central Poland), Prussian (Kaliningrad/Königsberg) and Habsburg (Galicia, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Trieste) empires added to by the physical challenge of crossing the European main water divide in the Beskid mountains and the Alps in Slovenia.

For my bike tours, I maintain two principles:
1. Start in an area, that you know and get a feeling of distance from that place both geographically as well as culturally. Even at your furthest point you will be able to positively relate back to where you started. In this sense, you can never get lost - or otherwise get the feeling of being lost.

2. When biking, minimize your sportive ambition as it will most likely reduce your perception of where you're moving. Whenever you can, slow down your speed, stop more often at places (rather than passing them by) and you will enhance your positive feeling of distance.

Olympia (Greece) Feb 20 – Athens Feb 24 – Istanbul (Turkey) Mar 04 – Tbilisi (Georgia) Apr 03 – Baku (Azerbaijan) Apr 13 – Ashgabat (Turkmenistan) Apr 23 – Samarkand (Uzbekistan) May 08 – Chugand (Tajikistan) May 17 - Osh (Kyrgyzstan) May 20 – Kashgar (China) May 26 – Turpan Jun 14 – Xi’an Jul 20 – Beijing Aug 08
Details about route in China updated later