Hello Horizons Unlimited members!

I just wanted to take the opportunity to share a little about a trip my girlfriend Amy and I have just recently set out on a little over a week ago that we are calling The Great Ride of China.

On July 19th, we left from Beijing on a CFMOTO 650TR to travel in a counter-clockwise direction around China, up towards Harbin, across through inner mongolia, towards Xinjiang, into Tibet, up north towards Qinghai (the east of Tibet is closed to foreigners) and then down and around the southern provinces. We're looking covering around 25k-30k kilometers on the trip and it should take us a little over 4 months.

At the moment, we've covered about 2000km and gone through 5 provinces as we arrived in Harbin yesterday, our eastern most point on the trip. Tomorrow we'll be turning north west towards Inner Mongolia and the Russian border before moving west. Really looking forward to the grass plains of inner mongolia!

One of the highlights so far was riding through certain sections of Liaoning province. The roads there are probably the nicest I've seen in China so far and rank highly for me in all roads I've ridden on. Much of the time they were lined with sunflowers which made the air extremely fresh smelling! (A nice change from the smog in Beijing where we live). Two routes I would recommend in particular are the G305 that cuts across the Dalian peninsula and then the 319 east out of Dalian which winds around the Yalu river and borders North Korea for a good bit of time. It eventually meets up the G201 which parallels the expressway and is really spectacular riding including some great mountain twisties.

I'll be trying to post updates here, but time is scarce of course, so it'll probably be closer to every 2 weeks. We do try and post pretty regularly on our social accounts (Our weibo, the Chinese twitter is @骑行中国爱心之旅, where we post most often. You can also follow me on instagram @bukco13）and we also have a website The Great Ride of China. We are having some page load issues at the moment so please excuse any lag while we get that figured out! On the site though we have pictures updated regularly, a GPS track that we update daily as well as trip stats such as mileage, days, provinces, etc.

Finally, if there are any riders out there who we may happen to cross paths with, would be great to try and meet up on the road!