Arriving in Henan and Meeting Wenxin

Today, instead of taking the overnight train to Chengdu as I once did, I rode my bicycle to Sanmenxia. When I set off shortly after 7 a.m., it was a "cool" 26°C. It had rained during the night, and compared with yesterday, the air actually felt refreshingly cool. After just a few hundred meters, I made my first pit stop of the day to buy breakfast.

I didn't eat the baozi until I had covered almost 20 kilometers and returned to the banks of the Yellow River. There, I also officially entered Henan Province, Jiabin's home province. From here, it is no longer very far to her hometown of Luoyang.

After the break, I first followed a road running parallel to the main highway, thinking there would be less traffic there. Before long, however, I reached a locked gate and had no choice but to turn around.

A few kilometers later, an underpass was completely flooded, yet trucks were still driving through it. So I decided to ride through as well. The water was surprisingly deep, making it impossible to keep my shoes dry. Thanks to my clipless pedals, however, only one shoe ended up getting wet. Just a few kilometers farther on, I encountered exactly the same situation again. It must have rained very heavily here last night.

After that, the route alternated between smaller and larger roads and constantly rolled up and down. Along the way, I met two Chinese cyclists who openly expressed their amazement that I had ridden all the way here from Switzerland. They themselves were on their way to Tibet and planned to ride along the G318—the same highway where Jiabin and I had begun our bicycle journey from Chengdu twelve years ago.

The climbs once again felt very hot, but apart from that, the temperature was actually quite pleasant. I still had to drink plenty of water, though. At one point, I stopped at a natural gas station hoping to buy something to drink, only to discover there wasn't even a shop there. Instead, they let me refill my bottles at the water dispenser and even invited me to rest for a while on a sofa in the air-conditioned room. I gladly accepted the invitation.

After that, it wasn't far to Sanmenxia, a city that felt enormous to me. After all, around two million people live here, making it the westernmost major city in Henan Province. Incidentally, the name Henan literally means "south of the river," referring to the Yellow River.

When I arrived at the hotel, Wenxin was already waiting for me. Jiabin and I had met him during the bicycle journey along the G318 toward Lhasa that I mentioned earlier. A few months ago, when I told him about this trip, he immediately said that he wanted to ride part of the journey with me once I reached China. And now, here he was. If everything goes according to plan, he'll ride with me all the way to Shanghai! Fortunately, as a teacher, he has plenty of vacation time. When we had discussed where to meet, I was a little surprised that he hadn't come farther to meet me, since his holidays had already started more than a week earlier. He explained that he first had a few things to take care of at home, which took several days. Curious, I asked whether he had actually cycled here directly from home. He simply replied, "Of course I came by bicycle." By the time he reached Sanmenxia, he had already covered 354 kilometers in the saddle. That answer could just as easily have come from me.