November 19, 2009 - Resting in Kunming, China!

Hi All -Since our last post we have switched gears quite a bit. After almost five months of cycling we arrived at our long awaited month long break in Kunming. Although our time on the road is fun we are excited to have all the comforts of a home for the next month (a fridge with food in it, not having to find a new hotel every night and not having to worry about where in that hotel you can store your bike, etc). Since moving into an apartment though, we have also noticed that the downside to not changing hotel every night is that your mess follows you from day to day! We are slowly starting to accept the fact that whatever mess we make will no longer disappear at 11:00am the following day.

For the month we have a number of things on our "to do list" such as planning out the route for the rest of our trip (more on that in a future post), studying Chinese (Jen), prepping a law essay (Mike), finally sorting out our Chinese visa situation (it also was stolen in Kangding), and applying for other visas for the rest of our trip! As well Jen's parents are coming to visit us for a couple weeks which we are really looking forward to.

Over the course of the next month we hope to post some random thoughts on various topics. Although we do have more than enough free time to get this done, the old adage that the time required to complete a task expands to fill the time allotted has held true and it seems that simply waking up, feeding ourselves and going to bed are filling the day quite nicely, so this may not happen.

Our time in Kunming so far has been relatively mundane so we don't have any new photos to post, so I thought I would post a couple older videos. We have not been able to post videos to our blog yet due to either slow internet (Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia) or because the video sites are blocked (China). As I have now have more spare time I was able to figure how to circumvent the blocking of video sites here, so thought I would post a couple videos. The videos below are all old (from Russia and Mongolia), because unfortunately all our new videos were in one of the bags taken when we got robbed.

Here is a video of Jen riding through the Altai province in Russia.

One of our first days riding through Mongolia...

Stopping for a water break in Mongolia...

And finally, men from a ger that we were passing by pulled us in for tea and cake during a good bye party they were having for a young boy...