Day 38, 87km: (By Chris)

The moment I woke up I was subjected to a fresh volley of anxieties from Amy but these were temporarily put on hold when she crawled outside the tent to see a magnificent view of snow topped mountains poking from a sea of cloud and hills peppered with red, yellow and green leaves around us. So far I feel I have been quite negative about China, but today is an opportunity for me to say otherwise. We have finally found a place where we can't see telegraph wires / pylons or hear Chinese people hacking up phlegm. We cycled alone along our skinny muddy trail past colourful autumn hillsides, forded crystal clear icy streams and weaved between mountains dusted with snow. At the top of the 14,200ft pass colourful prayer flags fluttering was the only sound in the near freezing conditions. We then descended down a rocky track through swirling cloud, pine trees, deciduous woods and finally into a warm, sunny valley. At the bottom we had to make a choice between three roads, one went in the wrong direction, one straight up a steep mountainside and the other cut into a cliff face running up into a narrow gorge. None were on our map and the few locals we found contradicted each other. We chose the gorge. It soon deteriorated into a steep rocky track, we had to push over landslide debris and eventually reached an old wire foot bridge with wooden slats (some of which were missing) across a raging river below - no real adventure would be complete without this. We delicately crossed it and realised from our position we must have unintentionally taken the 'perilous' left-hand turn to Yading, our original intended destination before locals told us two days ago that it was not possible. With absolutely no flat land to put a tent, we continued for another 20km into the dark with head torches along a good gravel road to finally reach Shangri-La Village at 23:00.