Came out after a decent sleep on a very hard mattress…exhaustion does that to you… to find out that my back tyre was flat.

I realise we’d driven 8 hours of which most of it was on terrible roads…but it looked like someone had punctured it on purpose.

So.. pumped it up with a bike tyre… and then found the nearest repair place.

I acutally don’t remember how we found it… I don’t think we checked online, I think we just kept asking people.. and then done.

Found this bad boy in it. 

And then instead of changing the whole tyre, the guy just repaired the inner tube, then patched it up with one of those tyre plugging kits 

So for any of you that think you can only do that on tubeless tyres, let me assure you its not true…. You CAN indeed do it with tubed tyres.

From there we decided to check out a bit of QinHuangdao.. have some el-cheapo local food.

 

and then drive back down to Beidahe and check out the actual beach.

After all, that’s one of the 2 reasons we came on this trip after all.

Got to the beach, took off our tops, went for a dip…  by the way, we were the only 2 people swimming on the entire beach.  I don’t think Chinese people like the water very much.

Also… a little insight… it was not a good experience.. the water wasn’t blue blue.. there were little cordoned off areas everywhere…and zero waves.. .but good to be at the beach none-the-less.

Then some guy comes over with a bucket full of crabs and seafood and stuff… …he’s just wandering down the beach selling it to whoever he can.. and Fin just goes… yeah sure why not.   This guy looked proper crazy, he was laughing and shouting and when we didn’t buy as much as he thought ‘rich foreigners such as ourselves’ should buy… he shouted a bit more.. and then laughed a bit more.

Strange experience.

Then as we’re both just laying on the beach..taking in some sun for once.  (pretty difficult in Beijing, considering the pollution.. and you can’t just go sun bathing anywhere)

Anyway, as we’re laying there with our bare chests and t-shirts covering our eyes… I head some girl go, “你看你看， 这个老外那么百”  “hahahaha”
[Basically, look, look… that foreigner is really white…like white I’ve never seen before]

And then I thought to myself… that sounds like Eva.   I lifted my head, and sure enough it was my friends’ Max’s Chinese girlfriend Eva, with Maxime walking next to her.

I was the 那么百 foreigner。。。 and they all started laughing.  It was pretty surreal to see them there.  Especially as they just caught the train across to spend the weekend celebrating her friends birthday… 2-3 hours on the train….no effort at all, and we’d spend 8 hours of pain getting there.

Really a huge contradiction there.   We were ‘out adventuring’  and they were just …there.

Anyway, they had their thing to do, and we had ours…so we bid them fair well.. and after a while went onto our next adventure.

We saw this cheeky bad boy.
A 7D cinema.    Apparently the Chinese were keen to 1-up the westerners with their 4-D cinemas.. or 3-up it seems.  So they had a 7 D cinema.. I have no idea what the other 3 dimensions were… but I think neither did they.. nor did they even know what the D even stood for… I think, maybe they just thought…the more of them…the better.

Great window into Chinese entrepreneurial spirit there.

From there we took a bit of a drive around and settle on a place to relax by the seaside and have some dinner.  We saw some other bikers.. although with much much nicer bikes.  I’m talking Kawasaki Ninja 600s, Benelli’s, Ducati’s, Honda CBR’s even a few Harleys.

They stopped at nearby the same restaurant as us, and once again when they found out we’d driven from Beijing in a day using the G102 and it took 8 hours, they were all laughing their arses off..  but, it they seemed to show a great deal of respect for that as well, which was nice.

All started because they could see our 京B plates once again.

The food there is good, lots of seafood… and a mix of some Russian dishes, because it was previously a Russian relaxation kind of town.  Also I heard Mao had quite a few parties there. But anyway… it was a little expensive because of this… not Mao, but the seafood.. Russian link and what not.

But good food none-the-less.

Early in the morning the next day we went off to 老龙头 Lao long tou (Old Dragon’s Head).  This is the place where they’ve built the great wall to meet the sea.

It took us a while to get there to be honest, but it was worth it.

Both Fin and I are really glad we got to do that, and kind of cross it off our lists.  The whole thing is under renovation as are many things in China, so you don’t really get the full authentic experience.. and there are hawkers everywhere selling food, and what not… but even with all of that.. it was still pretty impressive.

We then checked out one of those old towns… or maybe it was a reconstructed old towns.. but that was pretty cool too..

 

And then we started our long Journey back home.

So we literally left Friday afternoon… had Saturday in QinHuangdao + Beidahe on the beach, Sunday checked out Old Dragon’s Head, then started our way back.