china-p7

And eventually, after some harrowing bike riding up a steep muddy hill, the road became a mud pit. Our wheels were jammed by all the mud that had collected under our fenders and brakes. The only way for us to advance at this point was to carry our bikes up the hill. Ed was not doing too well walking, as his flip-flops stuck in the mud, with a suction-like noise. He ended up walking barefoot...
You can see my bike in this picture, abandoned in the middle of the 'road', as Ed and I gave up hope that conditions will improve. We decided to turn around and go back to the town we had left that morning.

On our way back, Ed was riding and admiring the scenery in the valley below, when he hit a pothole and his front wheel (purchased in China) folded in half. This is what his bike looked like after.

This shows our sleeping arrangements for the night, in the middle of nowhere. We turned our bikes upside down and draped our mosquito netting on top, hoping that it would not rain that night. We were sleeping on a green tarp we had stolen from an abandoned truck, which stank so bad I thought I would throw up...

And here is our attempt to build a tandem bike out of our two individual bikes. It worked mechanically, but the balancing act was something of a challenge which we did not master because we did not need to, as a truck picked us up from where we were stuck and gave us a ride back to the city.