Good Bicycle

A week after I was taken up a mountain by class 118, another group of students - this time all Anthony's students (he teaches grades senior 1 and 3, I have senior 2's and all the junior classes) - took us on a bike ride out to a place called Nan Wan Qiao. It translates as 10,000 year old bridge, and it can be seen in the photos below. It ain't 10,000 years old, but it is pretty ancient, as is the small village of mud and wood houses it leads to.




One of the students who visits us most often is called Adam, and he's at the back right in this picture. He's an avid bike rider, hence the reason we came all this way on our bikes.

It's a good job he knows a thing or two about bikes. We certainly needed his help along the way...

Buying our bikes here in Lanshan was traumatic. Not only did we have a crowd of around 30 people watching us intently the whole time, but we also knew that these bikes were far from decent. It wasn't even possible to change the
damn gears to the lowest setting! In my book a bike with 9 gears and only 6 of them useable is the definition of a design fault. With the pressure of the crowd, the inability to explain what was wrong, and the knowledge that these probably were the best bikes in town, we bought them anyway, just to get out of the situation.

This was our first long-distance bike ride. With all the hassle we'd already encountered, we really should have known better than to trust them...


Five minutes down the road, Anthony's rear-gear-changing-mechanism-thingy falls apart. It just literally came to pieces the first time he tried to change gear.

We should have turned back then...

By the time we arrived back in Lanshan his actual gear control had come loose so he couldn't change gear anyway, a pedal had fallen off and my front brake had broken twice!

Despite all this we had a great day. It was a beautiful place and once again we were with some of our most entertaining students (see photo!).

I'm just not so sure whether I can trust my bike enough to go out on it again for any distance.

The truly ironic thing is, that printed on the frame in big
bold letters are the words 'Good Bicycle'...