In Beijing:

I have now arrived in Beijing, all happy.  My bike and all my stuff happily arrived with no problems.  The bike is re-assembled, all the repacking is complete and I’m ready to go.

Our first day riding is tomorrow, an easy day of about 90k with only a small bit of climbing.  The first 15k or so we will do as a convoy, 

Having spent some time in Beijing 12 years ago, I didn’t do any of the tourist things, other than I did visit the Olympic village - as is the case with most things in China, the facilities are geared to handling a lot of people.  The open gathering “square” in front of the main venues is probably 2 km long.  

Interesting in that there is now security getting into everything:  bags are scanned getting on the subway, access to Tiananmen square and most other major sites also require security checks, and the Olympic Village.

I also noticed that way more cyclists wear helmets today than 2 years ago.

Some quick facts:  China has 20% of the world’s population - and that doesn’t include Richmond.

I didn’t sense any air pollution, however there were a fair number of people wearing face masks.  Possibly some form of fashion statement.  As I noticed two years ago, I have yet to see any sort of vehicle belching smoke, many of the moped’s and other small vehicles are electric - this is a problem when on a bike as you cannot hear them approach from behind you.

a couple pics from the day:

The Birdsnest and around the Olympic site

The "park and ride" at many subway stations are aimed at bicycles:

Greeting our dinner before we ate it:

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Ready to ride start of day 1: