Call me Paobu.

*I needed to give myself a Chinese name. "Pablo" has no meaning in Chinese. I looked at my pocket dictionary for the closest sounding word and found 'paobu'. Guess what? It mean "to run." I am pretty happy with my name, to the least. If I were a girl and my name was Sarah, I'd have to be Sala which means "salad", so things turned out very well for me.

Leaving Namba on day 5, we hit heavy traffic once again. Buses race passed us, leaving clouds of dust for us to inhale. An hour or so into the ride we pass a long line of buses. A mile and a half later we still pass bus after bus. I am reminded of "Le Tour de France." People waiting outside their tour bus, start cheering and clapping; to my delight, the thumbs up and the peace sign are still cool in China. My fear of a horrible accident fades when we finally reach the end of the line and see a large truck carrying an excessively larger cylinder taking up both lanes, creeping it's way up the hill. Pablo and Maria are victorious! At the cost of thousands of waiting tourists, we have the road all to ourselves for the entire rest of the day.

Day 6 proved to be the toughest yet. Our "road map" is vague in detail, so we begin our climb do not knowing how high we'll go. 52km later and entirely exhausted, we are 2020m higher from where we started. Reaching the top of the Huangtuluang pass (roughly 3150m high) the night falls and the nearest village is a long ways down. We walk our bikes away from the road where no one can see us and set up our tent in the middle of a cow pasture.

Day 7 is a bittersweet ride downhill. 40km and we barely touch our pedals. Our entire climb yesterday, is almost all lost. We reach 1300m, and then settle at 1410m in the town of Namping 66km later. We are ownly 40km away from Juizhaigon! Lost and confused among the fast-paced town, we make friends with a little girl (maybe 9-years-old). She grabs her four buddies and happily escort us to the cheapest hotel. Once there, they scold the quick-thinking owner when he tries to charge us double the rate. Elated with their little victory, our friends happily insist on carrying our luggage to our room. We settle in, eager for an early night. Knock, knock. Guess who? So we their invitation to walk around the town. We invite them to icecream and the girl scolds her little sister for choosing the expensive one, costing 1.5yuan instead of 1 (a 5 U.S. cent difference). When we say it's alright they all put theirs down and grab the expensive one.

Three words to describe day 8: wet, muddy, and bumpy. It had rained all night and is raining when we leave. Haha for us. Our seemingly easy 40km day resulted in a much longer struggle. Up river we go with vehicules splashing past us. We arrive at Juizhaigou wet and cold and quickly take a cheap hotel. We had hoped to take a break and rest here for a couple of days, but this by far was the filthiest hotel my sister and I had ever stayed at. Stuck here for the night, we decide to go hotel shopping for our other two nights here. Tourist towns are much more expensive and we are quickly losing hope for a reasonable stay. We then accidentally walk into a small massage parlor/spa which seems desparate for business. While I doubt people ever sleep here, they will let us stay in a clean room for the same price as Hotel Filth. I am looking forward to my first real shower in 5 days.

*I am reluctantly leaving out much detail. I want to go on and on talking about every little village we stop by and all the people we meet. Every day we are welcomed with new faces, each with their own story. As much as I want to share EVERYTHING, my access to internet limits my time to write. This is a beautiful country with beautiful people; when I return, I hope to share my pictures and video footage to give better image of this experience.

Thus far we have been moving from place to place; but in a week or two, we will be furthur in the country, away from most tourist attractions, and I am looking forward to hopefully settling down in a small Tibetan village for several days or weeks to live and learn.