City fix

1st – 7th August 2026

A mere week after the desolate mountains of Central Asia, with the help of a flight from Kashgar, we found ourselves in a windowless shopping centre in the heart of Chengdu. This would not be either of our first choice of places to be in, and after weeks of failing to buy the most basic things, it felt completely bizarre to be surrounded by so much stuff.

Given we will be spending some time off the bikes and will be going hiking at the end of the trip we were shopping for backpacks. Buying backpacks was the kind of decision which made complete sense up to the very moment we made it, at which point we began trying to work out how we would each strap a 48 litre rucksack to our bike and cycle many, many kilometers with it on top of everything else we are already carrying. Still, I was now the proud owner of a mustard yellow backpack, and that has to count for something.

Without the bikes we had to find something to do. This process revealed how truly inexperienced we, and myself in particular, are at planning a holiday that doesn’t involve an extortionate amount of exercise. Top of my list of things to do whilst we had some time off was, to Ben’s slight dismay, a bike ride. Whether a wise choice or not this was going to have to wait: shortly after arriving in Chengdu we had got a text notifying us that there had been flooding nearby on the line and the train had turned back with our bikes on it. It would be another four days before they reached us. For once, we were rather happy we’d opted to take a plane over the train, as if our bikes’ journey was anything to go by it saved us five days travelling.

What we found ourselves doing in the meantime was walking a dot to dot of tourist destinations across Chengdu. Like any dot to dot, it was the walk between the attractions, our “dots”, which revealed the city, rather than the attractions themselves. It didn’t take very long at all for me to fall in love with its tree lined streets – although tree-lined does not quite do it justice. My favourite streets didn’t feel like streets at all: it felt like buildings had sprung up from the forest floor, the tree canopy taking up ever inch of space between them. Bundles of electric cables wound themselves between the branches like vines, and the chorus of cicadas followed us down the streets in oppressive waves. We could barely see the vast towers that soared above us through the trees, and their scale was not at all present at street level where the buildings were broken up into a mix match of many, many tiny shops and restaurants spilling out onto the pavement. We strolled through several of the city’s many parks which are more like elaborate gardens than parks as we know them. Whilst they were swarming with people, the densely packed foliage, artificial hills and meandering lakes provided a sense of solitude which can never be obtained in an inner city park in England. Many of these parks were connected by rivers and canals, and whilst the paths running alongside these where mere metres wide they were overflowing with so many plants that we barely noticed the buildings alongside us.

Our bikes finally arrived just after we’d planned a leisurely day with an even more leisurely breakfast. We made the snap decision to skip the breakfast, check out of our hostel and travel across town to a hotel near where we were picking the bikes up. I think this probably had a lot more to do with us feeling far too old to be staying at a youth hostel than any logistical reasoning. Our plan had been to have cheaper nights’ stay where we could to offset some more expensive ones elsewhere in China, but the reality was the bathroom was essentially a glass shower cubicle with a loo and sink somehow squeezed in, separated unsuccessful from the rest of our room by a curtain. This along with the resident duck may have been the perfect combination of luxury and novelty to the other guests still in their early 20s, but it was very apparent that it has been some time since we’d both grown out of that phase of our lives.

Reunited with our bikes and strategically located in a hotel further out in the city, the next morning we set off to the Tianfu Ring City Greenway, a 100km continuous traffic free cycle loop of the city. It largely links parks and greenspaces, although some sections to the south are decidedly urban. China is far more cutesy than anywhere I have ever been: everything has a smiley face and a stuffed toy dangling from it, regardless to whether it’s being carried by a grown man or a six year old child. It was unsurprising, therefore, to find that they had managed to make a vast piece of strategic infrastructure, well, cute. Swooping bridges in various complimentary pastel shades seamlessly weaved their way under train lines and over roads, taking us up to the treeline before gently twisting and turning down to the waters edge, always at a remarkably safe gradient.

It is an incredible piece of strategic infrastructure which very much brought out my inner planning geek, but we got the sense that it perhaps wasn’t working as well as it could for the city’s residents on a day to day basis due to where it was located on the outskirts of the city. Cycling a continuous loop of it proved to be an interesting experience. It may have had something to do with the average temperature being 37 degrees, but after a while we found the novelty of the flat, smooth, uninterrupted cycle path became rather monotonous. By 60km we’d got the picture. By 100km we were positively elated to be back on the roads and returning to our hotel for the night before banishing the bikes to Guangzhou by train whilst we took more extended break from them.

During our time in Chengdu, we became intimately acquainted with Sichuan peppers which liberally seasoned every dish, numbing our mouths and our insides. After several days of this diet morning, noon and night we were desperately craving western food. After a Domino’s pizza, which we thought we had accidentally ordered from Shanghai, failed to hit the spot, our quest for beige, bland stodge continued. It was for this reason that on our penultimate day in Chengdu we found ourselves traipsing through an Ikea carpark in search of meatballs and their vegetarian equivalent. The Ikea Cafe brought us far more joy than either of us could have imagined. For the first time in China I could read the menu, and rather than embarrassing myself trying to eat with chopsticks I could watch others do the same with cutlery (I would have normally have felt bad for this, but given we were regularly stared and pointed at for being foreign, I decided it was about time I repayed the favour). We each had a Belgium beer to wash the meal down which helped immensely when we had to navigate our way through the maze of the showroom to reach the exit.

There are numerous day trips that you are supposed to do from Chengdu: there are pandas to see at the breeding centre, mountains to take cable cars up and lakes to queue up and take photographs of. We couldn’t stomach the long travel and crowds of tourists that these day trips would have entailed, and on our last day decided instead to take a short metro journey to a new suburban neighbourhood centred around a lake. This wasn’t any lake however – it was “Luxe Lake”, an exclusive and somewhat dystopian community housing the super rich. The landscaping was undoubtedly beautiful, but it had the odd, artificial feeling that often belongs to these exclusive communities. Wherever we went we were followed by music piped out of the flowerbeds. The soundtrack seemed to be chosen to elude the feeling of playing the starring role in your very own romcom. Farm animals wandered around selective areas, and based on the look in the alpacas eyes I wouldn’t be surprised if one day they cracked under the superficialness of it all and ripped someone’s head off. The short route back to the metro took us through a different world entirely, with numerous food sellers set up informally in the shade of a motorway underpass, presumably serving the many people needed to keep a place like Luxe Lake running smoothly.

Given my work has everything to do with buildings I’ve always found it a little odd that I crave the countryside. It was a relief after Central Asia to realise that depraved from urbanity I will start to crave that too. We realised quite quickly that cycling in and out of any city is rarely fun, and as a result our route has been working hard to avoid them. So over the next few weeks off the bikes we are looking forward to exploring some of the largest cities in the world without having the anger inducing experience of cycling through them.