Being a Chinese growing up in mainland means riding my dad's "forever" bike at age 6 on the right side of the bike by peddling inside of the frame. I still remember my first crash while racing home against a thunderstorm at age 7. I ended up in an irrigation canal. My first recreational ride was the 80 miles from downtown Beijing to the Great Wall on the same "forever" bike. Never in my wildest dreams could I image to ride in Tibet with ray & john in 1996 on an American made mountain bike (It's a "big forward leap" from the "forever" bike that I rode through my collage days in Beijing) and kept telling everyone I am not a Japanese but a Chinese. 

This will be John's fourth bike trip in Asia and second traversal of Tibet. Previous trips include two circuits of Ladakh and Kashmir and a north-south crossing of Tibet. When not shaking his fillings loose on a mountain bike, he spends time writing software and skiing. He was born in Canada, but made his way to San Francisco via England five years ago and has no plans to move. He brings to the trip two useful skills - he speaks Chinese and likes fixing bikes. Best personal characteristic: likes grueling activities. Worst personal characteristic: grumpy when underfed. Favorite movie: Lawrence of Arabia. Favorite author: Hemingway. Favorite composer: Stravinsky. Dislikes: frills, boredom, lite beer, diet foods, poorly engineered machinery, idiots, television, and light-duty equipment. Looking forward to unplanned adventures, cold, Tibetan people, hunger, exhaustion, seeing Everest again, dehydration, bad roads, vicious dogs, government officials, headwinds, dust, great scenery, wallet panics, long climbs, long descents, going higher than 20,000 feet on a bike, and hanging out with Ray and Liyang. Definitely not looking forward to missing his girlfriend Jeannie. 

Having cycled more than 8000 miles (13,300 km) in the Himalaya on four different trips, Ray finds it difficult to go back to anything resembling a "normal" life in the western world. After spending months on end in Tibet he has perfectly adapted his diet to chunks of pork fat, yak meat and 761 Chinese Army biscuits. The later being a small rectangular compressed food product that can withstand being run over by a truck without suffering any damage, they are often eaten with the aid of large rocks that are used to smash the biscuits into smaller bite size pieces.

If you want to learn more about the Himalaya region and Tibet, take a look at Ray's Suggested Reading List 

To find out more about Ray's three other bike trips in Tibet go to: http://raykreisel.com/