A Long Strange Trail ... - Part 2

A couple of very eventful months:

In my last post I had just swapped e-mail addresses with Simon Vallance who owned a Chang Jiang 750 motorcycle and sidecar which I had seen outside a pub in Sai Kung. It was a while before I was to use that e-mail address.
My family moved to Brisbane Australia in December 2003 and I returned to Hong Kong to continue working there for a further 2½ years.

Now it is my habit to start each day in prayer. But upon returning to HK, every time I would begin to try to pray, I would keep seeing pictures in my mind of a Chang Jiang motorcycle and sidecar with me riding it. I would try hard to focus on the list of things I wanted to pray about (the list did not include motorbikes and sidecars - Wendy and I had agreed that I wouldn't ride a motorbike in HK traffic), but these mind pictures kept interrupting my prayer time. I went to see my pastor about the trouble I was having praying: is this an attack from the devil, or what? He prayed with me and then said, "Do you suppose God might be asking you to buy the kind of motorbike you keep seeing in your prayer times?" So I added the potential purchase of a motorbike and sidecar to my prayer list. Since I was now committed to praying daily for it, my prayer times became much less disrupted.

A few days after my talk with the pastor, I e-mailed Simon Vallance and received back the web-site address for "Chang Jiang Unlimited." I logged in and spent hours looking at photographs of these beautiful sidecar outfits, knowing that I would sooner or later own one.

Almost forty years down the trail:
In May 2004, I telephoned Simon Vallance and caught the bus around to his place where he allowed me to go for a ride on one of his two Chang Jiang outfits. The black one in the photo at top right is the bike I rode that day. I took it on all the rough back tracks around the village in which simon lives. I loved it! He said my grin was so wide my ears were nearly falling in! Now I knew that I knew that I knew that I really wanted one. But was it really God's will? Wendy was against me owning another motorbike. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" says the old proverb, so I decided that if God really wanted me to buy it, he would cause Wendy to change her mind. I guess I was treating it kind of like the fleece that was laid out by Gideon in the Bible when he was seeking to know God's will.

I went down to Australia for the school holidays in June and asked Wendy about buying the bike. Her response was, "I shall really have to pray about that!"
The next day she came to me and said, "You know that motorbike and sidecar you asked about? ... I really believe God wants you to buy it!"

Wow! . . . In a few short weeks, the trail was really hotting up!

Beijing January 2005 - Part 1

Have you ever faced a Texas Blue Norther? Has your face ever been instantly freeze-dried?

The doors from the terminal to the car-park at Beijing's International Airport opened and I instantly knew the antithesis of the opening of a blast furnace!

I had been met by Clay and Gerald, who guided me to where Alpha was parked in the car-park. No, that's not a typo; it was not an Alfa; it was "Alpha."

Alpha (fine-weather photo at top right) is a 1959 Chang Jiang motorbike and sidecar which had been meticulously restored by Gerald, not as a museum piece (although it is well worthy of display as one), but as his everyday ride-to-work vehicle. Flat army green in colour, the bike represents one of the very first made-in-China sidecar outfits built after the production line had been moved from Russia in a 1957 Technology Exchange. In fact, Alpha has several Russian parts left over from the train-loads of parts that had been shipped as part of that exchange. The tank badges on Alpha are genuine Russian "IMZ" badges, for example.

I hopped into the sidecar, Gerald mounted the bike and Clay perched himself on the pillion. Alpha started with the first kick, as any well-prepared motorbike ought to. We paid the Shroff and accelerated out onto the Airport Motorway.

Now I was well rugged up clothing wise, but had no helmet, only a white cotton cricket hat. It was -2ºC (US = 28.4ºF) in Beijing and I saw Alpha's speedo sitting on 80 km/h (US = 50 mph) so the wind chill factor made it seem very much colder: -13ºC (US = 9ºF). The trouble was, I didn't want to miss any of the sights, so I alternately held the sidecar's canvas tonneau cover over my face, and then kept peeping above it to enjoy the scenery. I kept also scrutineering every part of the bike as we sped along; I had ridden this model bike before, but this was my first experience riding in a CJ sidecar. What a freezing introduction! But soon we would be at the warm hotel I had booked through Zuji Travel - a really great and easy to use online booking system that finds incredibly cheap flights and hotels. CLICK HERE for Zuji Travel

We shall post more on this ride later . . .