Our first goal was to get out of the city. This was not as easy as we expected because the urban landscape reaches far beyond the city limits of Guangzhou. Since neither of us speaks any Chinese, we were a bit tense on whether the cycling would go as planned. On top of this, there are very few roadsigns. We went south west and reached the town of Heshan as planned and were immediately the talk of town. From Heshan we went to Zhaoqing, a medium large city and somewhat accustomed to tourists (mostly from Hongkong). Zhaoqing is a nice city to stay for a few days and visit the nearby national park. Especially the townsquare where all residents come every night to watch the music and light fountain is worth visiting. (around 20.00hrs)

From Zhaoqing we set out to cycle to Mocun. According to our map we had to take the largest road out of town which we did, but nobody warned us that someone had build a new (even larger) road after they drew our map! So, instead of arriving in Mocun we were heading towards Deqing, a town we were supposed to visit in the middle of our journey. We decided to end the day in Deqing as cycling back was not a good option. Deqing is a quiet (boring) town on the border of the Xi Jiang (Xi river). After a thorough study of the map we decided to change our route and cycle part of our original route in a reversed order. The route would still have the shape of an 8.

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