Tough at the top // On-One Fatbike commuting to work // Mountain bike films // 26 inch vs. 24 inch

On-One Fun Fattie 24 inch diameter wheel mountain bike,
Is it twice the fun?

[Authors notes:  On-One Bikes staff member Ross takes the more fun option to get to work...on the worlds first production 24" fat bike] Smaller rim diameter than the conventional 26 inch wheel Fatbike or mountain bike, but perhaps it is also more manageable for trail riding control and more of a daily appeal to the ride? Follow the trails to another quality adventure cycle option. 

Let's compare 26 inch touring tires with Fat Bike tires...

Wheel diameters and tire dimensions keep changing in the global market, Fat bikes use conventional 26 inch wheel diameter on larger rim widths for smoother rolling resistance without any necessary suspension.Compared to cycle touring on Schwalbe Marathon Plus Tour 26 inch by 2.0 inch width (Marathon XR) 1100 gram Kevlar tires (thunder and a hammer of a beating on the body for endurance riding offroad plus 2000 kilometers), the Fat Tire ride comfort difference would be considerable - although you can carry 145 kilograms of rider + bike + equipment and not worry about having punctures while doing the Schwalbe option above.

With bikepacking setups, riders cut the equipment weight losing frame-mounted carrier racks and using strapped packs referred to Bikepacking.So adventure travel with Fat Bikes is an option, although there is additional weight factored into the frame and rim materials, tire dimensions and design (Fat bike tire replacements are expensive too). It's worth looking into for your adventure. Which setup works best for you depends on price, quality of components, your budget and destinations!

Trail riding in Outer Mongolia 2014

Cross Mongolia (2500 kilometers) bikepacking in 2012

A TransAm bicycle tour // Recumbent cycling through Wyoming USA // Adventure Cycling in America // Deserts of China // The Himalayas on tour //

Cycle touring across the Taklamakan Desert in 2011 [Perich travels, Korean-World]. This tour was awesome, I started on the slow boat to China from South Korea. And continuing from Beijing, I took a train to Urumqi in northwest China [Turkestan] and cycled the deserts first along the southern Silk Road before entering the Aksai Chin and returning to Kashgar. I continued my trek through Sichuan (western Tibet) and Yunnan Provinces via Chengdu, Kangding, Xicheng, Lugu Lake, Lijiang, Deqin. 3200 kilometers or 2000 miles later, I lost 53 pounds (24 kilograms) preparing and riding the tour. [Video from HimalayasX2011]



I discovered some great cycle touring video collections, this one covers the Trans American route across Wyoming, United States and seeing the scenery reminds me of motorcycling there 1994-1996.
[Authors notes:] I rode my bicycle self supported across the USA in the summer of 2011. This is a little video series that highlights parts of my trip.


Adventure Cycling Association just published this great short film on bicycle touring the American TransAm route. Videos like this are inspiration to go out and ride anywhere. [Authors notes:]With the incomparable Madison Range as a backdrop, cyclists explore the backroads, farmer's markets, and small towns of Big Sky Country using pedal power alone.

Mongolia X Journals 18 // Endless Drifting after completing

I find myself deep adrift in another world. East Asia, South Korea. Miles from the outside, clear air drifting over deserts and arid grasslands of Mongolia. My eyes are fixed on that movement, the survival I face, alone and with Nomads, the horses, the sheep, the tough yaks and camels brought along by horsemen and further ahead on the track, I see goats scurrying and munching mountain sides in symmetrical rows and tracing patterns. The land is natural under my feet. There are no paved roads, lines, traffic lights or the fog of drivers and pollution here. It's still out of reach for civilization and much of the land is needed for the animals who roam and feed their Nomadic people. The Russians have left the country, the Chinese are over the borders. Solidarity and democracy and pastoralism where the roaming sheep and goats outnumber people. This is a good feature of Outer Mongolia. Unforgettable. 

Sponsor support came from Lynskey Performance, USA

Today, I feel a vast emptiness bigger than deserts and I am home now in South Korea, while the North cajoles the idea of a nuclear war, I fall out of order losing touch with the westernized, commercialized South while we look out from stone wall apartment blocks and sliding glass windows at similar structures in rows of apartment columns, this could be the U.S.S.R. And in the back of my mind's eye, I can still see a golden sun and washboard roads, the rocky track and dust blowing behind a UAZ-452 people mover revving up over the mountain peak past the Ovoo, the spiritual cairn with horizons coming and going all the way from Lake Baikal in the North across the border in Siberia to the clutches of sand desert Gobi in the south. 

Here again, it's South Korea and the air is dry carried over the Taebaek and Cheongoksan mountains nearby. Here we are "Yellow Dusted" all springtime with a hazy cloud of pollutants that recently choked airports to close in Beijing and cause serious respiratory hazards in the elderly and those prone to allergies, my children were sick for weeks from this foul air. Far away and unclear, East of China, East of Mongolia, East of the Gobi Desert - the Far East is where we live. All spring is "outdoor activity on hold, or exercise with caution" since air masses are mixed with sandy dust and toxins from Industrial two-face, China.

I've been in physiotherapy for 4 weeks, best time spent in my life of recovery. A doctor who cares and knows my injuries, he can feel them with his hands and works the muscles and tendon like kneading a loaf of bread before throwing it through the fires of the oven. Everyday I leave the clinic I can walk straighter, feel less pain, do more than I did since I spent the summer hunched over while scaffolding 40,000 meters across 2,500 kilometers of the Northern Steppe in Central Asia.

I hurt, I feel pain now like I never did before. Today, I don't ride bikes, I don't speak to sponsors and I drift further away from finding them with my own personal life rolling through turbulent storms, electric clouds, dark shadows and light casting nets over my happiness and drowning it in a wild river. While trapped within nature's grip, I feel peace slipping through my hands when the next CNN report sensationalizes and draws more world attention to their news, their advertisers. While over here, we are struggling to keep watch over our families, homes, jobs and security - this is life in a divided Korea, today a risk environment for future warfare. Now, I must report to work and get the classes done, professional, work and family life, money and debts paid - the fine art of balance on a thin red line.

I now live again behind concrete walls, the internet, the social scene is displayed on a computer monitor, thousands flock to see, hear and click "Like" and add a new page to follow. I do the same as the sheep following the social road through a digital whiteout, a blizzard of connectivity and temporal connections. I miss living from my tent in the deserts, the grasslands, the yelp of dogs and bleeping of sheep coming round from their pastures in the middle of the night when stars twinkle bright and you feel alright. 

I miss the creative space of nature in wide open pastoral lands, where I could camp somewhere each night between 1,564,115 square kilometers of a single country, mostly open Steppe, arid grassland undeveloped, as were the tracks serving as national highways connecting life routes of trade and traveler. Small-bore 150cc Chinese motorcycles and the occasional 350cc single cylinder Russian motorcycle - a IZH Planeta 5s moving slowly, bobbing through holes and around overturned stones with a newborn baby wrapped in blankets between mother and husband, headscarf and sunglasses, jackets and heavy Mongolian overcoats, saving them from the cold nights, the harsh sunlight, and biting flies as they roll along.

It's tough living far from your cultural roots for so very long, the distances grow bigger each year and you always plan to go back, but you can't. And inside the Southern half of the Korean peninsula, the geographical space begins to shrink into one culture, one moment in time. You drift here, they don't see you, you work and serve the needs for hundreds, time ticks by, you drift by, nobody says goodbye. The wave of endless life, replaceable and timed out in the moments eventually lost in the sea of drifting memories. Mongolia was exceptional, I want to return.

What is the next expedition? 

--
Brian Perich

Adventure Cyclist, Explorer, Father, University Lecturer

Global Ambassador at Education Through Expeditions

Ambassador at IDEAS, Intestinal Disease Education & Awareness Society, Canada

Nandadevi International MTB Expedition

Korean-World Micro Blog

A2A Expedition project

Facebook groups, 1, 2, 3

Facebook profile

Twitter: Cycleagain

Media Sample Media Sample 2

Skype: prof.brian.perich

Ph. 82.10.8075.5121 (South Korea)

HIMALAYASX2012 / EXPEDITION OF WESTERN CHINA / NEPAL / INDIA

Adventurer sets course of returning to the Himalayas with a second mountain bike expedition starting north of the Taklamakan Desert. The expansive territory of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region include desert crossings to reach high altitude desert plateaus (5000+ meter altitude) descending to the lush wildlife inhabited jungles of Nepal to the Himalayas of northern India is route for the HimalayasX2012. In 2011, Brian Perich completed a round-China expedition with twists in the journey. A 30-hour passenger ferry from Incheon, South Korea to Tianjin, China was only the beginning. Once landed in mainland China, he cycled in Beijing and boarded an overcrowded passenger train traveling 3240km to Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. After standing for 36 hours without access to a toilet, and drinking only boiled water while wedged between passenger cars and people, he endured the real experience of economy train travel across China. Liberated by local Han Chinese university lecturer-turned oil company executive, he sponsored  a free apartment to recover from blood clotting in his legs and feet, a free visit to a local hospital. Adding the generous assistance of Uyghur bicycle owners and mechanics repairing the brakes and reinforcing the make-shifted front racks...he launched into a 3200km (1800km) whirl through the Tian Shan Mountains, across the Taklamakan Desert en route through the southern Silk Road to the northern Himalayas and back to Kashgar, Urumqi and continuing stage two, across Chengdu, Sichuan to the Himalayas and south through Yunnan Province ending the expedition at Deqin, Yunnan. It was the most extreme adventure to date, beyond the borders, into the cultures, languages, people, he encountered genuine kindness, generosity, serendipity and magic that can only be found while traveling long distances using only a bicycle, foot and thumb on the road. 

This solo expedition is supporting several non-profit organizations:

IDEAS, Intestinal Disease Education & Awareness Society, Canada 

in partnership with ETE, Education Through Expeditions, U.K.

 Local sponsorship: AN DAE GI at Gangneung Bike Mart, Gangwon-do, South Korea

 My sponsor knows mountain bikes and has built my recycled mountain touring bike.

 I will be using the same equipment from the HimalayasX2011

 Bicycle touring expeditions like a pro. Simple is reliable.

 Fully loaded Blackcat mountain bike, frame is aluminum alloy.

 Day and nights on expedition routes to complete in 60 days.

Updates to come....

Passing camel tracks in the Borohoro section of the Tian Shan Mountains, Xinjiang Uyghur 

Handy: Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook, 2nd Edition: Worldwide Cycling Route & Planning Guide