Really old photos - China Bike Ride
In 2001, I took part in a sponsored bike ride around Beijing Province (not across China as the title seems to suggest), raising money for MENCAP, a UK charity that supports people with severe learning disabilities and their carers (from whom Lady Thatcher, in one of her stupider moves, withdrew almost all state assistance). Like a lot of these things, the required fundraising was actually a bigger challenge than the ride itself, so it's really best viewed as a contract between participants and the charity: we do this work raising money, and in exchange get a fantastic trip for much less than it would usually cost.
This was the trip that really sealed my love of bike touring. We travelled at the right speed to take in much more of the countryside than we ever would from a car or bus (would we even have noticed these two harvesting fruit at 60mph?), and still got to have some interaction with villagers in spite of travelling in a group of 40 blatant aliens. And I do mean aliens - in China's big cities a foreigner isn't that strange a sight, but within an hour's bike ride of Beijing city limits we were into places that only see tourists because this ride happens every year or so.
I had the good sense to keep all the pictures from back then, but unfortunately kept them by way of a backup CD burned by some stupid software that scrambled all the time and date information. I have at least a thousand photos datestamped March 2nd, 2002, which must be the day I made the backup in preparation for moving to Bristol, and including many duplicates. This is why I hadn't put them up on Flickr yet, in spite of having already editing them back then for a now defunct personal website.
Recently I found a directory on my computer that had the old website's China album in order, so while home sick over the weekend I resorted all these pictures, and now I've started putting them online. The bike ride itself is up, and I'll do the set from the free weekend in Beijing some time soon. Technically, these are appalling quality photos-a testament to how much I had to learn about photography, how poor my camera was, and how much I overcompressed files because disk space wasn't so cheap then-but I think the subject matter's interesting and the whole exercise brought back some great memories.