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We are having trouble ordering our food in Chinese. My chinese is good for getting by and around, but somehow I never developed my food ordering vocabulary. We point to what other people are eating or we go to the kitchen and choose our ingredients. But somehow we always end up having a plate of "chef's surprise." Last nights 'surprise' was pig foot soup we tried the foot then did our best to eat around it. Today's bike route was a little bit like "chef's surprise". The best road map we could find has no contours or indications of height or mountain passes... oh and its all in Chinese. (There are some US aviation maps we could have bought but the budget would have been spent before leaving Canada.) So we started the day with an uphill that we thought would end at every corner we passed. We made bets as to how high we would climb that day settling on 2000 and 2100 meters above sea level from a starting height of 1000. Instead of that downhill we thought we'd see behind the next corner, were sections of switchbacks to inch us up another mountain. We ended up reaching a height of 3000 meters... well beyond our estimated guess. The despite the burning muscles, a final push was made to reach the next village shown on the map where we could get a warm meal and a bed. "Chef's surprise" again. Unlike the other dots on the map, this one was not a village but just a dot indicating the top of the pass. So our last uphill efforts were unrewarded and as it was getting dark... instead of descending to reach another dot on the map which could feed us and house us, we walked a bit away from the road, pitched our tent and had a nice meal of cold, raw Ramen noodles. The cow paddies on the ground should have been the first indication we were not alone on the mountain side. But we were too tired. The cow moos around our tent became our sweet lullaby.