A member of Rideal on Moganshan Mountain.[Photo provided to Shanghai Star]

Flying on cycles

There are also various riding clubs in the city that attract bike lovers. Apart from plain old cycling, some are slightly quirkier.

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Vintage riding is a special form of cycling as cyclists dress up as those in the old Chinese or foreign movies and the bicycles used are assembled to imitate those of several decades ago. Skeat Yu is in a group of 20 vintage ride fans.

“The pace of life is so fast and we’ll feel bored of bicycles soon if we use them just to commute. In the vintage ride, we want to pay tribute to the good old days and share the happiness of cycling with more people,” says Yu, a training specialist born in 1981.

To participate in the city’s first vintage ride party in September, he assembled a vintage bicycle with old-fashioned components collected from shops here and abroad. “The bicycle is a foreign good and the best ones were first made in Britain and Germany,” he says.

The naked bike ride is another way that some cyclists want to promote a more environmentally-friendly mode of travel.

“We don’t want to be misunderstood. We want to tell more people that bicycling is healthy and can keep cyclists in very good shape so that they dare to show their figures,” says Zhang Linyuan, leader of a cycling club who has co-organized two naked bike rides in which men wear board shorts and women wear bikinis.

But more often Zhang organizes mountain rides. “We don’t do riding within the city or on inter-city highways. We cycle on mountains and nature trails to enjoy nature as much as possible,” says 40-year-old Zhang.

They do excursions to remote places in the country five times a year, including two times in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. “Although we may go to a destination for a second time, we bike via different routes to explore more and have new experiences,” he says.

They also pack their bicycles and fly abroad to ride twice or three times a year.

“Traversing the Alps is a classic international mountain route. After we arrived in Germany, we reassembled the bikes that were disassembled as checked luggage and cycled through Austria to Italy,” Zhang says.