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After a week in Beijing, we began our journey by cycling along the Great Wall 300 km east to Qinhuangdao, the chief port of Hebei Province on the Bohai Sea. There we spent a day there discovering the city before moving on to Dalian, a beautiful, modern European-style city near the tip of the Liaodong peninsula. From there we embarked on a ferry ride to Yantai situated on the northern coast of the Shandong peninsula. Traveling south we entered Qingdao, a major seaport and industrial center on the Yellow Sea and the host city for the sailing competitions of the 2008 Olympics. The team continued south along the yellow sea moving through largely rural areas of the Jiangsu province. Our travels through these rural locations provided us a glimpse of the 'forgotten' China and the people who live outside the rapidly modernizing cities. We rode parallel to the Grand canal which was started in 486BC and took over 1000 years to build. This impressive canal is the longest man-made waterway in the world and is a major means of moving goods and materials through this area. We continued south through one of China's most fertile and populated regions one our way to Shanghai, one of the largest urban areas in the world with over 15 million people, where we ended our cycling journey in Pudong, the financial center of Shanghai.