Saddle Soaring in Guangdong by John Borthwick

China has scores of so-called 'minority' ethnic groups - Tibetan, Kirghiz, Yao, Uigur and many more. As I pedal through the back blocks of Guangdong Province it strikes me that, due to the garish cycling garb we are wearing, my ten companions and I may well be regarded by the Chinese as the 'Lycra minority'.

We are on a mountain bike tour of Guangdong, the capitalistic, gung-ho province just north of Hong Kong. Having escaped the melee of its capital Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and the endless tollways that seem to appear overnight like spider’s webs, we cycle mostly on Guangdong's rural by-ways. The new highways and party boys in Volvo limos soon give way to a recurrent image of China: a barefoot peasant arm-wrestling her buffalo-drawn plough across muddy rice fields. For those without mobile phones, it seems that the more things change the more they stay the same.

Our trip might be described as 'ten days that shook the coccyx', plus three rest days. We have 700 kilometres to cover - in and out of villages, beside rivers and through low, wooded ranges - averaging about 70 km cycling per day. Our first stints in the saddle are, of course, days of whines and moans as tendons shriek on the up-hills, calves knot like a petrified forest and our tails feel as pulverised as tartare steak.

Riding into town like the Dirty Dozen (or the Lycra Eleven) on our 21-speed gear bikes, we attract much attention. Friendly local people ask our guide Zhi Wei, "Why do these foreigners spend a fortune to travel here on bicycles - like peasants?" Answers about "adventure travel" or "cultural tourism" never satisfy. It is only when he says, "This is the best way they can lose weight," that the onlookers find the logic of the explanation fits the lunacy of the occupation. And it's true. Not that any of us were obese to start with, but the kilos do drop off.

Zhaoqing, Deqing, Fengkai, Babu, Pingshi... We overnight in towns that I've never heard of before. Take Wuzhou. Hardly a household name beyond its own province, it sits on the banks of the West River (of the Pearl River system) over which our hotel's 17th floor rooms look. If I am surprised to find a modern, high-rise hotel here, it's little compared to my astonishment at the view behind the hotel. A multi-tiered scrum of flats clings to the hillsides like a low-rise Hong Kong. One million people are squeezed into Wuzhou, and yet it is merely a dot on the map of China.

Pedalling comfortably - at last - on fairly level roads, we ride through a vivid travelogue of images: willow plate scenes beside morning rivers, limestone crags that jut from the plains like a dragon's molars, peasants in pagoda-wide hats toting improbable loads on balance poles, a thousand waving, "hullo-ing" (in English) children, and oddities like an old shack with a satellite dish as polished as a new wok sitting on its old tin roof.

These days there aren't many Mao suits in Guangdong. On the contrary, in the larger towns, massive investment (often by overseas Chinese) is throwing up avenues of apartments and office blocks - usually clad in tiles. Often remaining unoccupied for some time, these developments have the look of instant ghost towns, shining in their tiles like brand new public toilet blocks. While freewheeling through one of the few rural villages that has retained its lovely pre-Revolution curved roof architecture, I find myself contemplating (from my perspective as a member of the "Lycra minority") the proposition, "Will Guangdong be completely tiled by 2010?" Not completely - but they're working on it.

Towards the end of the trip, at a roadside lunchbreak, I ask Zhi Wei the population figure for Guangdong. Mistakenly hearing his answer as, "Seventeen million," I add, "About the same as Australia's." "No," he corrects, "Seventy million."

Overwhelmed, I hop back onto my bike and push towards the next town - of perhaps only half a million people - contemplating China's rapid flux from traditional peasant life to an amphetamine economy that they're trying to rein back to eight percent growth per annum.

I am overtaken by a man who's heading to market with 20 wobbling, live ducks trussed to the back of his little motorcycle. I catch up to him in the town of Pingshi, where the big money these days is not in ducks but in digital karaoke players and DVD players, However, they still calculate the bill with an abacus.