PEDALING your bike from Shanghai to Africa takes a while. To be precise: It takes a total of 480 days and nights — at least for Shanghai-native Shi Wen and her husband Xie Dun, who passed through 15 countries during their almost 22,000-kilometer-long journey.

They marveled at the sunset on fine sand beaches, traversed the Mars-like Jordan valley, zipped past zebras and giraffes and held their shabby but somewhat romantic wedding ship filled with refugees on the Nile river.

Yet there were also moments of despair — when they were hit by hail, almost washed away by heavy rain, and when soldiers pointed an AK47 at Xie.

“It’s not the scenic sites that attract me the most, but the whole journey, cycling from one place to another, going through these experiences together, helping and encouraging each other — that’s what I value the most,” Shi said.

The 28-year-old from Chongming Island was a quiet girl without any previous long-distance cycling experience. When her partner, Xie, told her that he quit his job working on a ship and that he wanted to cycle from Shanghai to Tibet, she objected in vain.

“When he set off, the first thing I did when I got up every morning was to check his updates,” Shi recalled. “On one hand, I was worried, but on the other, I became eager to go with him.”

About 28 days later, Shi couldn’t stay at home any longer. She, too, quit her job and boarded the next plane to meet Xie in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, with little more than a bicycle in her luggage. “I didn’t even tell my parents. I guessed that they would be mad if they knew,” she said with a smile.

From Chengdu, the couple took National Road 318, know as the most scenic in China, all the way to Tibet. Their original plan was to end the journey in the provincial capital Lhasa.

“But then we thought, if we cycled another 1,000 kilometers, we could reach Nepal. So why shouldn’t we?” Shi said.

The decision came naturally, and the couple headed to Kathmandu.

But once they arrived in Nepal, their urge to explore the world on their bikes was still as strong as it had been in Chengdu. With no particular reason to return, they just kept on cycling.

“We didn’t plan much,” Shi laughed.

Soon enough they had taken on gender-typical roles, she said. Her partner became the navigator and would fixed their equipment, while Shi cooked and cheered on her partner when things got rough.

When Shi’s visa for India was rejected, her journey ended abruptly. She returned to Shanghai, where she daydreamed about traveling again whenever Xie sent updates.

“He sent me beautiful seaside pictures but wrote: ‘The scenery is not that good if you’re not by my side,” Shi recalled, adding that she couldn’t stay in Shanghai. They met again in Jordan.

“When I saw him at the airport, I suddenly felt assured. Wherever we go, we stay together,” she said.

At Aqaba Port on the northeastern tip of the Red Sea, they had to wait for about one week to board a ship to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The region is known for piracy, and just a week before they arrived four Korean tourists had been killed.

Shi and Xie found the city unusually quiet and depleted of tourists.

The killings scared away most tourists, but for Shi and Xie, it meant a cheap stay. “One night accommodation was only 15 yuan (US$2.3),” Shi said. “We were afraid of the terrorist attack at first, but when you saw that the locals were living peacefully there, you felt like there was nothing to worry about.”

After one week in Aqapa and a long ride across the Red Sea, they started cycling toward Cairo. “Cities all seem the same,” they said, giving their reasons to avoid the bustling Egyptian capital.

Instead, Luxor was high-up on their to-do-list. But had they known how the trip would turn out, they might have preferred the streets of Cairo.

Like in most horror stories, their day started off as normal as it could be. The weather was hot, and the awe-inspiring pyramids lay ahead, leaving Shi and Xie in an excited, upbeat mood. But as they cycled along a desert road toward Luxor, they were trapped by a sandstorm. Unable to navigate their bicycles, they decided to set up their tent in a small pit nearby the main road.

Suddenly, they noticed two men, staring at them from a distance. They were carrying weapons.

“He let me hide in the pit and walked out with a surrender gesture, shouting hello to them loudly,” Shi recalled.

All of a sudden, the men pointed their AK47 at Xie. Trembling, he handed over their passports, hoping that all they had to do was to prove that they were simply tourist caught up in a sand storm. One of them phoned their superior and put Xie on the phone. Finally able to explain the situation to a fellow English-speaker, they were told to wrap up their belongings and leave as quick as they can.

The armed men were soldiers looking for rebels.

“Thank God they were government troops. If they were rebels, we wouldn’t be alive today,” Shi said, adding her whole body started to shiver in horror when she saw the machine guns pointed straight at her husband.

“People who never made this experience would not understand what I was feeling,” Shi said. “You don’t even have the strength to cry or speak. My husband is a hero.”

Form that point on, all they could do was cycle on, despite the 6pm curfew the government had imposed at the time. But once more, the couple got lucky. “We found a police station and they allowed us to put up our tent inside,” Shi said.

Finally, they reached Luxor, the ancient capital of the Egyptian empire, home to god-kings and the remains of shrines, temples and pyramids.

By chance, they met five Chinese backpackers and decided to share a dorm room with them for two weeks — some of their happiest days during their whole journey.

“Life was so easy during those days, plus we found five good buddies,” Shi said. After some discussion on the status of their relationship, Shi and Xie finally decided to get marry, though there wasn’t much time for planning.

The ad-hoc ceremony was held on a ship from Egypt to Sudan, right on the mighty Nile.

It was a simple affair. The rings were made of iron wires they had found on the ship and the reception featured a bottle of coke, peanuts and candies, and the five backpackers turned into groomsmen and bridesmaids.

Without a wedding gown, a suit or any other extravaganza, the couple exchanged their rings in the early morning on the top of the deck, squeezed and elbowed by other tourists, locals and refugees who got up to see the sunrise.

“It was not romantic at all,” Shi laughed, looking back at her wedding day. “I was in a total mess with tousled hair and dirty clothes,” she said. “But when the sun came out behind the horizon, I felt warm from the inside.”

From North Sudan, they cycled about 20 days through the Sahara desert. Uninhabited, the desert felt like a wonderland to the couple. “It was very safe, actually. In Africa, the fewer people there are, the safer it is,” Shi said.

Because of the scorching heat that makes it unbearable to ride during the daytime, they usually biked until 9am, had a rest along the road and continued after 4pm.

“The air was so fresh and the moon was so big and bright at night that we didn’t even need torches,” she said.

“It was so good to be alive,” Shi said, recalling the star-studded night sky in the desert.

In Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, they met a Chinese businessman. Touched by the couple’s stories, he invited them to stay in his luxury house for a week. “That was the one week we were taken good care of,” Shi smiled.

They reached Zambia during the Chinese Moon Festival, a day people spend with their family. Thousands of kilometers away from family and friends, Shi and Xie set out to find Chinese residents to celebrate with, but found that they were met with caution.

“We looked like beggars. We couldn’t blame them,” Shi said with a big laugh.

A local young man then invited them to spend the night at his home. “I didn’t trust him at first because he had been following us around for some time, but somehow my husband trusted him,” she said.

They followed him, straight into one of Karthoum’s poverty-stricken slums. “But we saw women and children, which made us feel a little safer,” Shi said.

Despite their poor living conditions, the Zambian family cooked a generous dinner and invited them to dance. “The interesting thing was a girl in that family liked my husband and asked him to stay and marry her. She wasn’t even joking — she looked dead serious,” Shi recalled, laughing loudly.

Pointing at his wife, Xie asked the girl what they should do about Shi if they got married. Sheepishly, the girl replied that Shi could stay, and that they could become friends.

The next morning, the young man who invited them over and paid a photographer to take a group photo.

Although they had stayed at the family’s home, eaten the dinner they prepared for them and slept under the same roof, Shi still didn’t feel safe. “Frankly speaking, I felt a little guilty because we had a digital camera, but we didn’t take it out for safety reasons,” she said. “To pay a photographer must have cost him a large sum of money.”

When the couple was about to leave, they exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers and are still in touch.

Their last stop was the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. “Sceneries are just a tiny part of the journey,” Shi said. “The people you meet, wether good or bad, the things you experience, the fun and the danger we’ve been through together, those things gave our journey its real meaning.” They returned home a year ago and now Shi is the mother of a three-month-old baby. Despite having settled back into their lives in China, they’ve now caught the travel bug. “We wont’ stop travelling. Maybe in two or three years, we’ll set off again. Just that then, we’ll have to take the baby on the road,” she laughed.

If you want to know more about Shi and Xie’s stories and their travel tips, follow them on the Sina Weibo @小司这厮