A Bicycle Travling in Qinghai

This summer vacation my cousin and I went to Qinghai Province for a bicycle travelling trip. Qinghai Province is near Tibet and Xinjiang and the altitude there is about 3,000 meters.There is a famous salty lake called Qinghai lake. The lake is very big and blue, like a sea. That's why Qinghai in Chinese means "the blue sea". The circumference of the lake is about 350 kilometres, and we planned to circle it by bicycle in 4 days.

Actually Qinghai lake has become a famous place for bicycling. More than 10,000 people come there to circle the lake every year. The road around the lake is in a good state and few cars and trucks drive on it. In spite of the high altitude of the lake, the circling route is quite even and smooth. When we rode on the road, we could always see the blue water on the right side of us. That really delighted our eyes and minds.

But sometimes the lake showed its fierceness. On one of the several days, the weather suddenly turned bad, and when we noticed that, we were already on halfway on the day's journey. At the beginning, scattered drops fell on our faces, and we decided to speed up, hoping to reach the destination before the heavy rain. But as the wind strengthened, the black clouds rolled about in the sky and suddenly the heavy rain and hail poured down on us. Almost immediately the temperature lowed down dropped to almost (or close to) 0ºC and we found ourselves almost (or nearly) freezing to death, even if we were keeping stepping continuing to peddle the bikes.

If this situation continued for more than one hour, we might get into shock (I think you mean suffer from hypothermia) because of the temperature. Fortunately a house of local people appeared in front of us, and we rushed to there without thinking. Five minutes later we were sitting around a stove covered with heavy wool blankets. Thanks to the friendly local Tibetan, or that day didn't end up with in tragedy (After 'Thanks to...' we normally write the good result, not what negative thing could have happened.  So, the fact that something didn't happen is here the 'good result').

Because of some bad fortune, our cycling was paused delayed and we had to take a truck to our final destination. There were some regrets (or We have some regrets - present tense) but still the trip was something impressive (or worth it; rewarding; dramatic; exhilarating). Maybe that (or this is...) is what we call travelling.

A nice piece of writing.  It sounds like an enjoyable trip!  :)