Chinese man took two years to get to London's Olympics on his rickshaw
London has become a hot ticket since it won the honor of hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics. Getting to the Games by plane from just about any corner of the globe can cost quite a big chunk of change if you don't have enough cash or frequent flyer miles to get you there. One Chinese man may have found a way around that, assuming you have super strong calves and a couple of years to spare.
Chen Guanming, a 57-year-old farmer from the eastern village of Jiangsu, has made it to London just in time for the start of the Games today. He claims he got there on a rickshaw, according to the Associated Press.
His long journey started all the way back in 2008 during the Summer Games in Beijing. A British media outlet invited him to attend the Games in London but he couldn't pay for a plane ticket to get there. So in April 2010, he started pedaling toward Great Britain.
Chen told the AP that he had to traverse through some rough terrain to get to London, including flooding in Thailand and a dangerous snowstorm in Turkey, but he stuck through it and was able to ride his rickshaw all the way to France where he caught a ferry to get to London.
Of course, the irony is that after pedaling his rickshaw thousands of miles, there's no way he'll be able to find a parking space for that thing in London.
Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images
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I've been trying to get a visa for my girlfriend just to visit Germany for 90 days and still have not gotten one. I am curious though how did he manage to travel through all these countries without a visa and then take a ferry to England as well. Maybe I need to do the same thing. If it's a real story though, I'm impressed. The 65000 km seem to be way off though so he must have gotten lost many times. From Frankfurt to Beijing is only 8000km by air of course but the route he took is pretty close to the same route a plane would take.
