Published September 2007, in The Livingston Enterprise, Livingston, Montana Park High School graduate and friends plan to bike across China, other Asian countries

By Peter Vandergrift
Enterprise Staff Writer

A Park High graduate will soon be peddling a message of international
goodwill while pedaling his bike across China and Asia.
Jim Durfey, 25, said he and four other recent graduates from the College
of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Minnesota are looking
for adventure and a more intimate acquaintance with the people of the
world.
"We want to act as a voice," Durfey said Tuesday in a phone interview
from Minnesota. "We want to take what the average Chinese are thinking
and talking about and tell their story."
The five cyclists will pedal out of Beijing Sept. 15 and hope to ride
between 20 and 50 miles per day. At that pace, the quintet plan to
traverse China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh, ending
up in India before the spring monsoons.
With most of the coverage about China focusing on abstract statistics,
Durfey said, they want to give people faces and stories they can relate to.
The 4,000-mile trip is not just a pleasure cruise, Durfey said. The
trek, which he and his friends are dubbing "Fueled by Rice," will raise
money for orphans in inner Mongolia and children born in violation of
China's one-child law. These children have no citizenship and many live
in squalor, Durfey said.
The group had planned to bike all the way to Europe, ending in Paris,
but the prospect of traversing Pakistan and Iran seemed too dangerous.
Durfey first traveled to China's Hunan Province in 2004 to teach English
and fell in love with the people and the countryside. He spent a year in
the city of Changsha and another year in a smaller town nearby.
The group is also raising money for a project in western Hunan to
provide scholarships for children of farmers who can't afford to go to
school.
Durfey said he felt a real attachment to the rural people of China.
"These people are still living good lives, just without a lot of
material wealth," he said. "I think, certainly, growing up in
Livingston, I had a good perspective of how valuable the countryside is."
The five cyclists are paying for the trip out of their own pockets, but
hope to raise money through their Web site, fueledbyrice.org., where
those interested can visit the blog of the cyclists to read stories from
the trip.