Adventure travel writer Carla King rides a cranky Chinese Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycle through China, alone, and illegally, breaking down on backroads in mountains and desert, and follows blue supply trucks that trundle along riverbeds when the road ends, until they turn up to a village where the road begins again. The maps are wrong, the Mandarin she studied before she left is in the wrong dialect, everything she ever thought she knew about China is wrong. Where will she end up tonight?