Overview

In 2020, Colin Flahive packed up his aging Galaxy motorcycle and rode 2,500 kilometers north through the changing rural landscapes of western China. Behind him were pandemic lockdowns, a friend's sudden death, and twenty years of life in China coming undone. Ahead lay the Sichuan highlands, vanishing villages, and a government-mandated scrap date for the two-wheeled machine that carried him through it all. Part motorcycle memoir, part cultural meditation, The Galaxy's Last Ride is an unflinching reflection on loss, impermanence, and the unexpected grace found in riding straight into the unknown. Flahive's off-road bike takes him along horse trails and highways, retracing how village life has changed along a route he first explored over a decade earlier. Along the way, he tries to reconcile the journeys of his past with a present-day China racing forward at breakneck speed, searching for meaning in grief, fatherhood, and what it means to build a life in a place that refuses to stand still.

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Colin Thomas Flahive grew up in Denver, Colorado, and graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with degrees in anthropology and Asian studies. He first came to China in 1998 as a backpacker, later returned to study, and moved to Yunnan in 2002.Now based in Kunming, he has lived in southwest China for more than twenty years. He runs four restaurants, raises a family, and has built a long term life in a region shaped by constant change. Living and working in Yunnan has strongly influenced how he observes place, culture, and everyday experience.Flahive is also the author of three works of fiction and one work of nonfiction including Great Leaps: Finding Home in a Changing China which examined rural to urban migration and the forces driving China's rapid modernization. In many ways, The Galaxy's Last Ride returns to the same questions at a later moment, when movement and development have begun shifting back toward the countryside.

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