Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

After a couple days through some serious mountains, from Jiangle to Gaoqiao and Gaoqiao to Huyuan, our legs were starting to scream for a break. As we pulled off the road for lunch on our way from Huyuan to Anxi, I told Evan that after another full day through the mountains, I didn’t think I would be able to do much the next day. I suggested we check the map for a county seat with internet and take a rest day before setting out again.

Back when we first started the trip, we had resolved to stick to the back-country — to spend as much of our time as possible in villages (村) and townships (乡). A disheartening run-in with the cops on the second day of our trip temporarily resulted in a policy of avoiding mid-tier, regional centers at all costs. That was until we realized that we needed internet access to write this blog. Since then, we’ve pretty much decided that if we’re going to take a rest day, it should be in business hotel with internet in the room, which are usually found in only county seat-level cities (县城) or larger.

So we set our sights on Datian (大田), a county seat where we could be assured of finding a room with internet access. Exhausted, we pulled into the city’s dusty center late in the afternoon and started checking out the coffee shop internet scene in case we couldn’t find a wired room at the right price. The coffee shops, all rip-offs of the usual suspects like Straights and UBC, were a bust internet-wise, so we went to find a hotel. As we pulled up to a slightly expensive-looking hotel and Alexis went in to inquire about prices, a voice to my left called out in Chinese, “Can you speak Chinese?” I turned and saw a head poking out the passenger side of a police car and swore under my breath as the car pulled in front of Evan and the man got out to talk to us.

After a number of frustrating experiences, our blood pressure rises to dangerous levels at the sight of authority of any sort in China, especially the police. When the athletic man, Mr. Chen (陈), whom Evan would later rename Biff due to his resemblance to the antagonist from Back to the Future, told us he and the two other, overweight cops who had gotten out of the car were from the local cycling club and wanted to help us find a hotel room, we could only chuckle at the nerve of such a lie. We tried to shoo off the Police Uncles (警察叔叔), but they were not giving up.

When Biff told us they had known we would be coming into town for over an hour and had cars out looking for us, we kicked ourselves for being so open with Mr. Wang and the police back in Gaoqiao. Every police station in Fujian must be on the lookout for us now, we thought. I told Evan that with our Z-visas (the Z-visa, one of the most difficult to attain, is a one-year employment visa, which Evan and I still retain despite having left our previous jobs), we should probably start telling people that we had biked from Shanghai rather than Beijing so that we could plausibly claim that we had requested a sabbatical for the bike trip. We also decided to say we were ending our trip in Xiamen. “No matter what, we are not going to Anxi (安溪),” Evan told us. “That is the one place I absolutely want to go in Fujian, and we are not going to let these cops call ahead and get us kicked out of there. Tell them we’re going to Yongchun (永春) [one county north of Anxi].” So we began lying.

(more…)

. . . . . .

Jour 126 (25/01/10)

Jiangle(将乐)-Gaoqiao(高桥)

Province du Fujian(福建省)

- 60km -

Lé réveil sonne à 7h, et lorsque Andy va voir dehors: pas de pluie. Cinq jours à Jiangle! Nous pouvons enfin repartir!

C'est reparti pour des kilomètres et des kilomètres de montées!

(more…)

. . . . . .

By Evan

Ever since I began frequenting the institution of Shaxian Snacks (沙县小吃) back in Shanghai two years ago, I’ve always had a vague desire to know just what old Shaxian (沙县, literally “Sand County”) is all about. I mean, the little hole-in-the-wall (they all look more or less like this) vendors of super cheap banmian (拌面, mixed noodles), zhengjiao (蒸饺, steamed dumplings), and other dimsum’ish delicacies are almost on every corner (those not occupied by Lanzhou Pulled Noodles, that is) back in the Paris of the East (you heard me, Alexis). I passed two on my fifteen minute walk to work every morning. So it was that as we rolled south from Gaoqiao toward the Mecca of mian meals, I felt like a Bubba who’d spent years eating the Colonel’s secret recipe finally making the hajj to Louisville.

I'm telling you, southern Shaxian is Lord of the Rings stuff. Photo by Evan

Most unfortunately, however, the county city of Shaxian was just like any other county city anywhere else we’ve found, give or take a really gaudy central plaza and a giant, expensive, extra-touristy and double-lame City of Snacks (小吃城). We ate the only meal we could in good conscience eat, of course, and slipped through the city without too much event. However, since leaving, I found this article on People’s Daily about the phenomenon and have since reconsidered the rest of our time in the county of sand. If People’s Daily is to be trusted (you think FoxNews has an agenda?), nearly half of the rural labor force of the county is somewhere else in China operating dingy dim sum dives under the exact same moniker. That’s more than 50,000 people, mostly in Shanghai (over 2,000 locations) and Guangdong province (6,000 locations!). It just made me think how huge a role geographical luck plays in the life of people in China. Born in Huafeng,  you’ll likely spend your life in a coal mine; Jingdezhen, and you’ll probably see your fair share of ceramics; Anxi, and expect some tea in your life; Shaxian, and get ready to fry some noodles etc., etc. By the way, make a note of the last paragraph of that article:

Some outlets are plagued by poor training, or poor internal financial control. For example, the owners of many small outlets are not showing much competitive edge; they tend to use much of their profit to build new houses for themselves and spend little on reinvestment.

(more…)

. . . . . .



Jour 121 (20/01/10)

Zhukou(朱口)-Jiangle(将乐)

Province du Fujian(福建省)

- 70km -

Cette fois-ci encore nous nous levons tôt pour quitter ce bled un peu fou. Aussi bien hier soir que ce matin, nous avons eu mot pour mot, la même conversation avec quatre ou cinq lbx:

• “你们是哪国人？” (« Vous êtes de quelle(s) nationalité(s) ? »)
• “一个法国人，两个美国人！” (« Un Français et deux Américains! »)
• “哦～～～，三个国家？！” (« Ohhhh, trois pays différents ?! »)

Pont au milieu de nulle part (1)

Pont au milieu de nulle part (2)

(more…)

. . . . . .

Old men hang out on the stoop of what I believe is the Postal Savings Bank in Xiamen, Fujian. Xiamen was previously the country's largest tea-exporting port and then one of the five concession ports after the Opium War, a history which has left the city with old, European-influenced sections of town. In contrast to most of the other places we've traveled so far on this trip where we miss breakfast if we get out of the room after eight in the morning and miss dinner if we go out to eat after eight at night, store fronts in the old town were still closed early in the morning, but a vibrant night scene was still going strong at eleven at night.

. . . . . .

By Andy

One thing this trip has done for us is clarified the difference between villages (村), townships (乡), towns (镇), county seats (县城) and cities (市), which are all various administrative levels of government. Well, I still can’t tell you how the politics of it work or what sort of population a place has to have before it gets bumped up to the next administrative level, but I can tell you what sort of amenities can and cannot be found at each level and what the chances are of being hassled by the cops (on a scale of 1-5), assuming you’re a non-Asian foreigner: (more…)

. . . . . .

By Evan

When last I left off, we had just parted from the Daoist funeral and had to pass up the offer of some female Buddhist monks to stay in their temple due to its unaccommodating location atop a mountain. We rolled on again until around 4:30 to the town of Gaoqiao (高桥镇), where we realized there wasn’t enough sunlight left to continue. The only hotel in town, much to our dismay, had no vacancies, and we scrambled to ask locals where we could stay, half-way hoping one might invite us in. “If you have your own sleeping bags, you could sleep in the government center,” said one man selling raw pork in the central market. Well well well, a government center! That’s just ridiculous enough an idea to make for a good story, I thought. I was not to be disappointed.

Gaoqiao Town Government Center, our home for a night. Photo by Alexis

We proceeded to roll through the complex’s gate and in front of the five-story-tall government center — which possessed all the charms of a Soviet bomb shelter — we began incredulously asking if there was indeed room at the… inn. A Mr. Zhu, office director of the county government (镇政府办公室主任), looked with pity upon our plight and offered the center’s fourth floor spare room to us free of charge. To boot, once we had moved into the room with much fanfare from the other employees, Mr. Zhu, a terse, middle-aged man given to speaking in staccato bursts, took us to the employee cafeteria (员工食堂) for a bowl of rice with some cabbage, eggs, and pork strips — on the house. This world is just full of surprises! Afterward two dopey cops showed up to register us, and after telling us to “cooperate (你们配合一下),” Mr. Zhu left us with them for over 45 minutes as they clumsily took notes and filled in forms on nearly every detail of our lives, down to our religion (we were tempted to answer Communism but resisted) and our addresses in our home countries (were they going to send our moms letters if we misbehaved?). After they left, and just after I had climbed into my sleeping bag on top of one of the short bamboo planks in the free, broken-windowed room, an energetic man in his late 40s sporting a disheveled head of greasy hair, Mr. Wang (汪), burst into the room. (more…)

. . . . . .

The younger of the Messrs. Huang serves us tea in his father's home in rural Anxi County (安溪县) in Fujian province. We spent most of our time in the family's home with the younger Huang, a soft-spoken man who came off as embarrassed by the family's financial condition. Mr. Huang is using some of the family's roughly 100,000 yuan/year ($14,638) income from the tea farming and production business to build a boxy, cement, steel and brick home next to his father's traditional courtyard home. "The style is popular these days," he told us. Despite the new home's bland outward appearance, the younger Mr. Huang hopes its location directly on the provincial highway will bring in more business, allowing him to provide for a better retirement for his father and mother.

. . . . . .

The elder of the two Messrs. Huang pours us tea in the family's country home built into the hillside of a small village in Fujian province's Anxi County (安溪县). Sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in 1969, Mr. Huang built his own house and decided to remain in the village once the tumultuous period ended, becoming the village's first farmer of tieguanyin (铁观音, Iron Avalokitesvara) tea, the county's specialty. The generous elder Huang invited us into his home for dinner, an overnight stay and breakfast, an offer which we gladly accepted.

. . . . . .

A tea farmer in Anxi (安溪) County, China's most famous area for producing tieguanyin (Iron Avalokitesvara, 铁观音) tea, trims tea plants. Tea harvesting and production occurs mainly in May and October, with leaves from the spring harvest generally the most sought-after.

. . . . . .