Portrait of an LBX

Today marked our second day in Hebei and plenty of lessons learned. The first lesson we learned was that it is now officially corn season in Hebei. Other than the thousands of Chinese everywhere, the traces of giant industry, the very young forests of perfectly grid-patterned trees in between the industrial and urban centers, and the Arabic signs of Muslim Chinese enclaves, it’s hard to differentiate this place from Nebraska. Ok, so it’s not the Midwest, but there is a ton of corn everywhere – being shucked by families in front of their establishments, or already de-cobbed and drying along the side of the highway for miles and miles (see picture). Even a tax bureau had drying corn out front. I wonder if they’re using it for animals mostly or if here, as in the US, they are selling it to food companies to be put into all their packaged foods. This will need to be asked soon.

Lesson 2 is that we absolutely must stop staying in 3rd tier regional centers. We picked a city called Wen’an off the map because it was a good distance from Gu’an, our start (today was 75km), and it seemed like a good staging point to get into some real Hebei countryside tomorrow. Of course, when we arrived, it was another bastion of Chinese quick construction mediocrity, full of hilarious crosswalk signs and stores and restaurants indistinguishable from anywhere else, plus tons of traffic. That was par for the course, of course, but the police are the real reason we need to stop coming to these places (that and the fact they are not our goal). When we stopped in front of the first hole-in-the-wall hotel we saw, I went up to negotiate for a room as usual, and came down to find Andy and Alexis surrounded by LBXes and police, asking what we are doing here. After lots of staring and questions, one nice old man took us to another hotel where we got a decent room and rate and decided to move our stuff up the four flights of stairs to our room. Immediately after we had finally gotten every last thing up to the room, we were informed by the 4 policemen who had followed us in that we couldn’t stay here as they couldn’t guarantee “our safety” in such a place; that we would be safer in a more expensive hotel. After long negotiations of fighting illogic with illogic and lots of stupid catch phrases that police-types love, they allowed us to stay, needing copies of our documents. The head of the bunch a fat guy not in uniform with his shirt untucked and a lit cig always hanging from his lips, then tried to prompt me to tell him I was carrying weapons by asking, “so do you have anything for protection on you for this trip?” My answer of, “we foreigners aren’t allowed to carry weapons” was followed by, “no, you’re right. I’m afraid we’re going to have to check all your bags.” Entrapment much? After dumping out all our bags in front of 4 indifferent cops who were clearly just trying to save face in their department, they left us, but not before adding, “if you must leave, there’s food across the street, but don’t go far.”

So from now on we’re going to avoid these mid-sized blips on the map like the plague. Tomorrow we delve into real LBX territory south of here on the way to Shandong, and hopefully our first home-stay or camping experience to boot. With that, good night.