Portrait of an LBX

I had imagined that riding through coastal Shandong would be nice — beautiful even. For two days, however, we had some pretty depressing scenery. We’ve been forced to travel on provincial roads (省道) a good bit recently both as a result of our location in Shandong and our rush to get to Qingdao by Friday night to meet a friend. Generally we prefer the inter-village roads (乡间道), which are a tossup in terms of road quality but usually winners in terms of traffic flow and scenery as they usually run through fields between villages and small towns.

On Tuesday we woke a bit early but stayed in our room until noon editing pictures and writing new posts. We were already tired from a couple days of fairly hard riding and considered staying another night but realized that there was no way we would make it to Qingdao in time if we did. So we begrudgingly set out from our hotel in an awful oil-field town at around 1:30 in the afternoon to see what sort of distance we could put under us before we started settled down to celebrate Evan’s birthday. The answer to the distance question was 68km, which was pretty good for our start time and energy level — but we had to go through some awful stuff to get there.

Apparently Shandong is oil country, which none of us knew. The town where we were staying, called Chunliang (纯梁), sprung up around some nearby oil fields. If you’ve spent some time in China, you know that bad enough things result when small towns are actually planned. When they spring up around an oil field there is simply no hope. Rhetorically, Alexis asked, “So, where do you think will be the first place we get to that isn’t dusty?” as we began moving out of town. We had no clear answer to give.

Chunliang has a nice enough sounding name in Chinese (translating roughly to “simple bridge”), but we often find ourselves asking where they could possibly come up with the names for these places, because the towns themselves often bear no resemblance to their idyllic monikers. Chunliang is a one-street town with a single traffic light, but being on a provincial road, massive trucks move through the town like a herd of elephants — overweight elephants that far exceed the speed limit and don’t know how to stop blowing their horns. “Dusty” cannot begin to describe eastern China, and Chunliang is of course no exception. The dust permeates everything and is constantly kicked up by the cargo trucks blowing through town to make the traffic light. Trash, like in most small towns in China and probably any developing country, simply accumulates where it is dropped, i.e. everywhere. Like the dust, it floats through the air with the passing of trucks. The town’s buildings consist of rows of two-floor shops on either side of the main drag, too few of which are restaurants.
When we first arrived in town, I was approached by a woman speaking surprisingly intelligible Mandarin. As it turned out, she said she lived in Beijing for a long time, but had recently retired to Chunliang. I was taken aback to say the least. The next morning as we ate breakfast in an outdoor market of sorts full of street vendors, we saw a man selling Lanzhou pulled noodles. We expect Qinghai province, near to where Lanzhou is located, to be one of the highlights of our trip in terms of scenery. Again, we were baffled at the willingness of people to leave their homes of mountains, grass and crystal clear water to set up shop in a cart on the street of one of the cesspools that are sixth-tier cities in China’s east. Can following the money be worth such a sacrifice?

But speaking of money, we’ve recently taken to asking people how much they make, just like they do to us. It turns out if you can position yourself well, you can make a fair amount in occupations we never expected to have such paycheck. For example, the Chinese pear harvesters/packers we met make a bit less than 4,000 yuan ($585) per month, post-tax. The other night we met a farmer who ponied up 80,000 yuan ($11,700) of his own money to buy a tractor, which he now uses to plow other people’s fields for over 5,000 yuan ($732) per month. As an agricultural worker, he pays no taxes on his income. For comparison, many white collar workers in Beijing and Shanghai struggle to pull in 2,000 yuan ($293) per month, and you can’t feed yourself on five yuan per day there like you can in rural Shandong.

As we left Chunliang, the air quality began to worsen beyond its already abysmal level. We passed oil pumps bobbing slowly up and down on either side of the road before moving into some really strange stuff.

It would be interesting to count how many ghost towns we pass throughout our yearlong trek, but we have already lost track. As we moved 20, 30, 40 kilometers away from town, we passed through numerous abandoned towns not much smaller than Chunliang. Despite broken-out windows, dust kicked up by passing trucks and the dimness of the polluted air, we could still make out advertisements for dumplings, soups and dog meat. Wild dogs roamed the parking lots of former truck stops in search of forgotten meat. Every once in a while we would cross a bridge over a small river, each one wheezing its last, painful breaths through black, viscous water stinking like nothing we had ever smelled before. Humorous signs such as “No shrimp catching” lined the banks. Seeing a man in front of a parked car with a net, we shouted, “Are you catching shrimp?” Yes, he was — probably to sell to any one of the truck stop restaurants lining the busy road.

Shortly after dusk we arrived in a truck-stop town called Yingli (营里) where we found a place to stay and celebrated Evan’s birthday at a little noodle joint with some farmers and three Chinese bikers from Beijing.

On Wednesday, the previous night’s celebrations left us leaving town at noon once again. As we rode out of Yingli, we could not have been more than 20km from the ocean, yet instead of sand dunes as I had hoped, we found only the same fine dust blowing into our eyes. For about 20km of our 105km ride we rode a wide, newly paved provincial road through seemingly endless salt flats dotted with massive coal power plants spewing pollutants into the air. It was one of the most depressing sites I have ever seen. Again, I wondered how all this could ever possibly develop into something worthwhile. How long until the rivers can heal and grass replace the endless expanses of dust? How long until some semblance of quality works its way into the architecture and construction of all these dismal towns? How long until the scars of 30 years of “development” and “progress” finally fade away?

As I finish typing this note, I sit in a Starbucks in Qingdao, 2008’s “Seventh-most Livable City in China.” We arrived in the quaint, “livable” city yesterday after about 95km of biking, but due to China’s urban sprawl, which exists like gravity or any other constant of the universe, we didn’t arrive at our hotel in the center of town until 135km of biking. While ugly as all hell, the city is actually quite pleasant (but like time, this is relative). The proximity to the ocean kicks out much of the pollution we experience regularly in China’s east, and the streets are narrow and shaded by lush vegetation. The city is hardly bike friendly – there are no bike lanes like in Beijing. But it is certainly livable, and the and the old free-standing houses from the German “occupation” give it a quaint and attractive atmosphere. We are resting here today and tomorrow and a French friend arrives from Beijing tonight to spend a week riding around Shandong with us. We’ve had sort of a frantic push to get here in time, leaving little room for what we set out to do on this trip, but after the next week we will be fully devoted to our cause and plan to make a leisurely journey back east across Shandong and through Henan and Jiangsu before hitting Shanghai in a month or so for another respite.