Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

That last post was the product of a little long-article-being-deleted induced rage and a few days spent withering in a silly metropolis… but I still stand by it. Anyhow, after over two weeks without updating about life on the road, today it’s about time.

I left off last in Quzhou, where we had hung out with the flying man, Xu Bin (as an aside, he was really awesome, but nobody’s picked up on the article about him yet). From there we headed west in our quest to leave Zhejiang, where for over a month we did rest. Our first day out we stayed in a little town where we were snowed in the following day, giving us ample opportunity to become acquainted with a couple of alcoholic highway workers from Guizhou who had been stiffed on compensation for a job in the area and were hanging out until the boss gave in. The second night we got a little loopy on huangjiu and the baijiu made on the first floor of our hotel, after which the linchpin Guizhou’er, named Erfa, staggered in three sheets to the wind himself, insisted on buying two more kettles of huangjiu, and proceeded to tell us stories about prison life and show us his gang tattoo. Awesome. It was no small surprise the next day at breakfast to find he had skipped on the bill. Oh Guizhou’ers, when will you learn?

Yes, by the way, I did say there was a baijiu factory on the first floor of our “hotel” (which was really just a family house with a few rooms rented out). That was amusing because a week later we were on the fourth floor of a place whose third floor was one giant fluorescent pink “health massage” center with young girls lined up on a couch under a blanket staring into the stairwell where we lived. You never know what’s going to be below you in China. The rest of the road into Jiangxi was relatively uneventful — so uneventful, in fact, that there was no sign whatsoever to tell us we had arrived. Incidentally, every day we rode was short, 50 km, to ease Andy back into the riding.

Northeastern Jiangxi was, to our surprise, full of really beautiful old architecture. Proud looking white houses with characteristic dark roofs and ornate paintings above the door were strewn about the mountains and rice paddies everywhere, a real treat for the photography nuts. There was one hitch, though, as Alexis’s back rim started coming unattached from the wheel and made a louder and louder bang as it clanged into his rear brake. As we came into Jingdezhen on Dec. 31, he was thud-thud-thud’ing something awful (it was absolutely impossible to convince him to disconnect his rear brake, as it’s absolutely impossible to convince him to do anything else really) when a middle aged cyclist started talking us up and, seeing our condition, called his bike shop owner buddy to come meet us on the road. Once he had led us into the city past the helicopter works where Xu Bin went for advice, his shop manager told us they didn’t have a replacement rim and would have to put a crappy Giant wheel on his bike. Well, crap. As it was New Year, we just left it as was, about to blow out completely. Speaking of blown out completely, we headed straight for the Walmart, nabbed a bottle of Jim and some cheap wine, picked up our visiting New Years angel Cathy from the airport — who was kind enough to bring us champagne and good French wine! — and had us a proper celebration (just in case you were concerned that our lives are too rigid out here, I underscore here: no cause for worry).

Jingdezhen was a weird place, totally uglified and decrepit from years of commie mismanagement, but still very cool for the porcelain culture there. A separate post about it is coming… eventually. After a few days, we bade farewell to our New Years angel and started trekking southwest, toward the provincial capital Nanchang to reprocess Alexis’s visa (yeah, it’s a pain). Incidentally, he did get that Giant brand wheel put on his bike, with 32 instead of 36 spokes, in what he personally described as an LBX-rig (pretty much like spit and feathers holding it together). More on this later. The ensuing days could be summed up as cold, brutish, and short. I say cold because it was below zero just about every night and morning, and it rained for 24 hours on the second day, 28 km of which we stupidly rode through. From there it was ice covered fields as we looped around China’s biggest freshwater lake, Poyang, at less than 50 km a day — hence short –due to the intense misery of the operation. Honestly my feet went completely numb every day despite 4 pairs of socks. I have never dealt with more cold induced misery in my life than biking through ice covered northern Jiangxi. By the way, the fates have aligned against the timing of this trip as the Saints have 13 wins this year, the Yankees finally took back the world series, and the coldest winter in 60 years is hitting China. If the Saints win the super bowl, I’ll know it’s a conspiracy.

One sidenote is that one of the places we stayed during the cold days was a somewhat nice hotel on an insanely muddy strip of new buildings completely uninhabited and dirty — the same place that had the bright light massage downstairs. After dinner around 8 pm, when middle school let out (yes, 8 pm), a little girl corrected an older woman who told us that nobody sold fruit in their little rathole of a town. As she led us to the market street, we asked her what she thought of her home. “We’re poor. We don’t have as much money as you,” was the first thing she said, followed shortly by, “our economy isn’t developed enough. We need to develop it to be like your countries.” She was in 7th grade. I asked her who gave her those ideas and if she’d studied or even knew what the hell economics is. Answer: in school, and not a clue. There was a lot of stuff I was interested in in 7th grade, like Xmen and girls, but I promise you I didn’t even know the word economy (or get out of school at 8pm for the love of all things decent and holy).

Anyway, we finally did get to Nanchang, where Alexis got his visa in a snap (unlike the stupidity of last time). Unfortunately, his right trigger finger couldn’t bend down (making braking a hazard, not to mention freaking him out), and so he had it checked at the hospital. The docs didn’t know what it was, but that didn’t stop them from prescribing over 400 yuan worth of medicine (I love this medical system!) and telling him to come back 3 days later for blood analysis. Stuck in a giant, bland city (4.5 million people), we resigned ourselves to an internet and coffee binge (yes, we are weak). The owner of the cafe across the street from our hotel was a cool artsy type who had a workshop in Jingdezhen, and covered his walls in self-done paintings. He also gave us a bunch of locally grown tea and some local yangmeijiu (杨梅酒). Sweet dude. Incidentally the food in Nanchang wasn’t bad, and the local specialty of little bowls of soup slow cooked in a giant ceramic oven (in the bowls, it’s a little quirky) were kind of a cool local flavor.

After days spent zoned out reading, listening to NPR (we’re trying to contribute some writing to them… but its going to take a little study and literary elbow grease), and writing, the analysis came back: nothing wrong. Except his finger still can’t bend right (did I mention I love this medical system?) Alexis and I got new gloves (he got a traffic warden’s vest too… for other reasons), and it was off again, but this time finally (and blessedly) due south.

That brings me to the title of this post. A week or so ago I read about the hyper-endangered South China Tiger and how the government here is considering releasing some into the wild. The likeliest release site is apparently Jiangxi, since, as the article put it, it’s the wildest place left in Southern China. That news got us all giddy and goosepimpled until the the first part of our ride turned out to be a veritable revisitation of the industrial hellishness of the North China Plain. It was so bad around Poyang Lake that we started to call it the Hebei of Jiangnan (think the New Jersey of the Appalachian South). We consoled ourselves by saying over and over: the south must be better, the south must be better! Yesterday, the ride out of Nanchang started predictably industro-uglized, but the terrain gave way to some better farmscapes, much easier on all the senses.

In the interests of time, I’ll give a few bullet points about central Jiangxi:

• They use pee to fertilize fields. Yes, pee. Every indoor pee we’ve taken has been in a bucket, and we see guys all over the place carrying urine-reeking buckets balanced on bamboo poles toward fields. Is there a pH requirement we don’t know about in these fields?
• There are water buffalo EVERYWHERE. Whether the giant beasts are being pulled around by strings in their noses or just free grazing out in the paddies, their numbers are impressive. Also numerous are the ducks. I dig how the locals have this local ecology thing down: raising rice and other veggies, letting their ducks forage for bugs in the paddies, and using the buffalo as labor savers and for meat.
• The locals here are just painfully bored and freak out excessively when they see us. More than anywhere before, people here have been encircling us to stare for upwards of an hour (when we sit in one place that long). The questions they ask are just crazy too. They don’t get out as much here as they did in Zhejiang.
• “The party is strong in this land, Master Yoda.” We haven’t seen a more thoroughly propagandized province since Henan. And in addition to endless “scientific development,” and other harmonious BS we’re used to, they’ve got some real GEMS. “Maintain the principal status of party members; Protect the democratic rights of party members (保持党员的主题地位；保障党员的民主权利 — what the F does that mean???),” and today, maybe the best one so far, “Urbanize the life in farm villages; the loving kindness of the party is greater than the sky (农村生活城镇化；党的恩情比天大).” (if only Liu Xiaobo had seen this sign a while ago, imagine all the trouble they could have saved!!!!). My personal theory is that the people tend to be way more zapped out intellectually wherever we get strong party vibes — aka that there is a cause-effect relationship, but I’m not sure which begets which.

As we guessed it, too, Alexis’s silly back wheel did indeed start giving us trouble again, as it came badly out of true and slid incessantly out of its grooves (we didn’t know it was possible!). After we got that somewhat under control, his rear brake seized up, causing us to have to disconnect it. He’s certain it’s the 5000 year old curse of the Jews — I’m starting to think he’s right. Anyway, more temporarily successful spit and feather solutions, and today after about 80 km we’ve arrived in a funny backwater with again one hotel, whose front windows are all broken. I’m typing this post from under the watchful gaze of a young Andy Lau poster inside a really hilarious room, covered over in plastic in such a way that, as Andy said, it makes you think they’re preparing us for a slaughter. A naked lightbulb hangs from a long, sad looking cord about 5 feet over the ground, and our 3 bikes block the way to the door. I really hope I don’t have a nocturnal urge to go out and walk to the end of the freezing cold wooden corridor (who am I kidding, it’s freezing in here too) to pee in the common bucket “shielded from sight” by a 4 foot piece of plywood. Oh yes, life is good. And that’s all he wrote for tonight — catch you in a few days!