Portrait of an LBX

• Restaurant owner just gave us free breakfast for being such great guys! #
• Pretty nasty day of riding today due to trucks and dust. Now we remember what national roads are actually like. Got spoiled in Yunnan! #
• Has #chinaunicom rolled out new #3G base stations lately? Now getting 3G reception in town-level areas in Guizhou. Awesome! #

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An empty boat heads upstream to pick up watermelons from a Bouyei village with no connecting roads.

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• Rained all night and all morning…not a good choice for camping. Going to pack it in after lunch and wash/dry everything. Today = shot. #

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A group of farmers works across a field digging up what I can only assume is some sort of valuable medicinal root. They're probably not cutting the grass with scissors, anyway.

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By Evan

My mother, who doesn’t care diddly squat about China, has requested that I write something about personal development and insights over the trip, something more on a human/emotional level and less about the place I’m traveling in. So, fair warning, this piece is entirely subjective and in parts dangerously touchy-feely. It might, however, be of interest to others who have taken long trips in strange places.

The first thing to discuss is the psychology behind a trip like this. By that I mean the importance attitudes and moods play, especially when you’re essentially repeating the same up-down pedal motion eight hours a day and when you’re as severely introverted as I am. When I say introverted, I mean that my default mode of operation is to sink deep into my thoughts unless prompted by necessity or curiosity to interact with the outside world. So whenever we start pushing out a long, hard ride, my mind will grind away with increasing momentum in whatever direction it started that morning, usually tempered by extreme emotions. I can be in the highest of spirits while climbing a giant hill or sucking away life-shortening clouds of black truck exhaust, or I can be melancholy riding through a bamboo forest full of chirping birds. Unfortunately, in the last weeks the bottom fell out of my self-confidence, and I’ve been dwelling for hours at a time about how I won’t be able to write a decent book since I suck so much at organizing my ideas, and how I don’t know what the hell we’re doing this trip for, and how maybe it was a stupid idea in the first place, etc. etc. That’s why I haven’t been able to make myself write anything for this blog in so long, until two days ago I rode alone the last 75 km into Guiyang and blasted out the negative gook that was clogging me up. A month ago, I felt so great about this trip and the things we were seeing and how super duper insightful I thought I was that — with a little inspiration from reading The Sun Also Rises — I decided to write a novel about life in China in addition to the travelogue from this trip. I spent my biking hours soaking in every minute sensory detail to be recorded in notes, and simultaneously cooked up a killer storyline and a cast of characters. I was so high on the idea that I wrote 50 pages of it!

So you see, your attitude dictates everything when your activities don’t have natural beginnings and endings. That is to say, everything we do, determining destinations and distances for a day, writing posts, taking notes, having LBX experiences — it all comes entirely from us. Nobody is telling us what to do. When you’re the master of your own fate, your mentality determines whether you’ll use that freedom to become great — like Benjamin Franklin or Zhuge Liang or Ernest Hemingway — or just give up and become a bum. There’s a good line from the movie No Country for Old Men about having to recommit yourself to your task daily, maybe even twice daily when it’s particularly hard, that sums up the lesson I’ve learned about the importance of keeping my thoughts pointing in the right direction and not letting them fall into an abyss. (more…)

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• Camping in the rain #

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Spotted in a small-town market on our way out of Yunnan.

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• Andy's Shanghai sojourn comes to an end — a great weekend and a much needed refresher. #

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Spotted in a small-town market on our way out of Yunnan.

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By Evan

Mr. Xie, owner of Xinzhai Coffee, explaining the secret to his success, by Andy

“The first step to getting our coffee farmers to produce a quality product was to get them drinking coffee,” our host explained, a freshly pressed cup of his own brew in his hand. On the couch opposite him, one of his growers — and a friend from the same village — added that over the past years just about everybody in the village has picked up the habit of drinking 8-10 cups of the black stuff a day. Andy and I sat shaking like leaves in October from our eighth cup in a few hours, amazed that we had been out-caffeine’ed by a room full of Chinese.

We were sitting in the Xinzhai Manor Coffee Company (新寨咖啡公司), guests of the founder and owner Mr. Xie Xianwen (謝顯文). Mr. Xie opened his company in his native Lujiang (潞江) in Yunnan’s Baoshan Prefecture (雲南保山市) for two reasons. First, coffee had been grown in his home village of Xinzhai — after which the company is named — for years without anybody taking the time to organize the farmers or develop the industry. Second, he realized there was good money to be made in the domestic coffee business. So he quit his job in a tobacco company — and his smoking habit — scraped up a little capital, and got roasting. (more…)

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