By Andy
2010/06/16 — 79 km
Fresh, wild mushrooms for breakfast. Photo by Andy
Some days just make you feel privileged to have the opportunity to be out riding a bike instead of in an office, at home or just about anywhere else.
We crawl out of bed to the alarm at 6:30 in order to try a new strategy of biking for a few hours, taking a couple-hour break mid-day, and then biking a few more hours in the afternoon. All three of us are bouncing up and down, fighting the urge to pee our pants. You see, after we moved all our stuff into the hotel the night before, the hotel owner informed us that we would have to go to the bathroom at the gas station next door and locked the bathroom in her own hotel. We all peed off the balcony and into the parking lot at some point in the night, but without the cover of darkness we aren’t so bold now.
We step out under a brilliant blue sky. It has rained all night and every trace of the haze that followed us out of the city the day before is gone. The air is crisp and cool and the golden morning sun makes even the dreary old truck-stop town of yesterday a sight to behold.
A group of ethnic Miao women is gathering along either side of the street, selling wild mushrooms from the mountains in baskets. We pay 35 kuai ($5.12) for a sizable portion and bring it with us to breakfast to have done up in local style as we watch more and more women and children come down from the mountains with baskets of fresh wild mushrooms for sale.
Breakfast otherwise is fried noodles as usual. The mushrooms come out a bit later, sliced up and fried plain in copious amounts of oil. So maybe the local style isn’t all that great. Nobody starts hallucinating from the wild fungi, so after some stretching we begin down the road.
We climb at first, finishing the ridge separating two valleys that we began the night before as we sprinted into town ahead of the rainstorm. Cresting the ridge, short, rounded mountains stretch off into the distance on either side, and we descend into a long, green valley.
Tobacco and rice forever. Photo by Andy
The green this time is tobacco plants — hundreds of thousands expanding out in neat rows as far as the eye can see, interspersed occasionally with freshly planted rice paddies. The broad, green tobacco leaves are breathtaking under the cobalt and ivory sky, and yet they are destined to become one of my most detested products: cheap Chinese cigarettes. I try instead to imagine them dried whole and rolled into fine cigars instead.
We proceed through the shallow valleys, straining occasionally to push ourselves over the short ridges separating them, as if making our way through the crests and troughs of a calm, frozen surf. Soon, we’re following a rushing, brown river, mad with the rains from the night before and filled with the ruddy clay soil it’s picked up along the way. A white egret inches timidly toward the foamy edge and backs away in fear. No fish today!
The landscape and weather are revitalizing, especially after the experience of getting out of Kunming. At around 45 km, we crest another ridge and see the county seat of Malong (馬龍縣城) spread out in the valley below. We pull into town and relax for a couple hours drinking tea and eating.
A valley to be thankful for. Photo by Andy
After our midday rest, we decide to call it a day at Qujing (曲靖), a city 30 km down the road, rather than pushing it to 100 km as was the original plan. The road out of Malong quickly disappears into a mess of gravel and finally about five inches of muddy water, which we ride through praying that we don’t topple over and fall in.
Once we finally find our way back to the road, it’s a quick little climb and then a plunge into a valley where we find the city of Qujing and a 58 kuai ($8.48) hotel room waiting for us.
