Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Now, after over ten months of munching away the dry bottom layers, we have finally arrived at the icing on the cake of our adventure: Qinghai. This, the fourth largest territorial unit in the empire and birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, embodies nearly every reason we undertook this colossal ride: pristine natural beauty, life highly unadulterated by the worst parts of modernity, and for once, healthy resistance to mainstream ideology. The green, spacious province was also the intended target for my China ride in 2007. Thankfully, however, a grocery store clerk and hobby cyclist outside of Chengdu managed to convince me that my friend and I were unfit and underprepared for biking of that order.

Truly in 2007 I was in no way ready for this territory on my folding Dahon without camping supplies, warm clothes, or bike tools (I didn’t even carry any chain oil!), and so I probably owe my life to that grocery store clerk I found riding outside of Chengdu. This time around, however, we’ve built the entire trip — endurance, equipment, etc. — around our eventual arrival here in the northeastern corner of the Tibetan plateau, the challenges of which we have met in stride. This, of course, flies in the face of nearly every Han we told of our eventual arrival here. The vast majority was convinced we’d meet with something between certain doom and probable vexation in the territory of the rowdy, lawless Tibetans. In the end, they were right about the trouble, but completely off base on where it would come from. (more…)

By Andy

2010/06/11 — 149 km

Big day. I wake up abruptly to the alarm at 6:45 after the best sleep I’ve had over the last three nights — and that’s not saying much. I just can’t sleep in a tent. I have a hard enough time getting a good sleep in a comfortable bed these days, despite the daily physical exhaustion.

We get things packed up and get a reasonably early start down the wooded mountain corridor, where we pass dozens of “food and lodging” (食宿) places no longer offering either food or lodging. It’s amazing to think how much commerce used to go up and down this little, two-lane road (national road 國道320), which stretches from the Burma border near Ruili the whole way east to Shanghai, over 3,000 km away. It’s nearly empty now, unless the expressway that has since supplanted it is closed in one direction, in which case it’s a miserable, dangerous mess.

I can only imagine that’s what it was like back when G320 was the main trade artery between Lashio and Kunming, which would explain the dozens of now-derelict eateries.

Still a ways to go, although you never know with these signs, by Andy

After a breakfast of noodles at a Muslim restaurant (they make the best boiled noodles by a long shot when boiled noodles are all there is to be had!), we continue down the road. The valley gradually widens and we are on a wide highway of sorts. We pass two signs that seem to indicate that the expressway that parallels our national road can be reached to the left and that we should continue straight (have a look at the picture to the left and see if you agree with that assumption).

I continue ahead while Evan stops to take some pictures of local architecture and the murals on the walls and climb up a steep mountain for nearly a kilometer. When I get to the top though the road dead-ends at a toll booth. I approach and ask the woman at the ticket window, “This isn’t the expressway, is it?”

Oh, but it is.

“What happened to the national road toward Kunming?”

She gives me a confused look and calls another worker over. After a moment of consultation the man tells me, “You have to go back down the mountain and turn right.” (more…)

By Andy

2010/06/10 — 117 km

Little Weirdo, by Andy

This time we get out of our tents and packed up an hour earlier, although we still get on the road half an hour later than we would if we were in a hotel. Before we climb down from our plowed, planted perch, I check the altitude and find we’re at 2,390 m (7,841 ft). By the time we get on our bikes and climb to the top of the pass, we’re over 2,400 m (7,874 ft), the highest we’ve climbed on the trip, and possibly the highest we’ll get until we’re climbing up onto the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan province.

We find breakfast 18 km later in the valley, and I’ve already gotten my head in a steam about the insane traffic that still plagues us. Fortunately, when we pull into the restaurant I notice that the long strand of trucks, buses and SUVs is originating from the expressway exit in town, and breathe a sigh of relief that we’ll be free of the awful traffic and numerous near-death encounters until the next time they decide to close off the expressway in one direction for a hundred kilometers or so.

The day turns out to be fairly easy and uneventful, consisting of long cruises through green, rice-covered valleys and the occasional climb over into the next.

We stop for lunch around two, but Evan doesn’t eat. We’ve got metabolisms about as opposite as they come. When we continue after lunch, we find the Yunnan architecture that we’ve been marveling at so much (and which I’ve failed to mention to this point) has grown even more interesting. (more…)

By Evan

nomad |ˈnōˌmad|

noun

• a member of a people having no permanent abode, and who travel from place to place to find fresh pasture for their livestock.

• a person who does not stay long in the same place; a wanderer.

– New Oxford American Dictionary

The nomadic lifestyle, by Evan

Although the only things we seek that might pass for “fresh pasture” include fried rice noodles with eggs and maybe bottles of oil (or whisky), we do quite neatly fit the definition of classic “bike nomads.” This, of course, is a very difficult concept to convey to most Chinese, who typically after hearing the entire spiel about what we’ve done over the last nine months and will continue to do for the next four will then ask, “so you both live in Beijing, and you’re students there?” “Home is where your (sore) butt is” will probably mystify most until we get onto the Tibetan plateau in a month. I digress.

Back to the point, more often than not on this big, ridiculous trip of ours, we fall short of our forecasted feral-ness. We had planned from the beginning to stay a majority of our nights either in the homes of LBXes or in the wilderness, but this man-like plan has like many others gone mice-like. So it was decided, after several days of self-pampering à la European backpacker in Dali in the walled-in hippy nest of Andy’s college bud Rick, that we should man up a little. We also wanted to live cheap to recover the old wallet from our spending frenzies. Up to $20 USD in a single day — madness, madness! (more…)

By Andy

2010/06/08 — 72 km

Dali is a treat, although not in the most relaxing way, since there we meet up with a college buddy Rick who lives there. Our original plan calls for two days in Dali, but a stomach bug keeps us there for three.

After one last Western breakfast, we finally get on the road around 11:30. The combination of a day and night of spent sitting on the toilet and trying to hold my food in has left me utterly exhausted, but we need to be on toward Kunming, where our friend Aaron is coming in from Shanghai to meet up and ride for a week.

"Accumulate wealth for the nation; carry out the law for the people." Pay your taxes (more each year) or the law will be carried out for you, people!

Immediately upon leaving the Dali old town, we remember just where we are. After three days of snoozy little streets and cafes, the national road out of town is a rude awakening. Horns blare, the “hallos!” are back in full force, and there’s even a good strong wind blasting us in the face to welcome us back to the road.

Eventually, and this is like 25 km in, which is a tribute to Dali’s suburban sprawl, the four-lane concrete road narrows down to two lanes of bumpy asphalt, and we begin climbing into pine-covered mountains on an easy grade. (more…)

Jour 71 (01/12/09)
Shaoxing(绍兴)-Shangwangcun(上王村)
Province du Zhejiang(浙江省)
-env. 45km-

Nous nous sommes couchés à 19h, et c’est 12h plus tard, à 7h, que nous nous levons. Après une bonne douche, nous remballons nos affaires, grignotons quelques baozi à la pâtes de haricots rouges et une galette aux œufs, et retournons au Starbucks pour prendre un café. Internet, c’est bien sûr très pratique, mais son addiction menace souvent notre progression. Ce n’est qu’à 11h que nous partons.

Au début, la route est remplie de camions et les paysages sont horribles. Nous décidons alors de bifurquer vers une petite route de montagne. Les pentes deviennent vite très abruptes, mais le décor s’embellit considérablement, et nous traversons quelques petits villages qui ne manquent pas de charme.

(more…)

In the last couple days we have inched slightly closer to our goal for this journey, which is to spend some real time getting to know the laobaixing of China in a personal setting — at meals and hopefully in their homes. Before we began this trip, my biggest worry was that it would quickly turn into a balls-out contest to see how far we could travel each day by bicycle and the goal of learning about the Chinese people would be left in the dust somewhere in Hebei (and there’s plenty of dust there). While we are by no means spending each night downing beers and baijiu with LBXs and sleeping in their courtyards, we are gradually coming by a strategy by which this may be possible.

At first, our Western sense of “civility” had us going up to random people and saying, “We’re looking for a place to stay. Can you recommend any?” Our hope was that people would somehow intuit our meaning and say, “I’ve got a giant courtyard, and I see you’ve got some tents on your bikes. Why don’t you set up camp there? I’ll bring the beers and tell you everything about my LBX life.” I suppose that sort of response is unlikely in any culture, but in rural China in particular, where most people have only seen foreigners on television, the immediate reaction is to ask us why we would come to their poor little town and to point us toward the nicest hotel around, which is the last place we want to be given both our budgetary constraints and goals.

Seeing our failed efforts, we tried a slightly more direct approach, going up to farmers in the fields near the end of the day and asking if there was a place where we could pitch our tents. While everyone was friendly enough, they still didn’t read between the lines. “This is the countryside. You can sleep anywhere!” They told us. Apparently they haven’t had any reason to read up on rules regarding foreigner residence in China. But that night we ended up pitching our tents on a tree farm of sorts and foregoing dinner. But we were closer — we weren’t in a hotel.

In general, and particularly since we’ve entered Shandong, we’ve been struck by the kindness of common people with little to offer. Before setting out from Beijing, we all knew Chinese people were rather welcoming (excluding the police), but we’ve each spent so much of our time in large cities where apartment living and a constant scramble for the next paycheck are quickly stripping away the last remnants of traditional Chinese culture. So far on this trip, however, we have seen a hotel owner implore us to remember our friendship as the police began shutting down her hotel as a result of our stay; we were offered lunch by a car full of twentysomethings as we passed; we have had another hotel owner attempt to let us eat and stay at her hotel for free; we were given a seemingly endless supply of Chinese pears from some pear farmers; and we were treated to lunch and had a number of cigarettes forced on us by some residents of a town we skirted around yesterday.

This sort of generosity makes it seem like we are simply not asking the proper question, and that people would be more than happy to invite us into their homes…if we would just ask them to do so. We tried this in Zhangguan and ended up sitting and drinking tea with an old Hui man and his wife for nearly an hour, and it seemed like if we had wanted, he would have been happy to sit with us all day talking and drinking tea. On separate occasions, we have broached the subject with a couple people after talking to them for a while, and they replied, “Sure, come stay with me!” But it was usually at lunch and we had another 50km to ride.

So, after the National Day holiday when security paranoia and overzealous policing has hopefully died down a bit (probably a week from now) we will try simply asking someone with whom we have struck up a good repoire if they would mind us pitching our tents in their courtyard. If that fails, we can always sleep in the woods, but I’m confident that we are getting closer and not further away from or goal.

I left off in Zhangguan, Shandong, a little Hui (Muslim Chinese) village just across the border from Hebei. The old town was like something out of a movie, people everywhere moving through tight streets and bunched gorgeous courtyard houses, except with Arabic signs intermingled with the Chinese. The old city is laid out on a simple grid of two interescting streets with alleys running between the houses to other houses deeper inside. There are main roads off the Western and Northern branches full of bigger, far uglier businesses and restaurants. The rivers that run in and around the city are black as tar and smell like last month’s fish left out in black oil cans in the sun.

As we walked into the old town in the morning we witnessed what Alexis called ‘Chicken Auschwitz’, a Muslim meathouse where the patrons slit hundreds of chicken necks in rapid succession before tossing them into a pen to bleed to death, the blood streaming out into the street in big thick streams. Only later did we find out  that the town’s main industry is the processing of animals, purchased from Han Chinese farmers, slaughtered in Halal fashion. The meat is sold to other Muslims all over the region, as far away as Beijing, and the skins sold to leather manufacturers. Of course, most of the slaughter of larger animals happens away from the old town.

My overall view of Zhangguan was similar to what’s developing into a pattern: newly developed sections bad (as in I wouldn’t make my childhood bullies live there); old and traditional good (as in I see them as places suited for humans to live in). The difference here is that the inhabitants of this town stick together more cohesively than most places since their bonds are religious as well as regional. How well do they stick together? Over 90% of the city is surnamed Zhang (张). There were also a lot of 40-something grandparents running around carrying babies for their hardworking 20-something kids as most here tend to get married at 20 (still haven’t figured out how that works in light of the new PRC marriage age minimums of 22 for women and 24 for men). Moreover, they were by far the warmest and kindest to us of any group of peopple we’ve encountered so far on this trip. Almost every smile and “nihao” was returned warmly, and one family even took us into their house. The hotelier family we stayed with gave us free breakfast and tried to let us stay for free. Of course, the breakfast included a huge plate of goat liver (local specialty), but nothing worthwhile is easy…

After the myriad obligatory photos with our hotel family, we tardily headed Southeast through some soul-rending industrial sectors and after a relatively short ride of 88 km arrived just shy of a place called Madian (麻店), where we decided to try a new strategy for lodgings. We cut off the highway into some farmland covered by corn, cotton, paper trees, and dates and started trying to ask the locals where we could camp for the night. The general concensus (at least we think it was – we could understand maybe 20% of what was being said) was that nobody gave a shit about us camping in the fields, although everybody tried to persuade us that there were hotels to be found. So with the most stealth we super colorfully dressed white boys on giant bikes full of luggage, we lit off the dirt trail and headed into a paper tree grove right up against a bunch of cotton plants and waited until dark while drinking the last of the Scotch that was given to us in Hebei (thanks again to Victor). Once safe, we threw up the tents in a line behind Andy’s (the most camo), and crashed nervously, not knowing if anybody would actually care.

Thankfully at 5:30 when we got up, we were surrounded by a dense fog that blocked vision past 20 feet and had gotten no bothers from the cops or locals, and after our morning situp/pushup routine were on the road a little after 6:30.

For the route yesterday, I picked a road from the map that ran a long ways along a big river. Once we got to the river, we found only long dusty dirt roads on top of a long levee winding through probably the prettiest farmland we had seen so far. After 10 km or so we arrived at a huge sluice gate upon which was printed “Control the Yellow River Sluice Gate of Lanjia.” Aha! So that’s the big river! Two old men with decent Mandarin explained how the gate is used for flood control (amazing since during the 90′s the Yellow was so tapped for industry that it made it to the ocean only 9 of 10 years) and told us about the pear orchard next door.

Curious and desiring pears, we wandered into the facility adjacent to the orchard and asked if we could buy 3 pears. At first we were met with skepticism as to our desires (frequently the first response), but once we got to a group of men moving boxes and munching pears, the “leader” presented himself and tried to give us more pears than we could fit in our bags. Now when I say that these are Asian pears, freshly picked the day before and just pulled from the fridge facility, understand I mean this was the best pear experience I have ever had. After receiving the pears, we got into lively conversation with the group of middle aged men, and – surprise of surprises – posed for about twenty cell phone pictures. Interestingly one man, after trying to pry median American and French salaries for workers (still haven’t thought of a good ready answer to this yet) also told us they were taking down 3000 yuan a month, which would be great for Beijing, let alone the stix of Shandong.

At lunch we had a feast of Shandong food (good hearty stuff) in a small restaurant next to some chickens (though they told Andy and Alexis there was no chicken on the menu) where I played with a 3 month old rabbit hunting dog (to be trained soon) and we were force treated (they don’t take no lightly) to 2 cigarettes each (smoked a puff and thew out once the coast was clear), and a particularly wasted ex military man picked up our tab on the premise that we always tell our foreign friends that “Binzhou people” are hospitable. So here I go: everybody, people from Binzhou are hospitable! We’re also spending less and less money due to camping and freebies. This may become our new fiscal tactic.

Finally we crossed the Yellow River (after making it a little bit yellower from the top of the bridge). Interestingly, apparently the Yellow River is not navigable. It’s full of pontoon bridges for local roads to cross – not even a toy sailboat could go more than 10 km. From there we headed south to a crappy highway boomtown recently rapid-developed (read: I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than spend another day here) after the discovery of oil in the area called Chunliang (纯梁), where we bedded down. On a comical note, this morning when we tried to buy mooncakes, the saleswoman told us, “a little over 1 yuan each. By the way, I’ve never seen foreigners before.” After we put 9 in a bag, she asked us for 45 yuan. I guess I’d try the old “foreigners don’t know math” trick too if I lived here.

The last few days have been great, but hopfully we can find more villages and less terrible industry on the way to Qingdao. We have heard and witnessed from the side of the highway that central Shandong is China’s biggest steel producing area in addition to being a general industrial hub. To say that the air contains some particulate is like saying Everclear is mildly alcoholic.

Alright, that’s it for now. Wish us luck.