By Andy
After a couple days through some serious mountains, from Jiangle to Gaoqiao and Gaoqiao to Huyuan, our legs were starting to scream for a break. As we pulled off the road for lunch on our way from Huyuan to Anxi, I told Evan that after another full day through the mountains, I didn’t think I would be able to do much the next day. I suggested we check the map for a county seat with internet and take a rest day before setting out again.
Back when we first started the trip, we had resolved to stick to the back-country — to spend as much of our time as possible in villages (村) and townships (乡). A disheartening run-in with the cops on the second day of our trip temporarily resulted in a policy of avoiding mid-tier, regional centers at all costs. That was until we realized that we needed internet access to write this blog. Since then, we’ve pretty much decided that if we’re going to take a rest day, it should be in business hotel with internet in the room, which are usually found in only county seat-level cities (县城) or larger.
So we set our sights on Datian (大田), a county seat where we could be assured of finding a room with internet access. Exhausted, we pulled into the city’s dusty center late in the afternoon and started checking out the coffee shop internet scene in case we couldn’t find a wired room at the right price. The coffee shops, all rip-offs of the usual suspects like Straights and UBC, were a bust internet-wise, so we went to find a hotel. As we pulled up to a slightly expensive-looking hotel and Alexis went in to inquire about prices, a voice to my left called out in Chinese, “Can you speak Chinese?” I turned and saw a head poking out the passenger side of a police car and swore under my breath as the car pulled in front of Evan and the man got out to talk to us.
After a number of frustrating experiences, our blood pressure rises to dangerous levels at the sight of authority of any sort in China, especially the police. When the athletic man, Mr. Chen (陈), whom Evan would later rename Biff due to his resemblance to the antagonist from Back to the Future, told us he and the two other, overweight cops who had gotten out of the car were from the local cycling club and wanted to help us find a hotel room, we could only chuckle at the nerve of such a lie. We tried to shoo off the Police Uncles (警察叔叔), but they were not giving up.
When Biff told us they had known we would be coming into town for over an hour and had cars out looking for us, we kicked ourselves for being so open with Mr. Wang and the police back in Gaoqiao. Every police station in Fujian must be on the lookout for us now, we thought. I told Evan that with our Z-visas (the Z-visa, one of the most difficult to attain, is a one-year employment visa, which Evan and I still retain despite having left our previous jobs), we should probably start telling people that we had biked from Shanghai rather than Beijing so that we could plausibly claim that we had requested a sabbatical for the bike trip. We also decided to say we were ending our trip in Xiamen. “No matter what, we are not going to Anxi (安溪),” Evan told us. “That is the one place I absolutely want to go in Fujian, and we are not going to let these cops call ahead and get us kicked out of there. Tell them we’re going to Yongchun (永春) [one county north of Anxi].” So we began lying.
Today marked our second day in Hebei and plenty of lessons learned. The first lesson we learned was that it is now officially corn season in Hebei. Other than the thousands of Chinese everywhere, the traces of giant industry, the very young forests of perfectly grid-patterned trees in between the industrial and urban centers, and the Arabic signs of Muslim Chinese enclaves, it’s hard to differentiate this place from Nebraska. Ok, so it’s not the Midwest, but there is a ton of corn everywhere – being shucked by families in front of their establishments, or already de-cobbed and drying along the side of the highway for miles and miles (see picture). Even a tax bureau had drying corn out front. I wonder if they’re using it for animals mostly or if here, as in the US, they are selling it to food companies to be put into all their packaged foods. This will need to be asked soon.