We awake at 7 a.m. with a collective groan – two weeks of going to sleep well after midnight and waking anywhere between 10 a.m. has taken its toll. I check the weather on the iPhone: still 40 percent chance of rain until noon and 60 percent after that. A quick glance out the bathroom window, which looks out on a narrow alleyway between two buildings, confirms that it’s not raining, and we pack up and head downstairs. I’m the first one out the door.

“It’s snowing,” I say. I missed it looking out the window. I don’t really know how to feel about it. It seems better than rain.

“November rain,” Alexis jokes. His English is getting better, and it’s making for some unbearable puns.

China sits closer to the equator than the United States, which means insufferably hot summers just about anywhere in the country for a northeasterner like me. If my memory is correct, Zhejiang province and Hangzhou, the nearest large city to us, are on the same longitude as northern Florida and southern Louisiana. The snow is downright strange and makes me worry about what we’re going to face for the rest of the winter.

After a breakfast of subpar vegetable-filled buns, fried dough and soymilk, we set out. The first part of our ride is gray and industrial. The smell of coal in the icy air hits my nostrils. Throughout the ride, my fingers fare better than the day before, but the cold still cuts straight through the vents in my shoes, freezing my feet despite the two pairs of socks I’m wearing. We have to figure out a way to avoid cold feet, or we’re done for the winter, I think.

Wuzhen is only a 50km ride from our start point in Jiashan over flat ground, but the going is slow. My Achilles tendons, a recurring injury on this trip, are shooting pain up my legs in the cold. I pop a Fenbid at a gas station and remove a layer of clothing as the snow turns to light rain.

After passing through another town, we stop for lunch at one of those big restaurants set up to the side of a large, manmade pond full of farmed fish. Inside, we find a private room with a heater running and immediately take off our shoes and socks and rub our feet furiously to get the circulation going again. As we order, Evan asks if we could have some plastic bags, which the restaurant gives us free of charge. Since the frigid air is coming straight through the mesh vents of our shoes, we figure putting plastic bags over our socks will at least keep the air off our feet. Surprisingly enough, it works.

After a somewhat unsatisfying lunch, we move through another small town and turn onto a road that used to be the main artery between two towns in the area, but has been replaced by a highway. Besides the occasional scooter, it is deserted. Tall pines line either side, and an air of tranquility falls over us. I let Evan and Alexis pull away a little, and the only sound I hear is the pitter-patter of raindrops hitting my coat. For once, people are actually making use of all that the land offers to build something. In Hebei, Shandong and Henan we saw so much straw being burned off in the fields after harvest – here they use it to make thatched roofs for their barns and duck farms.

For a while, the architecture of the villages we pass through takes a turn for the bizarre in a nouveau riche de Chine sort of way. Three-story houses, covered in ugly combinations of tiles that just don’t match the environment, are topped off with pointed cupolas surrounded by shiny, metal railings. I joke that the richest man in the village must have built one of the houses once, after which the rest of the town played “keeping up with the Zhangs” until the town was covered with them.

Later, the strange castles are replaced with more familiar and traditional architecture – white houses with gray, tile roofs. They begin to look older, and I feel excited about Wuzhen, where I expect to find a whole town of similar but ancient buildings, interspersed with canals and other waterways.

Of course, when we get to Wuzhen, we find there is nothing of the sort. Indeed, there are white buildings with gray, tile roofs and some waterways, but the whole thing is reminiscent of Disneyland. As we ride into town, we pass parking lots of tour buses and tour groups in matching hats led around by a tour leaders with flags and megaphones. The old town is broken up into east and west sections. After stashing our stuff at a hotel, we walk around the east section, which seems to be free despite a ticket booth with a sign asking for a 100 yuan ($14) entrance fee.

When we make our way over to the west section, we find more tour buses and a huge, gaudy visitors center. Men in suits stand at turnstiles ripping 120 yuan tickets in half. Who can afford this crap? I think back to Dingshu and the kiln workers making 900-odd yuan a month. Evan asks one of the ticket takers what’s inside. “A scenic area – ancient buildings, waterways, teahouses, cafes and bars.” Cafes and bars. We head back to the hotel.

I imagine all local officials being given a handbook titled “The Path to Development” or some such nonsense. Inside, it details the possible ways: industry, finance, services or tourism. There’s no preserving something beautiful for the sake of preserving it – there’s no intrinsic value placed on the aesthetic in this country…only monetary. The only consideration is, “how much money will it bring in?” The contradiction is summed up perfectly by a slogan we see painted in characters on a white wall before the ticket offices for the east town that reads, “Advance the preservation and development of the ancient town (促进古镇保护与开发).” To me, that is a contradictory statement. To these local officials it is the key to climbing the Party ladder: simultaneously holding two contradictory thoughts. George Orwell saw it:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself…

I try to imagine growing up in one of these places, maybe even growing old there and taking a walk every evening by the river with my wife. Then, one day, I come down my street, turn toward the river and find there’s a wall, a turnstile and a man asking for 120 yuan. I don’t think I could take it.

Others seem to think differently. Evan asks a local what he thinks of what’s happening to the town. “Not much has changed since I was young. It’s protected, so they’re not allowed to develop the old town.” Maybe, but I doubt there were hawkers occupying every building, selling everything from local alcohol to Mongolian hand warmers back then. Alas.

Back in Shanghai, we bought two books in a series called “Traveling China’s Ancient Towns (中国古镇游) and were looking forward to visiting some of the untouched, ancient areas in the pictures and seeing what sort of culture we could dig up. After this experience we have to assume they are all phony. If anyone knows otherwise, please send us a note.

Tomorrow, if the rain is light enough, we head to Anji. The 100+ km trip will take us into the mountains for the first time since Shandong. We have been looking forward to the mountains though. They’re where the last vestiges of culture and tradition lie. They’re also where we’ll have the hardest time understanding anyone we meet. Adventure awaits.

On Tuesday we woke a bit early but stayed in our room until noon editing pictures and writing new posts. We were already tired from a couple days of fairly hard riding and considered staying another night but realized that there was no way we would make it to Qingdao in time if we did. So we begrudgingly set out from our hotel in an awful oil-field town at around 1:30 in the afternoon to see what sort of distance we could put under us before we started settled down to celebrate Evan’s birthday. The answer to the distance question was 68km, which was pretty good for our start time and energy level — but we had to go through some awful stuff to get there.

Apparently Shandong is oil country, which none of us knew. The town where we were staying, called Chunliang (纯梁), sprung up around some nearby oil fields. If you’ve spent some time in China, you know that bad enough things result when small towns are actually planned. When they spring up around an oil field there is simply no hope. Rhetorically, Alexis asked, “So, where do you think will be the first place we get to that isn’t dusty?” as we began moving out of town. We had no clear answer to give.

Chunliang has a nice enough sounding name in Chinese (translating roughly to “simple bridge”), but we often find ourselves asking where they could possibly come up with the names for these places, because the towns themselves often bear no resemblance to their idyllic monikers. Chunliang is a one-street town with a single traffic light, but being on a provincial road, massive trucks move through the town like a herd of elephants — overweight elephants that far exceed the speed limit and don’t know how to stop blowing their horns. “Dusty” cannot begin to describe eastern China, and Chunliang is of course no exception. The dust permeates everything and is constantly kicked up by the cargo trucks blowing through town to make the traffic light. Trash, like in most small towns in China and probably any developing country, simply accumulates where it is dropped, i.e. everywhere. Like the dust, it floats through the air with the passing of trucks. The town’s buildings consist of rows of two-floor shops on either side of the main drag, too few of which are restaurants.
When we first arrived in town, I was approached by a woman speaking surprisingly intelligible Mandarin. As it turned out, she said she lived in Beijing for a long time, but had recently retired to Chunliang. I was taken aback to say the least. The next morning as we ate breakfast in an outdoor market of sorts full of street vendors, we saw a man selling Lanzhou pulled noodles. We expect Qinghai province, near to where Lanzhou is located, to be one of the highlights of our trip in terms of scenery. Again, we were baffled at the willingness of people to leave their homes of mountains, grass and crystal clear water to set up shop in a cart on the street of one of the cesspools that are sixth-tier cities in China’s east. Can following the money be worth such a sacrifice?

But speaking of money, we’ve recently taken to asking people how much they make, just like they do to us. It turns out if you can position yourself well, you can make a fair amount in occupations we never expected to have such paycheck. For example, the Chinese pear harvesters/packers we met make a bit less than 4,000 yuan ($585) per month, post-tax. The other night we met a farmer who ponied up 80,000 yuan ($11,700) of his own money to buy a tractor, which he now uses to plow other people’s fields for over 5,000 yuan ($732) per month. As an agricultural worker, he pays no taxes on his income. For comparison, many white collar workers in Beijing and Shanghai struggle to pull in 2,000 yuan ($293) per month, and you can’t feed yourself on five yuan per day there like you can in rural Shandong.

As we left Chunliang, the air quality began to worsen beyond its already abysmal level. We passed oil pumps bobbing slowly up and down on either side of the road before moving into some really strange stuff.

It would be interesting to count how many ghost towns we pass throughout our yearlong trek, but we have already lost track. As we moved 20, 30, 40 kilometers away from town, we passed through numerous abandoned towns not much smaller than Chunliang. Despite broken-out windows, dust kicked up by passing trucks and the dimness of the polluted air, we could still make out advertisements for dumplings, soups and dog meat. Wild dogs roamed the parking lots of former truck stops in search of forgotten meat. Every once in a while we would cross a bridge over a small river, each one wheezing its last, painful breaths through black, viscous water stinking like nothing we had ever smelled before. Humorous signs such as “No shrimp catching” lined the banks. Seeing a man in front of a parked car with a net, we shouted, “Are you catching shrimp?” Yes, he was — probably to sell to any one of the truck stop restaurants lining the busy road.

Shortly after dusk we arrived in a truck-stop town called Yingli (营里) where we found a place to stay and celebrated Evan’s birthday at a little noodle joint with some farmers and three Chinese bikers from Beijing.

On Wednesday, the previous night’s celebrations left us leaving town at noon once again. As we rode out of Yingli, we could not have been more than 20km from the ocean, yet instead of sand dunes as I had hoped, we found only the same fine dust blowing into our eyes. For about 20km of our 105km ride we rode a wide, newly paved provincial road through seemingly endless salt flats dotted with massive coal power plants spewing pollutants into the air. It was one of the most depressing sites I have ever seen. Again, I wondered how all this could ever possibly develop into something worthwhile. How long until the rivers can heal and grass replace the endless expanses of dust? How long until some semblance of quality works its way into the architecture and construction of all these dismal towns? How long until the scars of 30 years of “development” and “progress” finally fade away?

As I finish typing this note, I sit in a Starbucks in Qingdao, 2008’s “Seventh-most Livable City in China.” We arrived in the quaint, “livable” city yesterday after about 95km of biking, but due to China’s urban sprawl, which exists like gravity or any other constant of the universe, we didn’t arrive at our hotel in the center of town until 135km of biking. While ugly as all hell, the city is actually quite pleasant (but like time, this is relative). The proximity to the ocean kicks out much of the pollution we experience regularly in China’s east, and the streets are narrow and shaded by lush vegetation. The city is hardly bike friendly – there are no bike lanes like in Beijing. But it is certainly livable, and the and the old free-standing houses from the German “occupation” give it a quaint and attractive atmosphere. We are resting here today and tomorrow and a French friend arrives from Beijing tonight to spend a week riding around Shandong with us. We’ve had sort of a frantic push to get here in time, leaving little room for what we set out to do on this trip, but after the next week we will be fully devoted to our cause and plan to make a leisurely journey back east across Shandong and through Henan and Jiangsu before hitting Shanghai in a month or so for another respite.