I don’t know if you can tell from any of our other posts, but we’re kind of preoccupied with the fact that we have yet to see a naturally growing forest anywhere we have traveled thus far. Instead, nearly every tree we see is planted next to its brethren of the same species in neat rows, with no undergrowth or wildlife to speak of.

On our way out of Kaifeng, we stopped in a gas station to use the bathroom but were told we would have to go across the street to a lumber market to use theirs instead. We made our way through tall stacks of logs, the smell of freshly cut wood a welcome respite from the burning-tire smell common to the outskirts of so many of the smaller Chinese cities.  When Evan and Alexis went to do their business, I was immediately surrounded by LBXes asking the usual series of questions as is prone to happen to whomever is left to watch the bikes.

Finally seeing an opening in the conversation, I asked, “So where do all these trees come from?” I inquired because in addition to the skinny poplar trees we see farmed everywhere, there were large pines in the area where I was standing – not something we’ve seen so far in the “wild.”

“Some come from southern China; others, mostly the pines, are imported from Russia,” the man with the best Mandarin in the group told me.

When Evan returned he asked why they had to import trees from Russia. “We used to get most of our pine from the Northeast (东北) of China, but now China is letting the Northeastern forests return to nature.”

The second part of that statement was a bit laughable based on what we’ve seen in the northeast – planting monoculture plots of poplar trees to be harvested every three years is hardly returning to nature. It was reminiscent of the “China is concerned about the environment now” statement at the coalmine. That is, they now make some bricks and cement out of the waste rock instead of just piling it into a mountain for future generations to deal with – just ignore how much either of those processes affects the environment. But I found the first part rather interesting.

My first reaction was to think that making something illegal in China is simply not going to make it stop as long as there is a profit to be made from it. The man’s statement contradicted so clearly with numerous secondhand reports I’ve heard about hostels in Yunnan province’s subtropical zone that arrange rainforest tours. Each year the rainforest gets further and further away from the hostels. What used to be a day trip now takes multiple days just to arrive at a place with some large trees.

But I also can’t remember the timeframe on these tales of ecological woe in Yunnan. In fact, much of China’s forested land is now indeed closed to logging, as the man indicated. After particularly severe floods on the Yangtze in 1998 that killed more than 3,000 people were linked to deforestation on the upper reaches of the river, the government banned logging in natural forests in 17 provinces, particularly along rivers. The government also implemented a “Grain-to-Green” policy to subsidize farmers on high-slope fields if they agreed to reforest the plots. The result is that between 2000 and 2005, China actually planted 20 million hectares of trees. Again, from what we’ve seen so far I have a hard time believing these are true forests that support a wide range of diverse plant and wildlife species, but we have yet to arrive in Yunnan and Sichuan where most of the logging was taking place.

Apparently the ban has had some success, at least in China, but the country’s demand for wood is not going to stop just because the government banned cutting down trees – the problem moved elsewhere. According to the Earth Policy Institute, while Asia as a whole gained 5 million hectares of forest during the 2000-2005 period, South and Southeast Asia lost 14 million due in part to massive demand from China. Of course, as with most other products, much of the demand doesn’t actually originate in China, it originates in America and Europe – it’s just that the factories that make the furniture are here and the regulatory environment is lax, to say the least.

Apparently, in 2007, China drew up rules to govern its companies involved in the wood trade internationally, although without faster access to the internet than through my cell phone on 2G, I’m having a hard time tracking down information on whether this was implemented on anything more than a trial basis.

If anyone has any more information, especially anything more recent than 2007, on illegal logging in China and China’s involvement in illegal logging elsewhere, I’d be interested to read about it. The offhand comment by a man in a lumber market in Henan will certainly give us something to look into as we eventually travel into the same mountainous areas in Yunnan and Sichuan that were devastated by logging in the 1990s. I’ll be particularly interested to see whether we end up camping in real forests or in more of the same, neat rows of high-growth trees that we’ve seen in Hebei, Shandong and now Henan.

After the exchange we headed out of the city and on a southwesterly route. A little more than a hundred kilometers later, we found a small patch of (row-planted) poplar trees in the middle of some freshly plowed fields and set up camp just as the sun was disappearing behind the row of trees that lined a road to the west.

I awoke at 5:30 the next morning to discover that Evan had gotten food poisoning from something the night before (possibly the peanuts?). We made it only 30km to the county-level town of Taikang before deciding we would have to throw in the towel and rest. This morning, Alexis was in a similar situation, and we spent another day in this strange shack-like add-on on the roof of Harmony Hotel. Unless I wake up with food poisoning tonight, we’ll be working our way south and west toward Shanghai and intend to arrive on November 4th, which will require some very dedicated riding. We intend to rest in Shanghai for a week and hope some of you can join us!

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.