Elderly men sit and chat near a market in a Hebei mountain village.

The donkey is the main beast of burden in northern Shanxi (山西) and Hebei (河北) provinces. Never have I seen so many donkeys!

Hebei served as the deserved butt of many a joke throughout the trip, but when we finally arrived in the mountainous northern part of the province three days before the end of our trip, we were pleasantly surprised. There we found blue skies, green hills and picturesque villages as unique and interesting as those in any of the remote areas we passed in the western part of the country.

Glorious landscapes of... Hebei! by Evan

Just two days ago when I woke up at 11:00am in my top bunk sleeper train berth, we were rushing past tranquil scenes of rolling green hills and high rice paddies. In fifteen short hours of much-needed repose coiled up in less space than corpses get in coffins, I had been passively sped back to the enchanting South and its rice, a sight that previously required two months of hard cycling across the Mad Max landscapes of the North China Plain. More than any moment in Beijing during the few days prior, it was those paddies that made me violently awaken to the fact that the all-consuming trip of my lifetime (up to this point), the one where the scenery changed gradually and pedal by pedal, is now over. As I now recall the last week up to the finale, all the events have taken on blurred edges as if part of a dream.

Without further ado, I should relate some of the details of that last week. To our dismay, the forecast called for up to six days of rain across all of central Inner Mongolia, and for once did not deceive us. The first bit out of Hohhot had us push up the longest, hardest hill we’d face for the rest of the week through a steady rain. The driving rain and gusty wind on the downhill robbed my body of all its heat and forced us to take shelter and change clothes in the first crappy restaurant of the town after the descent. I had gotten so chilled that Andy could in no way convince me to finish the day — it was still raining — to our goal, especially since the patron had cheap rooms to let. Then said patron did himself the disservice of attempting to double the cost of our fare on account of our having “cleaned up in the bathroom,” and so anger propelled me the last miserable 20 km.

Tea in Inner Mongolia? by Evan

The next morning we started the day to one of the greatest surprises of the whole trip: ganja plants growing in abundance all around the shores of Lake Daihai (岱海湖). Yes, cannabis, and full grown! It was the kind of thing you’d never ever see in a country where the inhabitants are acquainted with the medicinal effects of the plant bearing those beautiful five leaves, and if you did, well, you wouldn’t see it for long.

It took us until just before Shanxi to realize that it wasn’t growing on accident. A farmer in a small town just north of the Great Wall had several of the plants growing as high as myself, clearly well tended. He explained that they are planted specifically for their seeds, which they roast and eat like sunflower seeds, but that it had never occurred to anybody to smoke the things — oh how innocent these folk are!

See what I mean about Hobbits? by Evan

The first weed day of Inner Mongolia unfortunately ended in a second afternoon of cold rain. We ducked the worst of it with some migrant workers in the office of a tree farm, but I ended up that night going to sleep early due to yet another sore throat. It wasn’t until the next day that we were to be pleasantly surprised again, this time in one of the places we’d least expected.

We had inadvertently saved the best part of Inner Mongolia for last, as the valleys leading up to the northeastern corner of Shanxi were truly exquisite! Huge mountains hemmed in waving seas of sunflowers, corn, buckwheat, and several other grain crops. The villages and towns had by and large been spared the disfiguration of scientific development. The houses were mostly earthen, long and narrow with wide round windows and doors, all latticed with intricate woodwork. In their tight, courtyarded clusters, they more closely resembled Hobbiton than the dreary northern villages that tarnished my memories of the north. The ubiquitous donkeys — the beast of burden in those parts — both near the dwellings and on the fields, lightened the mood with their silly looks — Andy thinks they look like awkward teenagers — and drawn out eeee aaawwwwwws.

The Great Wall of Shanxi behind rows of ripe grain, by Evan

In the middle of these valleys, dividing Inner Mongolia and Shanxi (a quite appropriate border), stretched out remnants of the entirely unrestored Great Wall. The wall itself was mostly an elongated mound of grassy earth punctuated regularly by guard towers, which in their varying stages of erosion look like overgrown sandcastles. I’m more accustomed to the reconstructed stone wall that soars across impossible mountain ridges north of Beijing, so this demure wall gliding peacefully through fields of ripe grain gave me new perspective. Seeing it then so far from Beijing also reminded me what an insane project it was in the first place, and at the same time conjured images of what deep significance the imposing border line must have held for both the northern tribes and the Han — for centuries! I’m just sure the first Qin emperor (秦始皇), who dreamt up the epic project — the cost in human labor and life of which eventually caused his weaker son to lose the empire — could never have imagined that Han farmers would replace barbarian pastoralists for hundreds of kilometers north of his wall. Or maybe that’s what he was hoping for all along?

Tower of Terror, by Evan

Either way, I couldn’t resist the urge to take a closer look. Departing from Andy, Dave, and Ellen, I walked nearly two kilometers from the road to explore one of the more intact looking towers. The specific feature of that particular tower that attracted me was its large doorway, still intact. I scrambled up the wall and crawled through the short passageway until I reached a vertical tunnel of about 25 feet leading to the top of the tower. Almost without thinking, I started climbing up with the help of the footholds until I was about 5 feet from the top, where the passage suddenly widened, and the footholds disappeared. I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t be able to reach the top. Then I made a critical mistake, which was to look down. I saw 20 feet of air, but I couldn’t see the footholds anymore. At this point, alone, several kilometers away from any dwellings (I hadn’t seen a soul the whole walk out to the tower), that I imagined myself lying at the bottom of a guard tower with two broken legs and no way to summon help. That led to a horrible panic attack that took about ten minutes to snap out of. Finally I forced myself to descend, painstakingly feeling around for each hidden foothold, until I reached the bottom, a good fifteen minutes after I had left it. For most people, that would have been enough, but for me, the great fear-overcomer, I felt compelled to make myself finish the job. So like an idiot, I climbed right back up to the exact same spot, again realized that I still couldn’t get onto the roof, and again panicked, but this time with about half the intensity. After a second terribly slow descent, I crawled out and jitteringly crossed the crops back to my bike. I caught up with Andy et al in a restaurant in the first town of Shanxi, aptly named Changcheng (長城, “Great Wall”).

A nice spot to camp in Shanxi, by Evan

Now Shanxi, the home of Linfen (臨汾), the most polluted city in the world for the last godawful amount of years running, has always represented to me a place I’m sure Dante was envisioning when describing one of the middle-lower circles of hell. This prejudice was forged on my first visit to the province, to Datong (大同市), the horrors of which the nearby hanging monastery and Buddhistically significant Wutai Mountain (五台山) could not compensate for. So it was yet another fine surprise to find that northeastern Shanxi, up in the mountains, is really quite a charming place (although I wouldn’t wouldn’t wish for anybody but BP top management to traverse it north to south. Since it was Ellen’s birthday on our sole night in the province, when we camped next to acres of corn under a shadowy ridge, we had a chance to make another discovery. Fenjiu, (汾酒), the signature alcohol of the province and the last of the major baijiu’s we had yet to sample, is probably the most tolerable of all baijiu, bordering on the “I might buy this in the US if it were sold for the same price/volume as Colt 45” range, hitherto uncharted territory for baijiu. Its xiangxing (香型, “flavor category”) of nongxiang (濃香, “dense flavor”), is also probably also Andy’s and my favorite — over the jiangxiang (醬香, “sauce flavor”) of Maotai and qingxiang (清香, “delicate flavor”) of Wuliangye — but at the end of the day, trying to taste test for the “best baijiu” is a task akin to smelling around for the “least noxious of barnyard turds.”

A Bad-ass way to get around, by Evan

Early the next morning we crossed back into Hebei, a border we had been dreading for months. One of our stupid recurring jokes throughout the trip was to point out anyplace remotely pleasing to the eyes and say, “well, it’s OK, but it’s no Hebei!” So deep was our disdain for the south of the province we entered on the first day of our trip that we were overjoyed to reach Shandong, as you can see in the first post from that province. Our return to our most loathed province, however, proved once again that there are sometimes glints of gold even in the nastiest refuse heaps. The mountain villages were even more picturesque continuations of the hobbit theme from Inner Mongolia and Shanxi. Seeing their completely undeveloped nature and the slow, easy pace of the locals milling about in their donkey carts, Northern China finally vindicated itself in my eyes. Of literary importance, I finally could imagine a Hebei worthy of being the birthplace of Liu Bei (劉備) and Zhang Fei (張飛)! [Non-China geeks, please excuse this final Three Kingdoms reference]

And more surprises were yet to come. On our first day back in Hebei, along with the usual three wheeled blue putt-putt trucks overloaded with corn and donkey carts, we caught sight of… a gorgeous old European classic car, driven by gringos no less! My first thought was that it must be a mirage, but then came another, on which this time I spotted a red tag claiming “Peking to Paris.” Then there were more and more until we finally hit a little gas station that was full of laowai-piloted restorations. An old Brit standing next to the “organization” van explained that the eleven-nation rally had first been run in 1907, and that it had been reorganized in 2007, this being the 3rd annual of its current incarnation. The eccentric collectors, who he claimed had “more money than brains,” shelled out 35,000 British pounds per car and would be passing through Pakistan and Iran on their way to gay Paris. And they say we’re nuts!

Peking to Paris does Hebei, by Evan

The world, however, usually finds a way to balance good and bad fortune, and on that day with the scenery and the classic car rally also came Hebei’s revenge in the form of an involuntary 48 hour colon cleanse-a-thon, breaking my previous 48 hour record (I can only assume the protector gods of that miserable province had heard our remarks all year). So well short of the distance goal on that day, we stopped to camp on a freshly harvested patch of field next to endless rows of sunflowers taller than myself by a full head. It was a beautiful place to stop.

The following day, which we had slated as the final rest day of the trip, ended up being far less restful than we would have hoped. First off, there was a pesky patch of tiny gray lines on my map (country roads, usually indicative of good visuals) that on the google earth view  (have I mentioned how indispensable this program was to our trip?) crooked wildly up and down like a purple EKG printout through the hills. It was on these EKG roads, as easily predicted, that we experienced the crowning moment of our last week and near full redemption for Hebei: the most quaint villages and easy going LBXes we’ve ever seen anywhere north of the Yangtze. As always, they’ve got the mountains to thank for the inaccessibility to scientific development. One interesting point to note was that during this last leg of serene surroundings, we passed dozens of river beds, but not a trickle of water in any but one. In fact probably 95% of all rivers we’d seen since Gansu have been bone dry, presumably all of them suffering from desertification or completely tapped for irrigation or industry. It’d be nice to get an explanation on this phenomenon from somebody in the know.

Hebei redemption, by Evan

Anyhow, at the end of that blissful country road, two things happened to alert us that we were reentering the northern China that we remembered so well. First, the terrain opened up and got largely dry and barren, more or less all of a sudden. Then, right as we were about to hit our rest-ination in the early afternoon — with still enough time to throw up pictures and a post — Hebei reminded us with gusto that it was a mistake to even momentarily reconsider our negative preconceptions.

All along we had planned to end the day early in the county of Zhuolu (涿鹿縣). A few kilometers before the valley road emptied into that city, a man holding a camera standing next to a pink Suzuki two-door hatchback tried to wave us down — the Chinese wave of a straight arm with the wrist flapping up and down that women use to hail cabs in Shanghai. Since he was in regular LBX attire, we thought little of him and just sped by, since LBXes try the old “if we just stand in the middle of the road and wave like our life is in peril, the laowai will have to talk to us” trick all the time. They soon passed us and pulled over again, but this time the same man held out to Andy what looked like a badge, though he was holding it upside down.

“Passpoahts!” he demanded, at which Andy, livid, immediately assumed the role of “bad cop.” My preferred role taken, I had no choice but to be as cordial as possible to make the stupid situation pass. The passpoahts were rounded up and handed over to his female colleague, also in plain clothes and at the helm of the pink mini car. She looked at only mine, with a bewildered look on her face, and then handed the lot back to me — can’t beat Chinese cops for thoroughness, especially when defending the public from the unparalleled evils of four Americans on bikes! The man then launched into a barrage of hilarious questions, as follows:

Cop:    What are you doing? (你們在幹嗎?)
Me:    [looking down at the bike between my legs] Uhh, riding bikes! (啊… 騎自行車呀!)
Cop:    Where did you come from? (從哪裡過來?)
Me:    Hohhot. (呼和浩特)
Cop:    Where are you going? (現在去哪裡呢?)
Me:    Beijing. (北京)
Cop:    What’s your next stop? (下一站是哪裡?)
Me:    Zhuolu. (涿鹿)
Cop:    And then where? (然後去哪裡?)
Me:    Beijing! (北京!)
Cop:    But what’s the stop after this one? (可是下一站是哪裡?)
Me:    Zhuolu, and then Beijing! (涿鹿然後北京!)
Cop:    But what route are you taking, and where do you plan to stop? (你們要走怎麼個路線？要在哪裡過夜?)
Me:    We don’t know! We’re going to ask directions as we go! (還不知道！我們邊走邊問路!)
Andy:    Do you want us to show you every single village between here and Beijing on a map? (你需要我們在地圖上給你看這裡與北京之間每一個小村落嗎?)
Cop:    Ok ok, so where are you going now? (好的好的，那你們現在去哪裡?)
Me:    Are you joking!? Zhuolu, then Beijing! (開玩笑嗎？先去涿鹿然後去北京!)
Cop:    Are you staying in Zhuolu? (你們今天在涿鹿住嗎?)
Me:     We don’t know! (還不知道!)

Hebei country roads, by Evan

Finally he seemed to give up and got back into the driver’s seat of the Suzuki, which didn’t immediately take off. Laughing to ourselves, we rolled toward the highway. At the intersection, we stopped a second to check Andy’s iPhone for directions (I lost the Hebei map a long time ago). The pink Suzuki then pulled alongside us, and the male cop rolled down the driver’s side window to ask, as though our previous conversation had never happened, “Where are you going? (你們去哪裡?)” I bit my tongue and answered “I already told you, Zhuolu. (跟你說過，涿鹿)” “Do you need us to tell you how to get there? (需要我們給你指路嗎?)” he finally seemed to make himself useful. I said we’d figure it out, and, due to the cars building up behind them at the intersection, they were forced to cross the highway and park on the side of the road ahead of us. It was at this point that I noticed the back window of the Suzuki was filled with stuffed toy animals. Never forget, in China, face is all important! Thankfully, the iPhone indicated we wanted to go the opposite direction from them, and so we took off toward our much needed lunch. Not two minutes down the road, I turned my head and discovered that an oddly familiar pink Suzuki was trailing us very slowly about a half a kilometer behind. I can only assume they had seen this ridiculous maneuver in an old cop movie and didn’t realize that it’s hard to be discreet when following bikes at 15 km an hour on a highway. When, after our turn onto the main boulevard of the city, I noticed that they were indeed still following us, I had had enough. I made a sharp U-turn and rode straight up to their car, waving that silly Chinese limp-wristed wave that the man had used to pull us over in the first place.

Me:    What’s the problem here? (到底有什麼事兒?)
Cop:    Where are you going? (你們要去哪裡?)
Me:    [about to explode, but containing it] BEIJING!!!! (北京!!!!)
Cop:    But this is Zhuolu (可是這裡是涿鹿)
Me:    I know it is. We’re going to eat here. (知道。我們要在這裡吃飯)
Cop:    [blinking compulsively and starting to stammer] So you’re going to stay here for the night? (那你們今天晚上就在這裡住?)
Me:    I don’t know yet! You’re looking awfully anxious about all this, buddy! (還不知道！老兄，你看起來很急!)
Cop:    [still stammering] I’m not anxious! (不急不急!)
Me:    Also, buddy, do you need to follow us? (還有，老兄，你們有必要跟蹤我們嗎?)
Cop:    [he reflected with his eyes to the ground for a moment] Why wouldn’t we need to follow you? (怎麼沒有必要跟蹤你們?)
Me:    [realizing I was talking to a wall] Ok, do whatever you want, I’m going to eat now. (好吧，隨便你們，我現在去吃飯。)
Cop:    Ok. (好的)

I rolled to the next intersection to the rest of the gang. The pink stuffed animal wagon passed a minute later, the male cop looking straight ahead seemingly to avoid eye contact with us. Thoughts of requiring a cop escort for the rest of our route into Beijing haunted me throughout lunch. After the meal, we set out to find a hotel, since after all, it was our last, and much needed day of rest (I was still on auto colon filtration mode too). However, the city, overfull of cop cars and uniformed teenagers — always an omen of heightened vigilance on the part of the local brass — seemed bent on ruining our ambitions. We were turned away from three different establishments — since none had a license to entertain foreign guests — before we resigned ourselves to seeking lodging at the 30+story mega-tower complex of the Zhonghua Grand Hotel (中華大酒店), the tallest building in town. The staff were all vapid looking 20+ year olds in clean white shirts. The conversation went as expected:

Me:     Are you the only hotel in town that can accept foreign guests? (你們是全縣城唯一能接待外賓的賓館嗎?)
Kid:    Yes. (是的)
Me:    How much for a double room? (雙人間多少錢?)
Kid:    After discounts, 246 RMB, down from 400. (打完折246塊，本來是400塊)
Me:    Sweet Jesus! Go cheaper! (哎呀！給便宜點好吧!)
Kid:    I’m sorry, but that’s as low as it gets. You’ll note that it was 400! (不好意思先生，這是最低價。你看，本來是400塊呢!) [this is my absolute favorite of all Chinese sales tactics, one as prevalent in grand hotels as it is in trinket markets -- tell you a stupid price, and then add that by sheer luck you’ve avoided the truly absurd price, since you’re so special]
Me:    Can we put four people in one room? (可以四個人一間房嗎?)
Kid:    Sorry, no can do. (不好意思，不可以）

We had a little powwow, the decision of which was that we’d just pay the damn thing since we wanted rest and time to update the site. I then grabbed the bike from outside and pushed it into the lobby, at which point three of the blank-faced youths shouted at me simultaneously. I told them we wanted to put the bikes in the room, as we always do, but the kid from the counter came over to tell me that there was mysteriously a rule against bikes being in the rooms, but he could generously offer the use of the garage for storage purposes. I refused categorically, since we couldn’t watch over them, but as always, we were assured that nothing could possibly happen to them down there, where they’d be constantly supervised, wink wink! Eventually somebody mentioned that we could lock them in the luggage room, at which point we finally acquiesced. A zit-faced teenage guard then proceeded to lead us away from the front door and around the side of the complex, where, presumably, we were going to enter from the rear, so as not to offend any of the esteemed guests with the unseemly sight of our bicycles. He walked us right up to the edge of the garage ramp, where he finally informed us that the manager had not agreed to let us put the bikes in the luggage room, but that we could still put them in the garage.

At this last insult, a paroxysm of anger seized Andy and me simultaneously, and after spitting on the ground and some choice verbiage, we decided on the spot to ride the 30 km to the next county, rest day and this godforsaken city be damned! Amazingly enough, our two stupidest days with police and officialldom both occurred in Hebei, the first two days into the trip, and the second two days before its close. We rode the next 30 km of trucks, coal, and dust down National Highway 110 up to dusk, finally settling down around 7pm. It was one hell of a last rest day.

The next morning saw us roll down good old 110 through the armpits of Beijing’s external radius of industry, but sadly we came too late to experience the 100+ km coal truck jam of recent notoriety. It might have slowed us down, sure, but how often do you get a chance to be part of poor planning of historically hilarious scope?

Crossing the Great Wall a second time at Badaling, by Evan

By midday we had regained the good old municipality of Beijing. A turn off of the highway had us cruising through terrain still respectably bucolic considering it belonged to the great capital of the motherland (祖國偉大首都 — this is how conductors actually refer to Beijing in train announcements). We made the last supply re-up of the trip and then tackled the last mountain, right up to Badaling. The awesome restored wall shooting across lofty ridges, a new extension of the Beijing light rail, and lastly, the presence of gringos en masse signaled the end of our being in places seldom observed through round eyes.

It’s always been funny for me on the trip whenever we’d run across foreign travelers, usually only in big cities and tourist destinations, to compare ourselves with them. For most outsiders, and hell for most Chinese too, China isn’t a continuous mass inside its borders, but is a collection of accessible points on a tourism trail. “Oh yeah, I went to China! I saw the wall, the terra cotta warriors, and Shanghai!” Thinking back on it now, I am most grateful to know that China exists in real 3D between the various easily traversed points on the graph. More than that, I’m proud to say that it’s very unlikely that most people will ever have heard of the best places in this country, since it’s only the undeveloped places that have any value to them!

God Willing, this will be the last time we ever taste nescafe and noodles in the morning again! by Evan

Anyway, on that last night, we summited Badaling and camped in a dense wood just a stone’s throw from the wall. I had no idea you could find such nature just a Mongol invasion’s distance from the capital! We savored our last night of camping over trail mix and one last bottle of baijiu (I know, we have problems).

The next morning we broke camp lazily and late and after our last hit of Nestle instant coffee (seriously, we have a lot of problems) careened into the gray skied abyss of Mordor, down to an elevation of 100 meters, our lowest since Hainan 6 months earlier. We crossed the sixth ring (40 km from city center, because that’s just how much you want to sprawl!), fifth, fourth, third, second, and finally we were back in front of Tian’anmen scrambling to take the requisite photos while a fat cop screamed, “no stay! no stay!”

That's a wrap! by Evan

Exhausted and filthy, we arrived that afternoon, the 13th, at Cathy Li’s apartment, the same place from which we departed 355 days earlier. After showers and a snack we dragged ourselves (we hadn’t rested in 7 straight days from Hohhot) to Beer Mania, as you might have known from the announcement on the site, and thanks to the hospitality of many, including gracious proprietor Thierry, beered ourselves to maniacal levels. I woke up the following morning at noon on the couch of my friend Drew’s apartment, and despite a splitting headache (apparently even high quality alcohol does this when over-enjoyed), the first thing to hit my mind was: “how long do I have to feel better before we have to make today’s distance goal?” It was days before I could wake up late with a clear conscience. Only upon deconstructing and packing my bike into a box handed over to a shipping company did I realize it was finally all over, the same way seeing a coffin lowered into the earth symbolizes a final separation.

Since people seem interested in gushy stuff, I’ll add a little of that too before wrapping up. I was all mixed up emotionally, both from the end of the trip and the sudden reentry into mundanity. I like telling people that finishing was like breaking off a lusty, tumultuous relationship. It’s a relief to be able to move onto other projects, projects I’ve had countless hours on a bike over the span of a year to turn over and over in my head. It’s also a relief for my butt, which I’m fairly sure will be permanently marked with a giant red spot in the middle of each cheek. At the same time, sedentary life is horrifying. The prospect of returning to the numbing routine of working M-F at an uninteresting job, the fate of most of my remaining Beijing friends, makes my stomach churn and keeps me up at night. Thankfully, one of my greatest resolutions of the trip has been to never turn myself over to that lifestyle again, as I’d prefer poverty of the wallet to dissolution of my dreams.

So that’s where I am for the moment, all mixed up inside and despite being done with the bike trip, still not perched anywhere for long. I’ll need to quietly reflect for the next few days in the outlying islands of Hong Kong and probably a long time afterward in Shanghai on all the deeper implications of the past year. Then hopefully I can summarize a few of the major themes and satisfactorily verbalize them here. That is to say that there will be — at least — one more post coming, but I’m not sure when.

Best wishes to all from Wan Chai,
Evan

We stopped for our second lunch at small restaurant on the side of the road before our exit from Hebei province. The town was probably the most miserable place we've seen so far, with a "truck-stop" atmosphere and an an acrid smelling chemical plant spewing who-knows-what into the air. Despite the poor surroundings and the unhealthy look of the little restaurant, we had an excellent meal of delicious steamed beef buns (baozi) for a dollar. The owner, Mr. Zhang, told us that his type of baozi was famous in Beijing, although none of us had ever had them.

That lesson on the corrupting tendencies of power aside, we had a nice second day in Liugezhuang. We left our hotel a little after noon (drunken promise not fulfilled) in the industrial sector of town to walk down a new road – covered in tattered plastic and heaped over in so much dust you’d think they had it shipped in just to make the place look dingy – and took a stroll past some of the industry of the town, across the green river covered with trash (posted “bathe at your own risk”) and happened across a really interesting old neighborhood just beyond Main and Dusty Sts. The inhabitants were mostly shucking giant amounts of corn outside their courtyard dwellings or riding around on farm machines, but were mostly very affable. We found amid the yellowish-gray courtyards and piles of corn husks, to our surprise, a brand spanking new temple, outside of which a man of about 70 ushered us inside for a look. The temple itself was something. The architecture seemed authentic at very first sight, but there were several tell-tale signs of half-ass quality, including red paint splatters on the walls, an incorrect full-form character for “bell,” and a cheap feel about the statues and paint jobs. Another man in his 50′s wearing a white tshirt – apparently the full time guardian of the temple – told us it was 3 years old and built on the site of a previous, much smaller temple from donations by several citizens of the town (we had seen the list of donors, of about a hundred of whom, about eighty were surnamed Gao – go figure). When asked if the most of the temple-goers are Buddhist, he responded, “Some believe in Buddha, and some come to solve problems.” I could imagine a Catholic priest saying something similar.

Basically there were many parts of Liugezhuang that were beautiful and worth seeing, such as the old courtyard houses and the narrow streets of what was clearly the old city. They were charming, well thought out, and relatively ornate compared to their surroundings. However, the main drag of the town was a blight, and there were reeking piles of garbage strewn about everywhere, including right across from their new temple. We found out that the village mono-industry (just about all villages in China pick one industry and invest in it all-or-nothing) of insulating materials had recently gone nuts after Australia passed legislation subsidizing eco-friendly construction. Thus the village had come into some wealth, of which the temple was just one vestige. Despite that, the overall feel of the city was still utterly terrible, an example of what you might call “shitting where you eat.” As always the most recent additions to the city were the most despicable, leading me to believe more and more strongly that the (scientific?) development of these little places in recent years is really sucking the countryside dry of quality. As Andy said today in reference to one of the many nondescript Hebei towns we passed today, “I can’t imagine how they’ll develop all this into something good.” God, I hope we can find some traces of decency soon. At least last night we had a lively conversation with a Southern guest of our hotel, in town for over a month on business, who gave us a bottle of Johnny Walker black and took us to his favorite donkey cakes (local specialty) place. His arguments that Marxism is a valid religion and that China’s quality can be measured by its immense potential to change at any moment (which I said was pretty close to, “sleep with me today; we’ll get married tomorrow.”) were at least an amusing sidebar.

Today we made a 120 km jaunt across the rest of Hebei, stumbling across a group of bicyclists followed by a TV team, who gave us an on-the-spot interview. Afterward we followed them into yet another crappy third-tier city called Botou, where the police pulled us over from the middle of a crowded street to check our passports. After begrudgingly complying and telling the cops they made foreigners feel unwelcome in their city, we pulled out and a few hours later finally arrived in the greener (literally) pastures of Shandong province and a little Muslim enclave called Changguan (长官), complete with beautiful old Mosque and old city to boot. So far we have been treated by far the warmest by our Hui minority friends here of anywhere on the trip, and their neighborhoods are lively and colorful. Well, the old ones at least. We’re going to head out one more time tomorrow to see what we can find in the old city before starting to clip away at the next 450 km to Qingdao. More posts to come.

We walked around the town of Liugezhuang today, which could be a beautiful place if it were well taken care of. Unfortunately, many places are covered in trash, the new part of town is a dump, and like everywhere else in Hebei that we've encountered, it is covered in dust. Nevertheless, we came across a number of charming back alleys and even a buddhist temple where we chatted with the caretaker and learned a bit about the town's history and present fiberglass manufacturing situation, which has been a boon since Australia passed environmental legislation requiring higher building efficiency standards.

So it is with this background that I recommended from the beginning of our incident at the hotel to try to stay uninvolved. Morally, it is difficult to watch an innocent person suffer, but in the context of power and law in China, it is much safer to let events simply unfold around you.

We headed south slowly. Two days of hard riding (hard for us in our current physical condition) had worn on us. My knee had begun hurting the previous day as we pulled into Wen’an, and now it was hovering at about a three on the one-to-ten scale of pain. I’ve had problems with my right knee since running cross country in high school and knew that if it got to a five we would have to stop and wait for a recovery. Given Evan’s recent knee surgery, I received no objections.

We stuck to country roads, and the relative beauty of the countryside began to wash the taste of Wen’an out of our mouths, even though we were still shrouded in a gray haze. When we first left the city, the “hallos!” and baffled smiles directed at us from the locals were met with only cold stares from us, but as we moved out into the country, our spirits began to lift and we began responding with “ni haos” and increasingly enthusiastic waves of our own. Eventually our country road ended in a small village surrounded by corn fields. An inquiry toward three old men sitting on a stoop as to which way out would lead us to Liugezhuang, the next dot on our map, was met with some mostly unintelligible form of local Hebei dialect, and we peddled out into the corn fields.

We soon found ourselves in one of those perfectly planted, monoculture forests that are found everywhere in China. When the neat rows of aspen trees finally broke, we stumbled onto a patch of date trees and a family harvesting the dates, which had just come into season. As Evan described, harvesting meant whacking the trees with long bamboo poles to make the dates fall out or climbing into the trees to shake the dates down onto plastic sheets that the family had laid out below. The family was nice enough to take a break from their tree whacking to have a friendly conversation with us and offer us as many of their dates as we wanted, which quickly replaced the sour taste of Wen’an. This was why we came on this trip.

Perhaps as a result of the dirt roads, my knee had moved up to about a four-and-a-half, and when we arrived in Liugezhuang, I requested that we stay for the night and possibly the next day, although it was only 3:30 in the afternoon and we had traveled only 35km. A friendly man on a motorbike showed us the way to one of two hotels in town, and we got a huge room with three beds again for less than $1.50 per person. We  had dinner at the hotel and found that a rehearsal dinner of sorts was taking place before a wedding the next morning. By the end of the evening we were of course being toasted by the father of the bride and offered countless cigarettes. It turned out that most at the party were either local cadres, police or businessmen, who all treated us like honored guests. The difference between the city and a small town 35km away was striking. If we were going to hang out with the Party, we much preferred the festive atmosphere of the evening to the life-destroying power trip of the morning.

We tried our hand with some back-country roads today and came across a nice family harvesting their dates. Who knew those things grew on trees? They sell the harvest to various companies but were happy to let us enjoy as many as we wanted while we sat and chatted. Today reaffirmed our original assumption that the best thing we could do for this trip would be to avoid any semblance of a city and stay to the countryside where those without many of the strange concerns of modern life in China still reside.

Not thinking much more of it, we went across the street for cheap grub after the obligatory pictures with the babies of all the other business owners in the vicinity. After the first bite of my shaobing (baked flatcake), the boss lady tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go back to the hotel with her. Upstairs a plain-clothed, middle aged Chinese man showed me his Public Security badge and asked who I was, what I was doing, if I had stayed in the hotel, and a lot of nonsense questions. Finally he asked if the boss lady had registered us the previous night.

“Of course, we were registered. Four policemen came and took over an hour of our time making copies and going through our bags.”

That, however, was not the problem. Apparently the policemen had taken the copies of our passports for themselves, and the boss lady had not registered us in her computer herself. I tried pleading with him that of course, the police knew we were here, but he said that it’s not my responsibility to mind this affair. I suggested that if we all gave our passports now to make copies for the register, would that end the whole matter? So I went out and made copies of our passports after telling the guys to come for me if something happened. When I got back, the boss lady was sobbing at her desk. Through her sobs she told me they were going to revoke her business license and close her down. I tried to get her phone number or ask her to let me go downstairs to fetch money for her to pay to the policeman, but she kept saying it would only make matters worse. I asked her ten times about ten different solutions I could think of, but she didn’t want me to talk to the cop who was sitting in the back smoking or to go out and bring her money or anything. She just kept on telling me to remember that she was a good person and that she didn’t do anything wrong by agreeing to take us in, and that we will always be friends.

Enraged and befuddled, I walked downstairs and told Andy and Alexis about the situation. After much debate, we decided to all throw some money together and have Alexis take it up. He took it to her, but she refused several times. He gave her his cell phone number and promised to call us to let us know what happens.

So we left Wen’an with what Andy referred to as, “a bad taste in our mouths.” As I predicted before we set out, our major problems over this trip would all come from the government or their thugs (police). It’s likely, as we speculated afterward, that the cops are just trying to shake the hoteliers down for a huge fine or bribe. Either way, it stinks, and we are dying to remove ourselves from Hebei. Incidentally, it has finally occurred to me what is the biggest difference between here and Taiwan from my perspective. Today I’m sure it’s that only in idiotic dictatorships that everybody has to be registered to Big Brother at all times. In a place with nothing to hide, three goofball bicyclists with thousands of “USA-China Friendship Bicycling Team” cards would be seen as innocent and probably ridiculous, but not as terrorists or international pariahs.

Fortunately though, it wasn’t all bad today. We managed to get lost in some little village dirt roads covered by huge piles of corn husks among endless rows of corn and between little houses with courtyards covered in corn husks and husked corn (have I mentioned they grow some corn out here?). After getting really lost in one, we found a family of 5 with huge plastic sheets under trees, whacking them with huge bamboo poles. When we went up to talk to them, we found out they were harvesting dates, which have just come into season. When the papa of the family found out we took three days to get there, his wife told us he had once ridden to Beijing on a bike in one day. I’m glad they have appreciation for long bike rides (and that they called us out on being slow). Anyway, the point is that we still love Chinese people and even China. It’s just those prickly pricks in charge of things who bully locals for no goddamn reason who destroy it for everybody else. From here on it, hopefully we’ll leave places with the taste of good Chinese people and sweet dates and not the sour taste of oppression.

And as Alexis says, “nique la police!”

Former Filling Station Turned Corn Lot