Portrait of an LBX

A snoozy street in the Fengqing old town, by Andy

By Andy

2010/05/29 – 78 km

We start the morning with a search through town for the post office so we can send the tea we bought the previous day to a friend in Shanghai. During our search, we find that Fengqing actually has an old section of town. By old, I mean it looks Communist-era, with most things appearing to be built in the 1950s when the real Communists were around. With the exception of a few white tile buildings (why they built everything to look like a bathroom in the ‘90s is beyond me), everything is built in blocky, imposing, Soviet style).

What’s striking though is how alive the area seems compared to the new section of town where we stayed the night before. The streets are narrow, a single lane in each direction, and everyone is out and about. Street vendors peddle snacks, goldfish, bamboo brooms and anything else someone might be interested in purchasing on the cheap.

There’s even a big mosque, at which we take a quick peak on our way back to the main road. It is one of the unfortunate, white-tile monstrosities of the 90s, complete with cheap, blue, reflective glass windows. Unfortunately, there’s no one around from whom to learn any of the history, so we head back out to the main road and begin climbing.

The road, paved and in good condition once we get out of town, takes us straight up the mountain to the northwest. Below and to our right is the still under-construction highway that will soon make our road obsolete. On it, the occasional car or motorbike climbs over the piles of dirt that have been set up to keep vehicles off, a fairly ubiquitous but ineffective way of closing off roads in this country. Above, our road’s numerous switchbacks snake up the mountain, and the bridges and overpasses for the new highway, held up by tall, concrete columns, cling to the mountain face.

It’s nearly noon by the time we’re crawling up those switchbacks, and just as I’m considering a break to munch on some trail mix, we spot a small tea factory and stop to have a look. (more…)

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A Uighur man stands on a pile of rubble in Kashgar's rapidly disappearing old town.

By Andy

We probably won’t be making it to Tibet or Xinjiang on this journey — the distances are simply too vast. A year seems like a long time to spend on a bicycle until you set the goal of circumnavigating a country of China’s size in that time frame. Evan’s recent post on our walk through the Tangyin old town got me thinking about my time in Xinjiang last year, and particularly in Kashgar, an old Silk Road trading town with a vibrant traditional section.

There is an apparent mindset among the Chinese leadership that anything of cultural and/or historical value in this country must simply be wiped out and as quickly as possible. Kashgar’s old town is a prominent target. A recent article in the Global Post puts a softer edge on what we on this blog would tend to describe as cultural rape:

Kashgar’s Old City is also an anomaly in modern China: A well-preserved, relatively untouched section of ancient but living architecture. Most of China’s cities have undergone sweeping facelifts amid the country’s economic boom, but the Old City of Kashgar, a small piece of the larger city of more than 3 million residents, is set off from modern city by a river and hills, distinctly unique and almost out-of-place.

A Uighur man hired to clear the rubble of Kashgar's old town tosses bricks into a dump truck.

I think part of this appetite for destruction stems from an incomprehensibly skewed incentive system for local officials. Despite years of promises for reform by the center, local government officials are still evaluated primarily on their ability to generate gross domestic product (GDP) growth. All other worries — the environment, quality of life, cultural and historical relics — are cast aside unless they can be easily harnessed and transformed into GDP growth.

This has all sorts of horrible implications, but I think one of the most interesting is the real estate industry. As most everyone is probably aware, despite thirty years of “reform and opening,” all land in China is still owned by the state (or by the “people,” as the state will tell you). In China’s cities you can own an apartment (read: a little concrete box way up in the sky), but the land on which the apartment building sits is owned by the state. Citizens can “lease” land for anywhere between 30 and a hundred years depending on the situation. Peasants generally till land on 30-year leases. (more…)

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Today we finally made it to Tangyin (棠阴), Jiangxi province. With the exception of a long period of harassment by the police and Foreign Affairs Bureau from the nearby county seat, we found the town to be charming and completely devoid of tourism -- a relief after seeing a slogan on a sign leading into town calling for the spirited development of the tourism industry. Locals scoffed when we asked if there was an entrance fee, and for good reason: the entire old town is falling into a sad state of disrepair. A beautiful old house, once the home of a landlord before the revolution and of the county government thereafter (trading one landlord for another?), is now falling to pieces under the collective ownership of a number of peasant families, as is the rest of the town. There can be no entrance fee until the place is restored, and there is no money to oust the current occupants and restore (read: build anew, poorly) without the money that an entrance fee would bring.

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By Andy

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. (more…)

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A street scene we traversed as we followed leads to find one of Kaifeng's Chinese Jews. The city also has a more modern and commercial section of town, but we found the back alleys much more interesting.

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We had some very special arrangements while in Qingdao. When we arrived, exhausted after 135km, we found most of the hotels booked for the October holiday. When we finally found one with an open room, we booked it, although it was three times as expensive as we’ve generally been paying. After resting in the room for a while, we heard a knock and opened the door to find a girl outside asking us to come pay for the room. But judging from her attire — skin tight pants, tight orange shirt, slightly too much makeup — she wasn’t your normal Chinese hotel girl. When after two days we still hadn’t been asked for our passport numbers for the room registration, we finally realized that we were surrounded by hookers. As Evan pointed out, the two were connected because if a hotel is going to be full of hookers in China, the owners are likely to have a good relationship with the local police, making registering us unnecessary and perhaps even troublesome.

On our second night at the hotel, we needed two double rooms because of our friend Gilles’ arrival. Unfortunately, we were told the double rooms were completely booked except for two in the basement, which happened to be completely lacking in the window department and had a mold problem. Nevertheless, we accepted given that the price per person was cheaper and we had no intention of spending too much time in the rooms anyway.

After a night of all-you-can eat and drink at a swanky Japanese restaurant and a late-night dip in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, we spent Sunday trying our hands at bicycle maintenance, which so far seems to have been successful enough overall. We cleaned our bikes on a large patio outside from the basement, and hookers ran back and forth, giggling and laughing and generally acting like 12-year-olds with cigarettes hanging from their mouths. An older man did laundry, including that of the girls, in the washing machine on the patio for most of the afternoon. A sort of grandfatherly figure, he teased with the girls while waiting between loads. But when I went into our room after finishing the bikes to find the bike lock, he cornered me. “How about you get a foot massage tonight? What about one of the girls? I’ll give you a good price.”

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We met a lot of very welcoming people as we walked around the Zhangguan old town in the morning before setting out.

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Kashgar Old Town, Xinjiang

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The universal language of flirting -- Kashgar Old Town, Xinjiang

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A Uighur boy sells fried pockets full of lamb in Kashgar's quickly vanishing old town.

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