Portrait of an LBX

When Evan and I came to Yuanyang (元陽縣) in October 2008, an under-construction dam made for some awful, dusty riding as we finally finished the descent from Potou (坡頭鄉). This time, the dam was finished and the resevoir was dotted with fisheries like this one. The Red River (紅河) flows into Vietnam, where it is known as the Song Ca, or "Mother River," clearly of cultural significance. As with the Mekong, China doesn't care.

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I had imagined that riding through coastal Shandong would be nice — beautiful even. For two days, however, we had some pretty depressing scenery. We’ve been forced to travel on provincial roads (省道) a good bit recently both as a result of our location in Shandong and our rush to get to Qingdao by Friday night to meet a friend. Generally we prefer the inter-village roads (乡间道), which are a tossup in terms of road quality but usually winners in terms of traffic flow and scenery as they usually run through fields between villages and small towns.

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.
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Our Dongbei restauranteurs who had relocated to Bazhou, Hebei

Getting in shape is hard enough under any circumstances when one has been sitting in a desk job for two years without sufficient self motivation for a regular exercise routine. Getting in shape while breathing the air in Hebei province is an altogether different beast.

China has a severe desertification problem brought on by decades of equally severe deforestation. It is most evident in places like Inner Mongolia where lush grasslands have turned to sand dunes. In Beijing it can be felt in unbearably dry skin, heard in hacking coughs and seen in the sandstorms that blow in from the northeast in the spring. In Hebei there is simply dust everywhere. It covers the trees and grass, casting them in dull hues as if they are seen through a dense fog, and it covers the roads, which is what concerns us most. We spent much of our 75km ride today sucking dust as we rode alongside massive cargo trucks carrying who-knows-what toward Tianjin. The challenge was coupled with the already unbearable Hebei air, palpable in its polluted grayness from brick kilns, cement factories and other heavy industries.

After a late start, we left Gu’an for a town called Bazhou where we had lunch with a welcoming mother-son team running a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and hotel. The family had migrated from Heilongjiang province in China’s northeast 18 years ago for the father’s job. What we found interesting was that they had switched their hukou from their town in Heilongjiang to Bazhou in Hebei — basically an indication that they would never be going back. They were able to secure the hukou with a 2,000 yuan (approximately $300) processing fee per person and the purchase of a house. They had no idea what the processing fee would be today, but estimated that it would be much higher and that they likely would be unable to obtain the hukou at all. When we asked why (after all, China is more open and relaxed now than in the years directly after 1989, right?) they told us that people from the northeast are no longer allowed to get hukou here as they are viewed as hooligans and troublemakersby the locals .

From Bazhou we sucked dust for another 40km to a shitty city called Wen’an — a total misnomer, really, as it means “cultured and peaceful.” Evan has written more about our experience here in his post, so I won’t repeat, but I will say that I can’t wait for October 2 to roll around when I presume that the government will stop making local police so damn nervous that they overreact and treat a bunch of stupid bikers like terrorism suspects.

One good thing on our way from Bazhou to Wen’an was that we took our first “provincial road,” that is, a very local road running usually through rural areas. These are indicated on our map by tiny gray lines that often dead-end in this or that village, and these are the roads on which we will spend the majority of our time on this trip if all goes according to plan.

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