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.

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.

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 inter-township 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.