Portrait of an LBX

We are currently resting in Tai’an, the city that sits below Mount Tai, one of China’s five great mountains. Tomorrow we will travel 50km south to meet the family of a Chinese friend of Evan’s, after which we will move out of Shandong and into our third province, Henan.

Our ride to Tai’an was marked by our first hills and mountains, which while nothing compared to what we will face when we climb up onto the Tibetan plateau next summer, were enough to give our relatively inexperienced legs the workout of the trip so far. In the mountains, we passed a number of villages that, aside from the occasional slogan painted on the wall of a house, seemed untouched by the maddening rush for development of the past forty years. Nestled down from the main road among some of the largest and most natural trees we have seen thus far, the villages could easily be overlooked.

Clamoring down the steep slope into one such village, I was immediately struck by the tranquility of the place. With the majority of the tiny population out in the fields, themselves on terraces painstakingly cut out of the rocky mountain slope long before, the village was abandoned except for the occasional chicken and an old man pushing a wheelbarrow of corn who asked me if I was lost. Red paper banners with black characters imploring fortune and prosperity decorated the doors of each house. When an old woman peered out from behind one of the doors and responded to my “Ni hao” with only a blank stare, I began to feel like an intruder and made my way back up the rocky path to the road.

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One thing that caught my attention over the past few days is the condition of the elderly in these mountain villages and other small towns. In Beijing, retirees gather in parks to practice tai chi, fly kites, play chess, show off their caged birds or just sit and talk. Their only worry seems to be boredom. Passing through these villages, however, I have watched old ladies, clearly in their late 70s or 80s, crossing the road, their bodies doubled over under the weight of a load of dried tree branches with which to cook dinner or a huge basket of corn ears to husk. Old men push wheelbarrows full of rocks uphill for kilometers. In contrast to our romanticized view of life in the countryside and abhorrence of the mess created by the all-too-rapid development of China’s cities, life in the country is undeniably hard. The old ladies are the least likely to respond to a wave or a smile from us as we pass, instead only gazing at us from behind empty eyes as if to say, “I have seen crazier things, and I am too tired and broken to care.”

Now we are back in the city – another soulless place indistinguishable from the myriad, gray, expressionless urban centers that are already blurring together in my memory as if viewed from a merry-go-round. But in front of the temple next to our hotel, behind which the outline of Mount Tai is visible through the haze, the elderly sit and play chess or practice tai chi as black Audi A6s rush past on the main drag.

We left our hotel extremely late yesterday, around one in the afternoon, after a morning of trying to get stuff onto the website through the horribly slow Internet. I spent some additional time getting all the grit from the rainstorm out of my chain and other moving parts and re-oiling things again. I think my parents would be proud to know that I finally value something mechanical enough and understand how it works sufficiently to keep it maintained. At least I hope so. Reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in May certainly made me appreciate the process more as well. There is no doubt a certain satisfaction to be derived from doing something oneself, especially when doing it right. And when you start to know how to do it correctly, it becomes harder and harder to let anyone else do it for you because there’s no guarantee they’ll do it right, and they certainly have no skin in the game. At some point, I’d like to discuss some of my observations in China in the context of “Zen,” but this post is going to be long enough without it.

In my last entry we were debating whether to head south toward Rizhao or west toward Taishan and Henan. After looking at our map and seeing how far south Rizhao would take us and how silly it would be to work our way back up to Henan from there, only to head south again, we decided to head west. We began by moving southwest on the provincial road running through Ducun, S217. After missing our turn-off, we decided to take the next paved road west that we saw. The road took us through a small village, after which the pavement disappeared and we were on a dirt road through the countryside. With the exception of the ever-present dust and perfectly planted rows of trees, as we moved through rolling hills covered with corn I could imagine that I was back home in southern Pennsylvania. As we began climbing uphill, the dirt road eventually ran into another paved road, and we flew downhill at 45km per hour. From there we wound through narrow, back-country roads for what was the most pleasant ride of our trip thus far. We passed through several tiny villages where corn once again lay drying on at least half of the road. The words coming out of the mouths of the elderly residents meandering the streets were about as intelligible to us as the mooing of the cows tied outside some of the houses or the clucking of chickens from inside the courtyard homes.

As we passed through one of the villages by the name of Chujiawangwu (褚家王吴村), a man in his late 30s or early 40s waved us down and invited us into his home to eat. After stashing our bikes in his courtyard, we sat down in his living room where we chatted, and his wife served us bowls of noodles and sausage, which everyone ate out of courtesy despite Jewish, vegetarian and anti-sausage requirements. (more…)