Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

A lot has happened since my last update from Shanghai, which was written in a snazzy cafe in the French concession over fancy coffee during one of Shanghai’s trademark, endless, winter rain sessions. As you might have ascertained from Andy’s last two posts, we trudged two hard days through biting cold and slow, interminable rain across the Zhejiang border and to a famous “ancient village,” Wuzhen. We had a hunch that Wuzhen might be an over-commercialized touristy hell, but, like the kid who puts his finger in the electric socket, we like to learn our lessons the hard way. Andy summed up our disgust with Wuzhen very tidily, but I’d like to add how sad it makes me to know that nothing decent has a chance of surviving intact these days. It’s as though the prize Wuzhen gets for miraculously not being completely decimated during the Cultural Revolution is to now have the yolk of über-myopic, local Party economic goals tightly wrapped around it’s most delicate features. Don’t let this article fool you — all the “sights” are neatly tucked behind a walled-in area behind a ticket tearer and carry a high price tag (which we’d not pay even on pain of death). The whole city feels painfully fake, and everybody around the “historic” part of town talked to us as though we had RMB signs floating around our heads. In short, we’ve learned that any previously discovered “ancient villages” (notably those with a devoted tourism website) are to be avoided like the plague.

Wuzhen, probably a very nice place to live at one point, but now its best parts have been cordoned off from reality and turned into a mini-Disneyworld, which not even locals can access without paying, by Andy

After the weather finally allowed our escape, we bolted from Wuzhen in our final ride (for a good long time) across the great expanse of flatland encompassing the Great North China Plain and Jiangnan. The implications of the great plain and its current state deserve their own separate article, which I promise to write one day, but for the moment suffice it to say that the gargantuan depression should prove to be, in all senses possible, the low point of our adventure. Before setting out from Beijing, Andy and I sat in front of Google Earth and took comfort in how blessedly flat and easy our ride would be all the way to the beginning of the mountains which cover 70% of Zhejiang, but at the time we had no idea that the more uniform the surface of a large area, the faster prevailing winds sow seeds. Nowadays the prevailing wind blows from singularly-concerned-with-industry-and-development Beijing. As we’ve written and photographed extensively, that means long stretches of ugly, polluted, dusty, culture-shy wasteland. In case that was too subtle, just understand that we were dying to escape into the mountains, where a great deal of modernity’s insanity is physically impeded from sprawling too quickly. Since I’ve ridden through Los Angeles’ San Fernando valley this last summer, I have to point out that the flatlands phenomenon is not just Chinese — not by a long shot. Woe are the valleys of our world today, for they have no defense from the overwhelming, misguided power possessed by contemporary man. May we find respite in the high places, which thankfully mankind is not yet able to submit to its will. (more…)