Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

The Sino-Tibetan fusion family of Emasiji, Duosiji, and Mr. Sun, by Andy

It’s been only six days since we left Chengdu, but it feels like a year ago already. Fat reserves replenished and bikes passably maintained (poor Andy’s bar-end shifter crapped out in a part of the world where only mountain bike parts are available), we made our way to Dujiangyan (都江堰). That city, located in the northeast corner of the basin, is named after one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. It is a complicated flood relief system that redirected the tempestuous Min River (岷江) into the irrigation system that allowed the Chengdu plain to become “the Garden of China.” The plain is now so covered by sprawl and industry it could be called the “New Jersey of Western China,” but the irrigation system works today just the way it was designed to way back in 256 B.C. Sweet!

From there we headed north on G213 following the Min River valley up through the scads of giant green mountains that delineate the low basin and the high plateau. The road, the only one for hundreds of miles around, happens to be the preferred biking route from Chengdu to Lhasa, and so we were repeatedly asked if we were on the classic Chinese “prove your biking mettle” path. Andy pointed out that a long time ago, a pilgrimage to Lhasa, was a deeply significant affair reserved for devoted Tibetan Buddhists and the occasional Brad Pitt. Nowadays it’s the destination for all self-proclaimed badass bikers. That is to say that basically any pedaler worth his spit has either been there, is en route and already ran into us over the last few months, or is planning to go just as soon as he gets his chance. We met several groups making the month-long trip, including four cool dudes from the Beida (北大) cycling club and a bunch of old folks from the Chengdu Retired Persons Association — power to them! (more…)

By Evan

Sichuan (aka Szechuan) is one of the provinces we’ve dreamed and talked about since the beginning of the trip, especially on bland food days. Andy and I had both been here a number of times, and we had the impression it was one of the most in-your-face, interesting, and visually striking provinces around. Unfortunately, Sichuan and sister municipality Chongqing have largely been a disappointment. There was certainly a lot of greenery, mostly from of growing corn and rice, but it was all very monotonous. The villages and towns mostly looked alike, lots of concrete squares and white tiles. Just as up in the North China plain though, the place has been full of industry right smack in with the villages and towns, and we’ve seen nary a blue sky in our entire time crisscrossing the basin. Sichuan does have the rotten luck of following Yunnan and Guizhou, where we could hardly go a day without giant blue skies and stunning landscapes. All that said, there were some moments worth sharing, which I’ll talk about now.

Only a few days into the province, we undertook our greatest physical challenge to date, a 235 km (146) mile push from Jiang’an county (江安縣) on the Yangtze into Chongqing. All I’ll say for the ride is that the first 100 were the hardest, since it’s all in the head, and then the last 135 actually went fairly smoothly, with the exception of those 3 mountains (bad navigator). Once we shot out of the last tunnel and into the beginnings of what the uninformed might call “the city proper,” we were deluded to think we were almost there. For anybody who has never had the pleasure of entering a first tier Chinese city, I’ll try to explain succinctly. First you hit a wall of towers, giant gray rectangles somewhat spread out and interspersed by mega highways 6-10 lanes wide with no smaller surface options. As you travel inward, the buildings grow taller and tighter, and the roads become more crowded and frantic. Imagine a Beethoven symphony perverted into rhythmic bursts of cacophony, a grating, unchanging noise that rides a quickening pace up and down louder and louder until you think it should hit a deafening crescendo. But it never does. We rode down those mega highways for 15 km, past dozens of signs prohibiting bikes, and likewise past hundreds of bikes and pedestrians (since they have nowhere else to traverse) deeper and deeper through more and more sociopathic drivers until we hit the city center, where the only visible difference was higher density, more traffic, and more signs for brand names. With few exceptions, you could airlift us blindfolded to any big city in China, and we’d never know where we were based on the surroundings alone. (more…)

By Evan

Our loyal steeds, mine on the left, Andy's on the right, by Andy

I’ve always believed that in order to really love (or hate) something, you have to name it. Since we’ve become as attached to our bikes as classic knights-errant became to their horses, we have decided that it’s well past time to apply brands to our babies. The official handles are as below: (more…)

By Evan

As I sat in my tent last night under a bamboo canopy next to a babbling brook, when I’d otherwise be in a hippie-like state of revelry, I couldn’t help but consider the words a good friend sent to me lately: “Doing serious stuff like living out your dreams doesn’t work with everyone’s schedule.” Amen. As we’ve been out “living the dream,” into which we’re now well over nine months, the world didn’t hit the pause button the way you’d expect someone to do during a movie when you go to the bathroom. Nope, it hit fast forward.

Since we left in September, it’s been one major event after another. Cancer took both my uncle Ned and my dog Ebby. My childhood friend Patrick and first cousin Nick both got married. Another friend called off his wedding. My other first cousin Jess got pregnant. Google left China. An ex-girlfriend told me she’s walking the aisle soon. Then yesterday, the real heavy news, I found out that one of my best friends (who shall remain nameless, though he be far from innocent), the one I thought would hold out to the bitter end, himself succumbed to the insidious engagement impulse. On top of all that, the world seems to be caving in on itself, especially close to home, where the Gulf is still being irrevocably mucked up, meaning on a personal down note that there won’t be any trout, snapper, redfish, or oysters waiting for me when I get home. (more…)

By Evan

*I’m way too lazy today to put the pictures straight into this post. See the Maotai pictures here and the first of Sichuan here.

It’s been awhile since my last substance update, so I’ll back up and explain a few things behind the title. First, after Kunming we picked up Aaron, our old buddy from Shanghai, who followed us just across the border with Guizhou on a creaky 20” wheel Dahon. He is now an official member of the USA-China Friendship Bicycling Team. Then we trimmed some of China’s most stunning landscapes, the kind of stuff that inspired landscape paintings (山水畫) like this for hundreds of years, right after taking Aaron through the most bland riding we’ve done in a while. Probably bad karma on his part. before arrival in Guiyang. In Guiyang, Andy R&R’ed in Shanghai while I stayed behind to see the USA lose to Ghana (crapola) and spend time with an interesting group of expats (another story for another time, but thanks to my new Nigerian friend Henry!). From Guiyang, we had to pick a route north into Sichuan, and fate again took a hand, placing the little town of Maotai smack in our way.

For those who’ve lived in China, Maotai (also known as Kweichow Moutai), home of China’s most celebrated liquor, requires no introduction. For everybody else, let me try to explain. In terms of local reputation and legacy, Maotai is to baijiu what Dom Perignon is to champagne. But PLEASE, PLEASE don’t take that to mean that we are lovers of baijiu, or that baijiu is a liquid which should be used — by reasonable people — for more than blowing fire as a party trick or sanitizing wounds. To journey to Maotai for the love of baijiu would be like visiting Abu Ghraib on an “experience the world’s most inhumane tortures” tour. In case you still don’t get it, the stuff blows, and I mean hard. It burns like hell and gives you wicked hangovers, but for reasons I’ll never understand, that hasn’t stopped the Chinese from enjoying it in copious quantities for thousands of years, making it on the strength of this country alone the world’s most consumed spirit. Honestly, China came out pretty well with its cuisine, its tea, its arts, etc. etc. Unfortunately, they got the short end of the alcohol stick with baijiu and huangjiu (黃酒, much much better than baijiu but still pretty gross) as their front runners. (more…)

By Evan

My mother, who doesn’t care diddly squat about China, has requested that I write something about personal development and insights over the trip, something more on a human/emotional level and less about the place I’m traveling in. So, fair warning, this piece is entirely subjective and in parts dangerously touchy-feely. It might, however, be of interest to others who have taken long trips in strange places.

The first thing to discuss is the psychology behind a trip like this. By that I mean the importance attitudes and moods play, especially when you’re essentially repeating the same up-down pedal motion eight hours a day and when you’re as severely introverted as I am. When I say introverted, I mean that my default mode of operation is to sink deep into my thoughts unless prompted by necessity or curiosity to interact with the outside world. So whenever we start pushing out a long, hard ride, my mind will grind away with increasing momentum in whatever direction it started that morning, usually tempered by extreme emotions. I can be in the highest of spirits while climbing a giant hill or sucking away life-shortening clouds of black truck exhaust, or I can be melancholy riding through a bamboo forest full of chirping birds. Unfortunately, in the last weeks the bottom fell out of my self-confidence, and I’ve been dwelling for hours at a time about how I won’t be able to write a decent book since I suck so much at organizing my ideas, and how I don’t know what the hell we’re doing this trip for, and how maybe it was a stupid idea in the first place, etc. etc. That’s why I haven’t been able to make myself write anything for this blog in so long, until two days ago I rode alone the last 75 km into Guiyang and blasted out the negative gook that was clogging me up. A month ago, I felt so great about this trip and the things we were seeing and how super duper insightful I thought I was that — with a little inspiration from reading The Sun Also Rises — I decided to write a novel about life in China in addition to the travelogue from this trip. I spent my biking hours soaking in every minute sensory detail to be recorded in notes, and simultaneously cooked up a killer storyline and a cast of characters. I was so high on the idea that I wrote 50 pages of it!

So you see, your attitude dictates everything when your activities don’t have natural beginnings and endings. That is to say, everything we do, determining destinations and distances for a day, writing posts, taking notes, having LBX experiences — it all comes entirely from us. Nobody is telling us what to do. When you’re the master of your own fate, your mentality determines whether you’ll use that freedom to become great — like Benjamin Franklin or Zhuge Liang or Ernest Hemingway — or just give up and become a bum. There’s a good line from the movie No Country for Old Men about having to recommit yourself to your task daily, maybe even twice daily when it’s particularly hard, that sums up the lesson I’ve learned about the importance of keeping my thoughts pointing in the right direction and not letting them fall into an abyss. (more…)

By Evan

Mr. Xie, owner of Xinzhai Coffee, explaining the secret to his success, by Andy

“The first step to getting our coffee farmers to produce a quality product was to get them drinking coffee,” our host explained, a freshly pressed cup of his own brew in his hand. On the couch opposite him, one of his growers — and a friend from the same village — added that over the past years just about everybody in the village has picked up the habit of drinking 8-10 cups of the black stuff a day. Andy and I sat shaking like leaves in October from our eighth cup in a few hours, amazed that we had been out-caffeine’ed by a room full of Chinese.

We were sitting in the Xinzhai Manor Coffee Company (新寨咖啡公司), guests of the founder and owner Mr. Xie Xianwen (謝顯文). Mr. Xie opened his company in his native Lujiang (潞江) in Yunnan’s Baoshan Prefecture (雲南保山市) for two reasons. First, coffee had been grown in his home village of Xinzhai — after which the company is named — for years without anybody taking the time to organize the farmers or develop the industry. Second, he realized there was good money to be made in the domestic coffee business. So he quit his job in a tobacco company — and his smoking habit — scraped up a little capital, and got roasting. (more…)

By Evan

nomad |ˈnōˌmad|

noun

• a member of a people having no permanent abode, and who travel from place to place to find fresh pasture for their livestock.

• a person who does not stay long in the same place; a wanderer.

– New Oxford American Dictionary

The nomadic lifestyle, by Evan

Although the only things we seek that might pass for “fresh pasture” include fried rice noodles with eggs and maybe bottles of oil (or whisky), we do quite neatly fit the definition of classic “bike nomads.” This, of course, is a very difficult concept to convey to most Chinese, who typically after hearing the entire spiel about what we’ve done over the last nine months and will continue to do for the next four will then ask, “so you both live in Beijing, and you’re students there?” “Home is where your (sore) butt is” will probably mystify most until we get onto the Tibetan plateau in a month. I digress.

Back to the point, more often than not on this big, ridiculous trip of ours, we fall short of our forecasted feral-ness. We had planned from the beginning to stay a majority of our nights either in the homes of LBXes or in the wilderness, but this man-like plan has like many others gone mice-like. So it was decided, after several days of self-pampering à la European backpacker in Dali in the walled-in hippy nest of Andy’s college bud Rick, that we should man up a little. We also wanted to live cheap to recover the old wallet from our spending frenzies. Up to $20 USD in a single day — madness, madness! (more…)

By Evan

Mr. Li returning from a day's work in the paddies, by Andy

For months now, a powerful urge has been rising in me. At first I could control it, but then its intensity grew too much for me. Finally, in a moment of sheer desperation and weakness, I broke down and indulged my double fantasy. Now here I am, admitting before God and man, that I plowed a field with a water buffalo and planted rice.

One of the primary goals of the trip has been to get ourselves into the LBX experience, and honestly there’s nothing more Chinese than getting involved with the farm work. Hell, between subjectively lamenting that their country is “backward (落後)” and “poor (窮)” and “undeveloped (不發達),” they often utter one undeniable fact: that China has historically been and still largely is an agricultural nation (農業大國). Biking thousands of kilometers through the farmscapes, I don’t know exactly how many thousands of buffalo or tens of thousands of acres of rice paddies we’ve passed, but it’s been enough to make me need to know what the deal is behind it all. (more…)

By Evan

The valley of sugar cane surrounding Gengma, by Evan

Gengma (耿馬) is a sleepy little County Seat (縣城) nestled up against Burma. It’s hardly worth visiting unless you happen to be going its way, and is in fact much less visited than the much smaller border town of Mengding (孟定鎮) 80 km to its west. It sits at the center of a long， deep valley surrounded by high mountains. This valley is the most exquisite example of that geographical feature I have ever laid my eyes upon. Its boundless rolling hills are planted almost exclusively in sugar cane, surrounded by a ring of bamboo mountains and covered by a perfect blue sky. If Norman Rockwell had done Chinese landscapes, he probably would have painted a series called Gengma.

It is not entirely, however, the physical beauty of Gengma that made our visit worthwhile. As always, it’s the people who inhabit a place who make it worthwhile. The first people we encountered on our drop from the mountains of Cangyuan (滄源) were the Dai (傣族). The houses became the two-story bamboo houses (竹樓), and occasional Buddhist monasteries alerted us to the religious nature of the place. The young women wore sarongs, tight to the waist and bright to the eyes, often complemented by conical coolie hats. The older women generally wrapped their heads in white turbans and their legs in long, black skirts. The Dai had planted over their half of the valley almost exclusively in sugar cane, barely knee-high under the late May sun. It was for the thousands of acres of sugar on their side of the plain that Gengma’s central feature was a monstrous, state-owned sugar factory — a rusty, gated cathedral of confection in the heart of town. (more…)