The dream/nightmare is over

NOVEMBER 21, 2007: When you're on a Chinese bicycle journey riding on dump-truck infested roads and one of you keeps getting dizzy every time you try to ride, you know what that means, right? You don't? It means it's time to buy a Chinese peasant truck! Photos

The bicycles have been phased after 1557km. In their place stands a noisy, 0.1-litre 3-wheeler that we bought brand new for A$770. It's freezing cold on the front, rough as a Guangdong hair lackey (thanks for the heads up Kenty) in the back where Boxxy, like all peasant women, sits. Its 4.8KW motor powers it up to a maximum speed of 60km/h, but only if you can stand the fearful rattling that kicks in above 45. It's really just as well though, because despite being brand new this thing has practically no brakes. Its front wheel brake is unashamedly token - at the shop i complained that it didn't work and the salesman simply told me, "they're all like that". The rear brakes have an unbelievably slim margin between not slowing the car at all and locking up completely. In short, it's a real stunner.

So stunning, in fact, that we can now ride around wherever we please and not be stared at: being the same maroon colour as all the rest of the poor peasantry's transportation (the rich peasantry have blue trucks), the people's eyes just sort of glide over us. It's fantastic.

The worst thing about buying the "trerk", as we refer to it, was being stuck in Jingbian ("Refined Side") for 4 days. Right in the middle of north Shaanxi, Jingbian's a messy, overgrown town where the people are generally unfriendly. As often is the case in unfriendly places, everyone seems either to be mean (40%), afraid (45%) or exceptionally warm-hearted (15%). A large number, maybe a majority, don't speak or understand Standard Mandarin. Standard Mandarin, in case you didn't know, is the dialect of Beijing, which has been implemented as a common language for the whole country. The dialect of Songyuan and the rest of the northeast (Pirate-speak) is very similar to Standard - the main difference would appear to be extra piratifications - and my friends in Songyuan warned me that i would not be able to understand anything the people in Gansu (where we started the trip) said. Funnily enough, throughout Gansu and Ningxia, two of the furthest-flung regions of China, most if not all people could speak and understand Standard. It's only been since we got into Shaanxi - the closest we've come to Beijing - that the unintelligible dialects have kicked in. Here people often exclaim, "You speak the common language!" - as though they expected me to speak some regional dialect spoken across an area the size of metropolitan Perth.

So, not a minute too soon, we hit the road from Jingbian. Our welcome to the world of Chinese motoring consisted of nearly dying in a head-on collision 5 minutes after starting when a truck heading the opposite way decided to swerve onto the wrong side of the road, apparently so as to not slow down as he turned a corner.

Our "soft-and-gay" abandonment of bicycles was promptly rewarded, however, as we headed up, up and up, into spectacular canyon country. At regular intervals along this road, as it skirts the massive, sheer cliffs, are missing and sheared-off concrete barriers, the sight of which prompted me to drive at a cowardly low speed.


Back down on the flats, we flew along (40km/h) for about half an hour before we hit more canyons. New roads go straight over them on giant stilts.


But old roads go down one side and up the other. After creeping down and struggling up through several gorges, we reached a crossroads that wasn't supposed to be. I asked a peasant where the roads went and his reply was utterly indecipherable. In fact, given the abovementioned dialect situation, his reply may well have been, "I don't understand your foreign language". I pulled out the map...and was dismayed to discover that he couldn't read either. We turned around and headed back through the canyons. This represented the first real test of the bike, as apparently the slopes had been steeper on the down-side, which was now the up-side. (Confused? Me too. Yes, we were indeed lost.) Two-thirds of the way up what was surely a 30-degree incline, the bike simply stopped. I jettisoned Boxxy, put it in neutral, rolled back down the hill and took a run-up. On this occasion we were lucky. But this particular part of the country was not finished with us yet. When i finally found a person with whom to communicate, he informed me the road marked on two different maps didn't exist and we instead must take a much longer route involving 5 more massive hills. Each one had to be scaled entirely in first gear, and on two more occasions the bike couldn't make it and needed Boxxy to get out and push. Needless to say i've quickly become a master of hill-starts.

Eventually, however, we reached a civilised road that, in a genuinely inspired show of ingenuity, ran along the bottom of an especially large canyon, all the way to the next town, Hengshan ("Unrestrained Mountain" - probably not the real meaning as this Heng character has 2 pronunciations and 7 meanings but this is my selection) which lies at the bottom. With the temperature hovering around 2 degrees, the town's coal stoves had filled the canyon with smoke. Hengshan proved to be the most poverty-stricken place we've been in China - riding in with the darkness, mist and smoke enfolding, the place looked closer to Kinshasa than Xi'an. We retuned at the most inappropriate time (in the morning) to take pictures; here is Hengshan, basking in sunshine and crisp air.


Continuing in the spirit of inappropriateness, Yulin, the next city, whose name means "Elm Forest", rises from a treeless sandy desert. I wouldn't be surprised if there once was an elm forest there, however. Northern China, to paraphrase the blog of some sterling fools who walked the length of the Great Wall, is an ecological disaster, and has been for centuries. There's no visible wildlife at all and no trees that haven't been planted by humans for human purposes.


Quite a number of Yulin's population will be talking for a while of a strange intervention by two very strange foreigners. As i was getting the 3-wheeler's oil changed, about 10 or so young men sprinted past, shouting about something. I thought they were running away from something until one was promptly tackled into some bushes and kicked in the head. "Thief?" i asked the mechanic, who nodded. But he wasn't. As we drove away about 20 minutes later, we noticed a crowd standing around watching as the 'thief', on his back, convulsed. Apparently the People's Court was carrying out its sentence. "What would they do if we just went in there and started comforting him?" Boxxy asked. "Let's find out," i replied, "he's probably going to die." We stopped the truck and ran into the circle. I put him on his side and asked if anyone had called an ambulance, while Boxxy held his hand. There were murmurs, some people tried to stop us, and the crowd quickly doubled in size. People tried hard to explain to us why we shouldn't help him. I didn't understand beyond (i think) the claim that he was acting, but he was clearly drunk and even more clearly bleeding from the head. I replied by asking, "What evil has he done?" (in those words - i don't know the word for 'crime'), to which a few people tried to reply. After lengthy explanations, all i could ascertain was that he had trashed a table in a nearby restaurant. After about a minute he started grabbing Boxxy, repeating over and over, "You saved me! You saved me!" which the crowd found very amusing. About 10 minutes later, he got up and walked off at a fine clip. All this despite the fact members of the crowd had claimed no ambulance was needed because the police were coming to arrest him.

The way from Yulin to Shenmu, ("God Tree", our present location), was first spectacular...



(Unfortunately for both the reader and my pretensions to photography, the above photo does this gorge no justice at all.)

...then it was bumpy, sandy and very dark. However, driving up sandy dune roads at night proved much less dangerous than the highway, which was so smoky that i couldn't use the high beams, and could barely see the road at all. Everyone else on the road could, though - Chinese drivers seldom turn their high beams off.

This morning we were confronted with this spectacular parade going right past our hotel. So we overtook them and took lots of pictures of their colourful get-up as they eased past.


The final car in the parade turned out to be a hearse.

"What's my cat gonna do now?"

NOVEMBER 12, 2007: "What's my cat gonna do now? He's not gonna know whether to eat, shit, piss or bake!" Photos Ningxia, Shaanxi (Xi'an)

Xi'an, mega-city of squeaky clean pavements, atrocious air and hordes of foreigners. The above quote was the centrepiece of a night-making backpacker altercation between two drunken pommy dingbats and an grey-headed, moustachioed American whose name's not being Randy surely stretches the fabric of time and space.

The Xi'an backpackers charges the same price for one bed in a massive dorm as we were paying for an en-suite room in a small hotel. But its bar food and drinks were cheap. Randy (we'll be calling him that for entropy's sake), Randy was loud and loose. We'd seen him start drinking while we had lunch and when we returned to hit the booze 8 hours later he was exactly as we'd left him, prowling around, loudly playing games of pool against himself. So we settled in on some couches to watch him embarass the fat, intelligent American sitting behind us. This was providing good, cheap light entertainment - until suddenly from the direction of the stairs came a chaotic crunching, dragging noise along with the unmistakable sound of whooping, and in crashed these two clueless poms, laden with tattered bags. As they reached the pool table the long, long sports bag one of them was carrying tore open completely, and a torrent of various grainlike products poured out onto the floor. CDs, french sticks, a large metal bowl and various other flotsam followed. The poms giggled for about 10 seconds and then stopped. Randy was silent, but rapidly turning a discernable purple. The stuff was his - why the poms had been carrying it i don't know. Eventually he spoke. "You guys...you guys are my friends, and i love ya, but you really don't know how.......i'm pissed," he said, addressing his luggage strewn across the floor. He repeated this several times, louder each time, raising his head slowly until he was facing the two oafs, who could only bleat piteously, "i'm sor-rayy, sair-riously."

"You're gonna pay," boomed Randy, having dropped the "i love you" and "my friends" references on the second and third repetitions respectively.

The clearly disturbed Chinese staff attempted to drown interest in the sideshow by turning the music up full, but the PA system was no match for the roar of a wounded Randy. His anger increased steadily and before long he was rampaging after one of the poms, who fled hilariously, skipping around the room, hurdling low walls and tables like a gazelle being chased by a lion. As Randy reached his tattered sports bag, he stopped, stooped, picked it up and slowly poured the remaining contents (about twice what had already come out) on to the floor. "Come and take a look at this!" he shouted at the gazelle, who was watching from the temporary safety of the next room. The gazelle shook its head. "You have GOT to come and take a look at this!" pleaded Randy. "I got cat litter in the cat bowl, i got brownie mix mixed up with cat food...what's my cat gonna do now?" he demanded, looking around at everyone in the room. "He's not gonna know whether to eat, shit, piss or bake!"

"No, you're gonna pay," Randy refrained, moving towards the gazelle, who began another loop of the room. "I've got a 10pm train, and YOU GUYS are gonna go to the bank and get me 600RMB for this stuff." The poms weren't keen. It went on for some time, during which Randy kept increasing the amount and the poms could only respond that they would "wark e owwt". After about 15 minutes Randy was demanding 1000RMB. And all of a sudden, the poms were going...apparently to withdraw money. The intelligent fat American, who the whole time had looked ready to curl up into a tight, wobbly ball of shame, took the opportunity to slink out (slink is the wrong word), and the atmosphere returned to one of relative calm. But before long Randy was back in the spotlight, shouting down the phone. Apparently the poms had done a runner on him, gambling that he would catch his train despite not having his invaluable haul of cat products. This time, however, Randy kept his cool. He calmly walked into the neighbouring room and, in full view of all the staff and customers, picked up two two girls' handbags and stuffed them into his (last remaining) intact bag. The poms' Chinese girlfriends' bags, he explained, and walked out.

Ahh whitey. And for all he does to disgrace himself, the caucasian and human races, the kinder the city of Xi'an is to him. Clubs, fast food, western restaurants, supermarkets, bars, tourist attractions, translators, signs in English - Xi'an is the most westernised place i've been to in China, including Beijing. We've been staying in this awesome "village" - it's been consumed by the city and is now five to six storeys high but the village vibe somehow remains in the blade-thin alleyways. There's an outdoor (cooked) food market that rumbles 24hrs right outside our door.


But, so predictably, Xi'an not exactly as kind to its locals. On Tuesday this 10-storey scaffold collapsed onto a usually-busy sidewalk. It apparently only injured three workmen, although one guy told me it killed "quite a few" people...as long as those people were workers and not passers-by that's possible. (Passers-by would very likely be rich, workmen poor.) Unbelievably, you heard it first here - there've been no (English) news reports about it so far. A few hours later the workmen were slaving away clearing up the mess. Here's a place, Joe McDonald, where you're actually needed! Your wobbly, rolling gait and figure would fit right in here, too, among the hordes of wobbly rollers. For here in "communist" China, it appears class conflict is strong - a rich Chinese dude at the backpackers bar told us he didn't know or care to know anything about the incident only 400m down the road "because in China the rich don't care about the poor and the poor don't care about the rich". As Boxxy rightly points out, that's precisely the attitude behind the appalling safety standards that lead to thousands of horrific work deaths each year. Just a couple of examples of massacres (30+ dead) in the last six months: death by molten aluminium, roasted alive in a factory fire, gassed, incinerated or buried alive in coal mine.

So we're in Shaanxi Province now, only 2 more after this. It's statistically poorer than Ningxia, though richer than Gansu, but this includes Xi'an, and Xi'an is A.) very rich and B.) contains, with its 8 million, more than 20% of the province's population:



And momma, do they lerrrve the Walmart in Xi'an.


It's got surely the best maintained city wall in the world, 12 metres high and about 12km long, though that doesn't seem to help the people's relatively sombre disposition.




The same idea seems to have been attempted with the Great Wall where it reaches the Yellow River just outside Yinchuan in Ningxia. The execution, however...


Ningxia, like Gansu before it, left its worst until last. The last four days of riding were nothing less than terrifying. The road was home to an almost constant stream of massive quarry trucks that are all of half the road wide. It had no emergency stop lane, so whenever there was traffic going in both directions (which was about 40% of the time), we had to either slide off the road or stop completely.

On the second day out of Yinchuan, after 13km of steep up-and-down (and a return of the associated teleport effect), we came upon Shui Dong Gou ("Water Cavity Gully"), a site of archaeological discoveries like cave man tools, ancient animal bones and a Ming Dynasty army labyrinth. This was cool, especially the labyrinth, so we thought we'd take a look for about half an hour. Unfortunately we didn't factor in that "Water Cavity Gully" is in fact a gorge and, as such, doesn't have many exits. Once we bought the ticket we were locked in for a two-hour hike/boat/donkey ride. It was 5pm when we left, without a hope of getting to our destination and only a vague hope of getting to a place to stay at all. Sure enough it got dark. But this didn't mean any fewer trucks. A desperately bad time ensued, first being scared shitless that the trucks wouldn't see us, then walking the last 4km in pitch dark. Worse still, it was a steep downhill slope that we could've cruised down had we been an hour earlier. Instead we had to restrain the bikes as we walked, stopping to turn and watch as each mega-truck came past.

The following day on the same road, high winds took to trying to blow us into the path of the oncoming trucks. It was blatantly too dangerous so we jumped on the back of a truck to the next major road, which had a stopping (ie bicycle) lane...for about 80 metres. Then back to sharing the road with the quarry trucks. Heckling the truck drivers for being so "soft and gay" as to drive trucks instead of cycling probably got us through the day. Boxxy got into the spirit, heckling some kind of highway patrol (i didn't think of this) for their "soft and gay" highway.


But Ningxia did at least drop us a final bone, with two Great Walls (Ming and Qing) running parallel for about 50km. The Ming Wall (older) is mainly gone, but its watchtowers remain. This was one of them.