First days of cycling in China

  Deqing, China
Thursday, April 16, 2009

Greetings from Deqing in the South of China.  I wish I could remember the name of the hotel right now...or that it were written in English anywhere... but I don't have time to go back to my room and check.  My ability to name names of places in China won't be quite as good as in New Zealand and Australia...

China is off to a very very interesting start.

Yesterday we got up early and boarded the ferry out of Hong Kong to mainland China.  Ferry boat is the best way to get to mainland China from Hong Kong because, among other things, in Hong Kong they drive on the left side of the road and in China they drive on the right.  Silly British empire...

The ferry boat took us up a river to Guangzhou, though you could hardly see anything it was so hazy, where we had our first interesting experience in mainland China.  In Hong Kong there are money exchange places on virtually every street corner.  Guangzhou, though large by regular standards, is fairly small by Chinese standards.  We stopped at the bank of China because our guide Frank thought that'd be the place for us to get money out.  It turns out that GAP adventures, our tour group, somehow neglected to mention that our first 3 days worth of food werre all included.  So Frank started telling us that basically, at most, we'd need about 150 yuan apiece, or roughly $25 American.  He did not seem to understand that we all had much much more money than that in HKD because it costs so much in transaction fees just to get money out of an ATM.  But anyway, he said that they would change money aat the Bank of China.  Of course, there aren't many foreigners in Guangzhou, and the bank of China is not simply a money exchange.  In Hong Kong, you hand over the money and they change it in a snap.  But at the bank they were very skeptical of my 500 HKD note (about $75 US).  They took my passport ant made copies and everything just in case it was counterfeit.  It took about 20 minutes...with me not having a clue what was going on.  Funny.

We stopped in town for another group lunch with our driver Mr. Ding, who speaks not a word of English.  We watched the Chinese/Canadian curling match on TV, and actually talked a bit about sports.  Frank (and probably Mr. Ding) had never heard of the Super Bowl and had no idea what American football was.  We are in another world.

We drove about two hours to Zhaoqing...a "tiny" southern city of...oh...800,000, where we checked into our nice hotel on Star Lake.  This is where we had a nice 10 km "warm up ride."

Our ride was incredible.  I feel like I'm in a Chinese version of Slumdog Millionaire.  So we left our posh (by Chinese standards) hotel on "Star Lake," which is actually a big tourist destination for Chinese tourists, though there were almost no white people to be seen (except for a Hungarian musician I met who played a concert last night...).  We passed the boathouse and compound for the Chinese national boat team, the skullers and crew for the Olympics.  We saw them training this morning when they left the hotel, some were huge.
 
    We made a right and immediately we were on a big main road.  Off the road on the left were some nice new apartment buildings, but also old, rundown, unpainted apartment buildings with clothes hanging on the decks.  I don't think there is such a thing as a dryer in China.  We turned off the main road and were hit by the foul foul stench of pig stys, as we passed by pig farms, duck farms (little ponds for Peking Duck), and rice paddies (or at least that's what they looked like).  We continued on through a slum where kindergarten was just getting out for the day, so about a hundred smiling Chinese kids waved as we passed.  But after a while we were in the middle of a very modern city, with a nice board walk along the lake.  There was the local tv station.  Of course we were on the bike lane of the highway, passing everyone from yuppies in suits to old woman and men carrying farm goods on their backs.  As we got into the center of town there was a huge Wal-Mart, flanked by McDonalds...  There were also a number of advertisements for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer everywhere... (remember this...).

Group shot by the lake

 

We continued through the modern city with a bunch of tourist gates chinese gates (just like in China Town) and other stuff.  It wasn't dark yet, but you could see there was a Vegas like strip.  We biked along the lake with semi-posh hotels and restaurants catering to Chinese tourists, flanked by more slums.  We passed a building with gorgeous well dressed women out front and our guide stopped us.  He said that though the building's outside says in Chinese that it is a "Traditional Chinese Medical Center or Hospital," it is actually an "entertainment center."  I later asked him if he meant a whorehouse, but his English isn't very good and I don't know if he understood.   I think it was...or at least a strip club.  
 
So in a short hour ride in China I saw an Olympic team, farms, slums, schools, Wal-mart, posh hotels, a brothel, and loads of Chinese tourists.  This country is crazy.  I've never seen such remarkable contrast between old and new, modern and pre-modern.  Like today we passed rice paddies that have probably been rice paddies for generations.  Now I'm sitting in a throughly modern hotel on a computer probably made in China.  It's just remarkable.

Zhaoqing at night

All of our meals have been as a group and I'd like to tell you what food is really interesting or cool, but I don't really know.  Our guide and driver discuss it in Chinese and then order all our food.  Allison asks about everything though, so we get the hang of what is in our food.  It's was hilarious when she asked about variouse veggitables and a long discussion in Chinese between our guide and driver would ensue only to have our guide say "That's a turnip" or something else quite mundane.
 
   Last night I thought it was funny when the nice restaurant we were in had a Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement on the drink list (I think that's what it was, it was on the table all in Chinese).  I almost took a picture of it.  We were having really really spicey food so I decided I would get a beer with it.  I asked Frank to order me a beer and he asked me if I wanted the Chinese national beer or a local brew.  I thought, of course I want a local brew.  Imagine my surprise when they brought me a Pabst Blue Ribbon...with everything in Chinese except "From Milwaukee since 1844" (or whatever it says) on the bottle... It turns out there's a brewery where they brew Pabst in Zhouqing (where we were). Hilarious. 
 
   Later we went to get a new camera case...from Walmart of couse.  Amazing being the only person who speaks English in a Walmart (and a bit tricky).  They were suspicious of my 100 yuan note.  We also walked around and saw all the lights by the lake. 

This morning we got up and headed out of town after a huge dim sum breakfast.  Delicious, especially this egg drop biscuit that was like a pastry on the outside filled with egg that was runny like a poached egg mixed with sugar.  Yum... Yeah... I almost lost it on the first hill...oh well.

We drove out of town for about an hour...we stopped at a gas station, hopped out and got on our bikes. Interesting. One guy walked over and examined our bikes carefully, but he spoke no English, so no real conversing.

We biked 88 km through villages today.  It was crazy. First, there were huge hills and it was hotter than hell and humid, so I actually started cramping up real bad.  The last 40km were excruciating.  The first big hill both Kristen and I walked quite a bit of, as did Mary, though Allison made it the whole way.  I walked about 200 meters of the second hill and Kristen did about 50 meters.  We made it all the way on the third hill.  I was a bit dissappointed with my performance, but I didn't need any van rides, so that was good.

Action shot

But anyways.  We didn't see a white person other than the four people in our group for the entire day.  We passed through rice fields and through tiny towns.  We passed everything you might expect to see in National Geographic.  Old women riding their single gear bikes to the fields.  We passed a flock of school children smiling and screaming the only english word anyone knows "Hallo" at us as we passed.  I actually heard a couple more words and phrases, but one little girl said "How are you?" and I said "Good and yourself" and she looked at me like I was on a different planet.  

I wouldn't say what I saw was "pretty" in fact a lot of it was quite sad and dirty, though the little kids were just so happy to see us.  I wish I had any artistic phototaking ability.  There were sports that were, for lack of a better way of putting it, "beautifully ugly" because something seemed so "real" and "authentic."  We're not in a tourist spot.  Like we passed through a little township with mountains behind it and a little body of water in front of these matching shacks.  It was dirty as hell, but I'm glad I saw it.  It really made me think all of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire.  It was also a total contrast to the "cultural experience" we had in a Maori village in Rotorua, New Zealand.  There weren't any other tourists, just us on our bikes.  Most people stopped and stared, but we also got a number of smiles.  Loads of Chinese people ride either motor or pedal bikes to work, so we were often flanked by locals.  A couple of local kids kept racing me into one of the towns, but my legs were completely cramped so it wasn't that fun unfortunately.  Other people held out their hands for me to slap.

It was very very grey all day, and very hazy.  You can definitely sense that China has a bit of a pollution problem, though that's not surprising.  It's also probably not a whole lot worse than Houston.  I got burned through the clouds and haze...annoying.

Top of the hill

It's interesting to ride through such abject poverty, such dirty streets, and see such happy happy faces.  It's very hard to comprehend and describe.  Are the people really happy?  I don't know, but they sure lit up most of the time they saw us.  Of course, who wouldn't be happy to see me?  Just kidding.  More like of course who wouldn't smile at a big white guy with a red beard on bike with a yellow bike helmet.  I make quite a sight in the middle of nowhere in China.

Where we are now is actually a country with "only" 200,000.  So it's pretty rural by Chinese standards, and actually I'm from a county in VA with about 850,000, so I guess it's fairly rural by all standards.  We have 97 kms tomorrow, but fewer hills, so hopefully I won't cramp up so bad.

In my defense, I also had a broken bike that wouldn't get into the top 8 gears.... Really, I was stuck at speed 16 on a 24 speed bike... so that made the flats a little annoying, peddling twice as much as I needed to, and I had no control going down the hills.  Hopefully we can get it fixed tomorrow.  Of course, the only people with gear bikes in China are the tourists, so Mr. Ding and Frank don't really know how to fix it... Oh well.  That's the other funny thing, the looks people give us while riding up the hills... The pedal bikes don't go up the hills, the motor bikes do.

Lunch stop

We had another terrific dinner.  The best dish was some sort of fried eggplant thing stuffed with pork.  I haven't the faintest idea what it's called.  I had another local brew...more Pabst, America's best beer in 1893, or so the label says.  Funny.

I'm having trouble uploading pictures on this computer, so there will only be 5 today, and they took about 30 minutes of waiting... sorry.

Well, off to watch BBC news, glad that there is a channel (one) in English tonight...