Motorcycle Misadventures

Welcome to the Miss Adventuring Weblog by Carla King

Here's where you'll find the latest news and updates on motorcycle misadventures, writing, books, bikes, gear and gadgets, events, radio, and podcasts. I send live dispatches from the road when I travel, and talk about them on a variety of shows. I  post news and commentary here. Enjoy, and contact me if you have a suggestion for a trip, a story, or a show. And please visit my website for stories, books, and other writings.

Adventure Sidecar Classes and Tours

 Adventure sidecar classes (S/TEP) and tours in the Pacific Northwest 2010, from Adventure Sidecar.

Novice S/TEP class the following weekends:
    May 14, 15 & 16
    June 11, 12 & 13
    August 27, 28 & 29

These classes cover basic sidecar motorcycle operation and riding skills with and without a passenger. This is what you need to learn to corner with confidence cope with the unexpected challenges that traffic and road conditions present.

The registration fee is $260. Class is limited to a maximum of 12 students. Sidecars are available for use in the Novice Class at no extra charge.

Sidecar Skills Mini Tour Weekend Package - $550 - Sidecars are not included in price

July 16~18, 2010 Western Columbia Gorge Mini Tour

September 17~19, 2010 Eastern Columbia Gorge Mini Tour

You can bring your own rig or rent one of theirs. There will only be a very limited number of rental sidecars available and the mini tour will be kept to a small group to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience.

The Sidecar Skills Mini Tour is geared towards folks that already have some experience or training. Friday evening and Saturday morning is the Advanced S/TEP class. They will brush up on technique and work towards perfection during the Advanced S/TEP class, then apply it during the rides Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. The routes will be a mixture of highway and secondary roads with some gravel and dirt roads as well, touring the spectacular Columbia River Gorge and surrounding mountains.

Visit Adventure Sidecar.

Alone, Illegal and Broke Down (on a motorcycle in China) Part 2

This story is a continuation of  Alone, Illegal and Broke Down in China

Part II of the first story from my upcoming book Alone, Illegal and Broke Down: Stories from motorcycling in China

A man pushes his way through the girls and speaks in sharp tones that makes them stop giggling and stand aside. He is very young and so thin that his brown wool pinstriped suit hangs on him in folds like on a coat hanger. His hair is carefully clipped and gelled into a stiff American fifties-style flat-top, with one lock left long to hang rakishly in his face. He tosses his head back to fling the lock out of his eye, and says something to me that makes the girls laugh nervously and flutter a little farther away.

I greet him with a Chinese hello and a look straight in the eye, and the girls giggle again, their hands flying up to cover their mouths. Sighing, he beckons me to his office, a lit doorway just in front of us, and takes me by the arm to guide me inside. Surprisingly, he is a few inches taller than I, perhaps 5 feet 10 inches tall..

The girls follow us in but after few sharp words from the boss they reced into the darkness and we are left alone in the office: a square concrete box with a steel desk and a ratty Naugahyde couch bursting at the seams. I fish through the pockets of my black leather motorcycle jacket and hand him 20 yuan, the amount the woman at the gas station had quoted. He laughs and pushes it back to me. I am too tired to go through an extended haggling process, and too tired to remember that I am desperate for sleep. After riding all day in the heat, after the stress of being lost, the uncertainty of the motorcycle, finding gasoline, night falling unmercifully black and those tiny villages with fires and stray pigs and white-trunked trees, I am exhausted, and I could strangle him for what he is doing, opening drawers to find a pencil so that he can write the digits 200 on a piece of paper, ten times price the woman at the gas station had quoted.

I hold the paper and we stand silently together on the stained burgundy carpet. It is as thin as denim, and glued badly onto the concrete floor. The walls are covered in crackling stucco, and the sagging ceiling is stained with water. The black and white television set is turned on full volume, the sound horribly distorted. Two attractive anchorpeople, a man and a woman, report the news. Their announcements are a combination of guttural and singsong nasal whining. Footage of a public execution flits across the screen: two kneeling men, blindfolded with hands bound behind their backs, a mass of enraged or excited people. Would they be shot or beheaded or hanged? Then they show blond Russian children digging through a vast garbage dump for scraps of food, followed by stills of President Clinton who is due to visit in a few months. I’d seen the same footage in Beijing, over and over and over again. It is 1998, the year that China would remove borders and other barriers to sharing in first world wealth.

I study the piece of paper. I could counter with thirty, and he would insist upon 100, and I would write down thirty five, and he would then write fifty, and then I would hand him forty. He would take it, and I really should do all that except that the woman at the gas station already gave me the price of twenty yuan and in my exhausted state I’m not thinking about all the trouble I will cause here with paperwork and lack of language and writing skills and my need for hot water. I shove the paper back at him and explain in succinct English that the owner told me it was twenty yuan and twenty yuan was all I was damn well going to pay and hadn’t he heard that the days of Foreigner price were over. I wave the twenty toward the gas station and tell him that if he thinks I’m going to pay two hundred for a dump like this he was crazy and I push it into his hand. He takes it with a little shrug and a smile that means, “Well, I had to try,” and I stomp back to the motorcycle but it’s not there any more. Stunned, I look around and see, with no little relief, that it had only been pushed away into the crook of the L-shaped compound near the wooden gates. I feel the manager watching me as I stomp across to it. I jerk my suitcase out of the sidecar, unlock and open the trunk to get my computer case and camera, and two of the girls suddenly appear to escort me to my room.

The hallway is glassed in, and we step up two shallow stairs onto the same thin, wrinkled burgundy carpet that was in the manager’s office, and even more blotched. Standing by each door is a little yellow pot decorated delicately with pink fleur-de-lis, a quarter full of water. As I puzzle over the purpose of these, moths bash themselves to death on the bare light bulbs in front of each door, falling in the collected heap in front of each threshold. Every tiny impact creates a tinging sound that is just audible over the sound of a river.

The room is a concrete box. One of the girls pushes by me to rush in and turn on the television set at full volume. The other girl walks in behind me bearing a thermos of hot water and a small, thin towel. I walk into the bathroom—it built into the corner of the room like an afterthought, with walls that fall short of the ceiling by a foot. The hot water tap runs cold, as does the cold water tap. I request more thermoses of hot water, and she returns shortly with three more.

I put my suitcase on the double bed and the girls come closer as I unzip it. I packed very little but carefully; a Gortex rain suit, a fine-gauge, bicycle-weight wool sweater, long silk underwear, thick hiking socks and boots, sports-bras and tights, quick-dry shirts and a toiletries kit with neat little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, moisturizer and sunscreen and a clear plastic bag full of bottles of medicines I might need.

I wonder how to get the girls out of my room so I can have some privacy, and then the manager strides in, barking at the girls, who wander out reluctantly. Alone again, he looks at me and sighs, then hands me a form, knowing that this is going to be an ordeal for it’s in Chinese and I’m illiterate. We settle ourselves down at the fake walnut desk at the foot of the bed and study the form and my passport, attempting to figure out which information goes in which box. After studying each others documents, we look up at each other, shrug, and begin.

I ought to have asked a clerk in a Beijing tourist hotel to give me a form that was printed in both English and Chinese, as a reference, but I didn’t, and so with a combination of my phrasebook, sign-language, grimaces, and some laughter, we manage to fill out about a third of the boxes when he abruptly pulls the paper away, indicating that’s all that’s required. Now that we were done I wished that I had given him more money. He was really just a very young man trying to be a big deal, and I had already been a lot of trouble because of the form and demands for many thermoses of hot water. Maybe I’d give him twenty more, anyway, in the morning. That was “tourist price” anyway, even though China had officially revoked the two-price policy.

I put my passport away and we walk outside, parting ways as he returns to the office and I go to cover and lock the motorcycle. Suddenly, a large blue truck roars in at an alarming speed, just at the place where I’d first parked the motorcycle. No wonder they’d moved it—it would have been run over. Two girls in peach polyester pyjamas run to the door as it opens. One literally catches the driver as he falls from the high truck cab waving a nearly-empty bottle in his hand like a prize. It drops to the ground, empty and unbroken, and the girls help him, stumbling, to a room next to the manager’s office. The door remains open for a moment, and I hear the sound of retching. Two different girls break the passenger fall out of the truck and drag him to a different room.

So fabulous, this is who I’m sharing the road with. I’d been warned that these big blue trucks were piloted by drivers fueled by amphetamines and alcohol. They’d would be my most frequent companions on the road, though that was changing, fast. Even though private cars have been allowed for many years, most Chinese haven’t been able to afford them, and so trucks and official vehicles make up ninety percent of the traffic out here in the country.

I lock and cover the bike to discourage theft and to hide the attention-getting black Beijing plates, go back to my room, the door of which, I now notice, doesn’t have a lock. But I’d brought a solution for that—an alarm that worked by sliding into the doorjamb. If the door opened, a piercing alarm would sound.

I pour the hot water from the thermoses into a red plastic basin on the bathroom floor and took a sponge bath. Brushing my teeth, I peer out from between the tattered curtains to catch the action in the compound. Apparently I had arrived just ahead of rush hour. Blue truck after blue truck roar in, their drivers and passengers falling out like the first ones, spilling empty bottles of high-octane liquor. From the courtyard the sound of broken glass and giggling penetrates my walls. The same scene occurs again and again, the girls in orange pajamas dragging drunken truckers to their rooms. I am forgotten.

I settle into bed and try to sleep, but my mind turns over and over on the problems of my trip. I am traveling without a license, nor permissions of any sort from the Chinese government or mine, and risk arrest at any moment. In addition, the first day into the countryside I  found that I couldn’t rely on road signs or local people to tell me the way. Since I just generally wanted to head west, that didn’t matter so much. I had no particular place to be at any certain time. But it is also now obvious that hotels are difficult to find. Although I still doubt my trip is dangerous, since I felt perfectly safe even in this brothel, I wonder if I'm not  taking too much of a risk this time. Tomorrow will be the time to turn back if I'm going to, only one day’s ride from Beijing.

I miss Beijing. In Beijing people  interacted with me. Foreigners are not rare, and they laugh good-naturedly when I practicde my traveler's Mandarin. They willingly look at maps and point me in the right direction. I miss hanging out with Teresa, the agricultural attaché at the US Embassy. We rode motorcycles together through the countryside once before I left, and the farmers were astonished at us, the motorcycles, and at her fluent Mandarin. She talked endlessly with them about the state of the crops, the weather, and whether the government had paid them in cash or pink IOU slips. Tonight, at the brothel, I long for Beijing.

----------------

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Dirt Bike School Marathon in Irvine, California benefits Breast Cancer Awareness Month

In support of the PINK breast cancer awareness theme for the February 13 Anaheim III Supercross, Kawasaki is sponsoring 24-hours of dirt bike training. The flyer below includes the class start times and registration information.  All you need is a pair of jeans, boots that cover your ankles and a long-sleeve shirt. They'll provide the rest!  Space is limited to the first 75 who register (ages 14 and up).  All participants will receive a free ticket to Anaheim III, an exclusive track walk and a one-of-a-kind behind the scenes Monster Energy Kawasaki pit tour.  The class is free, with a donation (in any amount) to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization.  Shhh...it's a secret: They have special guests coming by all day and night to sign autographs and cheer for the students!

Special All-Sidecar Program on Side Stand Up Motorcycle Radio Show

Let's Talk Sidecars: A Special All-Sidecar Program on Side Stand Up Motorcycle Radio Show

Wednesday, January 27, 2010
7:00-9:00pm Eastern Time
More info
Join us in the live chat room

If you miss the program, you can catch the archive at the same URL.

Join us on Side Stand Up Motorcycle Radio this Wednesday January 27, 2010 starting at 7:00 pm ET for two whole hours of sidecar talk! Side Stand Up host Tom Lowdermilk and Motorcycle Misadventures' Carla King will interview a whole lineup of guests including:

• Doug Bingham aka Mr. Sidecar
• Joyce Canfield of the United Sidecar Association
• Scott Whitney of Hog Wild Racing
• Claude Stanley creator of the Internet Sidecar Klub and owner Freedom Sidecars
• Perry King yep the movie star and longtime sidecarist and now on the board of the AMA

You can listen by phone or, better yet, use the internet to listen in and participate live in the lively chat room via TalkShoe.

Sign in early and create your profile with your name so we know who you are.

We're looking forward to seeing you there!

Today 4-7pm PT SSU Radio: Motorcycle Travel & Road Food with Sam Manicom

Catch  Side Stand Up tonight at 8:30 Eastern (that's 5:30 Pacific) for my chat with  world traveling motorcycle author Sam Manicom about finding food on the road in even the most remote places, camping stoves, cutlery, packing, tips, stories. This is going to be fun because Sam's been everywhere.

Side Stand Up Motorcycle Radio

Every Tuesday 7-9 Eastern (4-7 Pacific)

Join the chat room or listen to the archive.

Packing for a motorcycle trip or anywhere, think "flashbacking"

This cute couple has shared 10 excellent tips on packing light and the philosophy behind it. I just had to share. May your saddlebags not sag...

What's the best way to pack for a year on the road? Okay, so it's a trick question. Unless you're off to tag penguins at a base in Antarctica, there's simply no need or even a good reason to pack for a year. Eight months ago, my wife Lindsie and I pooled our savings, quit our jobs, rented out our condo, and set off to spend a year traveling the world. But a year's worth of gear would be impossibly heavy; a year isn't a vacation, it's an expedition. So rather than plan (and pack) for all contingencies, we're flashpacking. Read all about it...

Motorcycling for Women - Dual Sport Bikes

From Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes

Dual-Sport Bikes
Jump Curbs. Ford Streams

These bikes are made for maximum maneuverability so you’ll find that the seat puts you upright at comfortable attention and the controls are all sitting where you intuit they’re going to be.  This is a basic bike that comes fairly “naked” with an exposed engine and higher ground clearance (and therefore seat height), so you can jump logs or curbs and ford streams or ditches. The handlebars are straight ad wide providing stability while you’re out of your seat standing up on the pegs.

There are many varieties of dual-sport motorcycles, but all are made for both street and dirt riding. Some dual-sports have dirt bike roots and others, such as “scramblers,” are street bikes modified to ride or race on dirt.

 Though seat heights can be high, the smaller dual-sports are great beginner bikes and really wonderful second bikes. Like standards, they don’t have a lot of expensive chrome and plastic that will be damaged when you drop them.  Adventurous travelers will throw a couple of saddlebags on and take off to anywhere in the world.

Examples of dual-sport bikes you might consider:

Yamaha TT-R125LE

This 5-speed, air-cooled 4-stroke weighs under 200 pounds wet.  A 31.7 inch seat height and 11.6 ground clearance is reasonable for most situations.

KTM 125 EXC

The 36.4 inch seat height and 15.4 inch ground clearance may be too intimidating for all but the most ambitious budding off-road enthusiast. The liquid cooled, 6-speed, 2-stroke engine is a real screamer though, if you have the need for speed.

Download the free ebook: Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes to learn more about great beginner bikes in cruiser, sport, dual-sport, scooter, and dirt-bike categories.

Comments? I'd love to hear them. Use the comments feature below.

And if you'd like to share this ebook on your blog or site, be my guest.

Thanks!

Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes - Sport Bikes

From Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes

Sport Bikes
Zip. Zam. Zoom.

Sport bikes are made for racing. For that reason they’re not really the best choice for a beginner, but there are a few under-250cc models that won’t scare a newbie out of motorcycling altogether.

 When you sit on a sport bike you’ll be tilted forward with your feet back behind your seat and some of your weight resting on your wrists. You’ll have to lift your head up to look around, because the sitting position forces you to curl into the shape of the bike.

That said, they’re made to be light and maneuverable and they can corner better than other models. But when (*when!*) you drop it, there’s a lot of expensive plastic that’ll scraped and broken. And it is for that reason you may be able to buy one quite cheaply. (You may consider removing damaged plastic altogether for a more “naked” look.)

A good alternative to a sport bike is a “scrambler” or a street-focused dual-sport, like an old Honda CL series or the Derbi Mulhacen Cafe described in the Dual-Sport section.

Examples of sport bikes you might consider:

Kawasaki Ninja 250R: Ninja is practically synonymous with sport bike. This zippy little 250 has a liquid-cooled parallel-twin engine with 6-speed transmission and 36 horsepower. 

Hyosung GT250R: This Korean company makes a slightly lower-cost competitor to the 250cc Ninja. With its 27 horsepower, 5-speed transmission, it was built with beginners in mind.

Download the free ebook: Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes to learn more about great beginner bikes in cruiser, sport, dual-sport, scooter, and dirt-bike categories.

Comments? I'd love to hear them. Use the comments feature below.

And if you'd like to share this ebook on your blog or site, be my guest.

Thanks!

Alone, Illegal and Broke Down on a Motorcycle in China

This is the first story from my upcoming book Alone, Illegal and Broke Down: Stories from motorcycling in China

Alone, Illegal and Broke Down

It is my first day alone on the road and I am lost. The mountains of northern China beyond Beijing are vast and enormous. There are no road signs, only larger roads and smaller roads, paved roads and dirt roads. When I stop to ask directions the peasants simply stare because I am the first foreigner they have ever seen, and a woman. Putting myself in their place I can sympathize. I ride up on a big black Chinese sidecar motorcycle, the most expensive motorcycle in China. Then I remove my helmet. A blond braid tumbles down the shoulder of my black leather jacket and I mutter something incomprehensible and then look at them with slightly crazed green eyes.

“Wa may loo la,” I say. “I’m lost.”

But most villagers have never traveled farther than their network of about a dozen villages all of their lives. And there are no taxi drivers or buses or truckers to ask.

Nearly out of gasoline, I am sure that Lijang, the town I had targeted for my first night on the road, will not appear anytime soon. The going is slow not only because of the dark but because of the potholes and badly banked curves and the asphalt that end without warning.

Where might I be? I might have looped back to where I began. I could be far, far away. I remember how the land looked in daylight; the jumble of pyramid-shaped mountains covered in soft green foliage jutting through the landscape, the crumbling hillsides, the plunging cliffs.

Another tiny village passes; windows covered in thick, oiled paper glow with the flickering light of cooking fires. Exhausted, I consider stopping but would they be friendly? How could I tell them what I want? If I stop here it might cause an uproar. Do they have food to spare? A bed? Certainly not. My thoughts loop on the problem of where to sleep that night and on the problems that hadn’t yet come. In the background the unfamiliar engine rumbles. I am still working out its idiosyncrasies. I don't yet know this machine well enough to take comfort in its working noises, its hard clunk down from third gear, its slight pull to the left.

Shadow trees fly by and another small village appears. I shift down, slowing in anticipation of the many potholes a village brings, and a small animal suddenly bursts into the road. A rush of adrenaline prepares me for hard braking, for swerving or impact.

I hold my ground, trusting my instincts. I can't tell if the side of the road dives off into a five-foot ditch or heads straight into a two-foot wall. The animal races alongside me and, improbably, others join in. Finally I realize they are piglets. We travel together down the road for several long moments of dark indecision. I hold my breath while they grunt and squeal hysterically, invisibly.

Several times it seems that they will move off the road and out of my way, and several times it seems that they will run under my tires. Finally, I gently let pressure off the throttle, decelerating very slowly. The engine noise changes and in response, one piglet lets out a sudden, long, high-pitched squeal. The others squeal in response and follow it off the road into darkness.

Heart racing, I am alone again. Dirt road. Dark night. Miles later I notice that my fingers are still stiffly poised above the brake lever. The icy night air leaks up the sleeves of my jacket and between my collar and helmet. My joints ache from working the clutch and the gears of this heavy beast of a motorcycle, bumping along a barely paved road in the pitch black backwoods of China.

~~~

That afternoon my friends back in Beijing, the four Chinese bikers who formed my send-off party, had led me through Beijing in a complicated route into these mountains. They had turned back at the Beijing-Heibi province border with regret in their eyes and I rode on. They were tied, without specific government permission to travel, to the province where they lived. Before I visited China I’d had no idea that people living in one province were forbidden to travel in other provinces without special permissions and special license plates. Their plates were blue, mine was black. I waved goodbye, and I traveled on, alone.

I had spent the previous week in Beijing trying to get my papers in order. Permissions. Signatures. Chops. Both the American embassy and the Chinese government proved useless in getting my permits. My trip required a Chinese drivers license because I would be driving on my own outside Beijing province. It sounded simple, but getting a Chinese drivers license requires residency. I had no residency. It seemed that, though the Chinese government was changing their laws to welcome independent travelers, they didn’t know how to accommodate them.

My expat friends, people I’d met through the embassy, explained that since the tourist policy was in a transition period, the lawmakers wouldn’t know what the rules were. It would probably be safe to go, even without papers, they said. “They won’t put you in jail for more than a day if you get caught,” one of them explained. “And you probably won’t get caught … at least not for a while.”

I left on a hot, humid Saturday, a particularly auspicious day for weddings, as it happened. Brides in layers of white silk and chiffon perspired in the back seats of economy cars trailing red and white streamers, their drivers honking incessantly in celebration.

I was escorted by two other bikes, identical Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycles that belonged to two Chinese members of the international CJ club in Beijing. We crawled along Beijing’s third ring road until, right in front of us, a truck plowed into a taxi and slid out of the intersection. For a moment, all was still. Then, suddenly, traffic on all four sides lunged toward the center. Within seconds every car was touching the bumper or door of another car, resulting in a tightly woven fabric of glittering metal.

We turned off the road into a shallow ditch and onto a railroad track that our sidecar bikes easily managed, for they were designed for use by messengers through the rough terrain where World War II was fought.

I was sweating in the deep heat of polluted, urban Beijing, thought I’d stripped to my tank top. I knew that our leader, Jiangshan, had to be steaming in his Harley Davidson jacket, but he kept it zipped up. His girlfriend Yang Xiao sat slightly away from the leather back of the sidecar chair, one hand gripping the edge of the car and the other held up to her aviator glasses. Every so often she’d turn around to smile and give me a thumbs up. Her glossy black hair tangled in the fringe of the brown suede sleeves of her American-Indian-styled motorcycle jacket. People driving, riding bicycles, waiting to cross the road, stared. Beautiful, wide-eyed Yang Xiao. She always had a slightly haunted look, except when she was riding, and then her black eyes sparkled, and her movements were almost careless. Jiangshan, an unusually tall, dignified man of around fifty, also brightened when he rode. His movements became larger, his voice louder. On the motorcycle, they seemed almost American.

Their young friends, Lee and Liu, followed behind me on another Chang Jiang, herding me through the ruthlessly dense Beijing traffic, and soon we rose above the city into the relief of a beautifully paved single-lane mountain road. The air cooled as we passed small farming villages, a lifestyle in harmony with nature. I glimpsed grain drying in courtyards behind village walls made from mud and straw. The traditional curlicue roofs seemed carefully maintained in the old style, with protective demons painted on doorways. Here, I forgot about the problems of urban life, enjoyed the scenery and dodged donkey carts full of twigs, and diesel tractors pulling into the road from the fields, a dusty wind in my face.

Country roads, sunshine, and the camaraderie of fellow riders should have made for a perfect Saturday, but the realization that in a few hours I would be riding alone for as long as six months through this strange country sent bolts of fear shooting through my heart and stomach. The Heibi Province border appeared.

The moment of separation was inevitable and my friends, licensed only to drive in Beijing province, world have to return to the city. My borrowed bike, with its expensive black license plates, was authorized for operation in any province, though its rider wasn’t. These black plates, an indication of importance, of guanxi—their term for power, freedom and prestige—would keep me from being harassed by the police—or so I hoped.

After our farewell I rode alone with a knot in my stomach trying to enjoy the first few hours of my solo journey but I was completely cowed by the wildness of Northern Heibi province. Somewhere I had gotten the impression that all of China was densely populated. But this lonely country backwater was riddled with potholed roads among jagged mountains covered in soft brushy bushes and trees. The air was fresh and cool in the late afternoon, and the green mountains gave the atmosphere a healthy glow. I had never imagined that China had such wide-open spaces, and then the road forked into three with no signs to mark the way. I switched the engine off and, for the first time since I’d arrived in the country, experience absolute silence.

After a while, I pulled the map from the sidecar to consider it seriously now for the first time and to search, unsuccessfully, for my three-pronged crossroads, when a peasant wearing ragged cotton pants and a peaked cap appeared. He pushed a jumble of tree branches in a wooden handcart, his arms and shoulders straining against the slight decline of the road.

“Nee how ma,” I said to him. He stopped and I shoved up the visor of my helmet, to be better understood. “Nee how ma,” I repeated carefully, intoning as properly as I could in my basic Mandarin. “Wah may loo la,” I said, slowly. “I’m lost.”

He stared, as if he understood, so I continued, “Liajang way, please?”

The man was tiny, and looked eighty but was probably only sixty, badly bent from work and probably mineral deficiencies. His face was tan and flat, lightly wrinkled, and his eyes, though bright, were sunken deeply I saw, a little startled, when he stepped nearer to me to peer up into my helmet.

“Liajang way?” I repeated, rattling my map and punching the name of the town with my finger. Its name was clearly written in Pinyin, the Roman characters that appeared under the Chinese pictograms, but I really couldn’t tell how to pronounce it correctly and it’s possible the man couldn’t read. The paper rustled, ignored in the gentle breeze as the man continued to stare at my face with the bald curiosity of a child.

I’d been stared at in Beijing but this was absurd. The man acted as if I was a statue in a wax museum. He studied my jacket, then bent down to study my jeans and my boots, and rose again to take a look at my helmet and gloves before walking all around the motorcycle.

At least it gave me time to stare back. So this would be the peasant so reviled and absolutely dismissed, usually with a disgusted sneer, by the Chinese middle class. In his peaked cap with his wrinkled old face he was a museum piece, a caricature of the Chinese peasant in his blue Mao clothes, with his stringy gray hair pushing his battered wheelbarrow. I asked one more time the way to Liajang, but he continued to stare, slack jawed and glassy-eyed.

Starting off again I chose the middle of the three equally unlikely looking roads. The middle way seemed appropriate as a spiritual path, at least. Not that I was practicing moderation just then, but it wasn’t a heads or tails situation.

The middle way twisted around and down and up and around again and I no longer had any idea of the direction it would lead me. It didn’t really matter, I told myself. I wasn’t on any particular deadline and I needed only head roughly west, toward Tibet and the setting sun. With that thought I settled into a not unpleasant resignation. The scenery was wild and serene and the tension knotting in my stomach dissipated. I had chosen Liajang because it was a fairly large town with a few hotel choices, according to my Lonely Planet, but surely another town would appear. Or so I thought.

The joy of exploration waned with the fading daylight, the absence of a road sign, a gas station, or a town. I’d continued to choose my way randomly at forks in the road and, like the first road, they followed the contours of the mountains to take me on a tour of all the directions of the compass. By the time darkness fell I had passed only the tiniest of villages. The peasants performed their end-of-day tasks. They were poor, desperately poor. Their windows were covered in oiled paper. Their water was fetched from who knows where in buckets hung from two sides of a stick that they carried on their shoulders, and their grain was sorted and ground by hand and their small gardens protected from the animals by fences of mud brick and it seemed impossible that anything would change for them tonight, or tomorrow, or in the days after.

~~~

Ten kilometers of empty road passes between the village where the piglets had run beside me, and here, where the road narrows and deteriorates into dirt and gravel. The dark shapes of trees hover above on either side. Long ago Kublai Khan had traveled through China and was dismayed at the unbroken monotony of the roadways. He ordered trees planted on every roadside to give solace to travelers.

The trees do not give me solace as my headlight shines on one after another after another white painted tree trunk giving me the impression that it is them who move past me, and that I am sitting still like an actor on a movie set, the wind machine blowing in my face.

What does give me solace is the sudden appearance of two gas pumps under a brightly-lit shelter. Beyond it stands a building strung with white lights that I hope is a hotel. I pull up to the pumps and after a moment a woman peeks out of the doorway of the attached shack. She hushes the two small children peeking out behind her to walk toward me. Her outfit is garishly illuminated under the fluorescent lights. She sports a shapeless lime green dress sprinkled with large white polka dots and opaque knee-highs that have left a sharp dent halfway up her short fat calves, set off by bright pink rubber pool sandals.

She decodes at my rough Mandarin while she pumps gas into the tank. Yes, she nods, smiling. The lit building is indeed a hotel—her luguan. I can stay there, and it will cost twenty yuan.

Equipped with a full tank of gas and this happy information I follow the road she traced with her finger. I would otherwise have never found the entrance, a steep dirt and gravel driveway that passes over a shaky wooden bridge built over what seems to be a very deep ravine. The sound of water running far below me quickens my heart. It will be interesting to see in the morning what death-defying feat I am performing by crossing over these rotted beams.

I pass underneath a concrete archway and though a pair open wooden gates into the compound where a low, cheaply built stucco building stands. It is L-shaped and there is a glassed-in hallway with motel-style doors in regular intervals, each painted bright red and illuminated with a bare bulb.

I pull up to the a partially open doorway that I figure is the manager's office nd switch off the engine. It is difficult to unfasten my helmet strap with my cold, stiff fingers. My back aches and my left ankle throbs from the constant shifting through gears. I toss my helmet, gloves, and scarf into the sidecar and dismount, only vaguely aware of the rush of people emerging from the door in front of me. I step away from the bike, allowing several people to push it closer to the building. My forehead itches, my hair is stuck to the skin.

Despite my aches, I feel a profound gratitude for having found this place, for the reward of having pressed on without panicking. It is dark and cold, but I’d soon be safe and warm. Finally my eyes adjust to the dim light and looking up, I meet the gaze of a dozen young ladies dressed in pajamas. When I smile they burst into giggles, covering their mouths with their hands.

So many maids! Why would there be so many maids for such a small country motel? I look at them more closely. Their black eyes flash. So much makeup! They giggle some more, then, suddenly shy, lower their eyes heavy with liner and false lashes. Their lips glow with thick red lipstick and their lurid peach-colored polyester uniforms shine. They aren't maids at all, I finally realize. I’ll be spending the night in a brothel.

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Join me tonight on Side Stand Up Motorcycle radio 4pm PT 7pm ET

On SideStandUp.com tonight Dec. 22nd at 7 PM EDT join us live and in the chat room for these great guests:

Just 5 days before he heads out for the 2010 Dakar Rally, Privateer Prince of Off-Road Endurance Rider Jonah Street is back. We can't wait to talk to Jonah about how he has prepped for the premier off-road race in the world today.

For the first time Ducati will be in the house. Public Relations Coordinator John Paolo Caton is on the show to tantalize us all with what is new from the builders of the Italian V-Twin.

Miss Adventuring Carla King is back with another awesome guest. Sarah Schilke, aka Super Sarah is an avid street rider turned amateur off-road racer. She's worked in the motorcycle industry for over a decade. Check out her website.

Geoff Gardisky National Executive Account Manager Centramatic / Motorcycle Division builders of a self balancing apparatus for the Gold Wing. Log onto sidestandup.com for the latest news and possible sponsor discounts.

And check out the site for a fun little JibJab animation of Carla, Denise, Tom, and Mike in a snowball fight. Cute, guys!

http://SideStandUp.com

Post Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes, in your site or blog, via Scribd

As an author, web content developer, and social media consultant, I like to experiment with all the new tools for publishing. So I just uploaded my pdf ebook Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes,  to Scribd. Now this is too cool. I made it a free download, and anyone can go to Scribd and grab the code to display the book on their sites and blogs. I want to share this ebook and so I invite you to do that. I've embedded the HTML here, in this blog, so you can see what it'll look like. Site visitors can page through the ebook right from your blog or web page. Yeah. It's too cool. Have fun!

Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes - Cruisers

From Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes

Cruisers
Low. Lid Back.

 Take a standard bike, extend the front fork, put a teardrop gas tank in front of the lowered seat, and you’ve got a cruiser. You’ll need to reach a bit more forward with your feet to find the foot pegs, but that all contributes to the “laid-back” styling of this kind of motorcycle.

Cruisers are good bikes to learn on because they’re low enough for most people to get both feet flat on the ground, which gives you better balance and more confidence.

They come “naked” so if you drop it you’re not breaking a lot of expensive options. But once you’ve got the hang of  it, you may be tempted to add saddlebags, a small windscreen, maybe even tie on a sleeping bag and tent and take off on a classic American backroads journey.

Examples of cruisers you might look at:

Honda Rebel 250: This popular cruiser is light and low and a real keeper with decent performance on the freeway. Buy it new or find one used, but plenty of people don’t want to give up their Rebels.

Kawasaki Eliminator 125: This single cylinder “thumper” is a great entree into motorcycling at only about 300 pounds wet. But budget-minded commuters also love this zippy cruiser with a big 3.4 gallon tank and outrageously good gas mileage for under $2700.

Download the free ebook: Motorcycling for Women: Beginner Bikes to learn more about great beginner bikes in cruiser, sport, dual-sport, scooter, and dirt-bike categories.

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