Motorcycle Misadventures

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 30

Yesterday I signed off of these live dispatches thinking that my adventure was over, that I'd reached the east coast of China where the Great Wall begins, and that I'd be riding a long boring highway the 250 km back to Beijing. But noooooooooo . . . what would a motorcycle misadventure be without the unexpected? There's no chase vehicle, we're on our own, and that's what it's all about, so what happens when things go wrong, like the right side of the engine starts to lose power, and you think the throttle cable is too slack and fix it, okay, whew, and get back on the freeway and then you lose power again and there's a knocking sound that gets louder and so you stop and take the cover off to check that the tappets haven't come lose or a rod hasn't broken. Nope, all is good, maybe a jiggle here, a jiggle there, will do it. But nope, it's still there and getting louder by the second so you switch off the key and strap the tow rope to Diny's bike and chug along in the emergency lane (new highway, smooth emergency lane, nice), to exit at Toll Booth Number 17.

Now, this is a BMW engine, darn it, so what could be happening? The thing has been using oil -- the dipstick usually shows it at the halfway mark when I check it each morning before taking off. That's expected with a CJ, and Teresa's CJ always needed to be topped up, Diny maybe used about two tablespoons in her BMW this whole time. Maybe it's the piston. That's what the mechanic at Toll Booth #17 thought, and then he ran off to find a truck to load me up and take me back to Beijing.

I said goodbye to Diny and Steff, who bundled up for their long boring ride home on the freeway, and I was swooshed into the white tiled building that was the toll booth workers office and housing, given a hot lunch of rice and stir-fried vegetables, and was then ushered into the exercise room where the exercise equipment was piled in a corner in favor of a few chairs and a big-screen TV.

An hour later my mechanic returned with a truck and driver. We found some metal ramps and pushed the CJ up into the truck bed, tied it down with rope, got directions to Beijing, and were off. My driver wasn't one of those people who were willing to try to converse in a language I didn't really understand, so the four hours back were spent largely in silence, except for a period of time when he turned on the radio to Chinese country rock and rave.

I spent my time looking at the cars, the freeway signs, and the passing countryside. As we flew by farmers inspecting their autumn fields I wondered what they were thinking. Possibly wondering if they had enough for winter, what would they plant where next spring, resenting the noise of the highway, or grateful for any money the government might have given them for their land--if they were paid anything at all. Were they paid? I'll have to ask Teresa. As former Agricultural Attache for the USA in China, she knows just about everything about farmers in China, food safety, and exports.

I was also still trying to figure out the Rules of the Road. Now here I was in a truck with a driver who knew all of them, and I noted carefully his behavior. There are four lanes on the highway. He mostly stayed in the second lane, and passed on the left or on the right, whatever was convenient. Most of the big slow trucks stayed in the second land instead of the first lane, largely, I believe, out of habit. On smaller roads people come jumping into the road from the right, so the bigger vehicles just hog the left lane, making everybody else pass on the right.

But the highway people were trying to get them to behave differently. They put big signs above each lane, from 4 to 1, labeled:

PASSINGLANE      CARRIAGEWAY      CARRIAGEWAY       EMERGENCYVEHICLES

Sometimes these signs were changed to read:

      120                             90                                        60                          PARKING

At dusk, few vehicles turned on their lights, in order to save the bulb, and when it got dark, only reluctantly. Brights were used momentarily to see better or to flash somebody that you want to pass or to punish someone who had their brights on in your face. It seemed a lose-lose situation.

Entering Beijing at night is a trip. First, there's the toll booths where you pay 80RMB ($10) for using the expressway from its origins in the east--which we did. There are about 20 booths stretched across the highway--on each side! It's truly massive.

Then there is the massive expansion. When you enter Beijing today, you see hundreds and hundreds of dark, unoccupied apartment buildings, cranes from every third rooftop, and thousands and thousands of drivers who have been driving only as long as they have owned their cars: Hondas and KIAs and Toyotas and Audis and more, specially made for the Chinese market.

It's 20 km between the 6th ring road and the 5th ring road, on which we exited to make our way to the Airport Expressway. Now, I was following along on my map and one would think that a city would have clearly marked signs at each exit to the airport, but not this city. You just have to know, I guess because foreigners aren't allowed to drive in China, and until recently, people just didn't have cars, so maybe the highway sign planners didn't think of that. We paid tolls twice more to get onto the city streets, which were crowded with pedestrians, construction zones, tractors, all with no lights, riddled with potholes, and absent of signage. (Yes, this is the time to thwack somebody in the Beijing city planning office upside the head and say "Hello? Let's past some big white airplane stickers on some of those exits, okay? And make it happen before the Olympics.")

Finally I recognized a big garden and pottery shop that I knew was very close to Jim's motorcycle shop, and pulled over to make a clarifying call. I would have been able to find it in the daytime, but at night, all bets are off.  We turned out to be about 100 yards away, thank goodness, and the driver backed into the courtyard where the dogs just went crazy. (Everybody has a chained up shepard trained to bite, here, for security. Not happy creatures.) We unloaded the bike, and I paid my driver (about 100 bucks), and got a taxi to Teresa's (about $2.50) just in time for a lasagna dinner with her mother and her dog, just arrived from the states after a few days of false starts due to the dog's vaccination papers. They both looked tired, and so was I. It was an early night for everybody.

Here are a few photos for the October 30 Photo Album.

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 29

This morning we headed east on the most direct road to the sea and within a short time decided to turn back up to Highway 101 because this secondary road was clogged with trucks and coal factory towns and nuclear power plants. So we turned north 30 kilometers, which took over an hour, and found it again and happily braved the snowy landscape for the solitude of the mountains. (Except for Qinglong, which I would linger in given more time. From my perch on the motorcycle it seemed a bustling, young town, maybe there was a university there, and beautifully surrounded by mountains. But we passed by quickly in order to get to the sea before dark.)

Our destination was the beach. Specifically, the start of the Great Wall of China in Shanhai on Liadong Bay, at a place called Shanhaiguan. We braved the outskirts of the big scary town of Qinhuangdao (where there was another nuclear power plant, coal mine, and gravel strip mine), and turned north to ride a large, empty highway for about an hour. Being almost November, this beach resort area was fairly abandoned, so we enjoyed having the roads mostly to ourselves for a change.

We'd been following the Great Wall for quite some time, and we saw where it might disappear into the sea, and were also following the signs to Mountain-Sea town. It is difficult to be illiterate in China especially when zooming past signs at 80km/hour, but this one was short and easy:

On the road signs the second character was usually reduced to just the right hand part of the character, which made it even easier. The name of the town means Where the Mountains Meet the Sea, Steffan explained, and I led the way.  (Most of the time Steffan is not riding in the front, by the way, because his muffler is so incredibly loud that neither of us can stand to hear it. Even he is using his iPod as self defense. And also, its good to be gone already when Steffan hits town, otherwise we'd be noticed sooner. Not really what you call flying under the radar.)

We turned down the road to the sea to find a bustling big city, clean and new and an "old section" completely razed and being re-built from the bottom up. The Lonely Planet said they started this project in 2006 and wanted to get it done in a year. I think they will. It looks nearly finished and is fabulously picturesque with the original old walls around it and some major monuments untouched. I'll bet in summer 2008 it'll be absolutely overrun with tourists. I must say, a little guiltily, that we three had a blast roaring around in the construction zone on mud roads under curlicued archways and workers hauling big glass windows on their shoulders. Everything here is done by hand. Manpower is not a shortage and the workers laughed at us, happy for a distraction. It's certain they've been working hard for a very long time. I took a movie of Steffan riding through taking a movie, see it here.

But I really really really wanted to put my feet on the start of the Great Wall of China where it rose from the ocean so we motored on down to the end of the road past the touts who wanted to wave us into for-pay parking lots and other distractions, and found a small road that wound around an iron gate to a beachfront motel and bungalows under construction, of course, and jumped off to run into the sand and snap photos of the wall much to the chagrin of the construction boss. Here's a movie of that.

But we were done by the time he explained we weren't allowed to do that and happily rode back to the Great Wall of China Where the Mountain Meets the Sea Parking Lot to pay our 50 RMB and stroll the rebuilt wall--it was just in crumbles and restoration couldn't be helped, so they said. It's difficult to know what's old and what's new. We frolicked on the beach some more--as much as you can frolic in leather pants, jacket, boots, and layers of fur-lined knee pads, scarves and vests--climbed the various stairsteps and ramparts, perched ourselves on the walls, and touched the sea, which always makes me smile.

Being at this site where the Great Wall officially begins makes me feel somehow that my journey in China has ended. Tomorrow we'll ride a long, boring highway the 250km back to Beijing, and aside from a party with all the people I've met in China on Sunday, it's pretty much over. Waah!

Here is the October 29th Photo Album.

And see http://www.carlaking.com/china2007/movies/ for an unannotated directory of all the little Quicktime movies I've taken -- please don't expect "professional" films :-)

There are many more stories to tell. Please sign up for my mailing list to get them, for most won't be included in these live dispatches as they aren't live any more.

Thank you for joining me on this misadventure. As always, I appreciate your comments.

Carla

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 28

Today we took the expressway north out of Beijing, led by a couple on a Harley Davidson. Chris works with Diny's husband whose job it is to open new hotels, and he's working on the new Ritz Carlton now, hopefully to be open by the time of the Beijing Summer Olympics. The word "hopefully" probably makes him cringe.

I haven't met Diny's husband, but I've met Diny's son Steffan who in fact is riding with us on a Chang Jiang he's owned for a very short time. He's 24 and speaks very very good Chinese with a Shanghi accent (that's where they lived before) that makes the people in this part of the country laugh. Also he is very tall and Dutch looking and so he stands out even more than Diny and I do, if that's possible.

Tonight we found out tonight at dinnertime, he doesn't know any of the words for vegetables, which means that he hasn't been eating his vegetables, which would have better been kept a secret to his mother or his mother's vegetarian friend. We were in a remote Heibi Province city, and found a restaurant that served local specialties (near the hotel), which turned out to be pig heads, served cut in half on a big plate with brown gravy, eyes, teeth, and all.

In case you're wondering what I ate it was spicy tofu,  sauteed Chinese cabbage, and sweet corn with cilantro and sesame seeds. Yes, they do things differently here.

But back to the beginning of the day. We'd lost the couple on the Harley at the beginning of the Beijing expressway because of the icy cold wind (despite the bright sun) but perhaps more because of  the sight of white snow dusting the mountains where we were headed. Diny and I, in our long, padded army jackets, thought it was picturesque. And Steffan, being 24, is immune to discomfort, as long as there is adventure involved.

The Beijing highway ends just short of the Great Wall at Simitai. We could see it but we didn't want to go there to touch it or anything, because it was probably more like The Great Wall Circus, of which we would have certainly been a part (hello! hello! hello! <giggle giggle giggle>), so we turned east to enjoy it from afar. The Great Wall of China, like many things in life, is perhaps best enjoyed from afar.

We did enjoy it. We wound our way on a country road,  numbered 101 (the same as one of America's favorites), south of Miyun reservoir where we had a mediocre lunch with a view of the many bushels of persimmons and the lake and mountains beyond. After lunch (tofu and cabbage) northeast through small villages at ever higher elevations where the villagers were harvesting their crops of Chinese cabbage in the most expedient manner possible since their beautiful green heads had been frozen overnight. We, and probably most of Northern China, would be having it for lunch, dinner, and possibly breakfast, for many days to come.

The edges of Highway 101 was thick with snow at the highest point of the highest pass we crossed, and we headed down into a jagged autumn landscape that was breathtaking in every sense of the word: I could barely breath with the cold. I stopped several times to arrange my fleece neck warmer into exactly the right place under my chin strap so that the cold air wouldn't get in. I could barely breath at those hairpin turns with no guardrail with a ditch that plunged hundreds of feet into a canyon where ever house of a village was roofed with big wire mesh barrels of dry yellow corn cobs. I was also breathless with the thought that I was so fortunate to be here now passing through this piece of a country that is so in flux and that it is so strange and foreign and I am almost sure to never pass by this way again, certainly not in this season with these people.

Diny is a wonderful traveling companion. She is always laughing when we stop, and willing to snap a photo or have lunch or just to look at something strange or beautiful. In the lead today, she pulled over at an intersection where the yard of a building was furnished with old, broken down pool tables. One of the pool tables held three snowmen, or rather a snow family--the mama, the papa, and the child--complete with coal buttons and carrot noses.

The teenagers on the 450 Honda who had been pestering us for miles pulled up. They'd been passing then holding back and passing again, putting us in no little danger at least twice while gawking and giving us the thumbs up from the wrong side of the road as a coal truck came barreling down the other direction while we were overtaking a donkey cart on ours. They weren't wearing helmets or gloves, and who knows where they were going. Country kids on a joyride to death, I thought, as we happily left them behind.

Steffan, who was tasked with asking directions for us while Diny and I were goofing with the snow family, had discovered that we needed to make the next right down the mountain, a direction that led to some of the most beautiful riding I've ever experienced. Think Colorado, think Bryce Canyon, think Blue Ridge Parkway with no RVs (but maybe a few trucks and a donkey cart or two). The road was perfect, there were rock overhangs, a canyon with the river swollen from last night's snowstorm, and the trees that were clinging to the golden brown striated rocks were yellow gold and brown in the late autumn sunshine. It made me cry that everyone in the world couldn't have this experience, and when we arrived at a village at the end of this long, beautiful canyon, we pulled over just because we had to acknowledge to somebody who had also witnessed this, "Wow."

And it so happened that a large piece of the Great Wall was hanging off a cliff just there. The villagers walked past it each day, and who knows if they even noticed, but we did and gathered an audience as we took off our helmets for photos while Steffan scaled the small hill to pose next to a piece.  (See movie.)

It was only another twenty minutes down this road to a big town called Sunhua where we found a three star hotel eight stories high with the usual dingy rooms and beds harder than usual, but just now there was a big fireworks show somewhere down the road. I mean a big one with all the splashy colors and whirly twirly gigs and everything. There always seems to be a fireworks show in China, every night in every city. And now I'm going to sleep, having pulled all the padding off the other bed in the room to soften the experience a little, and putting my earplugs in against other fireworks and the television turned up all the way in the next room. I'm sure to sleep well.

Here's the October 28 Photo Album.

China Motorcycle Misadventure: Part 2

I'm heading out again tomorrow for a ride from Beijing east along the Great Wall to the coast where it disappears into the sea.  Teresa can't join me but Diny will, and she's bringing her 24-year-old son Steffan, who will ride his own Chang Jiang, and one of the gang named Sebastian has texted me that he's coming, and we'll see who else shows up.

I hear you can easily get to the coast in a day but I'd like to take the scenic route through the mountains and around some reservoirs, so we'll take four days. I'll be blogging and uploading photos when I can. Sebastian said there are some old Ching Dynasty tombs up there, not the famous ones, but they're just sitting in the middle of a field and you can tromp around at will. He camped up there with a friend last week the night of the shooting stars. We may stop there. Who knows!

By the way, here's a Google Earth shot of the plan, in case you want to browse the terrain, see the roads, the wall, and photos people have uploaded from various sites. If you have Google Earth just launch it, go to Beijing, and take a look at the possible routes to the coast at lat=39.9679286549, lon=119.794032537.

Thank you so much for all of your encouraging emails. I'm glad you're enjoying the dispatches, and I look forward to hearing from you via email or, better yet, on each blog entry's comments area.

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 21, continued

Continued from previous entry...

The military cops said we couldn't pass. They said our license plates weren't legal in Beijing province which was ridiculous because all our plates had the Beijing pictogram and they were the special "go-everywhere" black plates, not the province-specific blue plates.

"I live in Beijing, I came from Beijing, so I have to get back home," said Teresa, but they weren't convinced. Also, they said, the road had collapsed, so nobody could get through. Then they asked for our papers.

"Show them your passport but not the bike registration," Teresa told us. The cops only looked at the cover, didn't touch them, didn't open them.

Meantime, a Chinese couple in a car were waiting behind us to go through. "I'll bet that as soon as we leave they'll be able to go through, no problem," Teresa said. She was furious.

Finally she called her driver who talked to the military police, who basically told him that there was no way they were going to let us through. Her driver said that we'd better follow their instructions or risk being arrested and having the bikes confiscated. The law was fuzzy on whether or not we could be driving. The cops would be escorting us personally out of their territory, in fact, because they were lying to us, it was a military installion, or so said the woman in the car behind us.

"Well why don't they just say that, and tell us to take another road?" I asked, eyeing the soldier with the gun. It was short and round and looked like a pop-gun.

"I know I know... my driver, he always talks me down, I get too reasonable, but he's right, we need to just do what they say, no matter what."

No time, no arguing, we just had to muster up the gall to smile and face the least of two fates, being escorted out rather than arrested for being in a place we weren't supposed to be, even though we didn't know we weren't supposed to be in it . . . then we were following a cop car, sirens blowing, on a secondary road through amazingly beautiful mountains at 40 km per hour, a painfully slow speed on twisty smooth roads.

Finally, after about 20 km of this, I rode up next to Teresa and yelled, "What if I race ahead, pull over for a pee, and that's our excuse to stop? Then you can explain that we can go faster."

She nodded, and I revved it up, overtook the cops at about 80km per hour, found a turnout, and crouched down behind the bike for a pee.  The cops and the other two caught up, pulled over, and Teresa used my excuse to have a conversation with them.

"You know, those Chang Jiang motorcycles the other two have, they have BMW engines, and they need to go fast," she said. "Me, I just have the CJ engine, and I'm okay, but they're overheating."

"Oh?" the cops said. "We were afraid you all couldn't keep up."

"Oh no," Teresa said. "You can go as fast as you want to. We can definitely keep up, and their engines will stay cooler."

Then those cops took off like crazy people, sirens blaring through the towns, scaring people half to death. Of course 30 seconds after that my fender started rattling like mad -- a screw had jiggled lose and I knew I was going to lose the whole thing under my wheel unless I stopped to tighten it. I did, and it took a long time to catch up but I did, grinning as I tested the BMW engine on the straightaways at speeds that topped 110 kilometers.

I passed Diny who had been lagging worrying about me knowing that the fender screws had probably come loose again but who felt uncomfortable with me out of sight, and then we both raced to catch up to Teresa, who was doing a respectable job keeping up to speed on her CJ 750 engine. Maybe 40 horsepower? I might have 60, Diny more. The main difference between the CJ and the BMW engines is in the throttle response. They'll all go over 100, but overtaking can be a problem with the CJ as it doesn't respond as quickly, where with the BMW's they just blow by the trucks, which is critical on these roads unless you want to be breathing diesel fumes for miles.

Finally we crossed over out of the cop's jurisdiction. "Say thank you to the nice policemen," Teresa told us, and we smiled and shook their hands. They grinned. We said good bye. Thank you much, thanks.

Relieved we sat at the side of the road for a while wondering what to do next when an old man rode up on a scooter and said there were two big lakes down that road there, a dam, an American resort, and all kinds of interesting stuff.

"It's on the way to Badoling," said Teresa, so we can stop by the Great Wall and get back to Beijing before dark."

I was all for that and so was Diny.

The road (path) around the lake was about paved and not in equal parts, and was nice riding if you didn't mind the rough spots. There were farmers selling fruits on the roadside: squashes, persimmons, dates, apples, Asian pears, and small crab apples both fresh and dried.

There were many wineries, too -- a new industry for China. Chateau de something. We'd tried Chinese wine during our trip and found it surprisingly palatable. "Get the later vintage," Teresa had advised. "They've had more experience."

The closer we got to Beijing the better the roads were, but then we were faced with the Expressway, upon which the tires of mere motorcycles are forbidden to touch, and the secondary roads, poorly maintained and clogged with donkey carts, three-wheeled diesel tractors and other such inferior vehicles.

But soon the Great Wall appeared in all its carefully restored glory. This is the stretch of wall that 99% of tourists -- Chinese and foreign -- come to visit. We planned to have a cup of tea, maybe climb some section of it, and head back to the city, but arrived to find that the place had morphed into a veritable carnival, with souvenir shops, a wild animal zoo/safari park, and about 100 times more tourists we'd planned on.

We circled the parking lot, gawking at all this while being gawked at, and I got this awful feeling that what happened in the Genghis Kahn mausoleum ten years ago was about to happen again -- that is, Chinese tourists from the provinces rushing at me with cameras, tearing at my clothes, pulling my hair, and yelling hello! hello! hello!, then running off screaming.

Teresa, largely immune to such experiences as she has the language skills to hold it off, looked back at me with a frightened look that frightened me and said, "I have a feeling that if we stop we're going to get mobbed."

"Let's get out of here," I agreed, and so we circled around and exited, contenting ourselves with the view of leaving the Great Wall. It didn't matter all that much. We'd seen such lengths of it -- rather worn, but more authentic -- many times before, and we didn't need the gift shops, the tourists, the camels and astrologers and souvenirs and gimmicks.

Leaving, we passed an American or European family, all blonde and being harassed by tourists. Hello! Hello! Hello! <giggle giggle snap snap>

They looked at us zooming by with expressions of astonishment and envy.

Descending towards the city the wall was visible for miles continuing south on a good road in fresh clean air and beautiful fall colors. Then we hit it. Traffic, smog, cars, trucks, taxis, busses hell-bent on killing us, or at least pretending they might. We were stuck in one of the worst traffic snarls I'd ever experienced in my whole life, an ambulance screaming its way through and being purposely blocked at every effort to squeeze by, when my engine quit.

At first I figured it had just become too hot with all the stopping and starting. I was sweating in my heavy leather jacket with its down snap-in vest and a sweater under that, not to mention the helmet, tights, boots -- but no time to shed clothes, I quickly unlocked the trunk, took out a screwdriver, and experimented with the idle screw and the air screw as Teresa and Diny looked back at me in their mirrors, with no little anxiety.

The starter button had given me a little trouble for a while, and I suspected that the starter motor might be wearing out, but that was of secondary concern as the motorcycle had a kick starter. I fiddled with the air mixture screw, figuring it might have rattled loose on those bad roads. I twisted it all the way in, then one and a half turns out. Then I noticed that the idle screw was twisted almost all the way in, so I loosened that a little.  During this time traffic hadn't moved, which tells you a little bit about how bad it was.

I kicked it over just as traffic started again, and it caught. Teresa and Diny let out a congratulatory yell and we raced through the light with the rest of the crazy people, and saw a sign that the 5th ring road, our destination, was 20 km away. Is it possible that the 6th ring and the 5th ring are really 20 km apart? Apparently, yes.

Teresa and Diny had a little conference talk ahead of me and suddenly we were turning left, going around and not through. The bike quit two more times before I got the idle-air screws right, and then we were on a ring road or expressway with maddened drivers as dying to get home as we were.

"Twenty minutes!" Diny yelled, as she zoomed by me on the on ramp. I held on and held my ground, thinking of the three of us as one unit and sticking to it so the cars and trucks and taxis wouldn't separate us. Eye contact and a smile helped a lot with the passenger cars, but didn't mean diddley with the professional drivers.  But by now, Teresa, Diny, and I were a well-oiled machine. We knew each others riding habits, capacity to take risks -- Teresa less, me more, Diny somewhere in the middle -- and recognized small signals like a shrug or a certain turn of the head that meant uncertainty. We were like the Blue Angels on that freeway, amazing spectators with our choreography.

And finally we turned off. And my bike quit again. And Teresa asked directions. And we were off again. "Twenty minutes!" Diny yelled at me, again. I rolled my eyes, but then even I recognized a street, the mannequins wearing garish coats with fur collars next to the barber shop and the grocery store, and then we were pulling into Starbucks laughing like crazy people.

"Wow, I can't believe it," said Diny, after our hugs and goodbyes. "My bike ran perfectly!"

She started it up, turned the light on, there was a ping, and the bike quit, no electricity.

"I told you I told you don't say that!" said Teresa, as we followed wires and couldn't find the fuse, enlisted the help of everyone in the parking lot, and then finally found the fuse after calling the shop, and then called the shop to cancel the plea for help, and found Diny's spare, and then she was off into the night.

"Only twenty more minutes!" she yelled, with a grin, and roared away.

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 21

We had set our alarms to 5:30 so we could get going at 6am because we needed to get back to Beijing before nightfall. Between us and Beijing were some pretty serious mountains, and who knew if all the bikes would stay together. Teresa's CJ was running well but the parts were barely holding together, she said, from all the bumpy roads. I'd was having pesky little problems like the screws didn't want to stay in the fender, no matter how many washers and nuts I put on the bolts. I ended up twisting baling wire through the holes. The headlight had also rattled lose, also an easy fix, and the air mixture screw seemed to be turning with the bumps, too.

Since the tire change, Teresa seemed to be a bit out of alignment, but not enough to risk messing with. Her back seat had fallen off, the riders seat needed tightening, and it was getting hard to shift, the gears kept slipping out.

Diny's CJ was holding together without fault, but we kept reminding her not to brag about it too much otherwise...

We planned the day like this -- we'd head back to Beijing on the same road on which I'd left Beijing a decade before, enter Beijing Province, go take a peek at the Great Wall, and end up at Starbucks near Teresa's house. We hoped to be back before dark, with no (major) delays due to motorcycle repairs, road closures, or other unexpected phenomenons.

The mountains were no less spectacular than I remembered, but the road was much improved. There were many tiny villages dotting the wooded, rocky hillsides and standing next to the river. The road looked like the only thing to have happened since I'd been here ten years before. No cities, no white-tiled restaurants, no modern conveniences. Then we came to a strip mine that turned the air to noxious yellow fumes, and then we were away again in the mountains, and then in a mountain village and then soldiers standing in front of the road we needed to continue on in order to get back to Beijing.

To be continued...

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 20

Last night's dinner was uninspiring, but the hotel went all out for breakfast with a buffet table full of choices including all the usual marinated, pickled cabbages, onions, and peanuts, also steamed buns filled with meat or mung bean, that bland gruel made of some kind of grain, a nice hot brothy vegetable soup, eggs boiled in tea. We asked for hot water for our mugs at the ready with instant coffee granuals, but it was a struggle to get them to make it. The Chinese don't drink coffee or tea at breakfast--they have hot soup, instead. We filled our bellies, had our coffee for dessert, then went through the long process of getting out of the hotel and checking the bikes -- oil, gas, tires, etc. I was glad to see that the dog who'd jumped on me the night before was tied up with a rope. Teresa and Diny looked at him and shuddered. He was a big, black, not terribly happy German shepard. I'd been lucky my vest was the only piece of me he got. 

Finally ready, we donned our big new padded jackets and set out on another glorious, sunny, cold Shanxi Province morning.

Thirty five kilometers later I noticed that Teresa and Diny weren't behind me any more. I figured maybe they'd stopped to fool with something minor, or take a photo, or to take a pee, so I took the opportunity to climb down the ditch to take a pee, right in the middle of which my cell phone rang, to make difficult matters worse. (Imagine, wearing three layers of underclothes, plus jackets, helmet, etc.) Teresa said, "Turn around, we need the tools."

We'd noticed that her back tire was almost bald a few days ago, but I hadn't looked at it recently. "I heard a popping sound and then the tire went flat," Teresa said. "You know, I should have noticed this and had them change it in Beijing when they were getting the bike ready for this trip, but sadly, I have to admit that when someone else is doing my maintenance for me I suddenly become stupid so things like this slide."

I felt that way, too. We'd had an opportunity to change out the tire in the town where I changed out the rubber donut on the end of the drive shaft, but didn't. So here we were on the side of the road, a huge petrochemical plant behind us and the mountains ahead. At least it was a good road with a nice, wide shoulder, and there weren't any throngs of onlookers or advice givers sticking their hands into the engine or bugging us for information about our ages, nationalities, etc., to confuse us, and we had a spare tire, so we took our helmets, jackets, and gloves off, got Jim's good set of American tools that were locked in my trunk, and proceeded calmly to make the repairs.

The first difficulty was that Teresa's kickstand had sprung a spring and fallen half-off the first night of the trip. I'd been directly behind her when I saw a shower of sparks coming from something metal being dragged along the road. She'd pulled over immediately and we'd all breathed such a sigh of relief that it was just the kickstand and not some essential part of the engine. It had seemed trivial until today.

Diny went off and found some rocks while Teresa and I unscrewed the tire. She returned and we hauled the bike up on one side of the kickstand and stabilized it with the rocks so we wouldn't get surprised by the 800 pound machine coming down on one of us as we worked on it.

We unscrewed the back part of the rear fender and fastened it in the up position with a bungee cord, and proceeded to remove the tire, which was easier than putting one back on, but isn't that always the case? In addition to the flat, one of the springs that held the brake drum together was dangling, the hook end of it having snapped off. Dismayed, we gave Jim Bryant a call. It turned out that the snapped spring was not on the critical side of the drum -- that is, the side that holds the two pieces closed. So we grabbed the baling wire and replaced the broken spring with that.

When we got the other one on we noticed, with more dismay, that it was not fully inflated. (Note to selves -- fully inflate spare tires before going on next trip.)

Just as we were about to follow her very very slowly down the road on the very inadequately inflated tire, I saw a guy on a moped coming our way. Luckily, he was employed as road crew for the aforementioned petrochemical plant. His equipment included a moped, a bright orange vest, a broom, a shovel, and a cell phone. In no time he'd called the vehicle repair crew, which was a guy in a vert battered up old moped who had a manual tire pump strapped to his back seat. Chinese AAA, we joked.

We tried to pay them but they wouldn't have any of it, so we started cautiously again down the road -- after Teresa had answered all their questions about our nationality, age, marital status, children, and what the heck we were doing all the way out here in the cold and we really should have been here two weeks ago instead. (How many times had we heard that, now?) Since he could only inflate the heavy tire to 20 pounds with the hand pump -- it needed 30 -- we followed Teresa to the next tiny little town where a mechanic interrupted his work on a diesel truck to inflate the tire with a compressor-fueled pump. Strangely, he seemed nonplussed to see us. Usually we get these blank stares until Teresa starts talking. And he mentioned that nobody ever sees foreigners in this area so please excuse the behavior of people who might seem curious. Then he went back to working on the truck. "Worldly guy," laughed Teresa.

We fueled up at the gas station across the street -- Teresa's Chang Jiang takes 93 octane but Diny and my (Jim's) BMW engines really need 97. Out here in the countryside it is difficult to get 97, so we get it when we can and use 93, and keep a can of 97 in Diny's trunk.

The gas station attendants recommended a restaurant at the end of town so we stopped there for a quick lunch of tofu sauteed with bok choy, potatoes and squash, and some unidentified chopped green vegetable. The men at the table next to us were cops, and talked very loudly to each other and on their cell phones. One of them smoked a cigarette from an ivory holder. Nobody really asked us any questions, or gathered around the bikes.

After lunch Diny laughed that we'd only managed to get about 40 kilometers that day so far and it was already noon. We'd probably average about 150 km per day by the end of the trip.

As we geared up to leave Diny mentioned that her left side seemed to be missing a bit, but not to worry about it. I was worried about it, and thought maybe her more powerful BMW wasn't liking all that 93 octane, or the carb was running too lean or rich, but she just wanted to get on the road. We did, climbing and climbing into desert hill country toward the Shanxi Province mountains we'd been aiming for the last couple of days.

Once we got rid of all the coal trucks and crazy bus drivers we really did have a glorious ride in the cold  afternoon sunshine. The sumac bushes planted on the sides of the roadways were bright orange and behind them stood miles of willow trees gracefully waving in the breeze, then miles and miles of farms.

This tree-lined landscape abruptly changed to one of yellow sandstone eroded into twisting mazes of shallow canyons and then suddenly we started seeing caves fronted with doors and windows. I stopped to admire one especially pretty village, houses dug into four or five levels of terraced cliffs, their courtyards stacked with bright yellow corn cobs. Teresa and Diny stopped, too, and we took lots of photos as a couple with a donkey cart stacked with corn husks abruptly turned into the little road into the village. They smiled at us as they passed, with a baby donkey trotting behind, but really needed to concentrate on keeping the cart from getting ahead of the donkey on the steep road. The old woman ran to the back and hung on to a rope, digging in her heels to keep it from sliding forward. The baby donkey scrambled to stay on the road beside its mother, and the man clucked to the donkey to keep it going. This was a process they'd done perhaps thousands of times, but it was clearly not an easy one, for as we continued to watch their progress along the road far down in the village one wheel of the cart slid off the steep embankment and the woman ran to yell, "We need help!" over a wall.

A younger woman emerged with a shovel, and handed it over the wall to her, then slowly walked to the other side of the compound and emerged from a doorway to the road. We never figured out what the shovel was for, because they just pushed and pulled until the cart was back on the road again.

Drama over. Photos taken. Ride continued.

We finally got into the mountains. Lovely, softly humped over like eroded waves, covered in fall colors or bare, with huge cracked rocks exposed, waiting to fall or to erode into fantastic shapes. On the map we saw that there was only one village where it might be possible to find a binguan or luguan, and we turned south off the main road for a few hundred yards to find that it was a true truck-stop town, with mechanics and metal shops and restaurants and prostitutes and not one clean surface in sight.

As soon as we stopped we were surrounded by drunk men, their faces black from working or perhaps just from being out in the dirty, smoggy street. Teresa asked if there was a binguan and a man pointed to a building next to a used rebar collector. The three of us looked at each other and grimaced, but we couldn't converse, the men were becoming more aggressive about touching the bikes and more were coming. I yelled, "Yikes! We need to get out of here!" and so started our engines, parted the crowd and motored a hundred feet down the street to get away and stop to talk about our options.

We didn't really have any. But then Teresa spotted a woman in front of a restaurant - one of the few we'd seen - and ran over to ask her about a motel. She told her that there were drunk men and we needed to feel safe, was there a safe place? The woman nodded yes, she understood, and sent her husband along with Teresa to look at the luguan. The knot of men we'd left stayed in their spot, talking and staring at Diny and me. We waited a long time for Teresa to come out and finally she jogged down the road, grinning, giving us the thumbs up.

The woman's husband climbed on Diny's back seat (Teresa's back seat had fallen off a couple of days before and I had a rack, not a seat, on my bike), and he led us through a narrow path through the mud walls of little housing compounds and left through some gates and into a mud yard. But just after that was a brilliantly clean white tiled compound lined on each side with five doors and windows. This was our luguan, a place our bikes and we could be safe. We settled on a single room with four single beds nearest the house where the owner and her family lived, and unpacked, sighing with relief.

The owner walked down the street with us to show us where to eat, a brand new restaurant, another oasis of sanitation in the middle of this filthy village. This restaurant had only private rooms--most restaurants have that option, but this one had no general eating area. This has been great for us because it is difficult to be stared at so much while we're eating.

We were served jasmine tea with rosebuds, the hot water was poured from a copper pot with a spout about three feet long by a young man in a red suit and hat and white gloves. The serving girls giggled nervously and couldn't answer Teresa, instead, fleeing the room. Teresa said that they were ashamed to talk to her in their dialect, they couldn't speak proper "Central Chinese."

One server stayed and recommended several dishes, one a Hui minority dish (we were in the Muslim Hui minority region) that turned out to have "stinky tofu" as an ingredient. I like it but the other two can't stand it, so that was a bust. The requisite potatoes and squash dish included pumpkin, which was delicious, and the cornbread turned out to be wonderful raised pancakes that seemed just like the kind we eat in America. The local beer was light and yeasty, and Teresa and I had two big bottles of it. Diny, a wine drinker, said again that she should have packed a few bottles.

An hour later our luguan proprietress returned to escort us home. We bagged up the leftovers to give to her, but kept the pancakes for our breakfast, and walking back, Diny saw a falling star through the smog. She was so excited, and then remembered that Jim Bryant had organized a motorcycle ride to the mountains to see the comet shower, and thought we might see more, but none appeared the rest of the walk back, which was not surprising considering the smog.

Back at the luguan we asked for thermoses of hot water and drank some tea. Diny went out to the bathroom -- the standard low-walled enclosure with slots in the floor -- and came back shouting excitedly, in her Dutch accent, "I saw two more shitting stars!"

Teresa and I laughed so hard we had to go to the bathroom ourselves after that, but even though we looked up hopefully, we didn't see any.

See my photo album.

Motorcycle Misadventure in China: October 19

Frozen water bottles, a shopping spree, the best noodle soup I ever had, a mob, and a dog attack. What more can you ask for in a travel (mis)adventure?

We spent the night in Zhangbeixian in a hotel at the edge of town and woke to find that the water bottles we left in our sidecars had frozen, "Not quite solid," Diny pronounced, optimistically. One of the staff climbed onto the back of Teresa's bike and led us to the military shop where they sell those big green padded coats we see so many of the motorcycle riders wearing. The shop also had mittens with a single digit carved out in case you have to do something like -- well, button up your new padded green jacket. I bought a few pairs of gloves, as "they cost nothing," which is Teresa's favorite expression, and happily, I've found it's true. Plus a pair of black leather lace-up boots with wool lining; twenty dollars. And a daypack, camo, totally Chinese military. "I'm not fond of the military except for their fashion," said Diny, as she purchased her coat and boots. She was whining that I got the only backpack until Teresa whacked her and said, "Oh shut up. You can get them in Beijing everywhere for the same price when you get home, they're regulated." You see we've become fast friends by now.

We couldn't find a visor for Diny's helmet, so she donned a ski mask, my goggles, and a fleece headband before we set out to the steppes. By the time we topped ourselves off with our new coats (over all of our existing clothes) we could barely get on our bikes. Actually, we could barely bend our arms, legs, or turn our heads. But we were warm.

We crossed into the frozen tundra of Inner Mongolia long before we entered the province. We knew we arrived when the paved road ended and we were following blue trucks into the headwind down rutted dirt roads through grasslands and by villages and even clusters of yurts. We stopped to pee on the side of a remote country road -- don't even ask how that process went considering how we were bundled up -- and found ourself on a beautiful aspen-lined country road. We stopped next to some burial mounds and I think even a stupa. After that, we were counting down the kilometers to one town -- Shang Yi. It was our halfway destination, and we arrived there tired but warm,  except for the last three fingers on my hands, Diny's nose, and Teresa's neck.

Is it impossible to choose a bad restaurant in China? We ate tofu, potatoes and squash, sauteed greens, and a bowl of vegetarian noodle soup with hand cut noodles an Italian chef would be hard pressed to match. Teresa, as always, made fast friends with the staff, and one woman escorted us to the bathroom down the dirt road across the street. We all kept talking as we squatted in the five-slotted concrete pad, and a line formed outside, the concept of privacy being nonexistant. During the conversation, the woman told Teresa that she was amazed that we were "so old." She said a lot of people had commented on that the entire trip. "Gads, do we look that old?" I asked. She replied, "Oh no, of course not!" with a roll of the eyes and a snicker. But added, "You know, after 45 or so they're grandmothers."

After many photos -- at the restaurant, not the toilet, sorry -- we were able to leave, and the process of getting dressed and geared up to leave caused many bystanders to clog up the main road through town that we could barely get through the traffic jam ourselves. As we rode out, I could see people craning their necks looking over our heads to try to see what all the commotion was about.

At least it was a friendly crowd. At the next town, Xinghe, we stopped for gas and fruit and were immediately surrounded by a mob of bored, curious, drunk men who would not stop fiddling with the bikes. As I rode away from the fruit stand to the gas station one of them held on to the back of the bike for a laugh. Ha ha. They followed us to the gas station where we got more of the same. Riding through town, car drivers pulled up next to us to gawk, nearly forcing us off the road or into head on collisions. We had marked it as a possible destination to spend the night, but we were all too rattled to even consider it. Later, I found that my headlight had jiggled loose, along with the right front turn signal, and though I was watching every second, except when I paid the attendant, I guess, I have to wonder if someone fiddled a little too much. 

Later, over dinner at our hotel in Huaiaxian, we decided that the men in Xinghe must have been imported to build this town. It was definitely the most rawly under construction town we'd ridden through, with many unfinished apartment buildings standing ready to be occupied for residents from the outlying areas. There were few women, which was another indication that they were imported and perhaps temporary, or waiting for their families to keep them occupied.

Our hotel in Huiaxian is brand new, too, as is the entire immaculate, as-yet unoccupied town. In fact the hotel just opened this month, and we have to be out by eight in the morning because there's a big event going on and every room will be occupied.

We brought our bags in ourselves -- the bell staff hadn't been employed quite yet. It was pitch black and the stars were shining as I went back to the parking lot to move the bikes over to the guard shack. The restaurant staff, a gaggle of very young people, opened the window and started harassing me with the endless hello hello hello mantra accompanied by giggles. I ignored them, moved Teresa's bike, and ran back across the lot (to warm up) to my bike when got hit in the back. I screamed. a big dog had lept on me, paws on my shoulderblades, and grabbed the collar of my fur vest with its teeth before running back into the neighboring park. The guard went running to the dog and I kept running to the bike and rode it back to the guard shack, where Diny was laughing. She'd seen the dog after the fact, and thought I'd just been scared of it as it ran by, not knowing that I could have been mauled by a possibly rabid dog.

We could hear the guard behind the hedge kicking the dog back into a cage, and talking furiously to someone on a cell phone. I didn't tell the hotel staff about it. Considering it now, he might be petrified that he'll lose his job.

This brand new hotel is very old school Chinese /Soviet style, with a big impressive tiled lobby and small rooms lacking in personality except for the telltale touches that proves you're in China -- the tile's been hammered out to let in the plumbing and the wallpaper's already peeling. There's only hot water between 8-10 pm and 7-8:30 am, and the staff brings you hot water in thermoses. The lights dim and bright randomly, and the heating system is a remote-control affair that beeps and blings but provides little actual heat. However, there is working high-speed Internet, via an ethernet plug in the wall.

The food in the hotel restaurant was a disappointment after last night's feast and today's lunch, but the beds are nice and hard and there are plenty of blankets, as usual, so I'm sure that after I put in my earplugs to drown out those spontaneous noises that always happens in the hallway or in the building next door, I'll have a great night's sleep.

Here's today's photo album.

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 18

Coming to you from an outer Heibi province city just sprung from the seeds of Chinese capitalism, the Great Wall cringing in horror on the hill and the Mongolian ponies trying to outrun us, three honorable foreign ladies loud on Chang Jiangs and fat on plentiful autumn dishes.

Between bouts of necessary motorcycle maintenance I was urged by Diny to buy fur-lined motorcycle pant fronts -- gortex on the outside, fur on the inside, you just stick them on the front of your leg and velcro them on, and Voila! Also, like her, I bought fuzzy mitts for my handlebars with fleece inside and again, gortex (or similar) on the outside. You tie them on and slip your hands into them to work the brake and throttle. Total cost, 70 Yuan=$10. Okay...so the fur is fake. I thought I was being frivolous until about dusk when the temperature dropped maybe thirty degrees and we rolled into town and asked for the nicest hotel and sped there as fast as we could.

That's saying something when you're entering a place that looks like a combination of Reno and Burning Man. China's architects are into neon, and big time. Every new building whether it's a car dealership or a restaurant looks like a casino, and the roads are full of vehicles of all vintages making noises and erratic movements. And to top it off, every new building site is cleared of evil spirits by a big dose of fireworks, and that can happen when you're just happening to be riding by or at three in the morning. Work never stops here.

Somehow, the three of us are staying toether. It's wonderful to ride with two such excellent women. We are each daring and cautious in compatible  doses and travel together well in very tough conditions screaming and smiling and curious and horrified and impressed with each new moment.

Entering a town/city is always a Big Adventure because things get tight right away. On the highways the small vehicles stay to the right and the big vehicles stay to the left and the medium sized vehicles take the middle, generally, but in the towns the large and the small vehicles decide they want to switch places at  random moments and the medium sized vehicles weave through the mess. It is more like a dance than driving, a dance with twenty partners at a time, each one anticipating the next move of nineteen others. Really, it's quite elegant, unless someone balks.

At dusk we arrived but passed the road that led into the city center, belatedly realizing it, and making a U-turn was out of the question so we turned around in a parking lot and headed down the wrong side of the road, hugging the curb (what there was of it), to the light. We were in the process of breaking every known traffic law on the books when Teresa saw two traffic cops and decided to stop. Duh! I thought. But they were very friendly and pointed us in the right direction to the best hotel in town.

We rode up right onto the big wide shiny marble walkway out front, lit up with neon and very casino looking to me, I'm still trying to work out those pictograms -- and the staff came running out, jogging in front of us to show us where to park behind the hotel. We dismounted and Teresa grinned and said, with her teeth chattering, "Worth it at any price," as five people grabbed our bags, helped me cover the bike, and led us inside to a vast golden lobby tiled in white and furnished with burnished gold leather couches and chairs under glittering chandeliers.

The lengthy black and inlaid burnished copper front desk was staffed with three young women who gave us the prices and we chose single rooms with Internet not above the kitchen for 280 Yuan = 37.25 USD, with breakfast, too. Two bellmen took us to our floor where three attendees led us to our rooms and when they were gone we changed and hustled to the restaurant where we proceeded to have absolutely the best meal of my trip so far served by seven wait staff, and that's saying something because every little podunk restaurant here serves outstanding food. Tonight we gorged on dumplings, eggplant, soft rounds of tofu the size and shape and almost the texture of scallops, carmelized mung bean balls rolled in popped rice, orange squash cakes, jasmine tea, the local beer. 

We were back in our rooms by 8:30 and will regroup in the morning at 7:00 to recreate our game plan. A cold front is apparently coming in, and so we know that the first order of business is to find  those coats we see a lot of the old guys wearing on their motorbikes. They're thickly padded army green jackets, maybe they're down, maybe they're fur-lined, we don't know yet but we will soon -- and they have black furry collars and are an absolutely necessary addition to our wardrobes.

Here's today's photo album. Thanks to Teresa Howes for many of the photos, especially the ones with me in them.

Motorcycle Misadventures in China: October 17

Chilly and sunny and fresh and mountainous, we found a motel in a crazy little western town where the police came when we registered and wanted to know everything. We are the first foreigners to stay here, and they don't quite know what to do. Finally it's all finished, passports, paperwork, and Teresa, ever the diplomat, has the police smiling and even sort of laughing by the time its all over with, saying she's not a foreigner she's Chinese, what are they talking about.

"Beijing is just about as foreign to them as America," she told us. That's why when I say I'm from Beijing they're just astounded.

The motel is comfortable and cheap and cold, but we sleep well and wake up early, determined to find an Internet connection so I can send these dispatches, but the first place we go they won't let us because they say foreigners aren't allowed to use the Internet in China. Teresa argues but the man goes off to find the police and we flee, but it's not long til we find another one who will let us in and I was able to get a paragraph out before the connection got cut off.

Riding was lovely once again, country roads, hay carts, and a fabulous mechanical road sweeping machine. Now my Internet connection has to be cut off again, and I may not be able to hook up again for some days. But I will be collecting photos and video for more formal reports later. Meantime, check out the photo album.

Photo album