Motorcycle Misadventures

More on sidecars in China

Awesome. In the second part of the show about Riding in China Jim and Bill talk about my 1998 trip in China, and the second trip last year with Teresa and Diny - 1st 5 minutes.

Motorcycling China: Video

Spring came a little early this year, so with temps in the 40s and 50s all week the Beijing gang went on a short ride to Huairo on Sunday. Join them virtually via this video courtesy of Sabine Hartmann. Brrrr!

Thanks to Jim of Jimbo's Classic Sidecars in Beijing for passing this on. (By the way, if you want to ride in China, this is the guy to contact.)

You can see more of Sabine's videos of riding in China in the Related Videos to the right of this one in YouTube.

ChongQing Motorcycle Expo 2008: MyChinaMoto Video

Check out this photo and video review by Carl of My China Moto on the ChongQing Motorcycle Show this year - amazing the variety of bikes, ATVs, and mechanical toys available. Jialing had a 600cc motorcycle - the only bike made in China over 200cc's today. Carl got to take it for a test ride. Member Franki has a JH600, and has ridden it 8000 km all over southwest China. He shares his impressesion, here.

My China Moto: New Forum for Owners of Chinese Bikes

MyChinaMoto is a new web forum and community which hopes to bring together all people of the emerging Chinese motorcycle market. It's a place for riders of Chinese bikes, for manufacturers, dealers, and importers, to share ideas, experiences and resources with one another. Dealers and riders of those antique Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycles are there, of course. And there's a report by a member who got a tour of the QinQi Motorcycle factory - see this thread for some fab photos by MyChinaMoto's CrazyCarl.

Note regarding motorcycle travel in China: It is still illegal for non-residents to drive/ride (your own vehicle or any vehicle) in China. You must have Chinese residency, a drivers licence, and a registered vehicle to ride in China.

 

 

D. Brent Miller and Carla King: A Conversation on Sojourn Chronicles

Today D. Brent and I talked on his Sojourn Chronicles show "Conversations" about my 2007 and 1998 motorcycle trips to China and my upcoming book Under the Radar, plus my new Miss Adventuring Internet radio show to launch in January. Here are the links.

Sojourn Chronicles Conversations (December 2007, China and Miss Adventuring)

Sojourn Chronicles Conversations (April 2007, American Borders)

The Miss Adventuring Show (Coming January 3rd, 12:30 pm)

China's Pollution Problem Goes Global

I just picked up December's Mother Jones to read this article about China. It's fascinating, and author Jacques Leslie has gathered all the facts, reporting in a more knowledgeable way what's happening in China than I was able to convey in my travelogue. Check it out. You (hopefully) won't shop the same after you read it. TIP: Print it out. This is a long complicated article and unless you're under 30 you probably won't like reading it online.

The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
By Jacques Leslie
December 10, 2007

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.