This is the preface to my book in progress: The China Road Motorcycle Diaries
In the summer of 1997 I received an email from an American
working in Beijing. It arrived like a fortune in my computer. “There's a bike
waiting for you in a garage in China …” it said. “You could ride it all over
the country.”
Bikers are a closely-knit group, especially sidecarists, and
after my 1995 motorcycle adventure around the United States on a Russian Ural
sidecar motorcycle I'd had invitations to motorcycle in Europe and Australia,
Russia and Tiera del Fuego. But in 1997, China was suddenly everywhere in the
news: the restoration of Hong Kong to the Chinese, the opening of the country
to tourism and foreign investment—bold capitalist moves in a tightly controlled
society. The country was interesting and unknown. At least, I knew nothing
about it.
A certain memory of childhood came to me. Myrtle Beach in North
Carolina, digging in the sand, some adult asked me, "What are you doing,
digging all the way to China?" And of course I imagined kids like me over
there on the other side of the world, but upside-down, with eyes slanted upward
because they were fighting gravity from the other direction.
The invitation appeared in my email again. "You could ride
around the countryside and talk with people about Hong Kong," it said.
"But Hong Kong isn't all that's going on here. It's overshadowed much more
dramatic changes, out in the countryside."
I love the countryside. By October, I was there as a guest of
Rick Dunagan and the Beijing Chang Jiang gang, an eclectic group of expatriate
Americans and Europeans, and one Chinese couple who owned an adventure travel
shop in Beijing.
The bike belonged to Jim Bryant, the owner of the Subway sandwich
franchise. The bike was black, just like my Ural, with a Subway sticker on the
back. Best of all, the license plate was 00069. I rode it through the streets
of Beijing to sights like the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square, to the Dirt
Market, the Silk Market and the Russian Market, and right past the Kentucky
Fried Chicken to the Subway shop for lunch. The traffic was frightening, it
seemed that everyone had just got cars in Beijing, and that meant that everyone
had just got drivers licenses. It was like driving with thousands of
sixteen-year olds. In 1997, there were only thousands. Nobody had any idea just
how many more there would be.
But one day Rick took me out to the countryside where the
peasants were harvesting golden yellow corn to be dried on the road. It was
warm and sunny and the natives smiled and waved as we drove over their crops,
threshing their grain. We stopped for noodles and beer at a roadside stand,
bought persimmons and walnuts, and other things you do in the countryside.
The grand finale was a group ride to the Great Wall. We left Beijing,
a city that’s about the same physical size of Belgium, which in 1997 hosted 11
million inhabitants. We rode and rode under the clear blue Indian summer sky.
The high mountains of Inner Mongolia were visible to the northwest, stark and
raised in spiked brown peaks over which laid the territories of the dreaded
Barbarians.
Only ten percent of China is arable and farmland stretches right
up to the feet of these mountains, not skipping a crevice as it follows the
contours of the flatlands. In October, the peasants were busy harvesting and
used half the road as a drying surface for yellow corn.
The farmers sat in piles of it, the men lounging, taking a break
from furrowing the fields, and the women were busy separating the husks from
the ears, piling the husks in the middle of the road, and the ears to the side.
Other women thumbed the kernels off into neat patches of gold onto the black
asphalt. Traffic, such as it was, drove around the yellow patches and directly
onto the husks to help with the threshing. A farmer burned fallen willow leaves
and twigs in his field, brown and furrowed by as he led his donkey to plough the
dirt.
We rode high into the hills breathing deeply of clean air,
polluting the silence with the sound of seven Chinese sidecar motorcycle
engines headed toward the wall.
The fields gave way to a lake and a road built up against a
mountainside, its gray granite cliff dripping with vines turning yellow and red
from the season and the sun, rapidly setting now, three hours from Beijing.
The piles of corn gave way to roadside tables piled with fat
orange persimmons, luminous in the fading light. Amongst the persimmons were
baskets of cream colored apples streaked with red, boxes of walnuts, pheasants
in cages of wood-framed chicken-wire and, next to the lake, tiny silver fish
strung horizontally through their middles with string and hung to dry on a line
like rows of metallic windchimes.
We were racing the sunset and the sunset won so my first view of
the wall was in silhouette, an irregular line along the mountain ridge that
folded in close to the valleys but forever stretched on toward the desert of
Mongolia.
Watchtowers appeared regularly along the wall in intervals as it
twisted off into the distance and overwhelmed me with the enormity of the
effort that must have been required over the years to create it. For the first
time I thought about the carriers of the stone to the ridge, the strength
required, the ingenuity, the tumbles and falls of people and stone back to the
bottom, the injuries and deaths and the constant toiling. That this human-made
dinosaur backbone rolled on for 4000 miles was simply unimaginable.
We pulled up to a gate and were surrounded by villagers. I'd
barely seen the low brick structures at the foot of the mountain. I sat
shivering in the fading light while the Chinese speakers in the group
negotiated with the villagers in what still sounded to me like random nasal
howling spiked with laughing, fake refusals, hand waving, more laughter, and
more shouting. I could make nothing of it at all, not from English, nor French,
nor from the little German and Dutch I knew. Though I’d studied basic Mandarin
before I left on this trip, now I recognized only the words for thank you.
The whole deal ended up costing about $16 for all 14 of us, an
all-inclusive package of admission to the wall and permission to camp on it,
portage of our things up the mountain, a boiled egg breakfast at dawn, and a
promise from them to leave us alone and save the souvenir-hawking until
morning. It was a deal both sides quietly laughed about, each party certain that
the other came from the stupidest part of their country.
We hiked up to the wall. I imagined we would pitch our tents on the
ground at the foot of it but I followed the group into a watchtower and up its staircase
to the wide, flat top of it. We pitched our tents and settled in just in time
to witness the full autumn moon rise over Mongolia.
As the rest of the group went about making dinner—a weird
combination of American, European and Chinese fare—I stood on the wall looking
around at the countryside in what can only be described as astonishment. I’d
really had no idea. And yeah, I could do this, I thought. Cities are horrible to
ride in, as they are all over the world, but the countryside—I had not imagined
such a vast, uninhabited spaces existed here, I had not imagined that China
would be so beautiful.
I’d done my research about the wall, though, and the residents
told me more. Our our campsite was atop just one of the 90 watch towers on this
thirteen-kilometer stretch of wall at Jinsanling, a section that runs through
mountain peaks for 7.5 kilometers from Gubeikou Pass—which used to be a
strategic outpost between Inner Mongolia and Northeastern China. The
watchtowers on this section are built at 100-meter intervals, except where the
terrain is more complicated, and then they are placed even closer because defense
so close to the capital needed to be strong. During the Ming dynasty the
Mongols had finally been ousted, but guards watched for them from the round
watch bays—unique to this section of the wall. Horribly, the warning signal for
approaching Mongols was blue smoke made by burning wolves paws.
It was a clear, chilly night and the stars sparkled. The Jiang’s
stirfried lamb, onions, and green peppers on a flat-topped grill and offered it
from white paper plates studded with dollops of plum sauce. Rick contributed
chicken wings and a canister of Pringle's chips, John and Susan had brought
barbecued ribs, Walter and Ursula grilled hot dogs.
After dinner, I fished through my backpack for the bottle of aged
Kentucky bourbon I’d wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap amongst the camera
equipment, and put my hand on a velvet bag. It was a selection of duty-free
Ghirardelli Chocolate bars from San Francisco I'd forgotten I'd bought, to go
with the bourbon. These treasures were met with delight by the others and we
sat sipping the whisky until the full moon burst over a far-away mountain to
wash us in its cold white light and send our thoughts centuries through to the
past.
Between swigs of bourbon there were silences filled with the
awareness of a place that holds generations of souls. Soldiers and slaves,
peasants and princes. A place of nightmares and sweet dreams.
Sleep came and went. In the middle of the night I crawled out
into a moonlight so bright that the zigzag of wall took my imagination to the
Gobi Desert where it ended abruptly in the sand. But here there as a watchtower
at the apex of each hill, a square silhouette in the weak gray light. To reach
the last one I would have to walk for hours in the night, through dark passages
under each watchtower and along crumbling stones in a still cold air as dry as
ice.
My boot heels clicked against the pounded earth surface and the
sound seemed to echo all the way into the craters on the moon. I continued
walking until I could no longer see the tents and then I noticed the perfect
silence. No nightbirds. No scurrying rodents. Where are the animals in China?
In the morning I walked the wall again to take a photo of our
tents. From my vantage point I saw the villagers approaching, bearing the
promised boiled eggs and souvenirs, and I walked back to meet them.
Adorned in "I Climbed the Great Wall" sweatshirts they
gently pressed me to buy gourds inked with romantic scenes of ancient China,
and cheap ceramic necklaces scratched with symbols of long life and happiness.
I studied the gourds for a long time, selecting them carefully. The scenes were
mythological: a long-eared pig-man dancing with abandon, an offering to a
goddess, two women in robes, their black hair piled meticulously into three
bundles, one atop the other. One gourd with a handle was badly etched but
unique in shape. I shook it, laughed, and returned it to the bag, much to the
amusement of the toothless old woman.
In the end I bought more than a dozen each of the necklaces and
gourds and the old toothless woman smiled and rattled the gourd I’d put back at
my ear, then pushes it into my hands. Yes, I paid too much.
I returned the next spring for a journey planned from Beijing to
Burma. But in four months, I never got out of North China. The roads were bad
or non-existent, and the maps were wrong. I got tired and lonely and came home,
not to return for a decade.
What a difference a decade makes! There were roads and cars—many
of them. And surprisingly, I had companions, two women on two motorcycles just
like the one I rode. We swooshed out of Beijing north and then west, and
experienced all the extremes that define China today.
So this is the story of two journeys to China, one made alone,
without companions, and mostly lost, and another ten years later, with
companions, and mostly lost, illegal, and broke down…
——–
Read preview chapters of the book free online or download the documents here.
I have to wonder what this trip would look like today. China has come along way since 97. No doubt you would cross paths with a lot more American bikes, with probably non-american riders in the seat. No doubt you also see a lot of Chinese riding scooters and wearing leathers.