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.
“We were served jasmine tea with rosebuds….”
CK, this is the classic!
Share more photos! More of you, more of you girlfriends, more of the bikes and you, more more more !!! You’ll need them later.
xo,
Lyn