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.