China Photos

The largest of the three pits containing the Terracotta warriors outside Xian and the nearby museum explaining their history












My friend Julie-Ann under a billboard that reads "Only socialism can change China. Only reform and open door policy can develop China."

Xian Day Three

[11/4/09. Posted by JP for GC. China blocks blogs.]

Friends: Even though Xian is another Chinese boom town with bustle and construction on every front, it may be the only city of its size, in the four million range, without towering skyscrapers sprouting all over, as it is intent on preserving a semblance of its heritage and not upstaging many of its ancient relics.

Beijing ranks as China's premier tourist destination with the Forbidden City and nearby Great Wall and Tienanmen Square and other attractions, but Xian ranks just behind with its Terracotta Warriors and intact old city wall and moat and other centuries old sites. Since China has designs on becoming the world's top tourist destination within the next decade or two, it shows occasional restraint, as it hurtles forward industrially, out of consideration for those tourist hoards to come.

Here in Xian the government has restricted the height of buildings so they don't dominate the skyline, allowing it to somewhat retain a feel of being less than a commercial and industrial juggernaut. It has an abundance of open and green spaces, around the walls and in a handful of parks, including a vast concrete park/plaza comparable in size to Tienanmen Square containing the towering Big Goose Pagoda built in 652. There are arcades of the plane trees that are so ubiquitous throughout France, lining boulevards and parks. I'd find Xian agreeable even if I weren't staying with such a great friend who would brighten any place she happened to be.

Julie-Ann is looking after me so well I gave in to her insistence that I see a dentist to look at a tooth I cracked a couple of weeks ago restricting my chewing to one side of my mouth. I have been coping just fine, though I have to be painfully careful not to bite down on that suspect tooth.

She hadn't needed a dentist in the six months she's been in Xian, but there was one just around the corner from her apartment who looked respectable enough. We stopped in this morning on her way to work. The younger of the two dentists was able to put me immediately into his chair. Julie-Ann stood chair-side like an able assistant providing translation.

A quick probe of the tooth revealed that it was so loose that it needed to be extracted. That's exactly what I feared. After some minor preparation he dove in with his forceps. As he pulled he discovered it was so loose because it had fractured just above the root. He broke the remainder off with a minimum of effort and pain. Leaving the root, he said, was my good fortune, as it could be built on. His fee, thirty yuan, even less than the $7 Stephen, who I will be soon meeting up with, recently paid in India to have a cavity filled.

It is a relief not to have to pay attention now when I chew. It is just one of the many things I can thank Julie-Ann for. I will be sorry to say goodbye tomorrow, but leave I must, as I have a much-anticipated rendezvous with Stephen fast approaching. We are both approximately 600 miles from Wuhan, I to the north and west, Stephen from the south and west, having just crossed into China from Vietnam several days ago. Our tentative meeting point is one of the eight McDonald's in the big city of Wuhan at noon on November 16.

Meeting that deadline and finding that McDonald's will be a challenge, maybe not quite as great as putting a man on the moon, but it might be cycling's equivalent. Wuhan is another huge city of some five million. It straddles the Yangzi River. There are more variables at play than either of us can predict or be aware of--the weather, road conditions, the mostly indecipherable road signs, mechanicals, our strength and health, and so forth. We'll be in contact in the days to come via email following each other's progress. We both would like to be the first there, hopefully arriving a day early so we're not under any last minute frantic pressure, and also to allow us to explore Wuhan a bit and get a breather before our final push to Beijing, 770 miles due north.

I am as excited and eager to meet up with Stephen as I was to see Julie-Ann, though in a different manner. Stephen will be thirteen months and one day into his round the world bicycle trip the day we come together. He set out from Telluride, high in Colorado's Rockies, where we met at the film festival. This is an adventure for him, but also a means to raise awareness of epilepsy (http://seizetheworld.com). Stephen has a mild case suffering usually just one seizure a year. He offers his trip as proof that such a condition shouldn't keep one house-bound or prevent one from leading a normal life.

He has suffered two seizures on this trip, the last a couple weeks ago in Laos. As long as he keeps up with his medication he's fine. Both instances he managed to overlook his daily dose. The other seizure occurred in Portugal just after his trans-Atlantic flight. Both occurred while he was on his bicycle. Both times he woke up with good Samaritans surrounding him.

Although I have kept up with his travels through his website and personnel emails and his parents, who are also Tellurideans and good friends, he has much much more to fill me in on. I anticipate we'll be gabbing away non-stop for days, debriefing one another as only fellow touring cyclists can. He has biked many of the same roads I have in the U.S., Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Israel, Egypt, India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and more. It will be glorious for both of us to have such a knowing audience for our impressions and experiences. As someone in his 20s, he's much more Internet savvy than I am. I may at last learn the ease of posting photos with my writing. He has many sensational ones on his website.

Later, George

Terracotta Warriors of Xian

[11/3/09. Posted by JP for GC.]

Friends: Visiting the Army of Terracotta Warriors on the outskirts of Xian was an all-day affair and well worth it. It was a two-hour bike ride out, slightly uphill and with slight complications going astray as usual, but just an hour-and-a-half ride back. I spent three hours at the site. The only time I was off my feet all day was for an introductory forty-minute movie narrating the utterly boggling story of their history and discovery. The film included footage of visits to the site by Queen Elizabeth and Ronald Reagan and other world leaders.

The farmer who found them in 1974 was also in the film. He was drilling a well that summer, as it was exceptionally dry, and unearthed some fragments of a sculpture. It led to one of the greatest archaeological finds ever. There were three mausoleum pits in the immediate vicinity interred sixteen feet below ground level containing over 8,000 sculptures of life-sized horses and warriors. The largest of the three pits was longer than two football fields with over 6,000 of the sculpted soldiers, each with distinct, unique features.

They were an army meant to protect the mausoleum of emperor Qin Shihuang half a mile away. It is believed that he began work on the project when he became emperor at the age of thirteen over 2,200 years ago. It took decades to construct. Some of the workers must have been criminals, as many instruments of torture were found at the stonemason's workshop.

The three pits of warriors are within a short lob of each other. Magnificent stone buildings have recently been erected over each of them, protecting them from the elements, but also making it almost too dark for photos. There is also a first-rate museum in another monumental building giving even more background information on the period. The entire complex is another exceptional example of what the Chinese are and were capable of. They do not hide their pride. Over 40,000 bronze weapons were buried in the pits. Some of them were chrome-plated to prevent erosion. An exhibit says the process wasn't rediscovered until 1937 by the Germans and the Americans in 1950.

After the army of warriors was completed, a wooden ceiling was placed over them and then covered with dirt. Laying eyes on the excavated rows and rows of life-like soldiers, each with individual features, some gentle and some harsh, some serene and some serious, is a staggering experience. Its almost beyond fathoming to consider all the effort that went into every aspect of the project and  the audacity of it. It makes the Taj Mahal and all other mausoleums seem pathetically puny by comparison.

There has been enough research done on everything unearthed to determine there were seven generals among the the 8,000 soldiers. In pit number two, about half the size of the largest, there were 172 archers, 116 cavalrymen with horses and assorted infantry men and war chariots. The figures are all sandy-colored now, but originally they were painted to look real enough to be inhaling and exhaling. The excavation continues. Over 600 archaeological sites have been discovered in an area of 56 kilometers.

There were crowds of tourists, including my first glimpse of Westerners since I left Hong Kong almost a month ago. The first I saw was a young woman who refused the flier a young woman was passing out promoting a nearby Subway sandwich shop. She snarled at her, "Subway is horrible." It was one of two American franchises on the site. The other was Kentucky Friend Chicken. They were almost lost though among the scores of souvenir stands and shops and restaurants. Subway is just gaining a foothold in China. There are KFCs everywhere, over a thousand, with a new one opening every three days. Sales people at the shops called out "hello" as I passed. Some thrust books in English at me. There were also quite a few officially garbed guides offering their services, though once I declined one, the others let me be.

I arrived back in Xian just before dark, somewhat delayed by the rush hour traffic. I met up with Julie-Ann at the performance theater where she works as a sales manager. She focuses her attention on local Japanese and Korean companies trying to convince them to bring clients to their dinner-and-dance shows.

Its not the most satisfying job for someone with a degree in film who would rather be working in that field, but she is doing well. She has matured magnificently from the young, slightly gawky student I first knew, into a most assured and polished young woman while retaining her youthful glee and zest. It has been a joy being with her. She once commented that she hoped one day she could make me proud of her. That she has.

We had a marvelous dinner last night at a hotpot restaurant so large we got lost trying to leave it. It was so popular we had to wait twenty minutes to be seated. Each table had a recession in the middle with a burner for a large tureen of soup that is kept at a low boil. One chooses a base soup and then various raw ingredients to put in it.

A small army of young women in matching green tops and all wearing head sets were continually on the go, making sure everyone was kept well supplied with whatever they needed. Moments after Julie ordered our soup it appeared before us even as the waitress was still taking our order of various raw potatoes and mushrooms and vegetables and dumplings and noodles to cook up in our tureen. There was also a bar with an array of sauces for us to combine as our imagination saw fit. Many of the people seated around us wore red aprons to protect their clothes as they slurped.

We ate and ate. It was the most stuffed I have been in a long time. We ordered way too much, so we returned with three bags of raw ingredients for tonight's dinner. Julie-Ann's Thai neighbor, who is in charge of food and beverages at her theater, cooked them up for an equally satisfying dinner this evening. These travels keep getting better and better.

Later, George

Xian Day One

[11/2/09. Posted by JP for GC.]

Friends: My trip is complete. Not only have I met up with Julie-Ann, but I got in some ping pong with a couple of gents this afternoon and even managed to win a point or two. As I was cycling the ten-mile perimeter of the towering old city walls, I stopped to take a picture of a man and a woman at play at the Chinese national sport on one of the many outdoor tables in the strip of a park between the walls and its accompanying moat. After I put down my camera the woman smiled at me and offered her paddle. I initially declined, but she insisted.

As a young teen, I had been a summer camp champion, but my game was horrendously rusty. It had been three-and-a-half years since I last played, and years since I had last taken the game seriously. I remember that last time well, as it was with Craig on the cement outdoor table in his small French village.

My preference is a volleying, rather than slamming game, standing back from the table, scooping balls up and lobbing them back, so my timing and coordination didn't need to be precise. I whiffed on my first attempt, but I quickly regained a bit of form and could somewhat hold my own.

After several minutes, my partner offered his paddle to a friend who had been watching. He was a bit more aggressive, but still a decent match. After a few points he took off his jacked and rolled up his sleeves. My heart rate was beginning to accelerate from all the bounding about. This was getting infectious. The last time I played with Craig we couldn't stop playing until it was too dark to continue. My legs were sore the next day. I wasn't going to let that happen this time.

After a few more minutes I put ball and paddle on the table and bowed my thanks. All three gave me a nod in return and a thumbs up. That gesture is so universal in China that Lonely Planet even mentions it. I had been receiving plenty of them out car windows and from passing cyclists and people who learned how far I had biked and each cyclist who had their photo taken with me yesterday.

I've had a pleasant leisurely day putting in about 25 miles on the bike exploring Xian. I bought the two Chinese English newspapers this morning and would have sat in various parks to read them, but it was too cold to sit for long, even in the direct sun light, so a thorough reading of them awaits me. A cold wave has hit the entire country. It snowed in Beijing yesterday, two months earlier than last year.

When Julie-Ann and I left her apartment this morning we had to go back in for wool hats and an extra layer. The high today was a predicted 57, sixteen degrees below normal. Still, it wasn't too cold, bundled up as we were, to have breakfast sitting at a small table beside a sidewalk vendor of hot bean curd soup just a couple blocks from Julie-Ann's office.

Julie-Ann pointed out a billboard behind us that said, "Only socialism can change China. Only reform and open door policy can develop China ." She said the many billboards I've seen with just Chinese characters and no product are all such slogans. They are about as antiquated though as Ho Chi Minh's museum in Hanoi extolling the virtues of communism. A story in one of today's newspapers wrote about all the people getting rich in Shenzhen in the mobile phone market in an environment of "anything-goes capitalism that has spread throughout this nominally capitalist country." Wealth is now extolled as a virtue. No one seems bashful about getting rich and living the good materialistic life.

There are still a fair number of bicyclists in Xian, but they are a distinct minority. Several of the places I stopped to visit had parking areas for bicycles and motorcycles for half a yuan. The bicycles were outnumbered nearly ten to one.

Tomorrow I'll bicycle out to the Terracotta warriors. Now it's off to dinner with Julie-Ann and a stroll around a huge shopping mall that has an accompanying Wal-Mart and McDonald's. We were up to one a.m. last night catching up. We could be in danger of that again tonight.

Later, George

Xian (arrived)

[11/1/09. Posted by JP for GC.]

Friends: Good fortune continues to stalk me like an unrelenting predator. As I approached the sprawling city of Xian, population over four million, a couple of fifty-year old cyclists wearing helmets out for an afternoon ride, one riding a fold-up bike and the other a mountain bike, tagged along with me for a few miles, exchanging nothing more than hellos and smiles and a confirmation that I was still on track for Xian central.

When we came to a light and the guys indicated they were turning, I hurriedly pulled out the sheet of paper I had written the hotel where I was to meet Julie-Ann. They indicated it was the direction they were headed and to follow along. We rode for another twenty minutes continuing on main arteries making a couple of turns. It was too much to hope for that they would take me all the way to the hotel. My luck didn't extend that far, but when they stopped again indicating they were turning, they drew me a map, marking that it was three kilometers further on the road we were on and then a left turn at a round-about that I couldn't miss and another two kilometers with the hotel on the left side of the road.

After three kilometers I started asking again, fearing I might have missed the turn. It was one kilometer further. I turned onto another wide thoroughfare with separate bike lanes on both sides of the street blocked from the highway by planters, making it difficult to see businesses on the opposite side of the highway, where the hotel was to be.

After a kilometer I spotted a baked sweet potato salesman along the road, one of my treats. I stopped for a couple, as I was famished, not having had a proper meal all day in over 65 miles pushing it to make it to Xian with adequate light to navigate the metropolis. It was closing in on five pm, so it was well that I had only had nibbles all day. I showed the potato man my piece of paper with the hotel on it, which the bicyclists had also written in Chinese. He pointed up ahead across the highway beyond an overpass and there was the hotel. And then a block beyond the hotel, I found this Internet place. I can hang out here until 7:30 or so and then go meet Julie-Ann at the hotel. It was too easy to be true.

The gentlemen cyclists weren't the only cyclists who came to my aid today. I met six others out for a Sunday ride in the mountains at the summit of a high, high pass after a steep eleven-mile climb to start my day. I had stopped to put on my vest and wind-breaker and gloves for the cold descent when I saw these six cyclists coming up from the other side. They were as astonished and thrilled to see me as I was to see them. They were accompanied by two car loads of friends who had come to pay their respects to a Buddhist pagoda that was under construction at the summit. Their friends all had cameras, real ones with big lenses. They immediately went berserk snapping me from every angle as the cyclists took turns for a photo op with me. It was so crazy I pulled out my camera to take a picture of them taking pictures of me. They laughed and obliged.

Only one of them spoke English. He was wearing a blue jersey with the official Tour de France logo on it. It was a product I had never seen on sale at the Tour. It was another of those notorious Chinese knock-offs. I pulled out my photo of me with the Tour Devil. He and several of the others immediately recognized him. They were the first people in China who had. It has caused quite a bit of befuddlement from others wondering who that horned character holding a pitchfork might be.

I could only guess how much further it was to Xian from there, since my map doesn't give distances, just a small scale, which of course doesn't take into account climbs and squiggles in the road. I was hoping I was within eighty kilometers. They said it was sixty but fifteen of those were another climb after this sixteen kilometer descent to highway 210. That wasn't good news at all, but it was a relief knowing how long that climb would be once I started it. I would have been distraught no end that I had to endure another indeterminate killer climb when I thought I had finished off my climbing for the day. With plenty of warning, knowing what I was in for, I could mentally prepare for the challenge ahead. And it was a good one, much much steeper than I would have preferred.

When I started this morning's climb I was hoping it wouldn't be more than three or four miles, just long enough for me to fully warm up after my coldest night of the trip, the first time I had to zip up my sleeping bag. As my wake-up climb went on and on, my only consolation was I'd have an even longer descent, and it was allowing the temperatures to warm before I commenced the plunge.

After the second ten-mile climb of the day I had a stupendous twenty-mile descent to the Xian valley floor. But it was another fifteen miles to Xian, fifteen miles those cyclists didn't tell me about. I kept nibbling on various biscuits and crackers and cookies I had in reserve. I had some noodles left over from dinner last night that I also munched on when I took breaks during the climbs. I'd also downed a 900 calorie bottle of a dairy drink, a recent discovery that has provided me with high-octane fuel.

I didn't know how high I'd climbed, as the battery went dead on my altimeter-watch a couple days ago, a loss even worse than being without my kickstand. I'm hoping I can replace it here in Xian, but if I'm unable to it's no longer much of an issue as the mountainous terrain is pretty much behind me.

It would have been nice to know how much climbing I did the past two days, as I made a gradual ascent of nearly 200 miles through two spectacular gorges. It has been cycling and scenery of the highest order with so little traffic that if I had been playing that game of making deals with myself allowing a stop for a rest only after a car passed me from both directions, I would have had a long, long time between rests.

I have penetrated far enough north that yesterday for the first time I could feel a decided nip in the air. Locals in the small towns I passed were sitting out in front of their homes or businesses around small fires in a large pan. The scenery has been brightened by a yellow and red tint in the mountainside foliage and the flight of falling leaves.

I've had to wear a vest and jacket the past two days, but still cling to my shorts, saving my super-deluxe team Garmin tights for more extreme cold. I know those tights with logos on the side will cause a sensation, even more than my bare legs in these chilly temperatures. None of the other cyclists I saw today were in shorts or bicycling gear other than helmets and gloves.

Some of the chill can be attributed to the altitude. If I only knew how high I camped at last night, and what altitude I'm back at now, I would know better, though I can say it is much warmer here in Xian than I've experienced the past two days.

Almost as dramatic as the scenery through the gorges was another Chinese engineering marvel, a divided four-lane superhighway paralleling the old two-lane highway that was my route. It was built largely on stilts above the river with countless tunnels barreling through the mountainsides that my road wound around and over. There were usually two tunnels, one for each direction of traffic. The tunnels were frequently 100 feet or more above the river with the stilts slightly increasing in height to the tunnel entrances. The precision and imagination in the road's construction was boggling, almost an exercise in proving it was possible to build such a road.

And there was no more traffic on that highway than on mine. It was another of the many roads recently constructed here in anticipation of the automobile-loving hoards to come. The new highway bypassed the two huge climbs I had to make. The new direct road was fifty kilometers to Xian. The old road was 110.

So now I have a couple days of R&R to look forward to with Julie-Ann. The renowned Terracotta warriors are twenty miles outside of Xian. There are other sites to see and a museum or two. The heart of Xian is surrounded by the most intact city wall in all of China, which can be bicycled. And with luck we'll find a movie to go to.

Later, George

Xungang, China (road crew lunch)

[10/30/09. Posted by JP for GC. China blocks blogs.]

Friends: I'm closing in on Xian and Julie-Ann, about 150 miles to the north. We are now in the same province, Shaanxi, the fourth of China's 22 I have traveled through, along with  Guangdong, Hunan and Hubei. The province of Inner Mongolia lies to the north and beyond that Mongolia. They'll have to wait for another trip as from Xian I'll be heading east for the first time towards highway 107 to meet up with Stephen and then on to Beijing.

Julie-Ann has to fly to Hong Kong this weekend for business, so I will time my arrival for Sunday afternoon. It is a three-hour flight from Xian to Hong Kong, or a three-week 1,600 mile bike ride. Julie-Ann returns around seven p.m. We will meet at a hotel five minutes from her apartment. I can't wait.

I have visited many friends over the years in distant lands--Thailand, Australia, Bolivia, South Africa, Ecuador, France, Italy, Israel--but never have I so looked forward to meeting up with an old friend in their home, or adopted, country, not that any of the others were lesser friends, just that it will be particularly exhilarating to have a safe haven with a long-time friend after having faced so many challenges these past weeks.

Its been five years since we last saw each other. I visited her in Manhattan just before she left the U.S. to return to her home in Malaysia to work for a travel agency. She had been working for Empire Pictures in New York, a film distributor, when her U.S. work visa expired. We met in Chicago five years before that when we were both volunteering for Chicago's International Film Festival. Julie-Ann was a film major at Columbia college. A couple years later after she served an internship in LA, when she returned to Chicago she didn't have a place to stay. I had a spare bedroom in my apartment so we were roommates her final fall quarter in Chicago.

Since she left the U.S. she has worked in Bangkok for a year and the past three years in China in three different cities. Although we talk and email, we have much to catch up on, and she has much to explain to me about what I have experienced here in China.

Initially I thought I'd be approaching Xian from the east on highway 312, but I missed a turn leaving Fan Xian two days ago. Rather than proceeding on the more significant highway 209, I ended up on a lesser highway, 301. It still led to Xian, but via a more complicated route into a more isolated region that could possibly take me into another Forbidden Zone. When I see a police car or officer now, I suffer a slight heart palpitation, though nothing like the near paralysis I felt in South Africa when I'd see sinister characters ahead on the road in the days after my assault there.

I thought I was in trouble yesterday when a police car pulled over after it passed me and four officers hopped out of the car. But they all held cameras, including one with a video camera, and they just wanted to take my picture as I passed. Cell phones with cameras are a common accessory here. I felt like a Tour de France stage winner when eight or nine truck drivers, who were having their trucks filled with gravel, surrounded me at small restaurant and snapped away. One even grabbed me by the arm, urging me to stand up, so he could include a sign in the background with the photo.

I continue to be accorded exceptional gestures of generosity and hospitality to a degree beyond anything I've experienced. Not a day passes that I'm not given a gift of some sort. Usually its food, but a couple of days ago a police officer gave me a pen when he noticed the Bic I pulled out of my pocket to jot a note was a bit battered.

With every patch of land seemingly occupied by a residence or a business or under cultivation, it hasn't been easy to find a place to stop and take a mid-morning or mid-afternoon break along the road or in a town between meals. Urban parks or open spaces are almost non-existent. I most often simply plop down at a gas station after using their toilet and wash basin. I don't dare linger anywhere near their toilets though as their stench can be staggering. As Lonely Planet says, few public toilets in China have been cleaned since the Tang Dynasty. The toilets are all of the squat variety, with an occasional urinal.

Yesterday morning I welcomed a gated facility in a quiet rural area that appeared to be deserted.  It seemed a pleasant spot to take a break where I didn't have to worry about being interrupted. I sat back against its roadside wall and nibbled on some food and read my book. About ten minutes after I plopped down two motorcycles bearing four women pulled up to the gate interrupting my peace. One of the women buoyantly bounded over to me, pointed at my water bottle and gestured for me to follow her inside so she could fill it.

She had that typical, unabashed Chinese curious nature and peered closer to look at what I was eating. It was spongy flour balls, bigger than a golf ball, but smaller than a baseball, cheap market food I had bought that morning after my breakfast of noodles. She gave my food a look of disapproval and then made a scooping gesture towards her mouth, implying if I followed her she could offer me better food than that. All day I'm playing charades with the locals.

The women were all wearing neon-orange safety vests. They were members of a road crew and this was their base. They were returning for lunch. My lead benefactor went into the building and returned with a pot, which she filled at an outdoor faucet. Five minutes later she filled my water bottles with boiling water, a favor I'm often granted at cafes.

Two more motorcycles pulled into the grounds, one with two more women and the other with a guy. The other women were outside washing and cutting an array of vegetables. They were preparing lunch from scratch. When I realized it would be a while, I took the opportunity to work on my bike. My double-pronged kickstand had loosened up a couple days ago. I had been unable to tighten it, as the threads had become clogged with muck. It was more than a simple operation, so I had delayed tending to it, simply tying the kickstand in place so it wouldn't swing into my rear wheel. I was able to thoroughly clean it and the rest of my bike. I discovered a woefully loose spoke on my rear wheel, though it hadn't effected its trueness. While I worked, the guy watched attentively and kept a cup of hot water filled for me.

When I finished my chores he drew a picture of a Chinese flag, indicating he wanted me to draw mine. I drew the stars and stripes and then pulled out my Chinese atlas that included a world map so I could point out the US. That brought all the women for a look. I still had a brochure from Mao's birthplace that I shared as well. One of the woman wrote the numbers 30 and 40 and 50 on a piece of paper and then pointed at me. I guessed she wanted to know my age. I wrote down 58 and then pointed at her. She wrote 38. I showed them The Reader story and pointed at the number 55 in it, my age when that story was published.

The only English any of them spoke the whole time was mid-way through lunch when one of the women rattled off a quick "a-b-c-d-e-f-g" to the amusement of all, including me. Eight of us sat on stools at a round table just big enough to accommodate us all. In front of each of us was a small heaping bowl of rice. In the middle of the table were four large bowls of freshly prepared vegetables. One had strips of chicken. The two women beside me took turns topping my bowl of rice with items from the bowls, almost faster than I could keep up.

Everyone held their bowl of rice in one hand and chopsticks in the other, diving into those four bowls in the middle. It was an eating frenzy that left me way behind. Everyone else retreated to the kitchen for a second bowl of rice, while I barely finished my own in the fifteen or twenty minutes of our feast. Needless to say, it was my best meal of the trip. I knew I couldn't possibly have a more authentic Chinese eating experience than this.

When I asked to take a group photo afterward, they all proudly put their orange vests and orange hats on for the photo.

Later, George

Fun Xian, China

[10/28/09. Posted by JP for GC. China blocks blogs.]

Friends: Day twenty in China and I have yet to need my sun glasses or sun block, as there is such a continual haze of dust and smoke and pollution clouding the air from all the industry and construction, that even on clear days, the sun's rays are blunted.

The entire country is a construction zone with buildings going up everywhere and roads being widened or repaved or freshly laid out. Rivers are being plundered of gravel. The sound of gravel being dumped into trucks is even more ubiquitous than fireworks going off.

Brick factories abound. Passing through even small towns I see bags of cement stacked high outside of stores for sale. It is no surprise that China is presently responsible for fifty per cent of the planet's annual consumption of concrete. Even in rural areas of minimal traffic, first-rate pavement is being laid.

I'm generally on the road by seven a.m., trying to maximize the dwindling daylight, now down to less than twelve hours a day, and also to evacuate my campsite before someone stumbles upon it. I am far from being an early bird though. Most stores in towns large and small are already open and the streets are thick with people bustling about.

As night closes in around six the industriousness of the populace hasn't slackened. Banks and all other businesses are still open. Road crews are still laboring away and people in the fields just beginning to call it quits. Only in the last fifteen minutes before dark does traffic thin enough that I can duck off into a wild patch to camp with relative confidence that I haven't been spotted.

I've had to scratch and claw and be creative and rely on all my years of expertise and ingenuity in wild camping to find places to camp here when none seem likely, often having to strip my bike of its gear and make three trips with it and my bike to reach some hidden nook across a gully or up a steep embankment or through thick brush that leaves my bare legs bleeding. Darkness has been my best friend in securing a place that would otherwise be visible in daylight.

There are no forests other than on on steep hillsides. Most of the fruit orchards are a small cluster of trees sandwiched between homes. There are no open, unsettled places beyond the towns and cities, just small land holdings. Even on my 125-mile stretch through the mountains on a road I had virtually to myself, all was settled and being farmed and I had to wait until dark to camp. But I know a place to pitch my tent awaits me, though not always what I'd prefer or as easy to come by as in every other country I have traveled other than Ecuador, another country of mostly small land holdings. There have been occasions when I would have liked to have quit a little early, but that is rarely feasible here.

I had the opportunity again last night to stay in a hotel when with half an hour before dark I suffered the rare occurrence of throwing the chain off my front chain rings with a sloppy shift as I reached the summit of a climb. Usually when the chain comes off it is when I'm shifting from a larger ring to the smallest. This was the first time it had happened on this trip when I was going in the opposite direction, and I do not know why.

It happened right in front of a hotel, though I didn't recognize it as a hotel. It was only when one of the people lingering in the parking lot who descended on me put his hands together as if in prayer and then placed them beside his tilted head indicating sleep while pointing at the building did I realize what it was. Moments later a woman said "100 yuan."

Since I'd paid forty the night before and the young man who chased me down on his bike a few days ago and wrote out hotel for me said I could generally find hotels for thirty yuan, I countered with thirty. The Lonely Planet guide book emphasizes over and over the need to bargain and haggle hard when it comes to staying at hotels other than the most basic and bare bones. The woman didn't react to my thirty, so I wrote it out for her. At that she shook her head.

Then I bent to put the chain back in place. When I stood up the woman tapped me on the shoulder and held up all five digits on one hand and made a zero with her other. If I hadn't stayed in a hotel the night before I would have countered with forty and accepted whatever the verdict was. She shook her head, so on I went. When I turned a bend and saw a sprawling city with skyscrapers I feared I might have made a mistake and was ignoring those unexplained forces that look out for my interests and come to my rescue when my predicament seems dire. Perhaps they were responsible for the unlikely throwing of my chain in front of that hotel. Or then again it might have been their opposite trying to tempt me.

I trusted my instincts and sped on, taking joy in floating along on my bike through another Chinese urban maelstrom, while keeping the faith that I'd find a place to camp and be happy about it. It took me fifteen minutes to get through this city and another ten minutes before I spotted some open space that I might retreat to. There was a cluster of trees up against the wall of a building on one side of the road that was a possibility or I could try the opposite side of the road up an embankment towards some orange trees. Since there was a truck stalled in the road near the trees that could attract people, I hoped the embankment worked out. I climbed up to scout it out and discovered a nice little ledge that I could set up my tent on that wasn't visible to passing traffic. It was one of the flattest sites I'd had, sparing me the worry of knocking over my cup of noodles while I waited for the cold water to soften them up. It was another great night in the tent.

Later, George