Thursday 31 December 2009

A trip to Poyang Lake

Our journey is not all about cycling. We went out of our way to the city of Nanchang so that I could visit Poyang Lake to look for the rare Siberian cranes that spend the winter there.

I had failed to find a guide, so equipped with our road map I set out on foot from our hotel across Nanchang to the bus station. I queued in line to buy a ticket and when I reached the window I showed the lady my map and pointed to the town I wanted to go to. Her vociferous head shaking, arm waving and chinese indicated that I was in the wrong place. It was dawning on me that I had no "plan-B" when I was rescued by two female students who spoke some english - apparently I had to catch a bus from the road opposite. The students kindly took me there and told me to stay on the bus until it terminated - however their conversation with the driver, which involved more vociferous head shaking, arm waving and me being trapped in the closing doors suggested something was amis, as did the 1 yuan (10p) fare. The bus started off in the right direction but after 15 minutes went the wrong way into a district of wholesale markets and stopped. I had no idea where the hell I was, which must have been obvious by the look on my face as some of my fellow passengers sought to help. I pointed at my map and there was some discussion, following which they indicated I should get into the trailer of a motorbike cart (these are a bit like a Robin Reliant van without a chassis and mainly used for transporting goods). I did as suggested and cruised several blocks of the wholesale markets much to the amusement and disbelief of onlookers. I was deposited at a different bus station, queued in line again and pointed at my map and this time got a ticket. For the journey I bought what looked like a blueberry muffin but once unwrapped was in fact a dry bun with jam on top. I nipped to the toilet before boarding the bus - as I stood at the urinal I noticed that along from me a man was squatting, pants down, shitting in the trough.

The bus ride was fairly uneventful. At one point the sun broke through the grey smog and the passengers closed all the curtains, enabling me to focus my full attention on the drivers attempts to kill us. Eventually we arrived in the town that I didn't know the name of and enquired if there was a bus to Wu Cheng village. A lady drew me a map of how to find the bus but it resembled a chinese character so I took up the offer of a motorbike taxi, who took me to a mechanics yard across the street where two battered, filthy minibuses were being taken apart for scrap - or so I thought until it was indicated that this was the bus to Wu Cheng. I settled in for a long wait.

Next to me an old lady was dozing with her young grandson in her lap. The child was wearing crotchless "porno" trousers and started weeing all over the lady, which woke her up enabling her to direct the piss onto the bus floor. After an hour all the moveable wooden benches and stools that constituted seats were full, but we didn't leave until we were packed in like sardines - and only once we had reached a bumpy, unsurfaced road did the conductor attempt to collect fares. Ten minutes into the journey and the lady in the seat in front of me stuck her head out of the window and vomited down the side of the bus. She was sick the remainder of the journey and I did my best to avoid the strands of puke being blown back into the bus. We passed a sea of fluffy cotton plants and stopped at the edge of Wu Cheng.

I pointed at my phrasebook for directions to the wildlife reserve office and set off on foot. It was further than I thought and I was tiring of being stared at so I took up the offer of a motorbike taxi for the remainder. When we arrived at the reserve HQ it was all shuttered up, which was a major blow as I had planned to stay there the night and get them to hire me a guide and boat. I tried using my phrasebook to get information from the taxi driver but it was looking hopeless when three young science academics from a visiting university appeared. One spoke english and knew the reserve. It was a month before the cranes arrived. They arranged for the taxi driver to take me to a spot to look for birds and if necessary he would also find a family in the village who could put me up for the night.

I clung onto the back of the motorbike as we slid around on the muddy riverbank. The "ferry" across the river was full of sacks being unloaded into a waiting truck by two old men. My taxi driver went off to get his jacket and left me at the waters edge. I figured we would be waiting hours for them to unload the boat so I boarded, shouldered a sack, covering myself in smelly shrimp powder and carried it to the truck. As far as the men doing the unloading was concerned this was like a gift from heaven - they were laughing and cheering and couldn't believe their luck. I had lifted about four sacks when another boat docked alongside, which with a sinking feeling I realised was the one we were waiting for. Taxi man reappeared, we boarded, everyone had a go with my binoculars and we departed.

There was no road on the other side only a bumpy, sandy path and as we sped along it was a little bit like riding a bucking bronco. We went through a small pond at speed soaking my right leg and then through a dilapidated village with no vehicles before reaching the lake shore - a vast flat wetland receded to the smoggy horizon. For the next two hours I would use my binoculars to spot a speck in the distance and taxi man would drive us there along tiny tracks or just through the grass to get a closer look. It was fairly futile and a cold wind got up so we headed back to Wu Cheng.
There were no more buses, which was probably for the best, so I hired two blokes with a minivan to take me back to town. They spent the journey hacking up greenies and gobbing out the window, chain smoking and blasting their horn at anything that moved - the holy trinity of chinese driving. I took a bus back to Nanchang and it was dark when we arrived. I had no idea how to get back to the city centre so I boarded the first bus and hoped for the best.

Wednesday 30 December 2009

9,000 - 10,400 miles: Hanoi - Nanchang (China)

We killed a couple of weeks escaping the crushing heat of Hanoi on top of a mountain at Tam Dao and amongst the bays and pinnacles of the coast. It was a real pleasure to have the company of Gil and Stuart after so long on our own and we had a great 2 week "holiday" with them in Hanoi, Halong Bay and the misty mountains of Sapa.



After a month off the bikes we felt healthy and rested. We fitted the new tyres and leather saddles that Gil & Stuart had kindly brought with them, dusted off our steads and rolled out into the noise and chaos. Crossing the Red River we headed north out of the city and most of the morning a wind coated us with sand from construction sites. In the afternoon smiling people waved and peasants led their buffaloes through bright green paddyfields - it was such a familiar sight to us by now that I was almost sad to be leaving. The next day we passed farmers winching bamboo baskets full of custard apples down from orchards perched on limestone cliffs and we cycled up a long valley and over a pass before reaching Lang Son. The children were finally back at school, though we were surprised to see them carrying their own seats as well as their satchels! Our new saddles had crippled us and we could barely sit down so we had an enforced rest day and visited the ubiquitous limestone caves and pinnacles in this pleasant town.




It was a short ride to China and one of the most pleasant border crossings of the trip, set amongst forested hills. The Chinese immigration area was a different world - brand new glistening stone, immaculate landscaping, glass and tarmac designed to make Vietnam look like the poor country it is. We had to put all our panniers through an x-ray machine, the first time anyone had checked them since we left home. We cycled under one of China's nine famous gateways and into the Far-East. The road to Pingxiang was like a dream and in town there were proper shops and more than a whiff off modernity amongst the concrete. We hoped we had arrived in the Promised Land.


On our first night the police came to our room just as I took ill and Tracey answered their questions above the sounds of retching and defecating emanating from the bathroom. I spent the next day in bed watching CCTV9, China's english language channel for promoting China to westeners (lots of smiling Tibetans). It was restorative enough and after drinking my noodle soup out of the bowl like the locals we began the 150 miles ride north to Nanning, the capital of Guangxi province. Things started well with scenery of forested hills, birds singing and a pleasant road but the further we went the more the real China was making its presence felt - trucks and buses blasting their horns, endless monocultures of sugarcane and tree plantations, poor peasants living a third world existence and ugly, dusty towns. It was swelteringly hot and our saddle sore arses became more painful by the hour. On the second day I started to feel ill again and the final day's ride into Nanning was an endurance and one of the few days on our journey when I felt like giving up and going home.


Nanning was a shock. A large city that at first glance looked like it had been built yesterday. A gleaming 21st century city with shopping malls, tree lined avenues, cycle lanes, chinese dressed in modern western clothes whizzing around on funky electric scooters. Consumerism had come to town and the streets thronged with huge buzzing crowds beneath signs for WalMart, McDonald's, Addidas and Septwolves. It was hard to comprehend given the third world countryside we had just witnessed. It was like two different countries and easy to see what was motivating the biggest rural-urban migration in history.

We spent three days in Nanning getting well, resting our bums and getting to grips with modern chinese culture - crowds line dancing in public places, feeding golden carp in People's Park, strange drinks with jelly balls and the heady stench of fermented tofu in the night market. I was swept up in the shopping euphoria and bought some "Playboy" trainers to replace the shoes that were rotting on my feet.



The four days riding north-east from Nanning was not a highlight - busy, noisy, dusty roads with filthy thundering trucks, it was hot and humid and our arses were killing us. The scenery was unremarkable and punctuated by quarries, brick kilns and archetypal communist era factories belching pollution. The towns were grey and dreary and cities new and placeless, but the chinese people were helpful and friendly and we sought solace in cheap tasteless ice lollies. The days were still hot and humid and sleeping at work and playing cards in the shade seemed to be the national past-times.

Away from the tourist centres and major cities almost no-one in China speaks any english. This was not necessarily a new experience for us but even with a phrasebook we found it impossible to translate chinese characters or get to grips with the pronunciation of the tonal Mandarin language. Ordering food for The Vegetarian was almost impossible so Tracey took to going into the kitchen with the chef, pointing at various vegetables and miming how she wanted them cooked - unorthodox but effective. On the whole food was either excellent or too oily and bore no resemblance to Chinese food back home.
Finding a cheap hotel room wasn't straightforwards either - hotels have to be approved to accept foreigners and have to register foreign guests with the police. Many cheap hotels have not gone through this process and so we often found ourselves turned away and had to hunt around for a place that could take us. This bureaucratic system seemed to be enforced differently across the country and in some places we were taken in at cheap guesthouses that were clearly not registering us with the police.



The only map we could find was in chinese characters and it had no topography or distances. We had no idea of the names of the places we asked directions for by pointing at our map, but in this way did discover that illiteracy is far higher than government statistics indicate! In short we had no idea what lay ahead and it was with some surprise that we began a long ascent into a range of hills on a very hot day - but we left the trucks and industry down on the plain and began to see old village houses made of ochre coloured bricks and tiled roofs, receding rows of hills and the clear water of mountain rivers. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that had live snakes and frogs in its aquarium larder alongside the more usual fish and turtles. Late in the afternoon I watched a fisherman with his bamboo raft and fishing cormorants. In the friendly town of Mengshan our hotel owner was so helpful that he took me on his motorbike to his favourite noodle cafe for breakfast.




It was mostly downhill through towering limestone pinnacles to the tourist town of Yangshuo. We enjoyed the panoramic views from the roof of our cheap riverfront hotel, eating western food (apple crumble never tasted so good), getting lost in the countryside on a tandem and the fantastic cast of thousands sound and light show performed on the Li River, one of the few things on this trip that my mum would have loved.




It was a pleasant, if hot, days ride north-east from Yangshuo through limestone hills and orchards of persimmon fruit across the state border into Hunan Province. We washed in an irrigation canal and managed to find a spot for our tent hidden from China's millions in a plantation of green tangerines and pomelos. The highlight of the 50 miles to the town of Daoxian were the old grey brick village homes with curved tiled roofs and gable ends but the entry in my diary reads "lots of quarries, dust, noise, dreary towns, poor people pulling hand carts, brick factories, sore arses". It didn't get better. I'm thinking of writing a book "101 places not to visit before you die" and the area around Chenzhou would make the top 5. At one point we approached what appeared to be a dilapidated prison, as we got closer I realised it was a derelict school, but as we passed we could see the children inside.

"Transforming China" is the mantra and its hard not to agree that transformation is desperately needed. What this means is a construction boom unprecedented in the history of mankind - China in 2009 is the world's biggest building site. Everywhere we went there were quarries turning hillsides into aggregates and cement, brick kilns, roadworks, new railways, bridges, coal mines, construction site after construction site - some villages consisted entirely of building materials and scaffolding. Thundering along the roads are thousands of dumper trucks piled high with sand, rocks and coal which simply blows off coating people, buildings, plants and cycle tourists in a grimy layer. We passed villages so filthy they were Dickensian. More often than not by days end we looked like coal miners.



Understandably foreigners were rare in these parts and whenever we stopped a curious crowd would gather to stare, speculate and pose for photos with us. In contrast to the rest of the world, we became fascinating to teenagers. For a generation embarking on the western dream, the real thing was hard to ignore and we found ourselves being stalked by curious youths with ginger afro's and tight jeans.




As we struggled uphill along the cracked concrete highway north of Chenzou being coated in dust and sucking in the filthy black fumes of noisy trucks Tracey broke down in tears, sobbed that she could take it no more and wanted to catch the bus - which was a fitting point to reach the 10,000 mile point of our trip. Once we were off the highway things improved a little until we ran into roadworks which plagued us for the next 50 miles.




Farmers in an array of straw and bamboo hats lined the approach road to Chaling's friday market with fresh vegetables. Inside butchers carved up dead dogs, live fish splashed in enormous steel bowls, jovial women sold all manner of dried leaves, sticks and herbs. It was a colourful, bustling place with a friendly vibe, lit by the morning sun.



It was a more pleasant ride north-east from Chaling up into some hills and over the state border into Jiangxi province. Our map ended and there were no Jiangxi maps for sale, so we managed to get someone to write the name of the city we were headed to in chinese characters so that we could follow road signs and ask directions by pointing at it. We camped the night in a conifer plantation not knowing where we were or how far it was to where we were going. It was was 70 miles through some enjoyable countryside with fantastically decrepit old villages from China past. Barely able to sit down we pedalled tiredly into Ji'an's bright lights as the sun set and a kindly young traffic cop showed us to a hotel.



The bunting was out and the flower beds immaculate in anticipation of the much hyped 60th Anniversary of the People's Republic and the forthcoming Golden Week national holiday. Our 30 day visa was running out so we left the bikes and fled by train south to Hong Kong, which to all intents and purposes is still a separate country. I would have happily bought an "I love HK" t-shirt. A place of sea and islands, green jungled hills and forests of skyscrapers, gleaming malls, skywalks, historic trams and beautiful parks, of giant buddhas and incense filled temples and perhaps most uniquely a hugely enjoyable east-meets-west culture epitomised by western tourists taking photos of themselves eating Hong Kong noodles while in the restaurant next-door chinese tourists were doing the same with their beans on toast. We were incredibly grateful to be hosted by Jo, a friend of two cyclists we met in Lahore. We spent a week based at her flat on Lamma Island and were humbled by her selfless hospitality, in awe of her ex-pat teachers tropical lifestyle and hung-over by her socialising.



The Chinese embassy gave us a new 30 day visa, we watched the 60th Anniversiray fireworks over the harbour and made our way back across the border to Shenzen - a small town that grew to a city bigger than London in just a couple of decades. It was the end of the national holiday and only 1 seat left on the train. Tracey spent the night in a comfy 4-birth sleeper while I stood with the other poor souls in a smelly, cold, cramped corridor being constantly bumped by trolley carts and passengers boarding/leaving with the entire contents of their house. It was still dark when we were kicked out in Ji'an and we wandered the deserted streets and fell asleep in a park huddled against the morning chill. When we woke the place was full of sprightly OAP's bouncing around, stretching, dancing and performing Tai Chi. We retrieved the bikes and within half-an-hour were cycling through roadworks being covered in dust by dumper trucks - welcome back to China!


It took us four days to reach the provincial capital of Nanchang, 170 miles to the north-east. Not for the first time we camped next to ancestor graves that dot the chinese countryside and were woken by the sound of dynamite. Along the way we had planned to stay the night in Xiangtang but it was a down-at-heel place, the main drag lined with the pale pink lights of brothels and bored girls in doorways so we pedaled on and found our way onto a quiet road that ran along the top of the flood defence for the meandering Gan River. As we rounded a bend we looked down on a Mad-Max like scene of dozens of giant, rusty dredging boats eating the sand banks and islands in the river and pumping the contents into a waiting flotilla of hundreds of giant metal barges to be shipped downriver to become the bridges, apartment blocks and roads that were under construction as we rode into Nanchang the following day. The roads of China had been so bumpy that as we hunted for a hotel a screw on my front rack snapped, leaving half the screw inside the frame.

Thursday 17 December 2009

Cycling the steamy highways of SE Asia

After 4 1/2 months and 3,500 miles of cycling through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and southern China, looking like a noodle and a grain of rice, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and headed north to more temperate lands.

It was a period of my life when I felt like I was melting and watched T constantly wiping the sweat from her upper lip. In hindsight the monsoon was not as wet as we had imagined (although we escaped the worst of it by fluke of luck in cycling through Vietnam, which is least effected), though ironically the rain turned out to be the best bit as it cooled everything off and the tropical storms were amazing to witness. Nevertheless the heat and humidity did at times take us to the edge and we were saved from combustion only by consuming 2,000,000 litres of sugary iced drinks.

I had been to this part of the world before and had wonderful holidays, so had been looking forwards to this leg of the trip. Turns out that SE Asia on a bicycle is a very different affair. For a start people aren't constantly running out of their homes pointing their baby's bum at you so that you can watch it wee/poo in the gutter as you pass. As concerned planet lovers we think the Asian "no nappy" approach is great, but not something to witness on an hourly basis.

The biggest disappointment was the cycling itself. SE Asian countries have not developed a network of surfaced rural roads linking villages - instead all roads feed into the surfaced highways, so if you want to travel any distance you have to ride the major roads. Although at times these are used as much by buffalo carts as heavy vehicles mostly they are busy, noisy, dusty and sometimes dangerous - and there is something about highways that makes them less enjoyable than minor roads regardless of the volume of traffic. We did ride some lovely country roads but they were few and far between.

As if in compensation we were entertained by the antics of millions of motorbike riders carrying their loads of live pigs, ducks, chickens, cows, dogs, rats and pet cage birds, ; transporting TV's, fridges, washing machines, full-length mirrors, billboards, window panes and fully inflated paddling pools. Parents carrying new-born babies in one arm while they drove with the other, whole families piled on for a day out, teenagers cruising on the week-end, elderly grandmothers with walking sticks climbing on board for a lift to the shops, passengers slumped asleep behind the driver, children in uniform driving themselves to school - At times it seemed as if they were playing out their lives on their bikes.


There are few chain-stores and most businesses are family run, very often from the front room. During the day these spaces are dining areas, cafes, shops or motorbike repairs and by night the dining room, living room and bedroom. It was always a pleasure to make a stop for food and drink in these places; looking around at the family photo's on the wall, the offerings in front of the shrine, the children's toys and if we needed the toilet we were usually escorted through the house, past grandmother asleep on the daybed, to their own bathroom - it was a small but intriguing insight into their lives.


In Asia if one person is selling something there will be a dozen others nearby selling the same thing. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the roadside. All of a sudden, as if by magic, lining the highway for a mile at a time we would pass vendor after vendor selling exactly the same thing. Some of these were understandable - salt sellers next to salt pans, fruit sellers next to orchards, stone carvings next to quarries, but others seemed completely random. In Thailand on a quiet stretch of road we passed 50 vendors all selling steamed chinese buns - the only roadside bun sellers we saw in 3,500 miles.

SE Asia is also the land of Lilliput and when you are sat at a table designed for 3 year olds its hard not to feel like Gulliver. For a ravenous cyclist the biggest nightmare are the tiny portions of food - many times I had the patrons gasping as I ordered a second or third plate of food "no wonder these westeners are so big, look how much they eat!". It was surprisingly easy to forget how tall we were by comparison and then find ourselves shocked at how short everyone else was - somewhere in central Vietnam a man asked to have a go on my bike but I had to refuse him when I realised my seat was at chest height. In hindsight perhaps it was our giant-like stature that caused such an interest in us rather than the fact of being strange westeners on cycles.
Asians are as obsessed with having white skin as westeners are with getting tanned. It is this which has driven women to wear ninja outfits of wide-brimmed hats, face masks and arm length gloves in 40C heat. Often all that could be seen of them was their eyes hidden in the shade of their hats. Understandably they were shocked and appalled to see Tracey with naturally blue skin, out in the heat of the day in a vest top and shorts. Every time we stopped they would be over, gesticulating at the sun and prodding Tracey's skin - something they soon regretted as lathered in sun cream and sweat she was as slippery as an eel. Doubtless there are now wild rumours spreading across the Asian countryside that western cyclists are as slimy as frogs in a pond.

Thailand's King, Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao - I feel like I know them all personally. Asians cultural deference to authority has elevated these leaders to god-like status and in every town and village they look down at you from statues and posters. As we passed through dozens of places every day we were being greeted by their faces at every turn. On the TV there seemed to be endless programmes highlighting their achievements and every other day was a celebration of the day they were born/died/liberated the nation. Coming from a culture where authority is challenged and ridiculed it was hard to understand the reverence surrounding these iconic figures and their ubiquitous presence in peoples' lives.


But perhaps the memory of SE Asia that will stay with me most is cycling for hour-after-hour, day-after-day past millions of smiling, waving rural people living in grinding poverty away from the cities and tourist towns and behind the facade of rapid economic growth.