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.
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