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They ask me if I’m tired and I say yes.  They tell me what I’m doing is amazing and I say “thank you very much, but its really normal,”with a head nod and a shy smile, bashfully attempting modesty, guiltily accepting the complement as justification. We speak in small words and language helpers like “well”, “I suppose”, “that’s great”, and let long acoustic breathes flop into our big meanings like ice cubes in a tall glass of water, melting, always fills you up, always cools down the awkwardness of silence that burns ears. Aahhh。 

We’ve been in big land ever since the wedding in Guanzhou when all of a sudden we were in the company of more white people than I’ve seen gathered in one place in 3 years.

In Japan, I knew my limits, and rested meekly on the foreigner crutch that allowed me to be aloof and ambiguous. In Asia, you can laugh when you’re embarrassed, or pretend you don’t understand when you don’t have anything to say.

In big land with its big ideas like carbon emissions, and non profit organizations, and one child polices, these tricks make me look silly.

 I found myself standing on the red carpet of a hotel banquet room coiling and looping with story book fantasia: glitter and confetti and ribbon and a bride sparkling in white and waitresses refilling whiskey flasks and people hunting for other people to talk to. This could be Hong Kong at night spinning on curvy sky ways, tubular lights making car trails, captured at the peak of speed, in a quiet postcard that moves like a bus in a floaty pen streaming down a snowy road where little people tidy little houses.

 I found myself twirling and turning trying to catch the clink of wine glasses toasting and the shriek of whispers shooting sharp tunnels through unprepared ears and the pillowed muff of heels piercing the cush carpet beneath them and the round body above them and the shrill staccato of confident lobby diners from the non-wedding world where people are free to be mute and untouched. The underworld of magnified sound padded me carefully against the onslaught of human interaction in big land. I kept my head steady for wind changes, ants carrying their eggs before a storm.

This is an eco system and I am an ant ducking for cover in carpet bush. Everyone is a predator.

I always get flabbergasted whenever we go to a big city like Shanghai or Hong Kong。 I feel like Alice looking into a world that makes little sense。Streets glow like computer animated cartoon characters that appear 3D， I cannot tell if they were drawn or graphically created。 And one seems realer than the other。 

 I find it hard to fit my writing into the vast space of a city。I am spread thin。Words appear in comic bubbles。They are not their descriptions。 They paint cartoon pictures of the people who speak them in this magnified setting of “meeting new people” and “making new friends”。 We scramble to project positives images of ourselves because this is what people will remember of us。 First impressions pressed into the presence like a name in a gravestone。   

We are in Hong Kong now and it is big. Jim has little patience for neon lights and the crowds and the trams and the billboards with the big models and their big abs shooting sexy laser beams with big omnipotent eyes. He’s a Montana man who dragged elks out of the woods before he could grow a beard. Buildings will never replace mountains.

I grew up in Xiao Dao Guo, that’s small island country to mainland Chinese. This does not suffice for the Hong Kong island people whose colonial past has spread out the whole world at its tiny finger tips.  One Nation, Two Systems. But this system, on the Hong Kong side, is much much bigger.

Globalization has the tendency to make small countries act big, or, in my country’s case, developing nations believe that they are developed.

The Bahamas and its relatively stable political climate draws in armies of international tourists imprinting pink feet on its tiny shores. 

Hong Kong has one of the busiest sea ports in the world and is fifth in attracting international passengers to its airspace.

The Bahamian dollar is pegged to the US dollar, and the economy leans on the service industries of tourism and banking. We manufacture nothing and have very little natural resources and skilled labor. We import everything that we cannot produce ourselves. We fear the Free Trade Area of the Americas gulping us down with its highly skilled, lesser demanding workforce, a long island ice tea that only kicks in when you stand up.

Hong Kong’s factories which initially built its wealth, are quickly being swallowed up by the cheaper, harder working, dispensable Chinese workforce. Now it is Hong Kong’s job to manage the huge amount of money generated in the mainland and its drudge task force of worker ants.

There are mouths all around tonguing crevices that tickle when touched.

But small country turn big doesn’t want to be touched. Doesn’t want the particles to drift. Wants to keep itself a subject – a being, a one and only. Leave the niceness to the big countries with the big aid like the US.

It is not an easy task for a mainland Chinese person getting a tourist visa to enter Hong Kong. Immigration officers turn away women who look more than 5 months pregnant fearing that they might intentionally remain in Hong Kong to make sure their babies are born there so that the child may have the right to better social health care and educational systems.

In Bahamas, we are constantly worried about Haitians stealing our jobs, exhausting our healthcare, and committing crimes, all of these accusations unproven by statistics, but highly feared.

But this is the big world. Or the small world under a microscope that unwraps it and all its cells out onto the sizzling sand so that one goes hungry for small wanders like purple oyster shells spat out onto the sea shore, and babies who wonder precariously away from the peripheral vision of their parents.   I am lying on the sand and my vision of the families playing at a beach near Mayrknoll is sideways. I feel lonely because I want to play with the children, but their parents and nannies are there. And I don’t want to be weird. This is not the mainland where children run rampant, invading our campsites and pulling us into their schoolyards to play. I have to scurry the sand for imagery.  I have to sulk.

This is big land and I am Glorified Individual. I have to walk with a click and suck the sound like a cup of coffee, my morning comfort. It’s become a habit here in Hong Kong. I have to lean my head forward, peaking at workers smoking in alleyways, exposed pipes on the backsides of buildings, cracks of white paint on the ceiling above my bed, floods on the 5^th floor of a shiny mall, accents that don’t match faces. Did you know that there are Indians of Mongolian and Caucasian races?

In big land, I find myself comforted by the parks that are inhabited at any given moment by 80% immigrants. There are Indian or Pakistani men with greasy puffs and stonewashed bellbottoms smoking on the walls. There are beautiful Filipinas and Indonesians picnicking on plastic tarps beneath footbridges and on the edges of buildings. This is abnormal to me until I get kidnapped by a friendly Indonesian at a park beauty pageant for domestic workers, who explains to me that this is how they hang out. She takes me to a street stall to get coconut rice and curry chicken for $10 HKD. You know you’re in big land when you can get cheap ethnic food on the street corner.

I used to hate when the Japanese used the word “ethnic” to describe foreign food in Japan. They did not describe French food or Italian food or American food as ethnic.  Only the more exotic places, or the lesser developed country foods: Thai, Indian, Jamaican.

Peter noticed that they included Mexican and Italian food on the menu at Ruby Tuesday’s in Hong Kong, whose motto is “Simple Fresh American Dining.” 

One of my favorite slam poets, Chinese American from Oklahoma, Beau Sia, once argued in a poem that spring rolls ought to be classified as an American food.

This is big world, where identities come pre-packaged in combat boots, opaque leggings, bleached puffs, and kimono sleeve A-line jackets. At the mall at the top of The Peak, there was a store that sold “cool Japanese style” drinks. I can’t wait for my country to become a fad.

I like Kowloon better than Central. The restaurants there are more raw. There is still fish being squished and scaled in buckets out on the street. You can still get slimed if you’re not careful. There are night markets where crafty market ladies don’t take crap from bargainers. The Indian restaurants here are owned by Indians. And the interior is not decorated but for internationally renowned white plastic chairs. Sit and eat and make sure your glass is clean before you drink the water.

There is peace in the tranquil oasis of Mary Knoll, the 1920’s brick monastery that’s opened its doors to us for a week. It is on the other side of Hong Kong Island, behind several mountain ranges, where the land rolls out its tongue to the ocean. There are beaches and coconut trees here and it reminds me of home again. 

There is peace here, shadowed by a vague discomfort. A sense of incompleteness. Like I don’t belong here. The Pacific Islander maids and nannies pushing children with blonde ringlets in strollers and walking chestnut golden retrievers smile at me with familiarity, the same look I get from Ethiopians selling write-off Timberland boots on the street. I am one of them.

But not. Not a maid. Not a merchant. Not selling suits. Not an immigrant in search of a better life. Just passing through on a bike. My friends are Minnesotans who know the difference between fly swatters and robins. Their vocabularies are different from mine, but we share the same passions. I am caught between familiarity with the foreign English teacher and the immigrant, the first world and the third world, the concerned hippy and the dirty pretty thing.  Beauty smiles up at me from big brown eyes in shadowy sockets gaping down as I use its face to start a blog.

Shameless graphomaniac that I am, I feel the need to write everything down to claim it the way a photograph claims an image in a pose. Keepsakes, the authority of memory. A ticket stub that shows I have been there before. I want to scar myself with experience so that I have something to start with. So that people ask me to explain: “What do you mean by that?”  So that I always have something to say at a wedding.

In big world, I find peace in immigrants. Those assimilated in inner city grime. Their culture is still raw like an unhealed wound, still steaming. Immigrants from finicky countries that may or may not ascend to G8 status. Immigrants that still speak their own languages, that still have little Indias and little Mexicos and little Indonesias gathered in apartment blocks in snowy cities, the scent of their curry or their pita bread carried through the pipes.

Immigrants that form little countries labeled in neon signs hung above highlighted streets in big land. Immigrants who push blonde babies in strollers while their own babies speak their first words to them via an international phone card. Immigrants that may or may not have a chip on their shoulder, but still manage to smile, unassumingly at someone automatically distrustful of their intent.

Immigrants who live under the intense, laser-colored city sky, bracing their shoulders against a marching crowd, arming themselves in fashion, and taking pics in the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon, their fixed off day, when the blonde children are under the supervision of their French and Finnish parents.

 Immigrants that have to start from here, and build.  Their journals burned. Their visa pages shrouded in work permits and extensions. Their memories of homeland unsticking themselves from the scrapbooks of their marmalade childhoods.  This makes big land seem much much smaller。.

Really it comes down to Kevin Clancy.  I mean, we could assign blame all over the place, but I think it would be best to light the burner under Kevin, and of course Kaishan.

  You see, we were doing just fine, sweaty and dirty, rolling into slimey places we loved because they were cheap (never mind that we shared sheets with the last who knows how many visitors, or the occasional worms under the mattress covering a hodge-podge of broken boards strategically placed to make a bed.  Never mind that.  Right?)  We were on a roll and getting used to dirty bathrooms where one showers above the squat toilet, which serves as a drain or walls that may have been white at one time now a comforting grimey brown.  All of that was becoming a very normal part of our daily lives; but little did we know, we were headed for a big-time change… (okay, so we had an idea, but indulge me here).

Kevin and Kaishan messed up our world by a simple invitation.  It was innocent enough, and quite nonchalante — something like: “We look forward to seeing you all at the wedding in GuangZhou and we’ve got you a couple rooms for the days you are there.” 

We tried to protest.  “Kevin, we can find our own accommodations.”  But no, Kevin and Kaishan had to insist that we stay in one of the fanciest hotels by the waterfront in GuangZhou for not one, but two nights.  And, I might add, for free.  Well, if there’s one thing FueledByRice goes for more than dirty and dirt cheap, it’s free.

We pulled up to the hotel early afternoon, right in front with our bikes–much to the hotel clerks’ collective chagrin (I think they were looking for “Audi” or “Mercedes” on our rides and couldn’t figure out how one drives a two-wheeled contraption in such proximity to this landmark hotel)–and we were giddy with our disbelief and anticipation.  Are we really staying here for two days!! 

In hindsight I recognize these as the beginning symptoms of the rare Chinese Enspoilitus, but we were too dazed to understand the implications…

So, after finding a place for our bicycles, we checked in and marveled at the mirrors, the carpet, the lights, the bathroom, the individually wrapped cups and complimentary toothbrushes, the hot hot shower, the western toilet — you know, the usual marvels of modernity– and prepared to purchase clothes for our participation in the wedding celebration.

Well, by the time the wedding feast came around the next day, we were pretty much a lost case.  We sat under chandeliers, surrounded by opulence, three glasses of different alcohol in front of each one of us (the baijio cup was mercifully small), a Lazy Susanna–that’s a fancy “lazy susan”– full of southern China’s tastiest delights.  We incredulously chatted with our English speaking table mates and sank hopelessly into the atmosphere of celebration as we filled our plates and satiated our appetites.

Speeches and toasts were made, gratitude was extended, and our first official “spoiling session” went off without a hitch.  Kevin and Kaishan managed to make their wedding into everyone else’s event, and the party continued late with live music at an Irish pub. 

  I think it’s still fair to blame Kevin for putting a microphone in Dave Harrison’s hands, so that we ended up being called to the dance floor several times throughout the evening (as well as any other names Dave could remember as he tirelessly and with amazing regularity made sure the dance was “happening” all night).

Well, after such an amazing hotel stay and party, you can imagine how we were losing our ability to think cheap and dirty, which is just like thinking clearly to us.  We were spoiled, thick.  But, as if that wasn’t enough, Kevin — again nonchalantely — mentioned that the Maryknoll retreat house on Hong Kong island overlooking the bay would be ready for us whenever we arrived and that arrangements were made for us to stay as long as we liked, three meals a day, all once again gratuit.  Unbelievable!  And the humility and air of hospitality with which he pulled this off would have sucked us in even if we weren’t already well on our way to being completely spoiled.

I’ve never come off a serious addiction, but I hear it’s bad.  Tonight I’m coming down a bit.  We’re back on the road, in the mainland, booked at a local cheap and dirty place, and I am washing my brain in the glow of a Net Bar computer to the sedative quality of the stale cigarette smoke hung atmosphere. 

Funny thing is, even though we’re getting back to normal cheap and dirty so I can once again think clearly, I’d do it all over again in a blink.  I think that’s one of the dangerous symptoms of being spoiled rotten.  You come back for more. 

Well Kevin and Kaishan, if you read this, beware: we intend to in someway return the favor… it may not be right away, but watch out!  And, thank you.

*Kevin Clancy is the lay coordinator for Maryknoll English teaching in China and just married Kaishan, incidentally one of his students when he was first teaching several years back.  Kaishan and Kevin now live on Lover’s Ave in ZhuHai on the southern coast of the mainland, just married.  I sang with Kevin in the men’s choir at SJU and Peter knew him from his involvement in the Maryknoll teaching program.  It was a pleasure to be part of the wedding and also enjoy Maryknoll’s hospitality.  Thank you Kevin!

Our first leg of the journey from Beijing to Hong Kong is now complete.  Yesterday we took a ferry in from Shenzhen 深圳, the border city to Hong Kong.  Unfortunately there is no way to cross the boarder by bicycle so a ferry was the only option.  From Beijing to Hong Kong I (Adam) have taken three ferries and one subway.  The rest of the was completely powered by rice, which ended up being over 4,300 kilometers on my bicycle’s odometer.  The three ferries were unavoidable, one to cross the Yangtze 长江, where the nearest bridge allowing cars was miles and miles up-river out of the delta, and two in Shanghai 上海 to cross the Huangpu river, one to get over it, and one to get back.  Strangely enough there are no bridges in downtown Shanghai, only tunnels for automobiles that go under the river dividing the bund and downtown Shanghai.  Jim and I had to cross the river in order to get to a bike shop and purchase the bandwagon.  In Guangzhou 广州 after Kevin’s wedding there was a reception at a bar about 6 kilometers from our hotel which most people took taxis to.  I was unsure about where it was and did not want to risk locking my bike outside on a street-post and having it stolen so Pete, Nakia, and myself took the subway.  Jim and Drew were out running errands and stopped by on their bikes.  In order to keep my “no automobile use” record going I walked back, the rest of fueledbyrice decided to join me, making us truly fueled by rice. 

Unfortunately Hong Kong is not a city developed with bikers in mind, in fact the roads are very narrow, steep, and people drive on the left side of the road making all of our instincts wrong.  In fact the steepest hill we have climbed so far has been the last hill we rode up to get to the Maryknoll house overlooking Stanley market.  Maryknoll, the organization Pete previously had taught through in China, and the organization Kevin works for graciously has let us stay here.  We will be highlighting some of the interesting people we meet here in the future.  We are also in the process of getting visas right now for SE Asia, our Vietnam visas should be done today.  Patrick Leung, a Hong Kong resident and St. John’s alumni organized a benefit dinner for our cause which will take place Saturday night at the Royal HK Yacht Club.  Money will go towards some expenses for the trip and the charitable organizations we have chosen to support.

广东，广州 (Guangzhou city [Canton], Guangdong prov) is essentially the epicenter of the famously booming Chinese economy.  Far in the south, just 2 hours from Shenzhen (mainland city started in the 1970s to faciliate the regional economic growth direclty across from Hong Kong) and Hong Kong (an economic “miracle” since the 1960s due its then status as a British colony and detachment from the mainland’s chaos of that time) its location location location that explains Guangzhou’s selection to be the factory central of China…with Shanghai and Tianjin playing in a close 2nd and 3rd.  After biking south 50km from Guangzhou, its been solid development and factories, and I expect it to be so down to Shenzhen, the port.

 Its of course the abundant labor that drives China’s economy, and those that fill the jobs often come in from the countryside with courage enough to seek a better life through higher incomes than agriculture can offer, and are willing to take the risk to move to a big city without pre-arranged work.  Guangzhou, due to its reputation as the economic and factory folcrum of China naturally attracts a comparatively large percent of China’s rural migrants.   Although countless construction sites in addition to its factories absorb an incredible number of these people, a surprising number of migrants who can’t find work (and therefore don’t have the dormitory housing that still accompany many jobs in China) make due with sleeping on sidewalks and under bridges.  Walking by them naturally makes me uncomfortable.  Most sleeping by 10pm, they look peaceful and comfortable enough.  It seems they’ve gotten enough to eat, this eases my unease.  A bowl of rice is, afterall, 1 Yuan (US$0.13).  But I still think of the luguans (cheap hotels) I’ve stayed at in the last 2 months, and how though most westerners would never even consider staying at them due to the lower standards, they’d be a far cry better than sleeping on the street.  But tonight, I’m not just at a luguan.  I’m at the Landmark Hotel, for Kevin’s wedding.  Just about as opposite on the socio-economic scale as one can get.

I’d often heard from people in the north - in Beijing and in Jilin - that Guangzhou was “dangerous” with “high crime” and is China’s least safe city.  Not that Guangzhou natives are more apt to stealing, but people told me its the poor migrant workers who steal.  Now my second time to Guangzhou, even if some statistics that I haven’t seen prove this, I’ve never had any trouble whatsoever.  I often tell people that China is the safest country that I’ve ever been to.  China’s obsession with walls and gates and guards seem to go well over board with a strong culture of early to sleep, early to rise, but no matter the reason, Guangzhou in my experience joins the rest of China in being very safe, not to mention rural Chinese people being overly more friendly and open than urban dwellers.  Perhaps my height scares off would-be pick-pockets, for they do exist in all Chinese cities, but I do think the northern perception of Guangzhou is a bit off.

When we 5 fueled-by-ricers pulled our bikes along side new BMWs, Mercedes, Audis (yes, the Germans dominate the Chinese car market), by the front door of the Landmark Hotel, in our dirty clothes, with our dirty bikes, carrying out dirty luggage, the perfect harmony of cleanliness, of niceness, that is characteristic of the typical Chinese facade of quality and wealth was disrupted.  Immediately, guards and car park guides felt uncomfotable with our presence and immdiately told us we couldn’t “park” our bikes here.  “No problem, we’re just taking our luggage off our bikes.”  “You can’t park your bikes here, go around back across the street to the bike coral.” “Ok, we just have to take our stuff…   Yes, yes, we’re guests here are your hotel.” 

Culture shock.  Really, we should fit in perfectly at the Landmark.  We’re foreign, and foreign means firstly wealth to many Chinese.  We all studied in America and have the ability to go to the US, which alone classifies us in the top echeoleon of world citizens.  We are, afterall, middle class, so the Landmark and its niceness, its cleanliness, its class, its fancy-pants image, yes yes, it’s all a part of who we are.  But its a part we’ve all seemed to have left behind when we started this bike trip, if not earlier in our lives.

As we passed through the lobby, our arms loaded with our Chinese road-grit-ladden bicycle luggage in our dirty biking shirts and beards, I felt uncomfortable, a misfit.  We’re used to staying in common low-end Chinese hotels in the rural areas…well, see the luguan photos in the Photo section yourself.  No, we hadn’t driven our cars to the Landmark.  Yes, reducing carbon emissions and helping to halt Global Warming / The Climate Crisis is sometimes dirty and unglamorous, dispite the romance of our trip that sometimes comes across this website.  Biking is sometimes dirty, dangerous, and uncomfortable (What?! You mean you have to use your own energy and muscles to propel yourself?)  But in the end, IT IS SO WORTH IT.  Until we have solar and wind produced electric cars, street cars, and light rails, riding bicycles instead of driving the internal combustion engine whenever possible is KEY to slowing and eventually stopping the Climate Crisis in the next 20 years.  We hope that our (rather extreme) example of how effective bicycles are in human (and luggage) transport may encourage you to keep that car of yours parked a little longer between outings.

Although our stay at the Landmark was very nice (after we worked through several staff people over the course of 1 hour to figure out where we could park our bikes) and we are SO GREATFUL to Kevin and Kaishan for their generous gift to us of 2 nights stay during their wedding, I realized that we have something in common with the jobless migrants sleeping out on the streets.  Its a common human weakness to judge someone by their outward appearance instead of a person’s internal character, but it must be overcome.  In modern China, image and surface looks are everything.  I’ve found the impression or illusion of quality is more important than there infact being quality.  One of Gandhi’s profound role models taught him this key life lesson, the role model himself wearing simple and rather dirty clothes daily.  Looking down upon people sleeping in the street, on people with the courage to try to better their lives through their own initiative and effort, leaving families behind, standing up to try to participate in some small way in China’s booming economy to balance the dangerously enormous income gap, is illogical and void of compassion and empathy.  Some Landmark Hotel staff may have looked down on me in a similar way because I don’t fit their image of a wealthy guest.  I’m foreign, yes, but…dirty shirt and arrived on a bike?  Confusion.   

2am walking the 5km back to the Landmark from an Irish pub the wedding party had migrated too late in the afternoon upon Adam’s insistence of not taking a taxi (The dirty “T” word), two women pulled me aside while I was ahead of the group.  At first moving their fists to their mouths, I thought they were thirsty, so I offered them my bottle of water.  No, not thirsty.  When they learned I speak Chinese, the sharades ended and they clearly told me that they were hungry.  Although most migrant workers are male, they’d just come to Guangzhou alone several days earlier from the countryside looking for work, but unfortunately hadn’t found any yet.  Their money had run out, most having been spent on their standing train tickets.  Having become a bit leery of giving cash to beggars in Beijing, I offered to go with them to a store to buy them food.  Half expecting them to tell me to forget it, they eagerly agreed.  So we walked about a block and found a latenight pulled-noodle restaurant.  They sat down at a small table in a corner, obviously embarraced in front of the restaurant boss as I ordered for them.  I ordered the standard beef noodels for them, just a hair over US50 cents a bowl.  It was late, I was tired from walking.  I didn’t sit down to talk more with them, though I wish I would’ve had the energy.  They smiled and thanked me, I wished them well.  Walking back I wondered if 1 bowl each would be enough.  Could I have helped them any more?  I worry about them, 2 women without work in a large city, in a country with plenty of prostitution for its overly male population due to years of selective abortion favoring boy-children in a 1 child policy environment.  They’re just 2 of countless others.  2 I had the honor of meeting, God bless them on their own journeys.

Interesting how Guangzhou’s migrants’ stories sound so similar to that of my great great great grandfather who immigrated to the US from Germany in the early 1860s at the age of 21.  And so similar to the stories of today’s Mexicans, South Americans, Somali, Hmong, etc in the US, and Eastern Europeans in Western Europe…

In the end, people are people - 人就是人。Its unfortuante so often our own identy depends on creating divisions, building walls, spreading sepratism in the form of loving those similar to ourselves and hating those perceived to be dissimilar.  Us and Them.  And though our identies are not identical, as John Denver sings in his Season Suite, “Yet as different as we are, we’re still the same!” At the very least, we may offer mutual respect to our fellow humanbeings.

Fear, they say, the people who appear in books, the people who author life, they, say, should speed one up, say, dilate the pupils, hasten the synapses, quicken the pace at which the heart squeezes the blood like a fist around a throat, or a fist around the pole of a revolutionary flag, a fist thrust upward, the direction of blood after it is deflated of oxygen, its second trip around the body.

We often blog about past experiences, personal insight, and meeting people.  For those of you who are wondering about more specific details of the trip this blog is meant as an update of our current status and foreseeable plans in the future.

Right now we are in northern Guangdong province and are working our way south towards Guangzhou.  This weekend we will be attending Kevin Clancy’s wedding reception in Guangzhou, Kevin is a fellow St. John’s alumni and currently works in Hong Kong.  From there we will be heading to Hong Kong for approximately one week, we will take care of a number of things such as obtaining visas, purchasing some much needed supplies, and resting.  

We are currently holding to our plan of biking around 75 km a day with a rest day every 5 days or so.  Lately we have been going through some pretty mountainous terrain and have been getting both large up hills and down hills.  There are a lot of forested areas with a good mix of both deciduous and coniferous trees.  We began to come out of the mountains today and are quickly finding it more sub-tropical.  Bannana trees and sugar cane fields are becoming much more abundant.    

From Hong Kong we plan on heading west towards Vietnam.  A number of our Chinese Visas will expire soon after the new year so we will have to make it to the Vietnam border by then.  

Our plan is then to continue west to Laos, south to Cambodia, then west to Thailand rounding out our SE Asia tour.  After researching many different sources, talking with officials, fellow bikers, and posting questions on online forums we have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to cross any borders into Myanmar.  We will however continue to monitor the situation and highlight issues that we think are important once we are in the region. 

We aren’t quite sure what Thanksgiving will be like for us, most likely biking towards Guangzhou to get there in time for the wedding.  We are thinking of our families and loved ones however, along with the food we are missing out on.  Turkeys, or huo ji 火鸡 are relatively uncommon in China, maybe a chicken or a duck will have to suffice.  We are thinking maybe we will celebrate it in Hong Kong when we have access to an oven.

We have been mixing in more camping lately instead of just staying in LuGuans.  We have found the reception in China very warm to camping and people allow us to camp pretty much anywhere we ask.  We attempt to find secluded places, usually away from towns and busy roads.  Sometimes locals come to chat and see what is going on, but no one seems to have the same attachment to personal property in China as people do in America.  In a country where most things are either shared or communal  it is not surprising and really comforting.

Mould makes me cringe. I have a psychological reaction to it like some people do to the sight of raw fruit being bitten into. It is my one and only request when we stay at hostels in China: “Is there mould on the walls?”

About a month ago ago, we were in a town I did not like. It made me itch. The walls of our rooms were white, but mouldy. I stared down at the market below, waiting for rain and watching women whose faces had been blanched by make up too white for their complexion, their eyes shimmering with mint green eye shadow. They were feisty though, and this gave their widened eyes enough color to be convincing as they rambled about below yelling at street vendors over Chinese veggie pancakes. I stole glimpses of them from behind the predatory mist.

I’ve heard that it is a law in the United States to repaint the walls of an apartment after a tenant moves out. To start out fresh, white and mouldless. I think of this wistfully beneath the safety of the white comforters. Peter said that there is mould in the bathroom of the next room and that I should steer clear of it due to my “problem”.

I shudder at the sound of the word cracking like sunflower shells in my ear.

This is sensory overload. Density of life (Kundera). Too many things coming at me at once. This is China. TIC. Better keep it in its acronym form, or else images will burn your mouth like a steaming baozi eaten too soon. Like a high orange persimmon broken into with teeth. Orange innards gushing everywhere like a late morning sun just breaking through the clouds. Like my bladder after fighting with it for an hour before getting up to pee at 5am.

China is like this. Unsolicited intimacy like flies crowding a table full of food you want to eat. Over lunch, we talk about them cathartically as if to face our outhouse fears where the dark holes in the ground hum with wet moving things. Dogs step on our feet looking for food beneath the table and cats scratch their flees against our legs as they chase rats, which they will devour wholly, mirroring us as we hold our chopsticks of glistening pork midway to our mouths, watching carefully. They remind us of the life that used to be lived in the morsel of meat neatly sliced and stir-fried with lively peppers and carrots that make our mouths hang open, slobbering with anticipation.

This morning, I stopped, stunned at an orange cat holding gray, anemic eyes into its smushed misshapen head. I remember the head of my childhood cat that seemed bilious and bony when wet. She hated water, and shivered and sneezed, and hated us for washing her. We loved her more in this emaciated state, and gave her kitty desserts when she was dry.

Life is short. Even cats slip and die on cow blood as we sit and watch through the steam of noodles we blow at before eating. Hot breakfasts take the edge off.

We ate five feet away from a bucket of crimson blood sitting silently like paint before the paint thinner is added. A pig’s four hooves lay broken and exposed on a table next to it. I followed the sallow pink to breathing red to greasy gray to an endless market of hooves and legs that fuzzed into a lentil salad of flesh and silver knives and the slowing lives of cold fish sliced open, their gills still flapping as if they do not know they are dead.

Everything is out in the open.

Mingy chickens dart around gas stations poking the dirt for bugs. Dead pigs are held upside down by four men washing the dirt from their bellies, scarlet blood dried up on their snouts like smudged lipstick. Heads of pigs look upward from kitchen floors with the hallowed eyes of scared ghosts as we snap pictures from the balcony, feeling big like the friends of boxers. Cows lay stretched from skin to skin on the black asphalt, darkening the city dirt with their smeared blood. Animals take up little space when they die. Everything is eaten.

Then we shit them out and fertilize cabbage, a dish we’ve been eating a lot of lately.
Everything is out in the open.

Like the fat rolls in my midriff that deepen in ashen folds when I look backwards into the mirror to examine my weight. Sometimes I reach around to touch them incredulous that they are there: enough fat to make secrets in my skin. Dark secrets. Like the cabbage I ate for lunch yesterday. I shiver, invading myself with cold fingers and cold reality.

We pee out into the open. The boys can do it standing up and into the air with perfect aim, sometimes from the peak of a mountain as they make echoes with their voices into the hallow humanless valley. I have to look for dry bushes, sometimes dried trash. 2 weeks ago, I crawled beneath a bridge and found a dried out, cracked leather belt near a trail of needles that once tapped dried flaky skin for red blood. I made a neat puddle next to them, careful not to get the dusty blankets at the edge of the platform wet, conscious that there is human life here, however faint. However hidden in the nook beneath a bridge.

Something flapped in me like a page of an open book flailing in the breeze. Something cracked. I’ve been cracked. My defenses weakening.The walls between me and China are eroding like a Bahamian shoreline after a hurricane has smeared its white sand onto the black road blocking the passage of SUV’s freshly washed by joonsers with bare backs and teeth that have rotted from thier mouths.

I cringe daily.

Dump Truck.  ughgh. I’ve come to hate this word in recent weeks, or rather the concept it represents.  And with it - Horn - deafening loud dump truck and long distance bus horns. A short tappy tap on the horn never seems to be enough. Long repeated blasts are the only way people will hear loud disel trucks coming up behind them, or so I imagine the Chinese drivers’ “logic” to go. 

5 or 6 days ago, when ever it was that we were biking into Zhu Zhou city near Changsha - the latter being the capital of Hunan province - I had listened to alot of dump truck horns, eaten alot of dump truck dust, and on top of it, was unusually tired due to a few days bout with diareha and nearly a whole day on the worst road of the trip thus far - a 1 on a 1-10 scale-, busy and ripped up with construction, add hills the whole way as the cherry on top and well, you get the picture.

Shoot. Is biking really fantastic? Is this trip….

I got disappointed with my whaning optimism, so I began singing one of our original songs to myself, Something Good (listen to it on this website under “Music” if you haven’t already) “The heavy world is crushing you; just wait on your turn, don’t skip past the moments of your life; something good is on its way…” And then…

Up ahead in the distance, through the shimmering light, saw the guys stopped by the road, wait, what’s that an extra bike?

Like manna from heaven, at the perfect time, two fellow travelers came into our lives, right in front of us, pedaling on the same terribly busy road in the same direction, also with a bicycle trailer and a loaded back rack with saddle bags! I couldn’t belive it. But wait, oh! Not two bikes but one, a sweet high quality tandem touring bicycle. It turns out, pure coinsidence or gift from God, that Kuang Sub and Su Ji (from South Korea) are also biking to Europe, and are planning on taking a very similar route to ours, with the addition of Tibet and Nepal, going a bit slower, and adding South and North America to make for a 3 year tour total world tour. They also happened to start at about the same time we did (early Sept 2007), not from Beijing like us, but from Qingdao city (home of the famous Tsingtao beer), not too far south of Beijing.

Since we were going the same direction, we biked into Zhuzhou and Changsha together, and spent our 3 rest days there together, visiting with Adam’s and Jim’s old friends and students and making new ones every time we’d walk on Hot Street, a winding narrow road with countless food stalls and packs of students milling about.
Kuang Sub and Su Ji are wonderful people, also in their 20s, Kuang Sub quit his job in the TV broadcasting industry and Su Ji quit college to do their 3 year world tour. They are both kind and funny, as their website is titled (in Korean) - see the “links” page of this website. It was such an affirmation meeting them and sharing our goals, and experiences from the first 1.5 months and our thoughts about where our journeys will take us, with all the uncertainties ripening our two adventures.

We parted company today after a break from our regular diet of 家堂菜 - “Home style Chinese cooking” - with a delicious Korean lunch, treated by Sub and Ji in Heng Yang city, Hunan (湖南，衡阳). They are heading southwest to Guilin, and we are heading straight south to 广州 Guangzhou for Kevin’s wedding. However, we didn’t say goodbye, just “see you later.” They will also be going through Southeast Asia, and we all hope that our paths will again cross in Thailand this Feburary.
I’m inspired by Kuang Sub and Su Ji, and am even more stolked for tandem bike riding with my future significant other. Another of the many blessings along the way.

Tonight’s town, whose name is probably only Chinese jibberish to you and only means something to me tonight and tomorrow and in my fading memory of a great old luguan with wooden floors for half the price we’re usued to (US$0.60/person) with a nice female laoban and a rigourous welcome from a gang of children, is called Fenyi, somewhere in Jiangxi province, but getting close to Hunan province, the capital of which, Changsha, we are bound for - 255km away according to the sign.  In Changsha we will be meeting up with Adam and Jim’s old friends and students from their days living there 2 and 3 years ago.

You might find it interesting, however, to learn that 江西 (Jiangxi in Pinyin) literally means “river west,” better translated as “west of the river” perhaps.  What river, I’m not so sure of.

We’re alive and well, though tired, and less Nakia, as she wrote, she’s in Hong Kong on “business.”  It’s definately not the same without her, something essential is missing from FBR.  We hope to be reunited in the coming week, if not in Changsha, then not too far south of Changsha on our way to the Guangzhou City wedding.  Tired because our Band Wagon is now packed also with Nakia’s disected bike…and we biked long yesturday, 110km instead of our usual 75.  Last night, the busy railroad near our luguan in a very small market town kept me up from 4am; other than that, a great experience of small town life - without street lights, but brand new concrete roads.

I’d like to do more music than we have been lately.  We’ve been plotting to play at Jim’s and Adam’s Changsha college campuses, where interest in our message of global friendship and mindfully low carbon emmisions lifestyles is sure to be ripe.

你好看的懂的朋友！我们今天晚上住在江西分宜，一个比较小的城市。我们往湖南长沙走。在那我们打算看Jim 和 Adam的朋友和以前的学生。我最近注意我们太少唱我们的歌，所以我们今天打算了在长沙的大学唱。我们觉得大学生会最明白我们的信息：国际友谊和不用汽油合石油的生活方式 － 变换到更觉察的生活方式。

我们最近是比较累的。累的因为我们之一，Nakia，前天坐火车到香港，在那有事情。所以我们放她的自行车在我们的推车。而且昨天我们骑比普通的天长：110公里。我们平时骑70－80公里。我们打算跟Nakia一个星期后再见面左右，一起骑到广州参加我们朋友的婚礼。可是到那时前，就是我们四个男的在路上。

今天，再考论如果你真的想一个汽车。如果你要一个，考沦为什么。

下次骑行车把！＝）

I sat on a bus yesterday that catapulted me into today faster than I could say “sit back and enjoy the scenery.” But maybe I talk too slow. A writerly friend of mine once playfully called me verbose. Milan Kundera might say i was expressing the“sudden density of life,” a case in which a writer loses sight of the limitations of prose and logic and stuffs his scenes with a surfeit of actions (The Curtain). And that’s why I love Kundera. He puts a name and a face to my narcissism, which, by the way, I had no time for yesterday on the bus.

The minute I sat down with the sun slapping me on the forehead and the whiplash of motored acceleration pinning my back against the seat, I felt very very tired. I bid my comrades goodbye and fell asleep watching the scenery speed by faster than I could ride a bike. I woke up to the scenery latent and slightly agitated by people clanging luggage and skimming plastic bags against my knuckles. Next, the scenery was asphyxiated by an evening scarf as stygian as ink that hung from the windows of the train, which stopped 12 hours short of the 24 I expected and spat me from my top bunk onto the inchoate morning platform like something bitter.

Suddenly, public transportation is making me its bitch, twirling and slamming me into curbs and harsh morning temperatures ever since I ditched it for the slothful, but sexily steady 2-wheeled bicycle that my muscles and crotch have come to know intimately.

I am in Hong Kong now on business if business can be defined by the Olympics, foreigners, small unpronounceable countries, visa expiration dates, consulates, and passport photos. At least that’s what I wrote on the departure form: business. I left the guys behind somewhere in the dusty mainland. I hope that by now they are swigging baijui (rancid Chinese rice wine) with farmers who wear green oversized blazers and smiles pressed into their faces like wrinkles. That’s what I crave now in the midst of arbitrarily stylish boots and balloon skirts, where I must wear my serious city face so people won’t mess with me.

I am in Hong Kong now and the scenery is a passive aggressive flash of neon light suspended above labyrinth alleys flooding with African tailors, Eastern European accents, albino Chinese, and Philippine guesthouses. It rings in the ears like mantras: Do you need a single room? I know where you can get suits made cheaper than in your country. Where are you from? Ooh! Where is that?

Signs are everywhere, ricocheting messages of somebodies’ home; countries left behind: Namaste Indian Restaurant, Forest Green Vietnamese, Sushimasa, Patty’s Irish Pub, the Kangaroo, Tony’s Ribs. Food is the fastest way for a country to get around within another country. The best meeting place for a family of Indian migrants discussing business and counting one’s blessings over lunch. It’s the best way for me to fulfill my cravings of garlic nan and spinach chutney, momentarily forgetting the mainland’s steamed dumplings and tasteless cake.

But my senses are overloaded in this megalomaniac carnival. I’m too used to brown rice paddies, the candy green of tea bushes, the soft tresses of corn fields and sugar canes.

This is probably why I am fighting to push my writing fast between the time it takes for my laptop to run out of battery in this socketless café franchise, in between frantic sips of froth from a parched paper cup before the steam stiffens, in between the insipid drawl dripping between taffy mucked teeth that talk about the rich suburbs of Dallas over my shoulders from the other table. Elvis is on the speakers above my head and a red two-tier bus is having problems moving its massive hind from the minute parking space in front of the glass wall of this socketless café franchise. 

My mind is immersed in the memory of the books I saw at an English bookstore. Delillo, Marquez, Murakami, Achebe, Kundera. My mind floodlighted with the thought of all these ideas summersaulting onto the shelves like an animated puzzle coming together. If I could I would lick them all one by one.

This is like Shanghai again. Everything is too immaculate. The ketchup sits in shiny plastic bottles. Skinny Malboro lights sit between the fingers of skinny girls and skinny boys in skinny jeans and anime hair, clinking hips beneath the bamboo scaffolding. The shiny plastic signs and the white walls of the 7 Eleven’s glimmer like a jar of candy in a doctor’s office.

I feel safe enough to stay here all night if I have to. Chocolate covered matcha cakes and Japanese Pocky’s are sealed in plastic covered boxes. They are sealed so we can eat them.

There are signs everywhere telling us it’s safe. There are signs with girls in smoldering eyeliner nonchalantly hanging off the shoulders of boylike male models in tuxes, laughing, simulating good clean fun. Signs telling me it’s ok to come into this hotel and that bakery where the best blankets and the best treats lay awaiting me like a nipple to a newborn. Signs become symbols of security in a big, bombastic city like Hong Kong.  They have meanings deeper than their message.  I seek them out like I seek out food. 

But i know that i am homeless without my bike. I wonder around waiting for Monday, loosing myself through the alleys. The scenery screams and slithers beneath my senses like wet cold through a coat, creeping in through the button holes and collar until I am completely exposed. I struggle to capture the fleeting moments of people walking by, but all they do is blur. This city is too big for me.

The thing is when we ride bicycles, I never have time. We must ride, we must talk to the locals, we must see the moving landscapes, the billboards, the sugar canes and the farmers and the mountains. We must experience. The signs in the countryside indicate towns and distances in Chinese characters and numbers. The billboards sport propaganda messages to protect the environment that will be used to give Chinese citizens better homes. We glimpse monumental images of cooked dogs on plates and stock photos of the same Lithuanian blonde smiling on store signs.

We cannot get too involved in our own thoughts while riding less we get distracted and slow our strides or get sucked beneath the wheels of a moving trailer. We cannot get involved in owning things. We own nothing. We share everything, even our time.

I’ve grown accustomed to squeezing myself in the tender in betweens, knees to my chest, book on my knees, body cradled in a bed covered with luggage and loose clothes and open guitar cases. I’ve gotten comfortable with sliding sideways in the 5 minutes it takes to stop and pee or ask for directions or fix a flat.  I wake up at 5am while the others are still sleeping and fit my words in the tight urgency of the morning fuzz, where I must be terse if I am to outrun the REM that will eventually pull my comrades out of their delicate sleep and into the embryonic morning with me. 

In the city, I am dwarfed by the larger than life humans laughing down at me from their skyscraper wallpaper. Everyone looks different here and I’m not sure what language the passerbys are speaking. Indonesian? Vietnamese? German?

 I am alone. No one looks over my shoulder to see my notebook. No one asks me where I’m from unless they want to sell me something. No one cares. Not even me.  I am wearing my city eyes like dark car tints. I am alone and my time to myself is vast. I make sure to keep it that way, dodging soliciting Indians inviting me in for puri and dosa. I have a mission.

With my bike temporarily amputated and stuffed into the trailer (that Adam affectionately calls the hearse), I crawl into the box that is my hostel room, and sit Indian (ok, Native American) style at 2am, typing steathily while my teammates are dreaming in the mainland and everyone else in Kowloon, Hong Kong is downing vodka and dancing to a deaf hip hop beat on a Saturday night.