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Like most mornings when you wake up and your sleeping bag is much warmer than the outside air (this particular morning it was only 45, but relatively cool all the same) staying in that sleeping bag is much more inviting than packing up your gear and heading on your way.  Nature generally does it’s part in helping you however, as it did this particular morning, so getting up no matter how difficult was at the same time relieving.

I emerged from my tent to an orange sun coming up over a freshly harvested rice patty.  We packed up our gear and made for the county highway we had been following the evening before. 

Just before we found our campsite the previous night we had come across a restaurant in the country-side, not far from where we had camped.  The red Chinese lanterns had called us in where we had a meal of beans, pork, and eggplant.  While eating we talked with various people, a few families, the workers, a pharmaceutical salesman, and a grade school teacher.  The teacher was named Mr. Zhan, he had a son who was 28, and a 3 month old grandson.  He taught in Mandarin instead of his local dialect.  He laughed at almost everything and loved to use hand gestures when talking. 

As we were mounting our bikes and preparing to leave that next morning he came walking down the road pushing a well used baby stroller with his grandson, and laughing loudly.  “Where did you guys sleep last night” he asked.  In our tents in that field we answered, it is relaxing, quiet, and free.  “Oh there was no need for that, you could have just stayed at my house” he replied.  He asked if we had yet eaten, a common question any time of the day in China.  We said no but were going to go look for a place.  He said we should go with him, ”dumplings, fried bread, steamed buns, it has everything!”  How could one resist.  We walked a short way and came across a number of stalls, he was quick to announce to his friends who we were and offer us breakfast.  Laughing the whole time and offering us more and more food we ate our fill, as usual for any group of people preparing to ride over 100 kilometers.  He offered to pay but we were faster than he.  He led us back out to the road pushing his grandson in front of him and wished us luck.  He did not have to work that day because it was Sunday, so he walked back home to rest. 

We rode our bikes down a road yesterday into a town, a pile of red dirt blocked our way so that we had to ride on the shoulder to get in.   Its name was Huang Feng, or Huang something Shan, I don’t quite remember, nor would anyone else.  If I had my map right now I could figure it out by either reading the characters, or asking a Chinese person how to pronounce them if I din’t recognize them, which would most likely be the case.  My mind is beginning to blend memories together, characters, unknown pen-strokes, words, names.  In fact I can’t remember the names of many of the places I have been over the last 51 days.  They just exist in a chain with no clearly defined links.  There are things that happened a long time ago, and things that happened a short time ago.   Certain things stand out, days when we rested, beautiful biking days, gifts we were given, run-ins with authority, meeting interesting people.  But the rest just blends.  

Last night in particular was one of those nights, just like most of the rest.  The middle of no-where China, a place where no other foreigner would ever dream of going, where I never knew existed, nor will particularly remember.  I love it, and I live for it on a trip like this.  It is why I am here.  A look into the everyday life of the putongde ren, the common person, real China.  You can taste it in the air, dusty, dirty, smokey.  You can see it in the people, wide eyed, curious, unsure.  You can see it in the city, regulated, communist with white tiled buildings, cement floors, low door frames, wacky advertisements, and homemade food stalls.  You can hear it, stupendously loud truck horns, cement mixers, jack hammers, undecipherable syllables being amplified through megaphones attached to bicycles.  You can feel it, people brushing against you, a man feeling the hair on your arm, the firmness of the plywood you are sleeping on.  You can taste it, the oil used in frying up the common man’s dishes, vegetables, meat, dumplings, and steamed buns.  This is China.

We biked down the one road going in and out of our town last night, turned at the intersection, and took a left.  We stopped in front of a sign for a luguan, or travelers hotel.  Pete went in with the laoban.  The three of us stood outside waiting, not for Pete to emerge, but for the inevitable masses to surround.  People had watched us enter the town, and were aware of our presence, now it was time to feel us out. 

Slowly and surly they approached, like a rat to a trap, timid, curious, and present.  One man stepped forward, “Where are you from” he asked.  “They don’t understand” said a woman in back.  “America” said drew.  Exclamation arose in the crowd that had now grown to about 15.  They can speak Chinese!  Confidence was rising, a flood of questions quickly followed. 

To steer the conversation to a level I am able to handle I usually run through all the meaningful things that I know people will ask me.  What we are doing and why, where we are from, where my bike is from, where we are going, how many people are in the group, where Nakia is from, where the Bahamas are, that the Bahamas is a real place, I then tell them I am not cold, tired, and will eat soon.  From there I try my hardest to pick up words, phrases, and ideas I can’t quite understand.

Last night was like most other nights in China.  People told us that we must be lost and asked why we were in their town.  Sometimes I tell people I am there because I have heard about it being a beautiful place so I came to look, other times I tell them the truth, I don’t know why I am there, I just ended up there.

Our luguan was two buildings next to each-other patched together like a maze, we had two rooms on the second floor.  We had to walk through an old photo studio with fake landscapes hanging on the wall to get in.  We had four beds, wooden slates with a wool quilt thrown on top, a door that kind of locked, a window that opened, a single light-bulb hanging from the center of the room, it was 6 kuai a person, less than one U.S. dollar.  It had a toilet that actually flushed, and cold water to wash with.  The chickens and ducks lived under the stairs.  Children followed us everywhere, screaming “hello”, and “how are you.” The perfect place.

We ate dinner at the same place we eat every night.  We got similar dishes to those we get every night.  We drank boiled water from the same thermoses that we do every-night.  

Pete Jim and myself went for a walk after dinner.  There were no street lights in this particular town, it saves electricity and is cheaper.  Everyone sleeps at night.  We walked down a road, a few hair salons remained open, a few families doors were open and you could see people playing mahjong, drinking beer, and playing with children. 

We stopped in front of an extremely small train station and were chatting lightly.  A man with a flashlight was walking towards the station with a flash light, he froze when he noticed us and heard our language then shone his light on us.  Jim said hello in a friendly voice, the man returned the greeting and asked if we from Xinjiang, a region in the far north west of China where the minority group of Uighur comes from.  No we said, we are American.  “That’s not possible” the man exclaimed.  After we had convinced him he quickly warmed to our presence.  He worked at the station and was on his way to work.  We chatted a while then parted ways.  

We return down the road we had come, and a family was standing outside their doorstep  and initiated conversation.  ” You are the foreigners who have ridden their Bicycles here from Beijing” they said.  “Yes” we replied, “you have heard of us.”  One man pointed at Pete, “you are 1.98 meters” he said.  Peter confirmed the statement.  Like a small town anywhere in the world word travels fast.  We talked a while and they invited us into their home to sit and talk.  We ended up returning to our luguan to rest however and to help Drew re-grease the bearings in his rear hub. 

We rode out of town this morning the same way we do every morning.  With long goodbyes, scribbling of addresses and names, and the snapping of pictures of quick friends. 

Slowly the landscape has changed, soon the language will also start to fade into incomprehensable syllables.  Hopefully by means of writing, video, and photography and I can pick out meaningful links in the chain of experiences to remember and share with others.  I have not yet grown weary of our trip.   Tomorrow may be similar to today, or it may be extraordinary, but either way I can’t wait to see how it develops.

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.

Looking down from our balcony we could see the head sitting on the cement floor next to a pile of herbs and a bucket of intestines. We took turns taking pictures. It wasn’t really gross, just curious. A pigs head on the floor and an old woman next to it, carefully cutting open the intestines with a scissors so they could be washed out and prepared for serving.

Adam and I found ourselves at the balcony together, observing and passing a few thoughts. How many people would turn away in disgust to see a severed pig’s head sitting, still bloody, on the floor? It seems brutal. And yet, we also eat pork chops in the United States. It isn’t pretty, but it is the reality of pork chops. The pork we buy in the U.S. has little resemblence to the animal it once was, being neatly packaged on syran-wrapped styrofoam with a sticker to tell us what it is: “pork tenderloin“. We know it’s a pig, but we’re not often brought face to face with it like this, so to speak. Hotdogs aren’t quite so honest, and we can be thankful that they’re not.

Even though it’s slightly horrifying to see the head and watch a woman cutting open the guts, it is nice to know that very little goes to waste. And it’s a healthy perspective, remembering that death is an every day part of our lives, in all its commonplace brutality.

Later, as we’re ready to go, we hear some excitement just outside our “lu guan’s” doors. A crowd is building as a man appears to be hitting a woman amid angry shouts and cries of alarm. The fight sways and swarms, and another man is now involved. He has in his hand a square wooden stool and it cracks loudly several times over his pursuer’s head. Somehow the man with the stool is restrained. One of the men is bleeding down his face. The fight breaks apart, then rushes to resume several times. Finally, the more clear-headed neighbors restrain the angry assailants.

I am surprised at my body’s reaction. I have put out adrenaline and my heart is racing. My blood pumps. I am ready; the fight or flight response. Pretty curious. I’m just watching. My blood races in my live veins, the pigs blood is cold sticky, the fighters’ blood is “hot”, while the injured man’s blood trickles.

Life and death are all bloody affairs. And it’s somehow real. It’s basic. Seeing blood reminds us of life and death, and it’s simple. It’s raw. And it’s not even ten a.m. on a Wednesday, so there’s much to think about.

Car, truck, truck, big truck, bicycle, bicycle, bicycle.  The perspective of a cyclists in China.  There are tons of bicycles in China, in fact more than any other country, which is how it got its nickname “The kingdom of bicycles” or in Chinese ”Zi Xing Che Wang Guo”  it seems however that this isn’t for any environmental reason as much as it is economic.

From moving massive construction cranes on huge flat-beds to people biking from their village to work the field we have seen it all in China.  We have biked through incredibly polluted areas laden with factories spewing smoke.  We have biked over rivers with banks covered in garbage, running black with pollution, and making their way out to the sea.  We have spent days riding into and out of huge metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai.  But we have also seen the families walking to their fields, the fields they use for self subsistence farming.

 It becomes easy to point a finger at the common enemy, China, with all it’s problems and harm-causing money-making industries that go into any industrializing country.  Too bad it is true, that China as a whole has now surpassed all other countries at leaving a deeper carbon footprint.  That the pollution is so thick in some areas that respiratory disease is the leading cause of death, and it has only been twenty years in most places where these factories have existed, what of the Children who will spend their entire lives living under these conditions?  

This trip has allowed me to have a more wholistic view of this country, beyond the smoke stacks, highways, and coal run power, beyond the government, oil hungry officials, and rising middle class tourists are hundereds of millions of people who have no choice but to get up everyday and bike to their fields to grow a few vegetables, or walk to work through pollution created by the factories producing goods for us Americans.  These people often have one light bulb hanging in the center of their house, one television, and consume relatively few pre-packaged products as compared to Americans.  They rise and sleep with the sun.  They are the forgotten China.  Not that they choose this way of life, but because they have no choice.  Which is important to consider as well.  If they had the choice to live like this would they choose it, probably not.  With this perspective pointing the finger soon becomes much more difficult. 

In America I try to consciously consume less than the average American, however it is still incredibly more than so many people I see in the country-side of China.  My plane ticket to come here for example created a much larger carbon foot print than that of many of the people I meet make in many months.

Many Chinese tell me of a common dream, that every person have a Car, like in America.  I believe this dream would quickly become a nightmare. Perhaps we can make a few people consider something they don’t often consider by talking with them about it, but unfortunately I feel more is necessary.

A man in the city of Huzhou in Zhezhiang province with the English name of Mike was telling me of no car days, where in the city people are not allowed to drive cars on certain days.  Beijing has had similar days as well, and has done test runs for the Olympics where factories and cars are not allowed to run.  My understanding however that these days are generally ignored.  I imagine such a day in the U.S. would have similar results.  Maybe the realization of a problem is a good first step anyway. 

The world is incredibly diverse, I have seen people drive their SUV down their driveway to get their mail and I have seen families with an old rusty bicycle as their only means of tranportation. Should we feel guilty for using what we have aqccured?  Not neccissarily, but we can at least be concious and make a choice to consume less.  For years messages of environmental protection have been drilled into our heads.  Use reusable bags and imagine the tons of plastic that could be saved each year, bike to the grocery store instead of driving and imagine the fuel we would save.  But what will it take to actually go through with these energy saving methods?  I am guilty as well.  Sometimes you conciously know what you are doing is wastefull yet you do it anyway.  What will it take to change?  In the U.S. there is a social stygma attatched to littering, probably because it is visible pollution that has an imidiate effect on our surroundings.  But driving a Hummer to work for some reason is seen as impressive. 

Clear facts pointing out how our world is being devastated is not working, perhaps however if the Jones’s talk behind our backs about how we leave our lights on when we go out people will be more likely to change.  Well we need more talkers!  Not behind any one’s back though, but in a respectable way, I feel to spread consciousness is really the best way.