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On the road now for six days, we’ve had ample opportunity to speak with a great variety of people. Whether it’s the five foreigners with heavily loaded bikes and blaze orange traffic-management vests that attract crowds of people, or just my delectable posterior as featured in biking shorts, remain unclear. In any case, there are many people who want to talk with us, so talk we do. The conversations usually fail to cover new ground, or even escape the geographical/anatomical realm: where are you from? where did you start biking? where are you going? how tall is that tall guy? (with the latter question of course referring to the six foot six Peter).

In order to simplify things we’ve been telling most people that we simply intend to bike to Hong Kong. Even with this conservative estimate of our trip, reactions to the idea of our journey usually vary between incredulous and amazed. During the tense period on the 16th when we weren’t sure if we would be able to leave Beijing, we scrambled to secure the guitars to Drew’s bike outside our apartment building. A young girl and her father stopped by to monitor our progress. Upon learning we hoped to go as far as Hong Kong, the girl cross her arms over her chest and shook her head emphatically. “I don’t believe you,” she said. Her father tried to convince her we were for real, but to no avail.

Another man we talked to in Hebei claimed biking to Hong Kong was impossible. “That can’t be true,” he claimed. I tried to give him our website for evidence, but he said, “I’m aware such a thing exists, but I’ve never used it myself.” Oh well. After unsuccessfully trying to get his son to talk with us he left.

During longer stops, we venture more detailed explanations about the reasoning behind our trip: our intention of advocating bicycle rather than car travel, our effort to raise awareness of global warming, our hope that more personal connections between cultures will lead to a more secure world peace. People usually nod and agree when we say these things, but we have yet to have a generally great global warming round table in any of the villages in which we’ve stopped. Sometimes even basic communication is a problem. The other day, after explaining reduced pollution (wuran in Chinese) someone thought I had merely said we were going to Wuhan (the capital of Hubei Province). I’ll practice my pronunciation, and in the meantime we will hopefully come up with a solid platform from which to advocate the environmental side of our trip.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 9:20 am and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.