Around China in 100 Days

[Roadrunner]

Ji’nan to Nanpi – Day 29

Had a short and fitful sleep, so I woke up still very tired from the day before. I got a call from Lulu ordering me to get downstairs ASAP because the guys that we stayed with had a morning class. Not such a good start to the day.

It was drizzly and a little cold, and still half asleep while I put the bags on the motorcycle, Lulu and I started to get on each others nerves, which would culminate in an on-road verbal explosion later in the day.

The drive was unremarkable. Cloudy, little cold, and not much in the way of scenery after crossing the Yellow River, but the roads were good and at one point in took me more than half an hour to catch up with Lulu after I stopped to figure out our route.

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We got into Dezhou and I thought she ran a red light (I’m pretty sure she did) but the accusation did nothing for her mood. She sulkily mentioned being hungry. I started off, intending to find a cheap place to eat outside the main city area. Not long after that, I realised she wasn’t behind me any more and stopped to wait for her to catch up. She drove past me minutes later, not even slowing down, so I hurried to the next set of traffic lights to catch her. I pulled up beside her. “Where did you go?”. “Are you crazy?!! she screamed, “there was a jiaozi (dumpling) place just back there, didn’t you see it?”. I was surprised for a fraction of a second, but that gave way to cold fury “Calm down!!” I yelled back at her. “Can’t you see I’m looking for a place”. I drove off, my illiterate pride smarting a little and keeping an eye on the rear view mirror to see if she was following.

Five minutes later, I recognised the characters for noodle house (面馆) and stopped. She asked me not to speak to her for the rest of the day, and I knew she needed space, so I ate lunch by myself.

We drove on for another 80 kilometres, each rider stopping at their own leisure, waiting for the other, but not communicating, until it was close to dusk and I thought it best to stop early at a fairly nice Lvguan in Nanpi.



We had a long talk about what went wrong during the day and sorted ourselves out with a mutual apology. I will never forget the Chinese characters for jiaozi (饺子).

[Roadrunner]

Nanpi to Beijing – Day 30

We passed 5000 kilometres together in Cangzhou, Hebei. We were both cheery and refreshed after the talk the night before and a good night’s rest.Our 5000 kilometres per month would be pretty standard the whole way through, despite my hopes that we would beef up our daily average.



We came across a couple of roadworks, the biggest of which was the G104 heading north from Tianjin into Beijing. After talking to a local rider, we found the way around along a fantastic country road as the sun was setting.





It was dark before we got into Beijing and there were a couple of times when I nearly hit pedestrians, walking along the shoulder of the road wearing black clothing, not exactly the wisest thing to do. In the interest of potentially saving a life, I dispensed with common road courtesy and drove in the middle of my lane with my high beams up.



We met Annie, who Lulu had been in touch with for weeks, outside the fourth ring road (motorcycles without Beijing A plates can have issues with the police inside the fourth ring road) and we found a place to park our bikes.

We had dinner and then were off to find the guest house that Annie had arranged for us, only to find that they can’t take foreigners. Half asleep and lugging my body weight in ungainly bags, I asked if it was okay if I could sleep on the couch. Annie said it was no problem; she had been in contact with Lulu for most of the trip, and she understood what we were doing.

Safe! We made it to Beijing!

[Roadrunner]

Beijing – day 31

Lulu stayed back at Annie's because she wasn't feeling very well and it took me a while to get my bearings on the way out from the apartment. We had arrived in a taxi in the middle of the night, so I wasn't quite sure where I was on the map of Beijing in my Lonely Planet. I walked around for a couple of hours, ate some McDonalds, which had never tasted so good, and found a Metro station so I could do my tourist thing.








I didn't really know what to do after the Tiananmen square because it was getting late, so I headed to Dongcheng to check out the Hutongs, Beijing's narrow alleys.





I found them incredibly interesting in the cool, spring, orange-tinted dusk as I wandered around. I found a bar with a Chinese rock band doing a sound check and stopped for a beer as a one-man audience before heading off for some noodles beside some instrument shops and a place called the Bed bar. This stylishly decorated establishment really refueled my spirits. We have nothing like it in Chongqing, so I had a couple of glasses of wine on the beds/couches and listened to some very relaxing western style music. Just what I needed after a month driving a motorcycle, day after day after day.

[Roadrunner]

Beijing – Day 32

The night before I arranged to meet Lulu at the 798 art area with XiaoZhu, a friend of Lulu's who once worked at a youth hostel in Zhongdian (also known as Shangrila) in Yunnan with her. I managed to do a little bit of internet in the morning on one of the hostel computers and found a friendly invitation waiting for the both of us. Richard (AKA Lao Jia Hou) from the Mychinamoto forum kindly invited us out for a Saturday ride with him and a couple of his mates.

It would have been great to get to meet some of the Beijing bikers and I should have organised my activities a little better before getting to Beijing.





My girlfriend recently went to Beijing and I asked her to take drop off some cold weather gear (a full body rain suit and a Powerlet heated vest) to a friend, which was great because I knew that I could manage some seriously cold weather. I chucked these (rather bulky) items into my increasingly ragged looking Bass bag, where they stayed for the remainder of the trip. I never needed the rain suit (except for when we slept on a very cold marble floor in Inner Mongolia), and I could never justify taking the time and effort to get the power socket installed on my bike for the heated vest because I never felt like it would be cold enough to use, now that we had to cancel our plans to drive to Haerbin.

We metro-ed to the Peace Cafe, on a hutong near the Forbidden City, where Lulu made another presentation to thrity poeple squeezed in to a small room. There was no space for me, and I wasn't directly involved, so I sat outside and enjoyed the view.

[Roadrunner]

Beijing to Gubeikou - Day 33

We got started late (as usual) so the plan of getting to Simatai in the morning to do the great wall hike by the afternoon started to look shakey. We had a healthy brunch of dumplings and veges with Annie and Zhuzhu (XiaoZhu's nickname, funny because it sounds like the Chinese word for pig) before saying goodbye and thanks to Annie. ZhuZhu had decided to come with us to Chengde, so he courageously hopped on the back of Lulu's bike to brave the Beijing traffic.



We picked up our bikes from the parking lot outside the third ring road and Lulu found her bike keys. She had been looking for them all morning and found them resting comfortably in the ignition of her bike, which had been left alone for three nights. It may or may not have been my fault, as I was the one who chained them together. I guess leaving them in a carpark next to a traffic police booth did the trick.



It took a couple of hours to get around Beijing, avoiding the inner city, but soon we were cruising along at a good speed. The landscape started to change to arid scrubland and we started climbing through hills and valleys north of Beijing. We passed by the Miyun reservoir, by far the largest source of water for Beijing, looking very empty.



Driving to Simatai we came across a sign saying that this section of the great wall was closed for "internal transformation of the scenic spot". We asked some locals if there was any way in, and they said that a new resort was being built there, and the whole section was closed off. Looking for an authentic Great Wall experience, we were surely grateful to the developers for closing off one of the highly regarded parts of the wall, while they went about their business in anticipation of the great tourist profit the development will surely bring in.





We decided to drive on anyway and see what we could, but the side road leading to the section was closed off with a checkpoint, so no hiking the Simatai great wall today. Quite a shame, because it looked like it would have been incredible.



We drove to Gubeikou at dusk, past pieces of great wall sticking into the darkening sky from ridges above the valley, and found a Lvguan for the night

[CrazyCarl]

That's Rock n Roll.

CC

[Roadrunner]

Gubeikou to Jinshanling to Chengde - Day 34

We drove to the Jinshanling great wall after breakfast. Lulu and Zhuzhu wanted to find less expensive ways in, but in the end we all opted for the less adventurous option of paying the 50 kuai entrance fee.



The part closest to the entrance had been renovated recently. It looked nice and airbrushed, but we were keen to find a more authentic part of the wall. There was plenty of hiking involved, and we soon got separated by the level of exercise we each wanted to exert. After a couple of hours hiking along the wall, which got more dilapidated and the scenery more breathtaking, I came across a sign announcing the end of my hike. "the Simatai Great Wall is closed". I kept walking because signs aren't much of a deterrent when you're looking at high ridges topped with Great Wall watch towers overlooking huge drops. I came across a group of Lithuanians who had the same idea and were coming back the opposite way. They said that there was an official looking guard in one of the watch towers watching out for overzealous tourists and turning them back. My plans for flouting the rules protecting the "internal transformation" were dashed.



I walked the 8 kms back through a detour down the hillside built for those who had come as far as was permitted by the sign, all the way to the Jinshanling entrance along a nice newly paved road. Minivan taxis stopped every now and again to offer me rides (for a price).

For those who would appreciate a baksheesh-free way of enjoying one of the wonders of the world, this road forks left at the last paved-road intersection before the main Jinshanling gate. 5-8 kilometres up the road should be a flight of stone steps leading up to the right, overlooked by a pagoda (which was under construction 9 months ago). Keep in mind that by now it could well have someone manning a money collecting station at the bottom of the stairs.

I met up with Lulu and Zhuzhu who had made it about halfway along the wall and we headed back to Gubeikou to get our bags and quickly packed our bikes and headed back into Hebei to Chengde.



We had some issues finding a place for us all to stay, the main problem (again) was the fact that I'm not Chinese and most of the places we asked couldn't take foreigners. In the end we found a two bed room for the three of us and Zhuzhu and I played paper-scissors-rock to see who would be lumped with the middle spot. I lost. Dammit!!

[Roadrunner]

Chengde to Guojiatun - Day 35

I visited the Puning temple while the 80 kuai entrance fee convinced Lulu that she should write one of her articles for the paper back in Chongqing. Puning temple was built in the Qing dynasty and is one of eight temples built around the Emperor's former summer palace in Chengde to show respect to the ethnic minorities of the empires' neighbours and vassal states, in this case, the Tibetans.





Inside the main temple stands a towering 22metre high wooden statue of Guanyin, the buddhist goddess of mercy. This is the largest wooden sculpture of Guanyin in the world.



By the time I left the temple, Lulu had finished her article under a tree near the bikes. Not only did she save money by staying outside, she also saved a couple of kuai by looking after the bikes herself.



We had the oil changed and chains tightened and other bits and pieces outside Chengde. I was particularly concerned about the roads in Inner Mongolia because I had been told that they could be pretty bad, so we had to make sure the bikes were happy before the roads gave them any punishment. I picked up some spare chain and master links, which could have come in handy much further down the road.



The further north we got, the more empty the roads became, which made the going easier, faster and more fun. We started to pass iced over rivers, still unthawed from the winter, and small villages among vast spaces of land and mountains covered with tufts of sun-bleached grass. After the massive urban sprawls that we had been riding through for so long, for me at least, it felt like heaven.



We stopped in a small, quiet village at a family guest house, who were very friendly, served us a meal and even let us use their internet in their lounge while an old man snored in a bed against the far wall.The room was very small, but we managed to pile our bags between the beds and hoist ourselves inside without too much fuss.

We didn't have a particular destination in mind as there is a distinct lack of cities in northern Hebei. Not the worst situation to be in; I certainly had had enough of crowded urban areas by that point.

[Roadrunner]

Guojiatun to Yuanshangdu – Day 36

We quickly packed our bags, which was a little harder than usual because of the size of our room.



We continued through the beautiful valleys and iced rivers of northern Hebei, slowly climbing in altitude towards the steppes and stopping every now and again to appreciate our surroundings.






We rolled down through the last pass onto vast plains stretching to the horizon and soon came to the border with Inner Mongolia. I thought that the road quality might change at the border, but it was decently paved asphalt.



The only tourist sign we had come across for the day told us to go down a side road, so we did, and came to a series of lakes covered in thawing ice, various bird life swimming around in what must have been a wildlife sanctuary.



The next tourist sign we followed led us down an awfully corrugated gravel road to a Mongolian culture centre, which was deserted except for what must have been the owner who came out of his conventional looking house to see what the dogs were barking at. The house was at the back of a cluster of solid looking concrete gers. Obviously the centre didn’t demonstrate the nomadic history of the Mongols, unless they had a big flatbed truck hidden around nearby.

Out on the Inner Mongolian plains, the sense of freedom that I tasted heading north from Beijing became a full body sensation. The roads were well paved and the horizon wide and burning with the setting sun.



We came to an agreement over lodging at the first place we stopped at in Yuanshangdu, a town off the main road in the middle of nowhere.

[Roadrunner]

Yuanshangdu to Huade – Day 37


We headed out of Yuanshangdu out west and soon hit some pretty bad roads, the first length of difficult road since Guizhou. After about 30 minutes of driving through gravel and potholes, we came to a tarmac road running parallel. Lulu blamed the navigator again, I blamed the 2 year old map loaded on the GPS. I didn't mind so much. It's good to have some variation in road texture.



But that was only the start. We branched off from the main road heading back into Hebei, and soon found ourselves in a sun scorched, wind torn landscape with yet more gravel roads and locals herding horses with motorcycles. It took a long time to find a place to have lunch, but when we came to the intersection of a main road heading to Manzhouli we found a sole building with trucks parked outside. Stopping was a no-brainer as we were both hungry, and the wind was starting to get quite bad and large dust devils twisted, writhed and rose into the air in all directions.





Continuing on down the county road we came across Eeyore and friends wandering along the road.



I did a little of my own wandering and drove up a side road as Lulu was catching up. I'm not sure if this is part of the Gobi desert, but it certainly looked like a desert to me.






We got into Huade before dusk and the only problem finding a place to stay was pairing up our expectations of price with those of potential hosts. While I like the cheap rooms, I’m always a little paranoid about whether the cops will care whether I’m there and whether my hosts might get in trouble for taking a suspicious looking foreigner and his collaborator.