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  1. #41 Re: Chengxian 
    Moto Scholar moilami's Avatar
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    Yeah, more please. Was daunting to read this, so much hardship and as I have lost the wanderlust myself, I could only ask why why why to go to that kind of desert heat places with semi hostile people when you can be in very diffrerent places. Of course I knew the answer, the inner adventurous call, and the fact that it is not that bad when you experience it yourself. Or lets say it is actually much worse, but there is so much good too and enchanted by all the hardship. No matter, when I think myself about an adventure I see my kids saying "don't do that, dad, it is stupid" :(
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  2. #42 Xian 
    C-Moto Regular cryptographicide's Avatar
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    Xian - July 26
    Odometer: 6620 (+380 km)



    The Day of Rest

    We were awake before Frank and began packing up at around 5:30am. The first hour of riding was heavenly. The air was refreshingly chilled. Our road wound perfectly around and over mountains; cutting a wild meandering line past lush valleys and picturesque mountain tops. Before 6:30, nobody is on the roads: just Andrea and I, the bike, and beams of morning sun cutting through the mist. Our first stop was in a small city tucked into the mountains. We found a sunny spot and made a picnic of leftover noodles and corn. A young boy stopped by to practice his English but ran away timidly after blurting out, "Welcome to China." Then, three old men, who had been eyeing us and chittering about us for a while, came across the street and asked us the usual questions: "Where are you from.", "Where are you going?", "Where have you come from?". We answered politely. Only one gentleman spoke and he used a slowed down and unnatural sounding version of "Putonghua" (Common Mandarin). His buddies would chatter in the local dialect that I could barely make out.

    The next section of road was all twisties. But they were amazing twisties and no matter how slow we had to go, there was still very little traffic and the scenery was jaw dropping. I could go 40 km/h all day if the price was twisties and landscapes. Around 9 am, there was getting to be a little more congestion. We entered a river valley with tall gorges on either side. Then I started passing a truck and realized that this truck was keeping 80 km/h. He was driving an empty load and driving like a bat out of hell. Corners that I had to slow down for, he simply powered through and maintained that impossible 80 km/h. So, I stayed behind him. I kept a responsible distance, but basically let him clear a path for me. His license plate was 甘K80083 but I nicknamed him POWER K! His turns were flawless. He never used his breaks. It was like he was listening to "Dangerzone" on repeat. This guy was legendary. After over an hour riding behind POWER K, My ass screamed and I needed a break. We left POWER K and stopped in a little village fully of extra cute little white cafes but not one chaoshi that sold bottle water. Frustrated, I peed on a house. From this town, we made a huge switch back climb to a tourist village at the top of a mountain. Then we descended. The traffic at this point, was staggering. Everyone was out for a Sunday afternoon picnic and they all came here. Those luxury sedans were taking those switchbacks so slow. I saw two BWM 1200 with full gear riding in the opposite direction. That was a rare sight.

    We got to a city 120km West of Xian and had Jiamian for lunch. They were daomian shaped noodles with a typical daomian sauce and for the life of me, I'm not sure why they weren't called daomian...

    The next 120 km were the worst kind of road hell. Big trucks, bumper to bumper, sections of road that looked like moonscape, dust, heat, anger, tears, and hatred all balled up into 4 hours of pain. I don't want to talk about it.

    Getting to our Xian hotel was difficult as it was a start-up and had no signs anywhere. We circled the block then called the front desk. They answered but were no helpful or clear in where they were. Some friendly Chinese youths found us grumpy and covered in dust. They took my phone and told the front desk clerk where to find us. They fed us Oreos and waited for the clerk to arrive. He was the sort of person that looked overwhelmed by everything that happened. He led us into the apartment building and up to our room which was a regular apartment that was being rented out on a nightly basis. It was a good deal for being so close to the old city. Also, the bike was parked off the street and out of the rain. We walked around and had some stinky jiao zi for supper. Then I chugged three beers and passed out.

    Day 1 in Xian

    Upon waking, I downed all our remaining water. Then realized that Andrea would do exactly the same thing when she woke up. I immediately left the hotel to buy water for her. I found some morning street food and bought a round. It was tofu skin and gravy served with deep fried dough sticks. WOW. That is a breakfast I could eat everyday. I would turn into a walking baozi but it might be worth it. I returned to the hotel with two ice cold bottles of water. After getting ready to meet the Xian city heat, we tromped out into the world.

    Driving in Xian is not scary. I am someone who tried hard never to ride in a city but Xian is an exception. I recommend driving around in Xian. It's hot as hell and smoggy but the traffic is mild and generally pleasant. For the most part, I enjoyed driving there. I wouldn't want to live there but I hate big cities.

    Our first stop of the day was the tiny Terra-cotta dolls in the first Qin Emperor's Tomb. So cool. Really awesome air conditioned site. It was quiet and we really enjoyed the few hours we spent there. Next stop was the Banpo Museum. Almost all the neolithic stuff you see in Chinese Museums may have been removed from the Banpo site in Xian. It doesn't have much left at the actual site. But it's still really neat to look at the remains and it's great to see an archaeological site being well cared for despite it's location in the heart of a bustling metropolis.


    The Terra-cotta dolls











    Doll re-constructions


    The indoor Banpo Site

    Andrea was feeling hot and sick in the afternoon heat so we retreated to the air conditioned hotel room. We relaxed in the hotel for the afternoon In the afternoon, we went looking for a mythical English bookstore but found nothing. It was suppose to be on the third floor of a Lining sports store. We got some very strange looks when we asked all the Lining stores if they had an English books section...crazy waiguoren. Next we wandered over to the Muslim Quarter and did some exploring. We tried some food. I had a bowl of special Xian Lamb Stew. This stuff was impossible to find and not worth all the trouble, if you ask me. It did come with a little bowl of pickled garlic cloves that Andrea and I devoured and vowed to make when we got home.

    The Muslim Quarter

    I bought some questionable cigars for 6 yuan/box of 8. They smoked like cigarette tobacco and were wrapped in brown cigarette paper, so they must have been good quality.

    Tower in the center of xian

    We tried to get an off duty taxi to take us three blocks but the cheapest they would go for was 40 yuan. It was a 10 yuan cap for that distance. We did find an electric sanlunche that would take us there for ten yuan. Home. Chug three beers. Pass out.


    Sanlunche ride

    Day 2 in Xian

    We took a solid day of rest here. Leaving the air conditioned hotel room 3 times.
    #1. Go around the block to the breakfast place. Today the delicious gravy stuff was replaced with a foul green goop that smelled like egg. Not happy.
    #2. Drive to decathlon to buy new rain gear and replace the stuff I ruined when we crashed. On the way back, I stopped for some biangbiang mian. This was great. It was lasagna sized noodles and all the fixings. Mmm. Nothing slurps like a two inch wide noodle in greasy salty broth with bits of cilantro and ginger sticking to your lips afterward.
    #3. Buy some groceries and stock up on snacks. Eye-spied a random escalator across the street that looked like it might be a decent grocery store. I was right.

    The hotel staff even knocked on the door to check to see if we were actually in the room, or if the AC was just running with the room empty. We had to put on pants to answer the door. We spent the entire day listening to the Hitchhikers Guide books on tape.

    Tomorrow, we see the Terracotta Warriors and stumble across Chinese Mardi-gras!
    Last edited by cryptographicide; 12-25-2015 at 11:42 AM.
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  3. #43 Re: Xian 
    Moto Scholar moilami's Avatar
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    Thank you again of the update, was very good reading, so good in fact, that I forgot the pictures, which is rare for me while reading ride reports. Anyway, please do post pictures too. You mentioned R 1200 GS to be a rare sight there. In Nordkap it was the most common bike. Those were everywhere
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  4. #44 Re: Xian 
    C-Moto Guru TexasAggie's Avatar
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    BMW R1200 GSA has a price tag of over US$50K here in the middle kingdom before you buy a license plate. Plates vary but Shanghai A plates are almost $25K currently to add on to the cost of the bike. Hard to locate and find a lot of people willing to spend more on a motorcycle in Shanghai than a Porsche 911 costs you in Texas. However, there is presently a waiting list on every R1200 coming into the middle kingdom so there are more and more seen here in Jiangsu province all the time....
    DT
    Keeping the rubber side down.....most of the time.
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  5. #45 Re: Xian 
    Senior C-Moto Guru zhu's Avatar
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    Those big fat noodles definitely worth finding.
    When it comes to the oriental madness I find deep sarcasm lets the raging anger out without anybody really understanding what the hell I am saying.

    Just my personal technique to avoid that bummed out "they got me" feeling afterwards.
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  6. #46 Re: Xian 
    Moto Scholar moilami's Avatar
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    BMWs are so 200x old school mainstream. Urals are the shit now. They also cost a new more than Harley Davidson, so should be fine regarding status too.



    The bike above would be especially good in China because of the Flying Tigers squadron.
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  7. #47 Re: Xian 
    Life Is Good! ChinaV's Avatar
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    Bump... we're still holding our breath for the ending

    Cheers!
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  8. #48 Re: Xian 
    Moto Scholar moilami's Avatar
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    Indeed. Was very good writing and photos, hopefully you have time and motivation to continue the report.
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  9. #49 Yichuan 
    C-Moto Regular cryptographicide's Avatar
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    Yichuan July 28th
    No Odometer reading today



    Terracotta Attack Plants

    Remember yesterdays awesome tofu and gravy breakfast? Well, returned to the same shop and they were serving a pea green gravy today with a different kind of bread. I guess it alternates. This stuff was terrible. It tasted like salty mushed mung beans...probably not a bad guess as to what it was. Terrible stuff and the bread didn't help. I didn't finish. Andrea was up and packing by the time I returned. We set off out of town toward the Terracotta warriors.

    The city sprawled continuously for 30km. It was another hot cloudless day. It took a little less than an hour to get to the warriors. We got in for half price using our student ID's.

    The warriors had lots of visitors besides ourselves. Everyone taking pictures and posing. Everyone pushing, everyone sweating. Trying to look and stare and appreciate this tremendous ancient art is made difficult by the fact that I must share it. It's simply distracting. Right when you get a good view of the armies, someone inevitably tries to wedge themselves beside you to get a picture. It does however help to be tall, overweight and slick with sweat. Less people bother such people.















    Underneath these rows are more warriors. They have not yet been uncovered. None of them have been seen.



    We eventually bought a souvenir. A man approached us and asked if we wanted to buy a box of warriors. They were of poor quality but would make a good gift. We were interested, so we said 20. He was happy and said sure. Huh. That was surprisingly easy. Usually they put up more of a fight. I guess I should have gone lower. "Twenty dollars". Twenty dollars, at that time, was exactly 100 yuan. We know this, it's common knowledge for us. He says, "so, twenty dollars is about 150 yuan." We laugh at him and say we meant 20 yuan. He looks so sad and says, "I'm sorry. I can't sell it for that." We walk away and tell him were not interested. He pesters us. We keep walking. He keeps pestering. Just before we enter another building and therefore pass security, he says OK to twenty yuan and we get it. Then, as we are walking out of the site, we see similar guys selling identical sets for 15 yuan.

    Lunch was at the McDonalds. It was busy and air conditioned. We ate a feast of McDonalds chicken. This meal was the most expensive meal of the trip. A whole 100 yuan for lunch.

    Getting on the bike, we rode off. The rest of the afternoon we plugged along through Shaanxi. Every 60 km or so, we stopped and had a little rest. In general, the roads were great. They were quiet. But they were straight and the terrain was flat. Evening arrived and we found a spot to camp out of sight on a little rise near the road. We could see a village into the valley below. The devastating defect of the location was the unusually irritating vegetation. Sichuan pepper trees. These are small shrubs that grow like weeds. They have the height and general appearance of a wild rose bush. HOWEVER, their two inch thorns are coated in some kind of toxin that, after breaking skin, causes a burning rash. If feels like you've got a fire under your skin. You know the numbing pepper, imagine the numbing got inside your skin. I was wearing good pants, so wasn't too badly off. But Andrea took a real grinding.

    At twilight, a band struck up in town. They had a fantastic sound to them. It was fun and dancy and I really wanted to join them, but sleep took me too quickly. The town was small and looked quaintly tucked into a small valley. The chicker bugs were chickering loudly and the crickets made a ton of noise. And it was still so hot. Even with the sun down, nothing seemed to chill. Everything was just as hot as it had been all day. The tent was a sauna.





    The damage



    The culprit


    Sleep eventually came, but the musicians played ALL NIGHT.
    Last edited by cryptographicide; 12-25-2015 at 12:25 PM.
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  10. #50 Re: Yichuan 
    C-Moto Regular cryptographicide's Avatar
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    Jincheng - July 30th
    Odometer 7272

    Wheat Belly

    During the night, at that moment just as a faint glow can be seen on the horizon and you begin to make out the shaped in the darkness, I awoke. LADUZI! I cleared a patch of the death plants and made a squat. It was painful. Everything was awful. It took at least ten minutes for relief to come. Ten minutes on my haunches squatting like that. I wanted to scream for the pain in my bowels and then I wanted to scream for the pain in my thighs. I cleaned up, used the last of the wet wipes and crawled back into the tent. Twenty minutes later, I was back in the squat. I emptied my bowels for over an hour in the morning glow. Then I managed to get another hour of sleep before we started off. If had become slightly cool in the morning and we enjoyed the empty roads.

    I found a store that had wet wipes but the owner was a jerk and refused to allow us to use the restroom. I could barely understand his dialect. A few kilometers down the road we found a truck stop with an outhouse. It was a concrete enclosure with slots that leaked into a ditch behind the station. It stunk like a well used outhouse on a hot day can stink. I cleaned up the mess from this morning. Then some more laduzi hit me. Squat. Clean. Keep driving. An hour down the road. More Laduzi. WTF! We got into a city. Laduzi again. I found a washroom in a hairdressers salon. He was really friendly and his washroom was AIR CONDITIONED. What luxury. When I came out, I was totally wiped. Like exhausted. Andrea suggested we find a place to rest. It wasn't noon yet, so we didn't need lunch. I found a coffee place but it was closed. The owner invited us next door to sit in the bakery. We spent about an hour in the bakery. A little juice, a little cake. It was a well needed rest.

    I put in some thinking and eventually figured out what was happening to me. I was not poisoned. I and my father have a rather unique sensitivity to MSG and wheat. If we eat a lot of wheat and MSG at the same time, our stomachs and intestines become torture chambers. It's taken decades for my father to figure out what actually caused the discomfort, but now, he's pretty confident. It appears, I suffer from it as well. When I eat MSG, my mouth goes really numb. It's a terrible feeling and one that only my dad and I seem to share. Powdered white weijing that is in all the Chinese food is dangerous in large quantities for me but generally I'm safe. However, the msg-like compound used in fast food restaurants in China, (KFC, pizza hut, McDonalds) that stuff destroys me. I had a big meal of McDonalds chicken and it was the most expensive meal of the trip. I paid for that meal with a full day of pain. I am not fond of McDonalds.

    We planned to get on the Gaosu for a bit. This proved to be possible and driving became much easier. We got a few hours behind us. In one of the tunnels, we took a rest in one the connected roads. All the two lane gaosu tunnels have these small connecting roads between the two directions. I looked around and saw a camera pointed at us. This made me nervous, so we only stayed a minute or two. When we left, a voice came over the loud speakers. It sounded upset and forceful. I'm fairly certain, that, had we stayed, we would have been talked to by skinny young men in blue fast food uniforms. But, someone was coming for us and my guess was, they were saying, "pull over and remained stopped". I honestly had no idea what they actually said because the echoes in the tunnel and my difficulty understanding the local dialect made it impossible to comprehend. We didn't stop. Nobody pulled us over. Lesson being...don't stop in the tunnels.

    Mid afternoon, the clouds got dark. The air got extra muggy and there was clearly a heavy rain coming. We got off the Gaosu and made for a town called Jincheng. I found a hotel that had rooms for 65 yuan but when we got there, they said they can't accommodate waiguoren. I'm not going to talk about how this clear racism made me feel. And I'm not going to relate to you my relatively embarrassing public tantrum. These things happen and, in the six months since this has happened, I have learned a lot about acting like an adult in China. We did, eventually find a place that would take us. They wanted 120 yuan. The price was not flexible and I wasn't about to turn it down. Just as we got our stuff inside, it poured. Like...monsoon.

    After the rain, we had shaokao. Goodnight. No pictures were taken today.
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