Things Fall Apart
(June 29-July 19)
good novel called Things Fall Apart. He was writing
about pre-colonial Nigeria, but he might also have been
referring to what happens to bicycles. The ride to Dali
resulted in a carnage of bike parts: the continuing
attrition of tires, popping spokes, burnt-out brake shoes
and, most annoying of all, constant chain skipping. I
honestly did not know that chains need to be replaced
every 3000-4000 kilometres, since otherwise they
stretch and wear down the chain rings and skip. Leaving
Luang Prabang, I was already over 5000 km, and the
chain was showing its age. The result of all this falling
apart was great annoyance on my part, with lots of
cursing the bike as I rode, and lots of roadside repair
sessions, often conducted under the curious gaze of a
rabble of Chinese loiterers.
It was hard to tear myself away from Luang Prabang and
its fading colonial facades and great food, but I
heard the call of China and Tibet and I answered it on
June 29th. After the tremendous hills between
Vientiane and Luang Prabang, the first day's ride was
a breeze, 110 km along a flat river valley to Pak Beng.
The next day, though, I headed into the mountains
again, turning away from the main road east to
Vietnam in favour of a northwest course towards China,
and the road surface went to hell as I climbed through the
forests and Hmong villages. These villages appear
desperately poor, with no electricity and bamboo hut
construction that look as though they would blow over
in a good wind. At higher altitudes, where it gets
colder on winter evenings, the houses become log
cabins, but the people, especially the kids, still
look raggedly poor. Only the indigo-dyed clothes of
the women lend any sort of colour to the villages.
The kids would gather to gape at me open-mouthed;
smiles seemed in short supply, perhaps because I was a
strange and frightening sight. Laos is still a fairly
empty country, with plenty of forest left between
village cornfields. The forests are intensively used,
though, with the village men heading off to hunt
almost every day.
The heat, the hills and the rain got to me that day,
and I was pretty beat by the time I rolled out of the
hills into an extraordinary sight. The valley of
Udomxai was full of new cars, bustling construction
sites and a very un-Laotian commercial energy. I soon
found out why; the town is a Chinese colony, full of
Chinese peasants from Yunnan and Sichuan working for
Chinese construction companies. The main street of
town is a strip of Chinese brothels, so I opted for a
quiet hotel down a side street.
I opted for a day off the next day to let my soaked
luggage dry out (the pannier rain covers eventually
surrender against persistent tropical downpours, as
water works its way in through the back of the
panniers). I poked around Udomxai a bit, and was
quite taken with the Buddhist stupa in the middle of
town, its gold leaf glimmering in the afternoon sun,
with a ring of green mountains all around. Something
in the style and atmosphere of the place reminded me
for the first time that I was getting close to the
Himalayas and the realm of Tibetan Buddhism.
July 2nd I headed up another poor excuse for a paved
road, 70 hilly kilometres to the Chinese border. It
was another tough ride, with more rain, more hills and
more sapping heat and humidity. The Laotian border
town was a small dusty truck stop with the obligatory
brothels, a couple of truck stop hotels (these two
categories often overlap) and a thoroughly useless
bank. At the hotel I met Roni, a fellow Canadian
(transplanted New Yorker) who had done bike touring in
the past and opined that I was carrying far too much
luggage. Which is true; I really feel as though I'm steering
a tank and not a bike He was off to teach English in
Yangshuo before setting off for more Asian travels; despite
his age (late 50s) I could completely identify with his
approach to life.
The border crossing provided a huge contrast. After
riding 2 km through no-man's land, I entered China and
found a sizeable, bustling Chinese city on the other
side, full of good food, old ladies changing money
(more useful than the Laotian bank, who wouldn't
change my leftover Laotian kip) and an abundance of
goods for sale (most of them probably destined for
Laos). All day I marvelled at the contrasts: the
smiles on the faces of the villagers, the manicured
tea plantations, the substantial wood and brick houses
with elaborate roofs, the sunshine. The ethnic makeup
had changed; this part of China is inhabited by the
Dai, close relatives of the Thais of Thailand who
didn't migrate south a millenium ago. I got to
Mengla, 60 km from the border, and remembered suddenly
how intimidating Chinese cities can be when you don't
speak or read the language well. I eventually
blundered into the nicest hotel I have stayed in,and
gorged myself on Chinese food.
I rode next to Menglun, a frustrating day of constant
ups and downs over passes and through rubber
plantations. The passes were good from a nature point
of view, as the land around them were usually nature
reserves, dense tropical forests full of birds. The
rubber I could have done without after all those
hundreds of kilometres of rubber plantations in
southern Thailand. I also could have done without the
undulations through the plantations; my legs were
still not in optimum hill-climbing shape. Menglun had
a botanical garden, which I explored the next morning,
full of 120 kinds of bamboo and hundreds of rainforest
species. They made a great deal out of the fact that
Zhou Enlai once visited and (I quote) "lovingly and
tenderly touched a rubber tree and said with feeling
'This is _our_ rubber tree'". Maybe you have to be
Chinese to be stirred by this.
The ride to Jinghong, capital of Xishuangbanna Dai
Autonomous Prefecture, was delightfully easy and it
only rained a little bit as I wound through endless
rubber plantations before hitting a rice-growing plain
full of interesting Dai Buddhist temples. I looked
into a few of them, and was struck by how Tibetan they
seemed with their low ceilings, hanging banners and
primary colours. The last 30 km into Jinghong was
along my old friend the Mekong, last seen in Luang
Prabang. It was a muddy, turbulent river in a
steep-sided valley full of (surprise) rubber.
Jinghong, a big, ugly Chinese city, full of the
obligatory new concrete buildings covered with white
bathroom tiles, was confusing because a new bridge
over the Mekong meant that the Lonely Planet map
didn't correspond to the city layout. I eventually
found my way to a travellers' hangout and headed out
to stuff myself in the various travellers' cafes.
Xishuangbanna is described in the Lonely Planet as a
major destination for foreign backpackers keen to
absorb local colour from the dozen or so ethnic
minorities who live in the area. In July, the heart
of the rainy seaon, there were almost no long-nosed
foreign devils to be seen, just hordes of Chinese
tourists in large, loud groups and neon baseball caps
worn at all angles except straight. Two of the few
foreigners I saw were on bikes, a Canadian-American
couple who had come up from Laos just ahead of me and
were then heading back south to Vietnam. I had
planned to do some trekking in the area, but with
heavy rain sheeting down for the entire day off that I
spent in town, I decided to give mud-slogging a miss
and headed off towards Dali.
My first stop was a town called Menghun (all towns in
Xishuangbanna seem to start with "Meng"), site of a
Sunday market that attracts tribespeople from the
hills around. The road led through a series of
"tourist attractions" built for the Chinese bus tour
hordes: ethnic minority villages where each bus is
welcomed by dancing costumed girls, rainforest
reserves reputedly full of wild elephants chained to
trees so that tourists can photograph them more easily.
Menghun itself lies on a road that runs to the
Burmese border, but which seems to attract few
Westerners, at least to stay. I was the first
longnose to sign in at the local hotel for 6 weeks,
according to the ledger. Judging by the state of the
hotel, I may have been the first guest of any kind in
that time.
The next morning I awoke to steady rain, but the
weather didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the market
hordes. By 7:30 the town was awash with hordes of
villagers from the boonies, in town to sell produce,
to buy necessities of life in the shops, but mainly to
see and be seen. The women in particular were
dressed to the nines in their tribal finery. Women from a
given village arrived together in rented tractor
carts, dressed identically to each other. Some
sported huge black turbans, others went for white
headscarves, and everyone seemed to wear home-woven
elaborate skirts and aprons, each village producing
its own distinctive pattern. I stood on the edge of
the market, taking pictures with my telephoto lens.
As always I felt a bitlike a voyeur, but the spectacle
of so many colourful costumes was irresistible and I
finished off a couple of rolls of film.
Southwest China, especially Yunnan province, tucked
against Burma and Laos, has an unbelievably complicated
ethnic mix. The same hill tribes that inhabit Laos,
northern Thailand, northern Vietnam and northern Burma
are found in China as well. Most of the several dozen tribes
are thought to have originated in Tibet and slowly filtered
down towards the lowlands, bringing their own land
preferences with them. Some tribes, such as the Dai, prefer
cultivating the bottom of river valleys, but the majority,
tribes like the Hmong, the Lisu, the Akhu and others too
numerous to mention prefer to live high in the hills,
practicing shifting slash-and-burn agriculture. Menghun
was a typical town, with the townsfolk mostly Dai with a
sprinkling of Han Chinese, serving a hinterland of many
different smaller tribes. The Chinese do make an effort to
provide the larger tribes with autonomous counties to help
preserve their languages and cultures, but there is always
a certain sense of Chinese superiority towards the minorities
who definitely have less material wealth than the Han Chinese.
Finally sated, I raced off towards Mengman, supposedly near the
site of hot springs, past a plain full of beautiful
pagodas. The pouring rain and a series of mechanical
mishaps saw me not reach the hot springs, and I put up
in a dismal little hotel in Mengman town, where the
local cops came to check me out, curious about what a
foreigner was doing in this out-of-the-way place. I also
discovered that the hotsprings were miles out of the way, so
I regretfully gave them a miss.
That night I replaced my long-suffering Panaracer back tire,
replaced a broken spoke and another flat tire and
rode off the next morning eager to put some big
kilometres behind me. I had been following the same highway,
National Route 214, since Jinghong, and it had
suddenly occurred to me that the kilometre markers I
had been following (counting down from about 3150 in
Jinghong) might well be the distance to Lhasa. I
wanted to see those numbers get much lower in a
hurry. I hadn't counted on the shocking state of most
Chinese roads, lulled into a false sense of security
by the continuous asphalt I had had since the border.
A few kilometres out of Mengman the pavement ended,
replaced by a rutted dirt track, full of mud puddles
and sharp little rocks that gave me flat tires.
Through the sheets of rain, I saw a wonderful
landscape of dramatic rice terraces, steep valleys of
red earth and the first pine trees of the trip.
Finally, on the other side of a mountain range, the
pavement returned and I rolled into the town of
Lancang.
The name Lancang is what the Chinese call the Mekong,
but despite this it lies a long way east of the river.
I found a cheap hotel with a friendly staff who fed
me for free in the canteen and took turns playing ping
pong with me. Unfortunately I soon found out that
come nightfall, Lancang turns into the Chinese
equivalent of Pat Pong Road, with its main
intersection a solid wall of "beauty parlours" lit up
with red lights and featuring a selection of
skimpily-dressed "hairdressers" lounging seductively
in the windows. All night the hotel corridors echoed
with shouts and giggles and slamming doors, and I was
awoken a few times by the telephone ringing as the
hotel's own "hairdressers" called to offer their
services. I had always believed the Chinese Communist
Party when it had claimed to have stamped out
prostitution, but I was obviously naive, especially after
what I had seen in Udomxai, Laos.
The next few days were hellish. The pavement
disappeared again, to be replaced with cobblestones,
which lasted for almost 300 km and nearly broke my
spirit (along with a number of spokes). The terrain
was unforgiving, endless climbs to passes, then
bone-jarring descents only to begin climbing again. I
seemed to spend as much time fixing the bike as riding
it. The rain never let up, and the dirt sections of
road became rivers of gooey mud into which I sank up
to my axles. The scenery, glimpsed between clouds and
rainshowers, was stunning, endless vistas of steeply
terraced valleys growing rice and tea, with mountains
stretching off to the Burmese border somewhere on the
horizon, but it failed to inspire me. I had expected
bad roads in Tibet, but to find them here, so much
sooner than expected, was cruel, and the endless rain
depressed me further.
One night I camped beside the road, exhausted, and
used up my headlamp batteries reading Alexandra
David-Neel's classic book My Trip to Lhasa. She took
more or less the same route that I planned to take,
and reading about her near-death experiences and long
hungry marches by night to evade the Tibetan
authorities put my own trifling troubles into
perspective.
I awoke the next morning reinvigorated, ready to
tackle more of the Gorge of Goo, the worst stretch of
road so far. Building roads along the bottom of river
gorges in the Himalayas and their outlying ranges is
never a good idea, and this road clung to the
riverside. Seepage and landslides made the road
simply disappear in a lot of places, and I had
river-crossings and long stretches of pushing the bike
through deep mud that brought back bad memories of the
road to Kailash three years ago. I eventually
emerged, though, and went back up, up, up into the
hills, thumping over cobblestones and hoping that I
would get to Dali before I blew the sidewall out of my
back tire, since I had now run out of spare outer
tires. I camped high in the mountains on a disused
logging track and wondered when pavement would begin
again.
The next day I climbed over the highest pass yet,
about 3000 metres above sea level, and for the first
time I was cold on the downhill and had to dig out the
Gore Tex jacket and rubber rainpants that had sat
uselessly in my luggage for the past 4 months. On the
way down, I stopped in a small village and was
accosted by Thad, a Chinese English teacher who wanted
to practice his English. We had tea and chatted and I
found out that pavement lay only 3 km ahead. I raced
out of there and flew downhill to Lincang, a huge
bustling city where Thad worked. He checked me into a
local hotel where I discovered that Chinese never pay
the posted room rates in hotels; there's a
more-or-less automatic 50% discount for them. This
information would come in handy throughout the rest of
my trip. I spent the afternoon at his flat chatting with him and
his wife, and that evening he dropped by the hotel, this time
accompanied by his mistress.
Talking with him was informative. He teaches at a
junior college and earns 10,000 yuan (about US$1200) a
year, which is considered a pretty decent salary. His
flat, fairly spacious (especially compared to Japan)
used to be a perk of the job, but the college decided
three years ago that all the teachers had to buy the
flats that they lived in for 30,000 yuan, or three
year's salary, a tough feat in a country without
mortgages. This sort of thing is happening all over the
country as the Iron Rice Bowl, the Communist social
security net, disappears in the interests of saving money.
While we were talking in my hotel room,
there was a sound of fireworks outside, and turning on
the TV, we found out that Beijing had just been
awarded the 2008 Olympics and the whole country was
celebrating.
That was July 13th. It took 5 more days to reach
Dali, over roads that were largely paved, but the
topography of the land was against me. From Lincang I
went down, down down to the Mekong (again) which I had
last seen in Jinghong. On the way I met Emmanuel, a
French cyclist going the other way, and talked him out
of taking the same road I had taken. As well I ran
into one of Thad's college students in Yunxiang, and
he helped me find Internet access, decent batteries
and a new tire (my back tire developed an ominous
pre-death bulge just outside town). Along the Mekong
I stayed in a little truck stop that was about 5 km
from a gargantuan hydro dam; they had electricity for
2 hours a day, which seemed a little ironic. The
climb out of the Mekong valley nearly killed me, as I
had to climb for 47 consecutive kilometres (in the
rain, of course). This pass and the next couple were
real dividing lines; every time I came over a pass
from now on, it got drier and more arid, with pine
trees replacing the rainforest I had been in since
Jinghong, and dry red dust replacing the black mud of
before.
Emmanuel had recommended taking a scenic detour to a
place called Weishan. After passing through the city
of Nanjiang, I turned off the pavement onto a cruel
joke of a track that was the road to Weishan. I
struggled uphill for 40 km, the road steadily
deteriorating until it became a construction zone, an
area of thousands of peasants smashing rocks by hand
and blocking the road with them while the entire
valley filled with dust. Just as I was despairing of
my decision, a huge pagoda hove into sight on a nearby
hill and I was in Weishan.
I loved Weishan; it was the capital of the Nanzhuo
kingdom before Dali and retains a sense of history,
with old temples and pagodas and an atmospheric old
city that has been preserved rather than torn down as
usually happens in China. It was full of the most
colourfully-dressed people I'd seen since the market
in Menghun, mostly Miao (the Chinese name for the
Hmong). The old houses were adobe, whitewashed near
the top, and topped with elaborately upswept roofs. The
streets were full of pony carts, and the streets were full of
old men with wizened faces and wispy beards puffing
placidly at tiny silver pipes. Unfortunately, my new Nikon
camera chose this moment to die, and I have no pictures of
this wonderful little town.
July 18th, the last day of riding for a while, was the
best day of riding I had in China. I left town early
and found, to my surprise, that the construction work
on the other side of Weishan had finished and there
was a beautifully-paved road all the way to Dali. I
was stuck in the morning rush hour, hundreds of
colourful pony carts bearing local peasants to and
from the market in Weishan. I turned off the main
road several times to explore small villages where
time had stopped two centuries ago. Wonderful
octagonal pagodas stood in Daoist temple grounds,
while the houses were in the same style as in Weishan.
Old men and women sat warming their bones in village
squares, while small children drove herds of goats
along the main streets (do they go to school? I think
not).
Passing through the town of Dacang, at the end of the
Weishan valley, I wondered why all the women were
wearing white head-coverings. Then I noticed that the
shop signs were in both Chinese and Arabic, and I
realized that it was a completely Hui town, inhabited
by ethnic Han Chinese whose ancestors had converted to
Islam during the time of Mongol rule in the 13th
century. Even the classically Chinese temple I saw
turned out to be a mosque, with two octagonal pagodas
as minarets.
One more pine-clad pass, another quantum leap in
dryness, and I was speeding downhill toward Erhai
Lake, the long lake on which Dali is located. I
passed through Xiaguan, an ugly new city at the end of
the lake, and marvelled at the 4-lane expressway that
I saw coming in from Kunming. For the money the
government spent on this ultra-modern tollway, they
could have paved a lot of cobbled roads in southern
Yunnan. There are no tourists, though, along the
nightmare stretches of road I had cycled, while Dali
is a huge tourist destination for the Chinese, and the
Chinese seem only to build decent roads where they
figure they can make a lot of money from hordes of bus
tourists.
After a brief dip in a dirty, crowded excuse for a hot
spring in Xiaguan, I hurtled along the expressway
beside the lake, trying to make the last 13 km ahead
of the obligatory daily rain. I arrived in Dali to
find a completely different world: thousands of
Chinese tourists, hundreds of Westerners, travellers'
cafes on every corner, thousands of
elaborately-dressed Bai women hawking souvenirs (and
drugs), and old architecture everywhere. I checked into
a pleasant hotel with a wonderful garden courtyard and
set out to eat my way through the four days I had to wait
for Joanne's arrival (by air, clever girl) from Laos. I was
glad that I had decided to take a break from the bike saddle
and to travel by train for a month with Joanne around the
big tourist sights of eastern China.