Riding China - Dexter Ford

> WORLD TRAVELS
WORDS: DEXTER FORD PHOTOGRAPHY: DEXTER FORD AND BLAKE CONNER
One of the great things
about riding through
strange and exotic countries—
especially scary, thermonuclearweapon-equipped communist
countries—is that it invariably
shows me just how wrong I am
about them until I actually go.
Actual experience beats halfassed assumption and prejudice. Who knew?
When my old friend Werner
Wachter, the Übermensch
behind Edelweiss Bike Travel,
dared me to ride from Beijing
across the gritty, industrial heart
of big, bad Red China to the first
Shanghai MotoGP, I was packed
before you could say Broccoli
Beef. I was about to make my
own Great Leap Forward. So
many evil empires, so little time.
ming along on brand-new, perfect freeways. Some of the cars
around us were familiar—Audi
A4s, VW sedans and, strangest
of all, dozens of black Buick
Centuries, mixed in with tiny
diesel vans and lumbering blue
trucks. Motorcycles? None.
The Party is working overtime
to turn the city into a showplace for the 2008 Beijing
Olympics. A polluted showplace:
The sky has its own unique
Bass-O-Matic-gray-meetstobacco-orange tint.
The Fragrant Hills are a
scrubby series of foothills, but
to the good citizens they were
a big draw on this Sunday
afternoon. We got our first
taste of Chinese traffic: hundreds of people walking, bicy-
4000-year-old hiker they dug
out of an Alpine glacier.
“You are about to go on a
trip that will be more than
physical,” he said, in his oddly
abstract English. “We will start
here in Beijing, which is kind of
a communist hell. We’ll then ride
into the heartland, onto the
plain, where the riding will be
pretty much hard work—let’s
call that purgatory. And then as
we get farther south we’ll start
to enter utopia: the area
around Shanghai. This is the
most modern, most Westernized part of China—it was built
by foreigners as a port and
trading center. If Beijing is all
government and communism,
Shanghai is all money and capitalism. There are buildings
At the Beijing airport I
expected suspicious, faceless
communist bureaucrats brandishing AK-47s. What I got
instead was a funky, informal
introduction to modern China.
Everybody at Beijing
International was well-dressed,
in contemporary Western
clothes. And there was not a
gun, a Mao hat or a red-star
flag in sight.
I joined forces with Blake
Conner, of Cycle News fame, to
find our hotel. We negotiated a
cab, showed the address, in
Chinese characters, to the
white-gloved driver and bounded off across Beijing in a
squared-off, Chinese-built
Volkswagen, heading for the
fabulous Fragrant Hills Golden
Resources Commerce Hotel.
Our cab rushed around the
outskirts of the huge city, hum-
cling, motorcycling, scootering
and driving in a mass closer to
a bee swarm than an organized
traffic flow. Honking bees, that
is—honking seems as vital to
en-route communication in
China as hand waving and finger flipping are in Italy.
Our hotel is a gated island of
privilege in a sea of scruffy
brick-and-plaster shops. Inside
there’s polished marble everywhere, with an ostentatious
fountain in the central courtyard, with three stone elephants, each 10 feet tall, towering around it.
That night, we get our official
Edelweiss briefing on riding in
China. Abandon hope, all ye …
shooting up into the sky, seemingly every day. It’s like no other
place on earth. But first we
have to get there.
“Chinese driving, and drivers,
are like nothing you have ever
seen before,” he continued.
“Expect them to do anything, in
any direction, at any time. They
won’t stop for stop signs. There
are no stop signs. They’ll just
bounce out on the road, right in
your path, without looking.
“To a Chinese driver, a mirror
is just a decoration on the side
of his car. They never use them.
So if you want a Chinese driver
you are passing to know that
you are there, you have to use
your horn. They will, and they
expect us to as well.
“To pass a truck, and we will
pass thousands of them, you
have to be very careful. But
pass them as decisively and as
RIDING
CHINA
The Club Red Vacation
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The Highway From Hell
Christian is the Austrian half of
our guiding duo: He’s the greatgreat-great grandson of the
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> WORLD TRAVELS
the head of a duck floating
around in a tureen of khaki soup.
We saw the heads, feet and
most of the other appendages
of many animals. But the middle
parts, the actual meat, seemed
to never quite appear.
Later in the trip we would
have the chance to try deepfried scorpions. I can just hear
Homer Simpson: “Poisonous
arachnids with huge, sharp
claws. Mmmmm.”
bridge in Alaska that will go to
an island where nobody lives.
Lunch and dinner, in the
hotels and restaurants we saw,
are served on a huge, tablewide Lazy Susan. You get a tiny
plate, chopsticks, a small bowl
and a cup of green tea with the
tea leaves floating in it like seaweed in a tiny fishbowl. New
dishes appear, carried by lovely,
giggling girls, and eventually
disappear. Raw peanuts, marinated in spices, soy sauce and
chives. All manner of sautéed
and steamed vegetables, some
of them recognizable. Odd little
potted-meat concoctions.
Soups of all description.
But the dishes we think of as
Chinese food here—Kung Pao
Chicken, Szechuan Spicy Beef—
are all but impossible to find.
Rice? Very rare.
There is, however, always
something for the adventurous
of spirit and strong of stomach.
If a thing had a head when it
was alive, it still does when it
comes to the table—there’s
nothing more appetizing than
long one—500 kilometers
across dusty plains. I drew a
BMW F650GS single, which
worked well—even with my
250-pound carcass on board it
would slalom around hay wagons and donkeys at least as
well as the R1200GS twins ridden by some of the other
Edelweissers.
The traffic, as advertised,
was nuts. You can see anyone
on the roads, driving just about
anything, carrying just about
anything, crisscrossing in every
direction, each driver focused
straight ahead, completely
oblivious of anyone else. It
would be like the first corner of
a 600 Novice roadrace—all the
way across China.
This suited me just fine. In
the city, I like to ride with a certain anarchic, damn-the-torpedoes flair anyway. Here, the
whole country is doing it. My
survival plan was simple: Keep
my eyes peeled, my brake covered, my throttle pinned and my
antennae twitching. Hooahh.
Most Edelweiss tours operate
Chinese Fire Drill
around the room at each other
and ordered another round of
Tsing Tao beer.
Another Brick in the Wall
Our first day’s ride was to be a
warmup before we threw ourselves into the tree shredder
that is industrial-strength
Chinese traffic. We plowed
through the scooters, minitrucks and bicycles around the
hotel like sharks swimming
through schools of sardines,
then looped around Beijing,
heading northeast toward the
Great Wall. Motorcycles are not
allowed on most of the freeways around the capital—we
were restricted to the smaller
surface streets. It almost makes
sense, because most Chinese
motorcycles are tiny, low-tech
125s and 250s, built more for
basic transportation than for
sport, and they are much slower than the cars. They would
clog traffic and be difficult to
pry out from under the trucks.
The wall alone is worth the
trip, snaking over the hard104
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Our first day’s ride on the Long
March to Shanghai would be a
on a loose organizational principle: You know where you are,
and where you’re going for the
day, but how you get there and
with whom is up to you.
Not here, foreign devil. We
had to ride in line astern, for
the simple reason that not even
the Chinese know how to navigate across China.
Our lead Chinese guide, Rick,
had apparently been assimilated
by The Borg. He had a handsfree Bluetooth cell phone stuffed
into his helmet, a helmet videocam bolted to its side and a
palm computer stuffed in his
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March 2006
jacket. He navigated by GPS,
doing an amazing job of riding,
keeping track of his charges,
talking on his cell and videotaping all at the same time. He was
leading the charge, but with the
vacant look of a Hummer-driving
housewife curling her eyelashes
while nattering on a cell phone.
I saw—and often touched—
the most amazing things, being
carried in ways I would have
never thought possible. Eastern
China is one big, open-air factory, with strange industrial
objects being moved by every
conceivable conveyance at all
hours of the day or night. I saw
huge haystacks the size of
houses moving along the roads,
a flatbed truck and driver
essentially buried in the hay. I
saw a man on a bicycle carrying
a huge piece of aluminum stock
on his shoulder that must have
been 14 feet long. Sideways.
The Minister of Poplar
Culture
There are no wild plants of any
sort in this industrial-rural
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scrabble hills like an endless,
stone-block anaconda. They say
it’s the only man-made, unlit
object you can see from space.
The section we saw was built
by the Ming dynasty about 500
years ago—the first sections
were built in 770 B.C. The idea
was to keep out the Huns,
invaders from the north, but the
wall never actually worked in a
military sense. By the time each
section was finished, the borders between the warring factions had already changed.
Think of it as the Chinese
ancestor of our $223 million
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quickly as you can. The less
time you spend next to them,
the less chance they have to
run you off the road. Don’t
assume that anybody, especially
a truck driver, knows that you
are there on the road with him.
They simply pay no attention.
“Even for very experienced
riders, these may be the most
challenging and exciting days
you will ever spend on a motorcycle. You will have to concentrate very hard just about every
minute of the trip.
“I just hope it doesn’t get too
exciting”, he said. We looked
expanse. No wild trees. Hardly
any grass. No shrubs. Just row
upon row of low-growing crops,
divided by billions of straight
white poplar trees, each girded,
like Fred Astaire, with a white
cummerbund. Poplars are also
planted close by every highway,
in rigid rows. Where there are
no crops, the trees extend to
the horizon.
The trees provide lumber and
fiber, slow the wind and keep
the soil from washing into the
Yellow Sea. Which is great, until
you carom off a moving
haystack, auger off the road
and plow into one.
As far as I could tell, there
are no wild animals. No birds,
squirrels, rats or mice. Not even
insects. There is no road kill,
because there are no animals
left to kill. In the bad old days
of famine, flood and Cultural
Revolution, the Chinese ate
everything that grew, flew or
crawled. Every natural tree is
long gone, turned into a building, a crate, a chopstick or a
fire. There is hardly any wood
visible: The few private houses
TWO-WHEELED
DIESEL
TRACTORS,
STEERED BY
LONG TILLERS
AND HELD OFF
THE GROUND
BY THEIR
OPEN CARGO
TRAILERS, CHUG
AROUND AT
7 MILES
PER HOUR,
CARRYING
EVERYTHING
FROM PLASTIC
COOKING-OIL
JUGS TO
ATTRACTIVELY
PRICED
MICROWAVE
OVENS.
we can see are low brick
dwellings, hard by the roads,
with courtyards for livestock or
for collecting recycled junk. The
outhouses? Brick, of course.
Environment?
What Environment?
The air is incredibly polluted—a
smoky salmon hue, with aromatic hints of sewage, diesel
and burned plastic. I’ve lived in
L.A. for 30 years, so I thought I
knew something about air pollution. In the West the bad air is
generally limited to a few urban
centers. In eastern China, it’s
everywhere. You can be a hundred miles from a major city
and still be breathing air with
the consistency of burnt butterscotch pudding.
As in Dickens’ England, there
is no effort made to control
what goes into the air. Millions
of diesel trucks spew soot and
oil into the atmosphere over
every road in the country. Twowheeled diesel tractors, steered
by long tillers and held off the
ground by their open cargo
trailers, chug around at 7 miles
per hour, carrying everything
from plastic cooking-oil jugs to
attractively priced microwave
ovens. Their single-cylinder
engines have huge, exposed flywheels and, like the populace,
are crudely governed. Most of
the time the engines are coasting, but when revs drop from
lazy to dozing, great gouts of
diesel fuel are called to battle
stations. The result is a cacophonic roar and a 10-foot-high
cloud of black soot—soot
which often completely
obscures the rig and its carbonized, malignant driver.
Trash—plastic, rubber and
probably plutonium—is routinely
burned along the road. Every
night I pick large, dark chunks
of China out of my nose.
Sometimes in private.
Mrs. Clean
So the environment is pretty
grim. But the women are spotlessly groomed and elegantly
dressed. Even in the remote
rural areas we traversed, every
woman, from 16 to 60, was
dressed in tasteful, perfectly
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pressed clothing that could
have come right from the
streets of Paris or Milan. You’ll
see a woman hitching a ride on
a muddy donkey cart filled with
farm equipment, and her shoes,
her slacks and her hair will all
be perfect. There’s very little
“Chinese” influence, save an
occasional silk top—the
Chinese are wearing exactly the
same clothing they’re making
and selling to Wal-Mart. Just in
much smaller sizes. On that
note, if you want to write a
best-selling diet book, just go
to China and record what the
Chinese eat. There’s plenty of
fresh, good food, mostly vegetables, everywhere. Nobody
seems to be starving. But
absolutely nobody is overweight. Except me.
In a Jinan Minute
From the rural darkness we
roar, complete with police
escort, into the electric bling of
Jinan—a huge, booming city
ablaze with neon lights, wallto-wall traffic and ultramodern
40- and 50-story skyscrapers
bursting up like geysers of civilization.
China has 1.3 billion people,
which means that tiny dots on
the map with names you have
never heard are actually
bustling, big-time, world-class
cities. There are 10 cities in the
United States with a population
over 1 million. China has more
than 200. China has cities the
way our cities have Starbucks.
The route south of Jinan
leads us to a rare and wonderful sight: hills. We climb past
terraced farmlands and even
the occasional wild tree. Along
the way the inevitable local
motorcycle gang, alerted by one
of Rick’s electronic devices,
blends in with us, riding an
assortment of Japanese sport,
supermoto and naked bikes. We
descend from the hills into the
outskirts of Tai’an, and to the
base of sacred Taishan Peak.
Confucius wrote, “The world
looks smaller when you ascend
the summit of Mount Taishan.”
We’ll have to take his word for
it. We didn’t have time to climb
it, and could barely see the top
for all the smog. We hung
around the hot parking lot,
drank warm 7-Up and took pictures of cute Chinese girls in
Joe Rocket jackets.
Later that day I had a ringside seat at the inevitable accident. We had just had lunch in
Qufu, another huge, anonymous
city, and were rolling in loose
formation on a wide, busy
street. A bus was stopped on
the right. As our group
approached, a young woman
pushed a pink electric scooter
out from behind the bus and
directly into the path of Neville,
a Kiwi investment banker on
an R1150GS. He nailed the
brakes, the fork shuddering
under the ABS.
At the last instant Neville
went to plan B, trying to get
off the brakes and swerve left
around her. Too late. His front
wheel hit her with a nauseating bang, she and her scooter
flew in separate directions,
and Neville’s bike swerved hard
left from the impact, carving
an impromptu U-turn. His GS
gently tipped to the pavement
on its cylinder guard, but
Neville nailed the dismount,
winding up standing, horrified,
in the middle of the street.
The woman was lying,
screaming, on the asphalt,
clutching her left thigh. Pieces
of the scooter, her cell phone
and the contents of her purse
were scattered all over the
pavement. Neville knelt down
to help the woman: He slid his
jacket under her head to keep
her off the pavement.
A crowd quickly gathered,
and the local police and an
ambulance arrived. Neville was
going to have to go with the
police, and Rick would stay
with him as translator and
protector. Our other guide,
Christian, convinced us that we
could do nothing to help
Neville, so we climbed back on
our bikes and headed south,
feeling uneasy about leaving
our comrade behind. Would he
be jailed? Brutally interrogated? Wasn’t that water-torture
thing, well, Chinese?
The next morning in beautiful Xuzhou, Neville and Rick
were back among us, to our—
and no doubt their—great
relief. It had taken a number of
Neville’s dollars—to pay for
the unfortunate woman’s
recovery, of course—and
much persuasion to get Neville
gas-station system. The stations are huge, sheltered by
monstrous steel-frame pyramids that tower six stories into
the sky. There will be dozens of
pumps in each station, and
maybe two cars or scooters
getting gas, serviced by giggling
young girls in blue hats and
overalls.
On one sparsely traveled
road in the middle of nowhere
we saw these stations every
half a kilometer, for hours.
Dozens of stations, all open,
with no customers. The
Minister of People’s Fuel
Retailing must get a bonus for
every station built, and to
make things simpler, he built
them all on the same sparsely
traveled road.
I was waiting behind one of
those pyramids when I heard
and saw a delta-winged jet
fighter arc over my head.
While the others filled up I got
THERE’S VERY
LITTLE
“CHINESE”
INFLUENCE,
SAVE AN
OCCASIONAL
SILK TOP—THE
CHINESE ARE
WEARING
EXACTLY THE
SAME CLOTHING THEY’RE
MAKING AND
SELLING TO
WAL-MART.
JUST IN MUCH
SMALLER
SIZES.
and his motorcycle sprung
from custody, even though
Neville had done nothing
wrong. The woman had apparently not broken her leg, but
was not going to be doing any
ballroom dancing soon. At one
point during the night, when
things had looked bad, a friend
of Rick’s had summoned a
local VIP—as in local mob—to
intervene on Neville’s behalf.
The police treated the imposing, gold-toothed VIP with
deference and respect. Hmmm.
How do you say Sopranos in
Chinese?
to watch pilots training in their
F7Bs, a Chinese copy of the
Russian Mig 21s our
Phantoms and A-4s and
F105s fought over Hanoi.
Another smoky, dusty day
brought us to the outskirts of
Nanjing. The Yangtze River is
over a mile wide here, and the
huge bridge that crosses it
was completely clogged with
traffic. We tried to lane-split
through the mess, but our
progress was glacial. Then I
noticed Jim Russell, a kartracing legend and an old hand
at China riding, swerve his GS
into the oncoming lane,
against traffic. I followed
him—at least we would both
be killed together. We bar-
reled along, right into the
teeth of oncoming cars, and
they all dutifully pulled over for
us. It actually seemed safer to
go against traffic, where the
cars could see you and react,
than it was to stay in line. Did
they think we were police?
High party officials? Huge,
overstuffed Round Eyes?
Either way, we wound up at
the hotel a good half an hour
before the rest.
The Ministry of Fuel
Dispersal
China has the most amazing
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March 2006
City of Tears
Nanjing is now a huge, bustling,
thoroughly modern city. But in
1937 it was the scene of one
of the terrifying acts of brutality in history. At the Jiangdong
Gate lies the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial Hall.
Nanjing was then the capital
of China, and when the Imperial
Army of Japan captured the city
on December 14, it went on a
six-week orgy of rape, murder
and mayhem. Of 500,000
Chinese who were trapped in
the city by the invading army, at
least 300,000 were killed.
A German businessman—and
Nazi party member—named
John Rabe is remembered as
the hero who saved much of
Nanjing. He and other foreigners risked their lives to protect
the Chinese, in hastily designated safety zones all over
the city.
Oscar Schindler, of
Schindler’s List fame, saved
about 1200 Jews from the Nazi
death camps. John Rabe and his
compatriots saved 250,000
Chinese. He personally sheltered 650 people on his own
property. Rabe is buried in a
place of honor at the Massacre
Memorial site.
It’s Raining and I Can’t
Get Up
The weather had been uniformly
hot, sweaty and dry ever since
we touched down in Beijing, so
for the last day’s ride I left the
waterproof inner liners of my
mesh Hein Gericke jacket and
pants in the chase truck.
Bad idea. Within an hour the
rain started to drizzle, then pour,
then dump in sheets, with lightning striking all around us. We
could barely see in the deluge. I
was soaked, frozen and feeling
exceedingly stupid—after 29
years of riding motorcycles for a
living, I was supposed to be
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smart enough not to be caught
without rain gear. The heated
grips of the F650 barely saved
me: Set to broil, they pumped
enough heat back into my shivering carcass to get me to lunch,
and a few rays of sun.
Shanghai Surprise
I paid again for my misdeed
that night. It might have been
the rain, and it might have been
the spicy fish soup from lunch.
Either way, I collapsed shivering
with chills, fever and intestinal
distress in our Shanghai hotel,
hoping to get back on my feet
in time for the next day’s
MotoGP practice.
108
If China wants to do something these days, it simply happens. Quickly. Our hotel in
Shanghai was located next to a
high-rise construction site. We
were there for two days, and in
that time the crew added a full
story to the building.
There’s a new, high-speed
Mag-Lev train that runs from
downtown Shanghai to the
airport—we saw and felt it
whooshing by our van, in the
median of the airport freeway.
Americans have been talking for
years about building a similar
Mag-Lev bullet train from L.A. to
Vegas. I read in a big-time U.S.
newspaper that the Vegas train
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March 2006
IF CHINA
WANTS TO DO
SOMETHING
THESE DAYS, IT
SIMPLY
HAPPENS.
QUICKLY. OUR
HOTEL IN
SHANGHAI WAS
LOCATED NEXT
TO A HIGH-RISE
CONSTRUCTION
SITE. WE WERE
THERE FOR
TWO DAYS,
AND IN THAT
TIME THE CREW
ADDED A FULL
STORY TO THE
BUILDING.
would be the first of its kind in
the world, which would be news
to the folks who ride one to the
Shanghai airport every day and
twice on Sundays.
Need more engineers? Build a
huge People’s Engineering
University. We rode past
dozens of brand-new schools
like this, out in the middle of
nowhere, with huge campuses,
impressive modern architecture
and top-notch facilities. China
may not have the world’s best
education system today. In a
few years … well, don’t bet
against ’em.
Hello, Moto
We had come all this way to
see the first-ever MotoGP of
China, at the futuristic,
megabuck Shanghai Circuit.
When China wanted to make a
world-class racetrack, they just
did it. Not that the Chinese
public was clamoring for international racing—it was done as
a showpiece, to announce to
the world that China has arrived
as a high-tech, modern society.
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We expected a crowd at the
first MotoGP of the world’s
biggest country. We were wrong.
Blake and I stepped out of our
cab at the front gate of the
Circuit and walked in like heads
of state, held up only by hordes
of street vendors hawking threedollar binoculars and two-dollar
Rolexes. The stands—whimsical
hillsides of stainless steel with a
huge superstructure that looks
like a flower arrangement of 747
wings—were essentially empty
as The Boys roared around,
shaking the Chinese air with
their gorgeous, unmuffled
machines. It rained. Kenny
Roberts led, then broke. Rossi
won. Who knew?
On our last night we walked
The Bund, the long riverfront
promenade that shows off
Shanghai at its metasticizing,
capitalist best. This loony
metropolis is exploding outward and upward, spawning
new skyscrapers like so many
stainless steel-and-glass skyrockets. Compared to Shanghai,
New York seems like a rusty,
worn-out husk.
What To Do About China
Every week, it seems, another
American magazine asks the
64-trillion-dollar question:
What Do We Do About China?
After crossing the heartland of
this unfathomable country, I’d
like to answer.
Be very nice to China. Send
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110
BE VERY NICE TO
CHINA. SEND
YOUR SONS AND
DAUGHTERS TO
SCHOOL AND
ENCOURAGE
THEM TO LEARN
QUICKLY.
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March 2006
your sons and daughters to
school and encourage them to
learn quickly. Nudge China’s
leaders toward treating their—
and especially Tibet’s—people
better. Invest in natural
resources, especially resources
China doesn’t have. And try to
invent things to sell to China.
Like America, China has a
history of brutality, both selfinflicted and otherwise. But from
what I saw, China shows no
signs that it is resistant to
peace, love and understanding in
the long run. China is today
about where America was in
1920—with some obvious flaws
and problems, but right on the
edge of taking off as a major
force in the world. The power of
1.3 billion smart, well-educated,
industrious, ambitious people—
all of whom want pretty much
the same cars, motorcycles and
refrigerators you want—will
surely change the world.
The people of China are, well,
people. They welcomed us without reservation. They smile a
lot, once they get over their
initial shyness. Every time we
stopped in a rural town,
whether to fix a flat or grab a
popsicle, we were instantly surrounded by happy, laughing,
inquisitive locals. I felt safer in
China than I would have in
many parts of Los Angeles.
When I wasn’t dodging roaring,
smoking trucks, that is.
I found the people of China
warm, friendly and accessible.
Their driving, their government
and their environmental stewardship all leave much to be
desired. But I’ll never forget
meeting—and learning to
appreciate—one of the world’s
most important, compelling collections of people. MC