The Long Road Home

People make a lot of comments about my bike. In the north Guangxi village of Fulu, some folk watching me load up the bike in the morning were giving advice: “You’e got a lot of stuff. You should ride a tricycle. Then you could put your bags on the back. And have a little hood over. And if it rains, you can crouch inside so you won’t get wet.” That was an enthusiastic man, doing actions to illustrate the crouching. A lady disagreed: “No a tricycle would be no good. You couldn’t put it inside your room in guest houses”. Very practical.

The village was hectic as buses rolled in blasting horns, people were busy moving chicken coops and wicker trays full of veg, and loading pigs in little woven reed baskets onto bus roofs. The Dong ladies are in dark blue smocks and white headscarves. I had some honey rice squares and yoghurt and went off.

These north Guangxi villages were very poor. Houses were more like sheds, just brown sticks roughly propped together. I stopped to buy food at a shop but the shop was almost empty. Just a few greasy glass jars on the counter. Two old ladies were on wooden stools outside with children on their knees, a grubby girl, very shy, and a toddler. I bought some biscuits and offered some to the children. The boy somehow couldn’t lift up his head and there was something wrong with his eyes. Finally he just held a biscuit but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Anyway they were soft and stale. The granny was nice and smiled.

There were thatched shelters where the bus would stop. People then crossed to their villages in boats. I met a young couple waiting for the bus. He was carrying a huge bundle of blankets on his back with their 3 month-old son somewhere inside, and a home-made red silk ball on a gold string dangling for him to look at. They had been visiting his wife’s family. They were walking along the raised mud path between two paddy fields from her parents’ house. I bought a three-cornered spring onion fritter and fried sesame dough ball, watching three boys race around on a home-made metal go cart. Men were playing cards and shouting.

I met a man called Mr Lu with a shoulder pole carrying baskets he had woven from rushes. He was from a village 6km from Rongjiang. He was now walking into town to sell them. A lady later told me these were Dong people’s baskets. Miao have different shaped baskets. In the afternoon, I crossed into Guizhou Province, and reached the little town of Rongjiang. My mobile phone sent me a message saying ‘welcome to green pure earth, ecological kingdom of south east Guizhou, may its beautiful and mysterious woods, mountains and water scenes may give you enjoyment of a strangely beautiful kind’. The road became tarmac again - wonderfully smooth, which was already enjoyment of certain kind. This was the opposite of what I had expected as everyone said Guizhou was terribly poor.

I read that Guizhou is home of 80 different ethnic minorities. This part around Rongjiang is mostly Dong. The Duliu River looked fantastic, calm green and blue with ripples on the bits where it goes over pebbly shallws. Rongjiang town has a few white tile brick buildings with big glass doors e.g. a branch of PBOC, the China Southern Electric board, the postal savings office, Agricultural Bank and rural credit cooperative. But the rest of the place is just like the villages - brown wood with tiled or thatch or bark roofs, and people are going by with their pigs or bundles of sticks or large baskets of grass (for hay?).

I met Mr Lu again. He’d put down his baskets by the road crossing in the middle of the town. He said he’d sold one so far. I bought one as a present for my Nana. Three girls played blind man’s buff with a red sash over the eyes of the blind one as I had my dinner of tofu and veg soup at a stall.

I came back down from the pancake place in Ping’an with an ink wash painter from Beijing. He and his friend were on a painting trip, painting scenes of Longsheng rice terraces after a few days doing Yangshuo water and mountains. Now he had to rush back to Beijing to take his fine arts masters exam in four days’ time and he was all busy with his bags and with his roll of paintings on his shoulder.

Back in the village I paid 30RMB to Mrs Pan’s father-in-law for board and lodging. She’d told me I’d know him because ‘he has a bad leg and marks on his face’. I found him at the first floor window of their wood house resting his leg.

I was hoping for a nice quiet easy ride to Sanjiang, but after 15km, the tarmac became dirt track, all potholes and messy gravel and mud and puddles. People told me it was because they were ‘xiu lu’ ‘building the road’. I think the character xiu originally meant ‘to perfect’. As I struggled through the mud and potholes, the road appeared very far from perfect. I was doing about 10kph and hitting a lot of potholes. I got uselessly cross that nobody seemed to be doing anything about the road. I came across one small band of folk patting with spades at small piles of gravel and mud, and later a man in a caterpillar earth mover moving orange dirt from one sdie of the track to the other, neither of which seemed to be helping anything very much either.

After about 30km, I pulled over at a shop and asked how much futher it was to Sanjiang and how much was ‘xiu lu’. Answer: 45km, all of it under construction. I realised I couldn’t make it before dark. I decided to give up. Mrs Cao the shopkeeper said she’d help me catch a bus. I bought some biscuits.

A boy of about 12 dashed in with scratched scabby legs holding a lizard stroking its head and silver throat. The boy was called Shengjiang. Sheng for Longsheng, and Jiang for Sanjiang, the two towns in between which he was born. Mrs Cao explained that you cook these lizards and ther’re very health-giving for young boys. Shengjiang leapt around the shop in his dusty sandals and then suddenly let the lizard go and it darted under a table with a basket of eggs and a jar of pickled cabbage on it. Mrs Cao was cross. No one could find the lizard. Shengjiang galloped off.

An old man bought an ice cream and ate it on the dusty bench outside the shop. The three of us ate the rest of my biscuits. Then Shengjiang came back with another lizard, and Mrs Cao got cross again and flapped him out of her shop.

She flagged down a local bus and helped me put my bike in the back with the spare wheel. The bus struggled through deep mud huge piles of rubblle and rocks, only doing 20kph. By the time we reached sanjiang it was 7pm and nearly dark. It was a pity because the river looked fabulous in the afternoon sun and it would have been nice to ride. At least I know now how to get a bus if I need to.

The next day I rode from Congjiang to Rongjiang along the Duliu River. The road was just a mud track but not being xiu’d so much better. I saw Dong women in blue smocks with white headbands. Children in villages all along the river were playing with hoops, bowling them with sticks. A boy yoohoo’d me from the top of a fruit tree where he was picking armfuls of blossom. Cowherds were squatting on the roadside watching their cows. I saw a couple of Dong ‘wind and rain’ bridges, a bit ramshackle, in a small village, and several drum towers.

In Yongxi town there was a tiny hospital where a pair of doctors in white coats were sitting on the doorstep in the shade of some old trees chatting. There were villages of wooden houses on the opposite bank, with noises of chopping wood and cocks crowing. Down in the river, boys were playing in boats rowing and shouting and swimming. People were rowing standing up with two oars or sculling slowly with one oar. Some were in flat-bottomed boats pushing with punts upstream. That looked hard. There were houseboats with little curved roofs lashed in pairs close to the gravel river banks.

Towards evening the sun shone orange over the river, and I could only see silhouettes. I stopped for the night in a small town called Fulu, with moths flapping and tapping at the window. Thank goodness for the mosquito screen and for Mr Lu the inn owner who with a grass besom brush got rid of the most enormous spider. I had dinner opposite with the inkeeper and his old school friend Mr Liao, and a telecoms engineer on business for a week from the nearest big town, Liuzhou. They got happily drunk on rice wine poured out of a tin teapot and Mr Liao’s dog Little Black went to sleep under the table.

I haven’t been able to send emails sometimes so am catching up now.

Detailed map of Guangxi

Sue and the band. What more can I say? I would argue one of the best podcasts so far.

Ping’an village, north Guangxi

Here I am having a pancake and coffee at a hostel in the Zhuang minority village of Ping’an, which is high in the mountains about 100km north of Guilin. There are tiled roofs below me with wagtails and swallows running along them. This is another backpackers’ spot. (For those who think I only eat pancakes, for my first breakfast earlier I had green tea with rice honey crackers and home-made egg-fried biscuits with dates in the middle. But if there are pancakes and coffee and toast on offer anywhere I can’t resist) Anyway, all around are hillsides ridged with rice terraces and clustered here are wooden houses a bit like alp huts in Switzerland. The Zhuang ladies here wear dark blue embroidered trousers and headscarfs.

I rode to this area yesterday from Guilin. Leaving the city was a bit tricky because thousands of other people were also going here and there on bikes and mopeds swerving in all directions. Matching pairs of girls on little matching tricycles a bit like Andy Pandy’s were carrying vegetables, a big lady on a big tricycle had a whole butcher’s wood board with bits of a pig on it going along, and people rather cleverly using two tricycles at once one going forwards the other chap going backwards, to transport large metal frames.

I managed not to have any accidents and was joined by a Mr Wang who was a police man pedalling along to start his shift. He said as a policeman he cared a lot to make sure I was safe, thought it would be better if I had a companion, but said it was all safe round here so I’d be fine. I should ring 110 if there was anything wrong and his colleagues would help. Quite reassuring. He turned off and waved goodbye.

It quickly became hilly. I stopped at a tea plantation and had some tea with Miss Hou and Miss Tan who had graduated in from the local touridm school specialising in tea. They made the tea for me with a lot of porcelain cups and pots on a wooden tray. Someone brought some sweet potato fritters. Then I turned uphill again and the road suddenly went into a rocky gorge. It suddenly became really windy, coming from all directions. I climbed up hairpins for a long time. At a lonely motorbike repair place I stopped and ate a whole pack of sandwich cream biscuits watched by a toddler in one of those walking playpens on casters, whose mother wouldn’t let it have one. The motorbike repair man gave me his MP3 to listen to. He didn’t really look the type but was listening to something like Enya.

The houses scattered here and there on the hillsides and near rivers were now wooden cabins with lattice windows and lattice balconies. People store sticks and keep hens on the ground floor. It looks like they live on the first floor. There was washing on poles. Finally I turned up a narrow lane towards the village of Ping’an, following the small river upstream. There were dippers on the stones, river chats I think, dark grey with orange tails. On the roadsides there were violets and wild raspberries. I slogged it all the way to this village of Ping’an up a ludicrously steep 6km of hairpins, only to find the last one km to the village was a flight of rough stone steps, which I couldn’t do on the bike. Arghhh. So I rode 6km down again and asked some ladies in the village of Huanglo if I could stay.

These were now Yao people. The ladies wear jackets with handwoven sleeves with pink geometric patterns and embroidered collars, also pink. They have pleated knee-length black skirts and embroidered cummerbunds with silver little tassel bits. They wear silver earrings which make their ears hang down, and silver bangles with birds and flowers on. They don’t cut their hair after age 18 and wear 2m long unplaited hair in a sort of black shiny coil with a black headscarf over. They wear black leggings. The men just wear shirts and trousers. A Mrs Pan invited me to stay. Her house is a big wood cabin in the village, with about 8 rooms on first floor, and a big living area with a TV. She gave me a lttile wood panelled room smelling of wood. I could hear the river and grasshoppers outside. This morning there were a lot of cocks crowing and bees buzzing (alarmingly).

Better go. Aiming for Sanjiang today. I find it amazing all these diverse minority tribes are living with their hens and their 2m long hair and home-made egg biscuits just 2 weeks by bike away from Hong Kong.

Sue takes a walk through parts of Yangshuo and shares the sights and sounds with us.

I’m now in the city of Guilin. I’m in a internet cafe in the city centre near the Bank of China main city branch. It’s underground (ie under the ground) and looked quite seedy from the outside. And also from the inside, actually, once i was down the dark stairs - pool tables, video games, grubby plywood tables, green plastic vine leaves along the strip lights - but it’s OK. I’ve paid 5 RMB for 2 hrs on a sofa in the plush area. It’s raining outside. I’m having a day off. I rented an umbrella and strolled around the city centre looking at shops and wet pagodas in wet parks. I drank a glass of boiled coca cola with freshly chopped ginger.

Yesterday I rode here from Yangshuo over the mountains. I didn’t really plan to do that, but my map has no contours, so you don’t know what’s coming until you’re already doing it. Actually it was absolutely fabulous. I set off to Fuli, a small town west of Yangshuo. I went through a tunnel. Lorries make a frighteningly huge noise when you are in a tunnel with them, but I was following an old guy on a Flying Pigeon and he didn’t waver, so I just kept going behind him.

The sun was out again and the dragonflies were back. There were swallows over the paddy fields, and I saw a crested mynah. (You see I have got my bird book with me. Actually, you get crested mynahs in Hong Kong, and they’re easy as they have white dots on their wings when flying.) I came to the village of Xingping and bought a sweet potato fritter and a sesame pancake from a stall where old men were sitting round a brazier under an awning in their green and blue jackets and caps.

It was lunch time, and people were putting toddlers onto little chairs and feeding them out of bowls with chopsticks. Why do people do that outside, right in the middle of the yard? The plump children don’t look at the food; they just stare at what’s going on in the road as the food is put in their mouths.

After Xingping I turned towards a tiny place called Baoshujia, and the road suddenly stopped being tarmac and became a track. A mix of dirt, gravel, sand, potholes and water, depending exactly which bit. The motorbikes were lurching along and tractors bashing into potholes. It was dirty and very busy. Lots of little villages close togehter with tiny schools and people on motorbikes, or bikes, in tractors, or three-wheeler vans, or trucks, or the occasional car, or many just on foot with their cows or their ploughs or their hoes or their baskets of stuff. I follow the track along a tributary of the Li River, climbing gradually. I saw a kingfisher. As I climbed the people and traffic got less. I climbed right up to a small lake high in the hills, and then climbed even higher around and above it. It was hot and really hard going. Now there were just stony hillsides on either side, and grey scree, and brambles. The odd motorbike went by, but otherwise it was quiet. There was a very strange bird singing which would start off with a high-pitched noise like some radio instrument being tuned in. Everytime it came, I would look round wondering how come there’s some electronics kit on a mountain in Guangxi, but then the noise would become birdsong. Sounds weird but that’s what it was like. (Anyone know what it might be??) Other than that, it was quiet.

From the top of the pass the view was absolutely fantastic - row after row of far away pointed mountains in pale shades of blue.

I descended down the rough gravel hairpins, with white dog roses hanging from the rocks and brambles. I drank a litre of water at a small village,where two old people were amazed that a dusty foreign woman had appeared having cycled over the mountain road. The old wall clock in their dark shop chimed rather nicely. It was 2.30, so I carried on.

The road came back to the Li River, and I rode along its east bank. Water buffalo were swimming, amazingly (to me). I didn’t realise they could swim. On a telephone wire, I saw a bright blue bird which I think was a bee-eater (bird book again, and this time I got my binoculars out in time). Actually it was eating a lizard, not a bee, so maybe my identification is wrong. I’ve never seen one before. It was holding the lizard in its beak and bashing the poor thing against the wire to kill it, and then it finally swallowed the whole thing, legs tail all.

Further down the road there was village with a huge ancestral hall, all dilapidated. Two men were mending bikes in the front part. It was the Bai clan hall. I asked if there was anyone called Bai anymore round here. They looked at me as if I was stupid, and said “everyone”. It turned out they were Hui Muslims who had moved here from Henan Province many generations ago. A man selling strawberries further along told me there were several Muslim villages here, and they still prayed somewhere - couldn’t find out where.

A bit later I went through Daxu, a village in which a long cobbled street of Ming and Qing houses has somehow survived. There were wooden houses, with deep eaves, and there were old ladies sitting in the doorways. SOmeone gave me some cold fruit tea. Old men were carrying sticks on their backs through the arches.

It was all very nice but I was getting really tired now. I bashed on into Guilin, and finally reached the city. I was also really hungry. Then I had my first small accident. It was not his fault at all but it was becuase of a man making pancakes. I saw him making these lovely looking pancakes at the roadside on a brazier. I was in a huge stream of bikes and mopeds but I suddenly decided I wanted a pancake. I swerved off the road, but steered wrong, and hit a stone bollard. The bollard tipped over, and sort of uprooted its paving stone, and I fell off the bike in front of a mobile phone shop with a group of trendy people outside it. A girl with orange hair helped me get up. No damage done fortunately. I felt quite stupid. I had a pancake. Better be a bit more careful when I’m hungry and tired.

I’m sorry I still can’t upload the podcasts or photos yet. The machines here are all Windows 2003 and despite a nice young guy helping me, it just won’t work. Tomorrow I’m going from here west towards Guizhou province. If it’s not raining…

Here I am having an english breakfast in Yangshuo. This is a bizarre place full of tour groups and souvenir shops in the middle of the Guangxi countryside. There are pony traps and minibuses with frilly roofs and people selling small model ducks and large silk patchwork quilts. The quilts, ducks etc are actually quite nice but what I really finding myself most interested in are the coffee shops and cafes.

Yangshuo

So here I am enjoying (another) one. (Eggs, toast and coffee in front of me) To get here I rode for three days from Wuzhou. First to scruffy little Taiping, then from there to Mengshan. I left Taiping riding alongside the very chirpy local primary school teacher who was scooting along on her scooter to start morning school. Once I got out of the town, people were walking along shoulder poles carrying hods of rice seedlings. Later through the day every day I see people planting them, which it seems you do by throwing them, rather like throwing darts, except the people throwing the seedlings look really bored. Blokes are battling away ploughing or sort of dredging with wooden ploughs behind an ox. In bog up to their knees barefoot with trousers rolled, shouting at the ox. Some guys have little motorised ploughs and they really churn along quite quickly, turning all the time bcause the fields are so small. It was gorgeously sunny and there were dragonflies going everywhere, white butterflies in the bamboos, some brown and black ones with blue bits in the shade of trees. I saw tons of birds, bulbuls like in hong kong, swallows over the water, some kind of shrikes or flycatchers on the telephone wires, warblers in small trees and grasses, and nice little brown finches fiddling with things in the roadside. Altogether a lovely day’s ride, and I arrived in Mengshan in time to appreciate sitting on a balcony at the Yong’An Zhou guest house looking at the Meng River. People bicycling over a very fancy green roofed bridge.

The following day (yesterday) was then a bit of a contrast, still interesting but I had to get into appreciating rain, mist, drizzle, hard rain, and more drizzle, all day. From time to time I could see grey misty views of huge limestone rock towers rising out of the wet fields, with little orange villages at the bottom. I punctured in the middle of nowhere and that took ages to sort out for various boring reasons. A few folk were still ploughing and planting but most were huddled in doorways peering out at the rain or watching TV at the back of their cottages. Or actually, in the case of the men, playing mahjong, billiards and cards under shelterd and plastic awnings.

Near Yangshuo it all got quite noisy and messy with loads of minibuses and little vans with people sitting in rows, and horse traps and tour buses. So I thought I wouldn’t like Yangshuo and I’m a bit old for backpacking these days etc but actually I’m really enjoying it. Ha! I met a delighted old couple on holiday from Yunnan cheerily reviewing which hotel they’d stay, carrying only a small shopping bag of their things. I bought two novels. I played a piano in someone’s bike rental shop. I ate an apple crumble. I met a man from Liverpool who’d been to Sihanoukville and seen the street children picking rubbish and the M’Lop Tapang centre, which is one of the things I’m raising money for. That was lovely. I also heard a lot of music - you can hopefully hear some on a podcast coming soon - if I can transfer the files in the next town. Which is Guilin. Eggs and toast lovely, but I guess I’d better get going to get to Guilin.

Sue gives us a description of the Xijiang River and her techniques on getting directions and help from Chinese men.

After getting a bit snarled up in a tricycle rickshaw jam crossing the Gui River I left Wuzhou. Wuzhou’s a nice town. This was sunday morning, and people were pushing toddlers around the square in their pedal cars, and old chaps were sitting in bamboo chairs on the shopping street watching families go by. A balloon seller was walking around with a huge bunch of helium balloons, and the rickshaw tricycle men were creaking along. On the edge of town it was all a bit scrappy with the road down to mud and gravel next to the bus station which was noisy and dirty. The buses stop all over the place to pick up people so you have to watch what you’re doing not to get squashed or stuck.

I took the G321 which goes all the way from Wuzhou up to Guilin and beyond. The road was nice two-lane tarmac and wound along with a line of trees on each side. It (and I) rolled over hills all the way, rising at times high over valleys with paddy fields, stands of bamboo, and low terraces with orange villages far below. I say orange because the earth here is bright orange and the village houses seem to be mostly made of the orange earth, with grey tile roofs. There were a couple of long climbs with hairpins up and down, and fabulous views of far off hills once you’d made it to the top. The road was quiet and you could hear the people working in the paddy fields and vegetable plots talking to each other. As it became evening men and boys were calling their buffalo to keep them straight walking home along the roadside, and there was birdsong or maybe frogs (do they sing?) across the paddy fields.

I arrived in Taiping at sunset. Taiping is a small town and all dust and piles of bricks and rubbish amongst people selling fruit and motorcycle repair places. I have picked one of the two local inns. It’s only 50 RMB per night but a nice old chap in a blue Mao suit very nicely helped me get my bike up the steps, and there’s even hot water. You need a stick to turn on the light which has to be poked to make it go on but seems fine.

The gap in posts the last couple of days was a result of my being joined on the road by eight cyclists from the Hong Kong cycling club ‘Danche ji you’. We rode a couple of hundred km as a group over Good Friday and Easter Saturday, through hilly county between Zhaoqing up to the border with Guangxi, which we crossed yesterday evening. Thanks especially to Eliza and Kitty in charge of the cuisine department we ate very well along the road. In a village on the River He these two ladies reviewed all the produce the surrounding farms could provide, discussed with the local eating house, and this is the menu we had:


Lunch on easter saturday at Duping village:

Sweet potato leaves with garlic

Scrambled egg with bitter gourd

Steamed tofu with spring onions

Hejiang fish with braised with pickled herbs and soy sauce

Spare pork ribs in black bean sauce

Pig kidney and liver stir fried with chives

Sweet yam with pork belly stewed

Garlic dried morning grloru stir fried

 Soup with local water cress and pork

Rice (lots)

Last night we ate a last dinner together here in Wuzhou with 23 dishes including 8 dofferent typed of pancake. Hope I can still pedal myself along after all this. Thanks a lot to all the club for a great two days together on this long road. And thanks for bringing my tennis partner Kakee as a surprise! Will miss you all.

Now I’m going on alone into Guangxi Province. Sun coming thru now after chilly morning mist. Glad to see the sun as it suddenly feels quite lonely now the whole crew’s gone. Going to buy a Guangxi province map. Hope Xinhua bookstore has got a nice detailed one.