A slow bike through China

A 600km bicycle ride through southern China proves the ideal way to observe a fast-changing nation

It was only dawn, but already the day looked bruised and defeated. Severed palm fronds littered the hotel grounds, plant pots lay smashed on their sides and the chairs where we had sat drinking chilled beers the previous night had been tossed into a bizarre sculpture of white plastic. Gravid clouds slouched over Star Lake, its grey surface fretted by gusts of wind that machine-gunned rain against my bedroom window.

Typhoon Hagupit had landed. Its epicentre was still some 200km to the south east, gyrating wildly through the high-rise canyons of Hong Kong. But it was a big storm. Meteorologists were predicting ‘level 8’. Suddenly the hard saddle on my mountain bike seemed the least of my concerns.

We had travelled from Hong Kong the previous day, cleaving the Pearl River on a high-speed catamaran bound for Zhàoqìng in Guangdong Province – the starting point for our 600km cycle through southern China. There were nine in our group. Only Chris, an attorney from Los Angeles, confessed to being a keen cyclist.

“I do 50k’s most weekends,” he had told me earlier. “And you?”

“Yeah, ’bout the same,” I had lied. In fact, two weeks before the trip, I had dragged my old bike from the garden shed, patched three punctures and wobbled to the local shops a few times before one of the pedals had fallen off. I had reckoned that a pair of padded cyclist’s shorts and the promise of no less than 21 gears would compensate for my scant training. But I hadn’t bargained on Hagupit.

A spot of bother

The previous afternoon, in the lull before the storm, our guide, Stony, had given us a briefing. Along with Vincent, his assistant, he would ride with the group. Mr Wong would drive ahead with the minibus, while Pancake would bring up the rear in a truck packed with spare parts (though sadly no replacement buttocks). Stony had issued detailed copies of the itinerary marked, kilometre by kilometre, with intriguing instructions like ‘Turn left at the roundabout with the big banyan tree’ and ‘Caution: tunnel. Take off your sunglasses’.

Apart from Harry, a 65-year-old retired doctor from London (donning a string vest tucked into black Lycra shorts), everyone had painlessly acquainted themselves with their new mounts. Somehow Harry had managed to twist his front wheel 180 degrees and was having ‘a spot of bother’ cycling with the front half of his bicycle facing backwards. The thirty-somethings comprising the rest of the group had sniggered. Little did we know that Harry would have the last laugh.

At the start of our first full day’s cycling, Mr Wong drove us an hour north of Zhàoqìng – not far enough, however, to give Hagupit the slip. As we clambered from the minibus, rain strafed the road. Chris, in a garish Spiderman cycling suit, seemed unfazed. So, too, was Harry in a voluminous blue cape. Garry, from Sydney, hadn’t brought anything waterproof to wear, but he also seemed cheerful. “If the locals thought we were funny yesterday,” he quipped, “they’ll be wetting themselves today!”

It was true. We were turning plenty of heads. At first I had thought it was just our unusual garb. None of the throng of local cyclists wore helmets, cycling gloves or wrap-around sunglasses. But it wasn’t until a woman had sidled up to me during a rest stop on our practise ride the previous day that the real, and very simple, reason dawned on me. She had shown me a photograph of a motor rickshaw for hire. “No thanks,” I had told her. “We’ve got bikes.” For a moment she seemed stunned. But when she started shaking with laughter and subsided into mirth-ridden Cantonese, the meaning was clear. There we were – wealthy tourists on push bikes – at the bottom of the transport pecking order. Why pay lots of money to ride a bike in China if you could hire a motor rickshaw instead?

The same thought crossed my mind as we pedalled away from Mr Wong’s minibus into the sodden clutches of typhoon Hagupit. Spray soaked our backs until the padded cycling shorts felt like wet nappies. As Garry had predicted, locals were captivated by the strange procession that rolled through their villages. Even water buffalo, wandering along the roadside, looked up with bemused expressions as we sloshed past.

Collision course

Throughout the day, rural tranquillity collided with modern reality. One moment we were weaving through rice paddies and a silver honeycomb of fish ponds, the next we were flinching in the wake of trucks on a four-lane highway or cowering beneath a cement factory. The rustic idyll was there – the romantic images of women stooping over plots of rice and vegetables; old men with goatee beards squatting on their haunches smoking pipes. But they were blinkered views; cropped versions of the real world – like carefully framed images in a travel brochure. I soon realised that by cycling slowly through China I would get a fuller picture – sullied and serene – of this fast-changing country.

The following day we encountered our first stretch of dirt track. Right on cue, Hagupit unleashed a violent squall that transformed the unfinished road into a mud-smeared battleground. Within minutes we were wrestling our bikes through an extraordinary traffic jam of bogged-down buses and wallowing buffalo; 15km later, we resembled a band of the living dead, freshly exhumed from yellow-ochre clay.

The track unravelled into a broad valley pimpled with limestone hills. Scattered amongst the rice paddies were traditional buildings with terracotta tiled roofs and walls plastered with local clay. Barefoot children ran to the roadside waving, laughing and firing a salvo of ‘hellos!’ in exuberant English. I never expected, or hoped, to have more in the way of conversation. Much later, however, I pulled alongside three boys on a rusty bicycle with wooden pedals and no brakes. One was riding, while the other two sat side-saddle on a frame over the back wheel. They must have been ten or eleven

“Hello!” they chorused in unison, their faces blossoming into winning smiles. “Hello!” I duly replied. “Are you happy?” they shot back, grins reaching breaking point. “Yes, I’m happy. Are you?” Without hesitation the chirpy trio gave an emphatic “Yes!” Intrigued, I tried another question: “How old are you?” There was a pause, followed by a triumphant “Thank you!” I changed tack: “Where do you live?” “Thank you!” beamed the boys again. Their smiles were infectious. ‘Hello’ and ‘Are you happy?’ struck me as fine starting points for learning a new language. I wished I had a similar command of Cantonese.

Chinese aspirations

We reached the small town of Jiu Long around lunchtime. While Pancake hosed down the bikes, we wandered along the single main street – a frenetic corridor of market stalls and human traffic. A man crouched over a bucket squirming with snakes. When I peered closer, he grabbed one, snipped off its head, deftly skinned it and held the delicacy aloft. Elsewhere in the market, there were catfish in concrete holding pens; chickens, ducks, doves and puppies crammed into baskets; whole ribcages of pigs stacked on wooden tables; and a dozen or more different fruits and vegetables – beans, spinach, cabbage, tomatoes, melons, oranges...

The fields surrounding Jiu Long seemed to provide its inhabitants with all the food and livelihood they needed. I wondered how traditions might change when the road was finished.

“Chinese aspire to own three things,” an English teacher called Mi Ling told me when I met him during a rest stop the next day. “A TV, a motorbike and a mobile phone.” Mi Ling was eager to practise his English and, within half an hour, I had gleaned several interesting snippets from him. Apparently, a decade ago, only the government had televisions. Now most people had one. I remembered spotting satellite dishes sprouting from some of the most ramshackle houses we had passed.

Motorbikes (and certainly cars), however, were still luxury items way beyond the reach of people in most rural areas. “They walk or ride – China has 300 million bikes!” said Mi Ling. I nodded gravely. A cycling trip in China would have been quite a different experience if even a small percentage of the population owned private vehicles. Change was afoot, though. You could see it at the edge of every town where young men with Western hairstyles posed on new motorbikes and watched disdainfully as we panted passed.

Evolution

During our fifth day of cycling Harry took a tumble, but escaped with a grazed elbow. He was waving to some children and misjudged the road’s camber. The temperature also probably had something to do with it. Hagupit had spiralled westwards and the damp heat it left in its wake struck us like a fist. Only Chris seemed unperturbed. He said he was taking potassium powder to ease muscle fatigue.

That afternoon we tackled the route’s most challenging uphill section – a relentless slog of over an hour, covering seven kilometres on a road chiselled into glaring limestone cliffs. The heat was stupefying, my legs felt like lead and my backside pleaded for mercy.

For the most part, however, the terrain was gently undulating. Daily distances ranged from 20-105km – and Mr Wong was always at hand if anyone craved a spell of air-con in the minibus. At times it felt odd to have this luxury ‘life-support system’ available in the midst of landscapes where, essentially, farming techniques were still medieval. We experienced a similar incongruity each time we rolled into town at the end of the day and found a hotel with flat-screen TVs and room service. An hour earlier we were most likely cycling past women in terraced fields threshing rice by hand.

The greatest culture shock, however, was arriving at Yángshuò – a backpacker’s Mecca nestled amongst dramatic limestone pinnacles. In the week since leaving Hong Kong we had grown used to being stared at and greeted as novelties in a region where Western tourists were rarely seen (particularly on bikes). But in Yángshuò we abruptly found ourselves fair game for tour and curio touts. Dire Straits and Bob Marley wafted from pavement cafés offering banana pancakes, sirloin steaks and cappuccinos, while market stalls groaned with soapstone Buddhas, bamboo flutes and T-shirts with ‘Leave me alone – I’m broke’ scrawled in Chinese across them.

At first we felt numbed by such blatant commercialism. The cormorant fishermen, one of the great crowd-pullers of the region, were making a better living posing for photographs than fishing. Tour boats were in such profusion that you could almost walk from one bank of the Li River to the other.

But I reminded myself that this was just another facet of modern, evolving China. Tourism was bound to take root in such a beautiful and fascinating place and it was selfish and unrealistic to derogate it. As I watched one of the fishermen demonstrate his patient art of using trained cormorants to catch fish, I realised that the survival of such ancient traditions might well depend on camera-toting tourists.

On our final cycle to nearby Moon Hill, we congratulated Harry for being the only one in the group to have completed all stages of the route without a sojourn in Mr Wong’s van. He told me he was running on ‘psychological euphoria’. As we followed a rough track that meandered through the mêlée of conical fairy-tale hills, I could see exactly what he meant. The sky was milky-white, fish ponds flecked the rice paddies like squares of foil and thickets of giant bamboo unfurled towering green plumes above our heads. For once, my saddle felt almost comfortable. I felt like nothing could stop me. Not even a typhoon.