Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (28 page)

But then, in the distance I saw a light that I first took to be a truck, but then turned out to be a candle in a window of an elongated hut. I stopped outside and knocked on the door.

‘Hello!
Nǐhǎo
?’

A group of men came bounding out with torches, and were soon helping me with my bike, taking me into the kitchen and sitting me down by the fire. They gave me hot water to drink. Soon the kitchen was filled with ten Chinese teenagers in ragged jackets. A big pot of
mian
stared at me. They all stopped chattering when a smallish man in a thin jacket crept in.

‘Hello. How are you?’

‘You speak English?’ I asked.

‘Little.’

His face was cold, expressionless.

‘I am a teacher,’ he said.

Through my pocket dictionary, we gained some idea of each other. I asked what they did up here, to which he brought in some roots and pointed to a packet of cough drops: Antiseptic. I could only imagine that they fossicked around these hills for roots for months at a time for a herbal-remedy company.

The noodles, slightly spicy, were served up with some potatoes and tiny bits of meat. The men all slurped their noodles noisily as if trying to outdo each other. No one spoke. On the wall hung racks of meat so old that when I first saw them I thought they were blocks of wood.

As more
mian
was slopped into my bowl, the teacher offered the kitchen for me to sleep in.

‘
Xiè xiè
(Thank you),’ I said.

But I soon discovered that they weren’t doing this as a gesture of kindness. One of the teenagers rubbed his fingers together and pointed to a word in the phrasebook.

‘Poor?’

‘Yes. China poor,’ said the teacher. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a one-
yuan
note.

‘Money?’ I asked.

‘
Shì
! (Yes!)’

He made a gesture to indicate eating, then one for sleeping, and then said, ‘Breakfast.’

‘
Duōshăo qián
? (How much?)’

‘
Yìbăi
.’

‘One hundred!’

It was $AU18, which doesn’t sound like much but was more than I had paid anywhere at any time in China. I had come in from the cold and the snow, and I felt like this guy was trying to take advantage of the fact.

‘Ten. I’ll give you ten.’

He waved his hand in disgust. ‘No.’

‘I go,’ I said and got up slowly. I put my jacket on, preparing to face the cold again.

‘Fourteen,’ he said.

‘Fourteen! Sure!’ I sat down.

‘No,’ he said, needing to clarify. ‘Forty.’

I got back up again. ‘Thirty.’

‘No.’

The wind creaked up against the glass. I took my jacket off, sat down and fumed, staring at the fire.

‘Okay. Forty,’ I said.

He went outside while some of the boys made up a bed – two bench-seats on logs. Eventually they left and I was alone to stew over what had happened. But then the decision to leave was made for me: one by one, starting with the cook, the boys slinked into the kitchen and made gestures indicating that I should give them some money, speaking in hushed whispers, ‘
Shí yuan
(ten
yuan
).’

‘
Meiyou!
’ I could see this going on all night, or worse, waking up with all my gear stolen. I got up.

The teacher came back in as I was putting on my jacket, gloves and helmet. I grabbed my bike.

‘Fourteen! Fourteen!’ He put his hand up.

‘I go. You just want my money.’

‘Yes.’

I stopped, took out my wallet and put a five-
yuan
note in his hand.

‘For
mian
.’

He took it at first but then gave it back to me, I guess to save face.

I got to the outside door; it was bolted. I tried opening it but couldn’t.

‘Open the door!’ Now all of them were around me, trying to get me to stay.

‘OPEN IT!’ I kicked at the door. In retrospect, this was a dumb thing to do – ten of them, one of me.

The cook jumped up and unbolted it and a cold brick of wind hit me in the face.

‘Well, 40
yuan
is not really so bad …’ a cold voice piped up in my head. But I was determined to make a point.

I gritted my teeth and pushed the bike down the ramp and onto the snowy, slushy road, the wind biting and finding channels into my body. They yelled after me but I kept going until I could hear them no more.

The moon was out and I could at least see the road. Some way down, perhaps only a kilometre, I found an abandoned rock enclosure, perhaps once used for yaks.

I set up my tent, furious at my experience in the hut, thrusting the rods through the seams, my profanities echoing through the valley while the pale moon looked on, somewhat amused.

In the morning, I shook the ice off the tent. My water bottle had frozen and the tyres on my bike were covered in a thin veneer of ice. My fingers numbed as I struggled to get the tent and my gear onto the bike.

The sky was a clear blue, and I could see the whole valley of rolling dry hills and pined slopes. As I was taking in the view, I saw a cyclist plodding up the hill.

We stopped and chatted. It was the New Zealander I had heard about.

‘Feel like a bickie?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

We sat by the side of the road and munched on his dwindling supply of biscuits. His name was Mark and he looked more like a biker than a cyclist – his hair was cropped, and he wore a Gortex zipped jacket and wind-stopper pants that hugged his thick, muscular legs.

Mark had cycled to China from England; he had recently travelled my original planned route from Pakistan through the Taklimakan Desert just days before the border to China closed, and he was now on his way back to New Zealand. As I listened to Mark’s stories, my grand detour back into India began to sound like a blessing in disguise.

‘It was a nightmare on that desert. Sandstorms, headwinds. I was doing five kilometres an hour. I had to hide behind rocks for ten hours. I wanted to die!’ He chomped into a biscuit. ‘Met some great people, but … never again. I can’t wait to get out of here and into Laos.’

Here I was, thinking I had done some pretty hard cycling. Mark made my experience seem like a ride round the block.

‘Don’t know anywhere I could get a new cassette? Chain’s rooted. Slippin’ all over the place.’

‘Kathmandu?’

‘Mm. Not where I’m goin’. I’ll see if I can get one in Kunming.’

He got on his bike.

‘You don’t wear a helmet?’ I asked.

‘Nah. Don’t tell my mother. See ya.’

He told me about conditions on the road ahead – they were rough – and we parted ways without once looking back. Soon, I was going to be very glad I had kept my helmet on.

The road was mostly downhill to Xiangcheng, but I wasted little time enjoying the glorious descent as I hurtled along, gritting my teeth with every pothole and bump. Suddenly, around a bend, a yak, startled by my rattling approach, darted out onto the road.

I clipped its hairy rump and fell hard onto the handlebars, and my ‘man bits’ hit the cross bar. The yak bolted down a ravine, crashing madly into the autumn foliage.

I’d had, as we’d say in Australia, ‘a stack with a yak’.
xxxiv

But my problems weren’t over. Continuing on my merry 35 kilometre descent and whipping up speed, I suddenly felt the handlebars wrenched out of my hands and catapulted into a somersault before landing hard on my back on the hard earth. The bike tumbled next to me with a horrible clang.

Winded, I tried to breathe. ‘
What … the
…
hell
…
happened
?’

Instead of leaping up, I decided to just lie there by the side of the road and enjoy the warm sun on my face. That was until a Toyota Land Cruiser filled with smiling monks in maroon robes burled past and covered me in another layer of grit and dust. Ah, well. At least they waved.

I sat up, wiped the rings of dust from my eyes, examined the bike and discovered what had happened.

A bolt that had held the front pannier racks to the forks had sheared off. This had caused the crossbar over the front tyre to drop suddenly, lock up the front wheel, and flip me and the bike ‘arse over tit’.

I was lucky I didn’t break my arm or worse, my neck. Just as I was about to haul myself up, a raggedy goat herder who had witnessed the whole event picked me up, dusted me off, and rigorously moved my arms and head around as if road-testing a Muppet. He helped me load the front panniers onto the rear of my bike, and several hours later I limped into Xiangcheng. I was covered in dust, one arm on my sunglasses was missing, and halfway to town the front cable snapped and now poked the air.

Xiangcheng was another small town cast up high somewhere among dull brown mountains. It was dusty, and there wasn’t much about town for nightlife. The most it could offer was a restaurant that only sold
bāozi
(dumplings), and this was where I bumped into Jason again, the Canadian I’d met on the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek and Eli, the university student from Melbourne.

We downed platefuls of bāozi and copious amounts of booze. This brought out Jason’s dark side. Little did I know that he supported free trade, cuts to welfare, and the legitimacy of the United States as the world’s police. I was amazed that I liked him at all and we argued bitterly for what seemed like hours, until Eli, jumped in like a referee and yelled, ‘LET’S DO KARAOKE!’

We stumbled into a bar that was lit with fairy lights, sat at a table and ordered more beer. Women were dancing cheek-to-cheek, cigarettes hanging loosely from their lips, while a short woman in denim overalls wailed into a karaoke microphone.

‘Hello,’ said a woman in faded jeans and a woolly jumper as she sat down with us. Three fat Chinese men with beards and long hair sat in a corner, smoking and staring at the women. One of the women, sporting a sparkly red jacket, approached the men and led one of them down the hall into a dimly lit room. The heavy sweet odour of shit wafted up from the toilets outside.

I slowly realised that we weren’t in a karaoke bar at all. The woman next to me tugged at my sleeve and made that gesture that I’d been getting all this time in China – the good ol’ finger and thumb routine.

‘
Sān băi nián
(300
yuan
– $AU40)?’

We got up and left.

Back at our hotel, we convinced the barman, a thin-moustached man, to open up the bar. This was no mean feat, given that it was two a.m. and we’d brought our crate of beer from the local grocery store. The bar man agreed and even put on the mirror ball. Jason immediately cranked up the CD player and it wasn’t long before Jason and I were yelling at each other in a high–spirited, joyous fashion above the morose tunes of
Creep
by Radiohead:

‘But why should I have paid?!’ I said, speaking of my stay in the hut full of mercenary root-fossickers on that near-fatal mountain pass. ‘I mean, if someone in the desert was desperate for water, would you charge them?’

‘But it was your choice.’

‘You chose to cycle in the dark. You chose to stop there. Why should he not ask for money from you? China is poor! If I were him, I’d try anything to get money out of you. Hey, this bit in the song is for you!’

And with that he got up and sang, pointing at me, ‘
You
’
re a creep, you
’
re a weirdo! You don
’
t belong here!
’

‘Ha-ha, Jason, ha-ha.’

In retrospect, he was probably right.

‘Ya gonna miss the climax! Come on, come on!’ Jason pulled up Eli and me and swung his arms around us. ‘SING!’

We did.

The barman joined us, not wanting to be left out, yelling whatever came to mind, it seemed.

We flopped back down and Jason and I continued our merry argument, then, when we went to leave, the barman wanted money for opening the bar. After arguing with me about how I should’ve given money to my ‘hosts’, Jason was surprisingly not as charitable as he professed.

‘Come on, Jason!’ I said. ‘We got him to open the bar and we drank our own beers!’

‘No! I’ll handle this!’ He jumped up and argued with the barman as if they were in a Chinese opera: walking off, swinging his arms up indicating disbelief, then walking back again and rattling off another volley of high Mandarin lilts. He took a drag of his cigarette, listened to the barman for a split second before beginning another round of high-armed gestures. Finally, Jason spun on his heel and rushed back to us with a triumphant smile.

‘It’s okay. WE DON’T HAVE TO PAY!’

We trampled noisily up the stairs to our room.

‘You see,’ he said with smug drunkenness, ‘I understand the “Chinese mind”.’

But shortly after we returned to our room, and while Jason was taking a piss, the barman burst into our room and started yelling at us.

Eli was quick to act: he thrust a beer into the barman’s hand. I stuffed a cigarette in his mouth. He baulked for a moment at the sudden gifts but then took a drag of the cigarette and stood, posing as he did so, showing off his masculine drinking ability, his beer bottle almost vertical as he gulped like a choking cormorant.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Jason had returned. ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’

‘How do we know?’ I said. ‘You’re the one who understands the “Chinese mind”!’

‘Ah …’ and for the next two hours, he nattered to the barman; Eli and I had passed out on our respective beds. Finally, the barman left and all was quiet … until Jason got up an hour later to catch his bus to Litang.

‘See you there,
ass-holes
!’ he baited us like he was Kevin Kline in
A Fish Called Wanda
, and stumbled out of the room.

Eli and I staggered out of bed some hours later, worse for wear. My bike looked like it had also been howling all night. The front pack-rack hung askew in the cold morning air. With the help of one of the English-speaking receptionists, Eli and I went in search of someone to drill out the sheared bolt. Sheet-metal workers turned up with empty help; no one had a drill-bit small enough. The receptionist vanished and left me to figure it out.

Fortunately, a man in a crumpled jacket took me to a bus workshop, where engines, differentials, bolts, wheels and chassis were strewn across the oil-stained dirt yard. Mechanics covered in grease knocked bolts into engine blocks, while another whacked a sledgehammer onto, of all things, a printing press. One of them, fitted out in a tracksuit and with a cigarette welded to his lips, came over and looked at the bike then laughed. He examined the wreckage of my front rack, then got out his electric welder and tried to zap away, but it wouldn’t take. I could hear Uros’s wisdom whistling up the valley: ‘Ah, because it is
aluminium
!’