Kellen Smetana
This is usually a question I reserve for phone conversations with friends after a night of beers.  But here on our trip it seems to recur daily (and not because of alcohol).

“Was that yesterday morning we were woken up at 6:30 to shaking tents caused by dynamite blasts on a neighboring mountain?

And was it also yesterday morning we were passed in the middle of that city by a little cigarette-sporting kid galloping full speed on a huge horse?

Do you remember when that tree branch fell and hit me in the shoulder?

Or how about when that guy talked to you for twenty minutes without taking a breath or stopping to realize you had no clue what he was saying?

Or that other guy who followed us for five minutes in his car and then pulled over to give you a Pepsi?

And was it really only last night we were led through the town by 30 people to the only hotel and then told we were the first Westerners to ever stay in their city?”

“Umm yeah, I guess it was yesterday…  Hey, did you know that the river we crossed in Luzhou was the Yangtze?”

“Wow.  What HAPPENED yesterday…?”

Yesterday was awesome.  Every day is awesome.  Traveling by bicycle is awesome.  Go do it.

Kellen Smetana
I gave a fly a ride today.  He landed on the middle of my handlebar map reader and looked at me for about twenty seconds.  I just nodded to let him know I wouldn’t shoo him away.  He seemed to get the point as he immediately turned to face forward and stuck around for about two kilometers before darting off to his continue his busy life.  I was happy I could help him out and give him a little taste of bicycle touring.  It made me think of how much fun it would be to give everyone back home a ride if only for a brief segment to experience some of what we see, hear, and smell (even in a sidecar Matt).  It also reminded me of how even little events or aspects of each day can stick with you and add to your memory of a particular place.

Some of those favorite memories from the last week are fields of rapeseed.  By the name alone, these fields sound like they may burn a hole in the retina.  Fortunately, the ugly name is not reflected visually in the slightest bit.  In fact, rapeseed is a beautiful yellow flower and it is grown on every inch of flat land in northern Guizhou province.

We rode through three consecutive days nothing but yellow fields and hillsides like we were journeying to Oz.  It was akin to the endless sunflower fields you may see driving through Kansas, only here made more stunning by the fact that the hilly landscape forces terracing to the horizon.

Keeping color theme with the landscape, countless yellow gourd (possibly yam) vendors and dozens and dozens of bee hives also lined the side of the road.

The only issue with the bees is that as you pass by a set of hives (especially on a downhill), it feels a bit like riding head on into a hailstorm.  We just closed our mouths, clenched our eyes, and hoped for the best.  Ben made it through the days unscathed, but on one such passing I had to Frisbee my helmet because I had a couple stuck in my hair.  They later stung me as I tried to work them out; apparently, they were not as amicable as the fly today – ouch!

What makes this even more amazing is that at the end of one of the days we climbed a long pass and poof – it was all gone.  The next morning replaced by 40 kilometers of downhill through a deep limestone gorge all the way to Sichuan.  And, all of this put a smile on our face as the roads were MUCH better quality (mostly paved).  No more Cee Lo.

Kellen Smetana
Last entry was about our individual experiences with food here, this post is meant to talk about what we see on a more widespread level.  It’s tough to assess the typical diet because there are numerous street vendors hawking fresh fruit and honey, rice is ever-present, and there seems to be plenty of markets selling fresh meat; however, we have certainly been through enough supermarket equivalents to make a judgment about the food we have seen there.

What we see is a food pyramid flipped on its head.  Everything is driven by sugar, sugar, sugar.  The infinite number of Twinkie-equivalents advertise how healthy they are because the middle filling is egg based.  Any sort of bread, muffins, and biscuits are actually just cake.  And there is a brand called 30% Juice, probably highlighting the fact that it is 30 times more juice than the next best drink.  I think it’s safe to say that Whole Foods does not have a Chinese market expansion plan in the near future.

It’s sad to see a mass of food reduced to such a sorry state.   The “fluff” is popular because of how cheap it is and it’s cheap because corn starch / corn syrup based products are cheap.  Without getting too political, it’s also pretty easy to see the connection of this cheapness to gargantuan farm subsidies in the US, because they’re not growing any corn over here and many of the same companies are the ones dumping these products.  A massive global trade network rearing its ugly tail.

I guess our hope is that the future results of this diet combined with increasing income levels across the country will bring about a change in taste.  Given the mass of infrastructure construction we’ve seen, it’s sure to happen soon.  Until then, we’re sticking to the street vendors.

Kellen Smetana
Traveling by bicycle through rural China is not for the faint of stomach.

Dining In
We’ll start with the easiest.  Dining in means pots of ramen.  Lots of pots of ramen.  At the moment we are probably averaging two each per day.  They work as a simple dinner while camping or lunch on a speedy day – just add hot water.  And the good news is that they have many more “exotic” flavors than Oodles of Noodles in the US and we are not sick of them yet.  It’s an exciting day when we get a small prawn or hot pepper in our ramen pot.

Breakfast and snacks consist of a mix of nuts, street vendor fruit, crackers, biscuits, the remains of our Hong Kong reserve of peanut butter, and any random assortment of crazy looking snacks.  We have made an attempt to buy at least one new item each trip to the supermarket; this has led to everything from tasty milk-fragranced peanuts and dried cherry roll-ups to spicy dried green beans and a whole lot of stale Twinkie-like cakes.

Dining Out
This is where the fun begins.  Each meal is truly an adventure, and as we’re using up so much energy we pretty much have to eat everything that’s set in front of us.  Here’s a short anecdote of our typical restaurant experience:

In a suburb or Guilin, we enter streetside restaurant for dinner.  We point to an open table, they nod, we sit.  Ben makes the shape of a menu with his hands.  The entire staff laughs as if to say “are you serious?” and then bring us a menu entirely in Mandarin characters.  We identify the different sections by prices (meats, vegetable plates, and a whole bunch of “other stuff”) and pick a couple items randomly.

Now, we have tried to learn the words and characters for chicken, beef, and rice, and I’ve picked up numbers from 1-10, but it’s still a crapshoot.  Imagine walking into an Applebees just knowing how to say the word “chicken.”  You can see how that falls apart pretty quickly; that or you end up with an entire chicken cut up on a plate in front of you (this has happened once).  So we just end up selecting randomly from the menu as we figure that will give us a good taste of the region anyway.

In this particular instance they just laughed at our choices and stirred up some spices.  Not quite understanding the response, we picked a couple other items.  The misunderstanding continued, so the five people – including the chef – now around our table motioned for me to get up.  As if I was marching to the guillotine, I was led through the restaurant, across an outdoor courtyard, and into the kitchen.  The chef got a net, caught an eel from a tank, and handed it to me.  “Ahhh, ok.  No xiexie!”  I assumed we were trying to order a fish pot per kilo without telling them how much we wanted.  “Hmm…” I looked around.  “How about that… in that.. with those… it’s ok?” I pointed to a chicken, a large pot, and a mix of vegetables.  Laughter and a bunch of affirmative nods.  We ended up with a chicken hot pot stew including, of course, head and feet.  And it was pretty tasty!

Occasionally we’ll even point to what others are having if it looks appealing (though not to the bottles of straight rice whiskey many men drink with lunch).  Meals include hot pots (big stews of meat and vegetables still cooking over a flame on the table) and a mix of stir fry’s, rice, and noodles with black bean sauce, oyster sauce, or any number of spicy sauces.  Our favorite meal so far was an incredibly spicy fish hot pot in Guiyang.  We both teared up and blew our noses a dozen times during the meal but the flavor was unbelievable.  As we’ve been usually eating at street vendors and roadside restaurants, it was also by far our most expensive meal of the trip; total bill: $6.50 each.

We will continue to keep it an adventure and are looking forward to setting our tongues on fire again with some huiguo rou and gongbao jiding in Sichuan.

Kellen Smetana
First, I know I’ve been slow to update our GPS map, so many of you only know that we are somewhere between Japan and Turkey.  We are actually currently taking a rest-day in Guiyang, by far the largest city we’ve visited since Hong Kong.

Before departing and still today, I had visions of different segments of the trip: big sky and snowy peaks in the Tibetan plateau, arid desert in Uzbekistan, blue Mediterranean coast in France.  I didn’t really expect much out of this area of China south of Chengdu.  I guess I was envisioning a bunch of dirty cities interspersed with flat, empty farmland ether.

HELLO!

This last week has been quite the eye-opening experience.  The dirty cities are still here – don’t get me wrong – but the ether is filled with beautiful, deep river valleys, Dong and Miao people minority villages, mountains, waterfalls, and rice terraces as far as the eye can see.  For most of the last week we snaked along the Duliu Jiang river until its source, a high plain laced with wildflowers.  I was surprised how much it resembled the deep blue-green rivers of the Rockies.  One of the coolest things we passed is an area called Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces.  Here, people have farmed a seemingly impossibly steep area for the last thousand years; a human battle against the immovable mountain that reminded me a lot of Machu Picchu.  It was quite a sight!

Pretty much the only reason not to travel through this area is that the roads resemble what might have been found in post-WWII Berlin.  Lonely Planet calls Guizhou province the little brother (no offense Cory) in comparison with the big names around it – Sichuan, Yunnan, Hunan, Guangxi – and it was certainly visible in their road maintenance literally 100 meters after exiting Guangxi.  Either they have no budget or have simply elected to spend it all on the web of highways we’ve seen going up everywhere.

Whatever the cause, it is incredibly taxing to ride over the roads here and it has made for some very long days.  It’s even tough not to cuss to yourself at the bottom of a big mountain pass where you can see a “speed bump” just about every foot.  I just start singing Cee Lo Green to myself to make sure it’s at least a cordial cursing.  But, as I mentioned, the scenery has definitely been worth it and I suppose we have to live by the adage “no pain, no gain.”  People here seem to manage just fine – they just learn to work on their cars!  (No joke, we have not gone one hour without seeing someone inside an engine).  So we’re crossing our fingers for similar scenery, better roads northward into Sichuan.

Updated Photos and Stats pages, check them out.  And unlike Gmail, nhl.com is not blocked in China.  Wings up 2-0!

Kellen Smetana
Last week we rode through the town of Taiping en route to Yangshuo.  Needing dinner and breakfast, we found a supermarket to visit before passing on.  A quick stop, Ben dashed in to get the goods; I stood out front in the sidewalk, holding the two bikes.

After about a minute, a man came out of the store carrying his bare-bottomed child in front of him.  As the baby’s pants were already down, a quick lift of the legs up to the head and he was ready.  The man stopped less than two feet in front of my tire and the boy began to pee all over the busy sidewalk.  Simultaneously amazed at the early age of potty-training in China, the audacity of this shot across my bow, and the general acceptance of public urination in such a busy place, I decided to survey the crowd to gather their reactions.

Out of roughly forty people in immediate view, five were yammering away on cell phones, five were generally minding their own business, zero were watching the human Supersoaker, thirty had their eyes set on me!  Just then Ben came out of the supermarket, “Dude, two cashiers followed me around this time…”  So is the life of a traveling cyclist.  I shouldn’t have been surprised; we have been experiencing this most days here and it will likely continue.  Children laugh or shout “hallo,” adolescents snap photos or ask to pose with us in their favorite thumbs-up/peace-sign photo, adults often stare or occasionally approach to assess the specifics of the bikes and gear, and if we get any reaction from the elderly, it is usually a seemingly unpleasant muttering and general shooing along.  The most fun time of day is definitely around 4pm, just as all the kids get out of school.  They run alongside us and giggle to themselves as we butcher “ni hao” and give a smile.

As with anything, we get used to it.  I can now tune out the Lady Gaga level of attention as we pass through the big towns; it probably even makes good practice for public speaking (I’m getting work training even in rural China!).  We really notice it here because we already stand out like two sore thumbs, but I don’t think it would be any different in the US.  I remember getting honked at cycling through Detroit earlier this year.  And to put it into perspective, I imagined a couple Moroccans hauling across America in a suped-up big-rig – I bet they’d drop some jaws…

Unique to China or not, it’s certainly a memorable part of the experience.  So if anyone out there is jonesing for some attention, throw a couple bags on your bike and hit the road… it will be sure to find you.

Kellen Smetana
Seven days.

That’s how long it took before I decided to send stuff home.  If you read the earlier posts you may remember I left with almost 70 pounds of gear – way too much.  I’ve already found one of the biggest lessons of bicycle touring is frugality.

Ben has been cycling through Asia for the last two months.  This morning I awoke to him cutting huge sections out of his China map and tearing the labeling off his toiletries.  I poked fun at his excess, but he laughed back, “Hey, it’ll save a couple grams!”  That’s when I knew it was time to purge.  Here’s a list of what I shipped home, threw away, or trimmed in some way:

Long-sleeve cycling shirt (Deloitte shirt’s going home… sorry)
T-shirt
Boxers (x2)
Shampoo (gave away half)
Waterbottles (x2)
Radio
Battery charger (switched with lighter/cheaper Chinese one)
Batteries
Two maps
Anti-chafing cream
Electrical tape
Wrench
Spoke wrench
Baseball hat
Bandana
Folder
Paper

We’ll see how long it takes before I too am cutting up my maps…

Kellen Smetana
Wow, what a difference!  The last three days of riding has been spectacular.  Since leaving Wuzhou, a passing freeway has taken all the trucks and buses and left us with just motorcycles, a few cars, and a couple chickens to contend with.  We have been cycling on the equivalent of a state highway (G321 to be exact) and in Guangxi it has meandered up and down through fertile valleys stemming off the Lijiang River.  Rice paddies, old farm houses, temperate rainforest, and limestone karsts – quite the difference from Guangdong.

The larger towns are still rather dirty and there are people in every corner you peek.  But the rest of the ride has been like a quaint farm neighborhood with rice paddies instead of corn fields and water buffalo instead of tractors (admittedly that’s a stretch, but you get the idea…).

Aside from passing motorcycles and their trailing farm tools, we’ve also shared the road with a constant barrage of firecrackers.  The last three days has been a Chinese holiday – Qing Ming jie I believe – and people have taken to the hilltops to shoot off fireworks to honor their ancestors.  At first we thought it might just be miners working with weak dynamite; that was until we had lunch two days ago and saw a four-year-old stroll past our table with enough gunpowder to take on Rambo.  Then we noticed the fireworks storefronts and put it all together.  Almost like solving a mystery, I think the fact that we stumbled upon the holiday in such a roundabout way allowed us to appreciate it that much more.

Yesterday evening we pulled into Yangshuo, a popular backpacker stopping point just south of Guilin.  About a kilometer outside the city we passed three hikers – Westerners – and realized they were the first Westerners we’ve encountered since Hong Kong.  It’s kind of strange how we get so used to riding through the country we don’t even notice how far removed we are.   Later in the evening we went out for a beer after dinner and played a few games of pool against three other Westerners.  All three were in medical school in Ann Arbor.  It’s kind of nice to know how close we are sometimes as well.  Go Blue.

The area around Yangshuo and Guilin is full of limestone karsts and the scenery has been unbelievable.  Rain yesterday blocked most of our view, but glimpses of the peaks looming in the clouds, almost chasing us along like ghosts as they appeared, made for some exciting riding.  The next several days look to be more of the same.

Internet access has been a bit tough as we’ve been camping most nights, but we’ll make sure the posts keep coming!

Check out the write up about our trip in the Royal Oak Review.

Also, photos from Hong Kong are up.  Enjoy!

Kellen Smetana
Both figuratively and literally.  Figuratively in the sense that we’re checking back with the western world after our first three days of cycling in China and all is well.  Literally in the sense that Guangdong province has to be one of the more polluted areas on the planet.  This afternoon we closed out a 125 kilometer day to finish in Wuzhou, the first major city in Guangxi province, and appear to be just starting to exit the industrial mess.

Over the last two days we passed through both Jiangmen and Zhaoqing: two cities you’ve almost certainly never heard of.  Each of these has a population of over four million, about equivalent to the entire Atlanta metropolitan area.  Guangdong province is strewn with generically named entities like the Wing Yuen Lung Garment Company Ltd. and Cinese Plastics Company.  If you ever want to know where half of the products you buy are coming from, you’ll probably find these companies at the base of the supply chain.  I mentioned Hong Kong has a lot of construction; this place has more.  There’s road work, bridge work, mining trucks, and scaffolding everywhere.  The air pollution in Guangdong is bearable; the noise pollution is not.  Every car, bus, truck, and motorcycle honks as they pass to make sure other vehicles (including touring cyclists) don’t jet out into their lane.  Since buses are the biggest and fastest, they pretty much ride the horn the entire time.  It’s amazing we have yet to witness any road rage.

Even as dirty-looking as we were after two nights of camping along the side of the road, we seem to be quite the spectacle here.  While stopped, we often have to smile for a photo or waive to anyone shouting “Hallo” from passing motorcycles.  The first day Ben had some problems with his gears and an entire team of passing cyclists stopped to lend a hand (and photo-document the ordeal).  With the little communication we’ve been able to have, the people have been friendly, helpful, and welcoming – all I could ask for!  So I can’t bash Guangdong entirely, but let’s just say if there were an NCAA tournament of places I would like to live, it might match up in the first round against somewhere like Bavaria or Provence.

Into Guangxi tomorrow.  Photos continue to wait until I can get my computer connected to the internet.