The People's Republic of China. We had no idea what to expect, arriving by bicycle into a supposedly closed area of the world's largest police state. Remembering the carefully worded warning of the consular employee back in Vientiane (\"China isn't like other countries; you can't just ride your bicycle anywhere you like\"), we half-wondered if they'd summarily reject us at the border, turning us back to Vietnam, where our visa expires today. I envisioned a nightmarish bus ride all the way back to Hanoi, followed by an enforced tour of Vietnam's many bureaucracies and paying a whole slew of fees. On the other hand, I remembered my first arrival in China, eleven years ago almost to the day.
After filling out a dauntingly elaborate customs form I had expected the worst, yet was amused to find the two male customs officers on duty at Beijing airport standing shyly in their ill-fitting uniforms and holding hands. Today's border experience held both a little of the scariness I had feared and a little of the softness I had experienced on that long-ago trip. First, we had to wait at the Vietnam side of the border for the better part of an hour for business hours to commence. While we went through the formalities, a whole army of Chinese came trotting across the bridge for a day of work in Vietnam.
As if reading my paranoid thoughts, the officer processing our exit said in the most serious tone he could muster, \"Since your visas are good only for one entry, you won't be able to come back until you get another one, in Beijing, or wherever. Have a nice trip!\" On the Chinese side, a hundred meters away, we surrendered our documents and tried to downplay the bicycle aspect of our intended voyage. I chatted away with all the uniformed dudes in nervous Chinese while Fred kept an eye on the movements of the guy who had taken our passports. We waited there for nearly an hour, and when we were cleared to go the instinct was to bolt, to get as far away from the immigration people as we could before they had a chance to change their minds.
Instantly we were plunged into China, finding ourselves in an old narrow lane crowded with people. And all eyes were on us. Right away I noticed the funky bicycle taxis that were unlike anything we'd seen elsewhere in Asia. Many of these were being driven by women. In all the other countries we'd been in, this kind of work is exclusively the province of men, and I found the change immediately refreshing. It was also impossible not to notice the many Land Cruisers of the Gong An --China's \"public safety\" police---who cruised alongside us, presumably scrutinizing us from the other side of their tinted windows.
First on the agenda was changing money. We went back and forth on the people-filled street several times before finding the place that people had indicated to us --little more than a low table presided over by two women with a calculator and fistfuls of cash. In the two minutes that this transaction required, we attracted a staring, slack-jawed crowd big enough to hold up traffic going in either direction. Finding the road out of town was easy enough, and it was on our way out of Dongxing that we first witnessed evidence of the breakneck speed with which China is developing.
Beyond the compact ancient core of town construction was rampant, with buildings going up everywhere along newly-established boulevards wide enough to land a 747 on. It reminded me of an ant farm I had when I was a kid. We followed the bike lane out of town, which ended abruptly in ricefields that looked a lot like the ricefields of Vietnam. The road, however, was unlike anything we'd seen in a long time --nicely graded, recently surfaced and deliciously wide. There was even a line running down the middle of it. It felt strange to cruise down such a road out of a futuristic town like Dongxing and through agricultural land being exploited in pretty much the same way as it has for centuries.
In spite of the tractors so prominently featured in communist China's iconography (e.g. their money, their stamps), the fields of Guangxi province are still plowed by water buffalo and planted, tended, and harvested by hand. One detail that struck both Fred and me as we cruised along (we had a good tailwind this morning) was how old so many of the peasants were. Truly ancient men and women, their hides tanned into heavily-wrinkled leather, their backs bent into the shape of question marks from so many years of agricultural toil. What goes through their minds when their grandchildren go whizzing past in brand new BMWs and Hondas, cell phones affixed to the sides of their heads?
Yes, passenger cars were also a feature of the sparkling new toll road. For the most part they passed prudently, though the high speeds at which they drove came as somewhat of a shock after slow-motion Vietnam. We reached Fangcheng, about sixty kilometers from the border, in time for lunch. It's a fairly huge town, and --like Dongxing---resembles a giant 3-D version of \"Sim City.\" We stopped at the first restaurant that we came across. The woman who ran the place was so excited to receive foreign guests that I feared she might wet her pants. Obviously not many big-nosed, pale-faced foreign devils make it through Fangcheng.
In a matter of moments we had attracted a considerable staring gallery. I had a craving for dumplings, and when I asked our hostess if she had any she said she didn't, but could send someone to a place that did. Meantime we munched on vegetables and soup, avoiding the organ dishes that everyone else in the restaurant was noisily chowing down. As we ate, Fred and I looked at each other in astonishment at the sheer decibel volume of the conversations that surrounded us. Cantonese is not so much spoken as it is howled, screeched and bellowed. As we finished our meal our hostess came up and asked coyly if we would mind waiting for her to run home and find a camera.
For reasons unknown, she thought the novelty of serving two sweaty cyclists worthy of a snapshot. In return for our posing for a portrait, she said, the dumplings would be on the house. A half an hour later she showed up with not a camera but a photographer in tow. He directed us and our gallery of onlookers for a photo. Afterwards, we presented our hostess with a crisp dollar bill as a good luck token for her new business. We pedaled off, marveling at the friendliness of the Chinese. The ridiculously wide avenue leading out of Fangcheng led past a long strip of banks, karaoke parlors and half-finished apartment towers before dwindling to a narrow bumpy strip of road.
We followed a couple of malodorous motorized carts hauling giant cauldrons of human shit out to the fields (they call it \"night soil\" here and use it as fertilizer), preparing ourselves for a long and uncomfortable forty kilometers to Qinzhou. Then we noticed a sign announcing (in English, amazingly) \"Fang-Nan Expressway, 2km ahead\". We envisioned another fabulous road like this morning's and thought how we'd make record time to Qinzhou. But it was not meant to be, for the expressway was of the four-laned variety and prohibited bikes. Even from the distance we could see that it was a road worthy of Sweden, and we both longed to ride on it.
We biked right past the very clear \"no biking\" sign to the tollbooth, hoping our powers of persuasion would win us access to the dream road. But the two girls working there nearly had coronaries when they saw us. They frantically explained \"*bu neng, bu neng*\" (\"impossible\") and pointed us back to the buckled old road which ran parallel. The old road was in pretty bad shape, but it was nicely shaded and delightfully pastoral. The remaining kilometers to Qinzhou rolled quickly under our wheels. Soon we were surrounded once again by a forest of concrete monstrosities rising out of the ricefields, pedaling among masses of cyclists.
The first hotel we saw was a huge and bizarre-looking place, an odd-shaped tower that looked on the verge of toppling over. I investigated and found the rooms to be wanting for hygiene. \"We'd like to look around a little first. Does this town have any other hotels?\" I asked the receptionist as charmingly as I could. She sullenly made a vague gesture towards the East and we quickly discovered that while we thought we'd already made it to the center of town, we'd barely begun to penetrate the huge city. If we learned anything today, it is that in China everything is built on an almost obscenely massive scale.
Just down the street we found the Qinzhou Hotel, a much friendlier and cleaner establishment that offered us a fairly luxurious room at just over ten bucks (we were both relieved to learn that China wasn't going to ruin us pocketbook-wise). Though we both could have used a nap at this point, our brains were still very much abuzz over being in a new country, so we went for a walk instead. The market was in the process of closing up but fascinating nevertheless. Many of the animals being sold were either completely unfamiliar to me or never previously considered as an alimentary possibility.
Even the impecunious Chinese poke fun at the people of this region for eating \"anything with four legs except maybe a table.\" Nearby we discovered a massive (and surprisingly luxurious) hotel complex straight out of Las Vegas. We found iced coffee here and told the receptionist that we might be back to stay the next day, depending on the weather and our energy level. As the sun set we walked down an older, narrower street and then along a canalside footpath. Though we were right in the middle of town, people were tending their vegetable gardens, washing their clothes in the river and minding their chickens and pigs.
Back on the street near our hotel we were surprised to discover a lively red light district full of bordellos thinly masquerading as karaoke lounges, bars and hair salons. We also stumbled on a discothequelike substance, where we peeked in and promised we'd come back after dinner. Which we did. Though it was only nine or ten o'clock the cavernous place was jamming. The raucous crowd included drunken revelers, the usual painted ladies, and a surprising number of families out with their small children. The many hostesses kept coming by and trying to sell us various items. When one offered \"red watermelon\"
it sounded good to me so I said yes. When she came back with a little dish of watermelon seeds we were put on our guard and ordered nothing more. On stage was the biggest karaoke machine I'd ever seen, and this was thankfully dismantled for... the floorshow. Both Fred and I were astonished by the show's elaborate choreography, the quality of the singers' voices and the fact that in a backwater town in a backwater province in a restrictive and uniform society one can find drag. Yes, there were drag queens. We didn't get much of a chance to watch the show, however, since a few of the celebrants from a particularly raucous group at the table next to us decided to take us under their wing.
One of them had seen us ride into town earlier (indeed, the whole town seemed to know that we had arrived by bicycle somehow) and they all wanted to make sure we got a favorable impression of their hometown. The guy that talked to us the most --and whose Chinese was the most understandable to me--- said he was a lawyer and had obviously had a lot to drink. He was friendly in a demonstrative way and Fred was convinced that our new friend was trying to hit on him. Fearful of getting entangled in the long strands of \"lucky hair\"
sprouting out of a mole on our new friend's neck, Fred made special efforts to maintain a safe distance. After a while an especially rotund member of their party joined our table, saying it was his 26^th^ birthday. Many toasts were made. Fred learned how to say \"*gan bei*\", or \"cheers\" and lifted his instantly-refilled glass of beer many times. We made a narrow escape by insisting we had to be on the road early the next day. Since we were a fair distance from our hotel, we took a bicycle taxi back. Halfway home we instructed our female driver to stop for ice cream, where Fred insisted I persuade her to let him drive the remainder of the way while she climbed in back with me.
She reluctantly agreed, worried that Fred would get us into an accident. He did well, though, and I could tell by the way that he was straining in the pedals that he'd developed a newfound appreciation for pedicab drivers' work. I hadn't seen Fred so playful in a long while. We'd taken countless pedicab rides on this trip and he'd never wanted to drive before. And I was astonished to see him pick up his glass with such alacrity back at the bar. He was obviously having a great time in China. Sure enough, as we retired for the evening he proposed, \"This is too much fun.
Let's stay in Qinzhou another day.\"