While hoisting beers with the birthday boys the night before we'd decided that Qinzhou deserved another night and resolved to stay to \"soak-up\" more of China before moving on to a big city. After breakfast today, however, we noted that there were big clouds blocking the sun's rays and that the wind was blowing strongly in the direction of our intended travel. So we decided to abandon our rest in charming Qinzhou and head for Nanning, capital of Guangxi province and home to over two million people. We got a very late start; it was nearly nine before we were pedaling through the crowded bike lanes of this bustling provincial market town.
In fact the bike lanes were so crowded we had to ride in the streets, which seemed to offend the sensibilities of the bike riding townspeople. Before we knew it we were thundering up the road to Nanning with the wind at our backs and with concrete road under our tires. The beautiful six-lane road quickly diminished to two lanes, cement giving way to tar. The tailwind evaporated and the terrain became hilly. Villages we passed were of two varieties. The first type was made up of characterless roadside burghs made of brick, tile and cement. Many of the buildings in these towns were partially completed and those that were finished were largely unoccupied.
Suburban Chinese development was obviously gearing up for busier times. The other type were brick and mud brick buildings with clay tile roofs nestled in craggy valleys on land that was too rugged to farm rice on. Sometimes we'd see a cement new town swallowing an older agricultural one. Despite the partly cloudy skies we had to contend with the heat that mounted as we gained altitude. We stopped at a tire repair and drink stand only to down three bottles of cold water each. The store itself was little more than a few rattan panels supported by stacks of truck tires.
The mechanic and his father lived and worked in the shack that reeked of burnt rubber. Their platform bed sat just behind the massive air compressor amongst the debris of tools and tire chunks. Unlike the day before, more and more trees dotted the hills around and the roadside, dashing my theory that the Chinese had defoliated their entire country. The terrain was nearly as beautiful as Vietnam only there was something different I couldn't place my finger on. A few days later Andy summed it up, \"the land has been in use for a lot longer by many more people.\"
Thankfully sometime around the day's midpoint we began to reap the rewards of the earlier climbs. Now gradual and long descents followed the ascents. The road surface got progressively better, enhancing our riding experience. As we approached the suburbs of Nanning the road widened and smoothed further and we both found ourselves starving for a snack. We'd eaten nothing but ice cream since breakfast and the hour was nearing three. We stopped in a strip-mall restaurant and tried to order food. Suddenly Andy's Chinese had become incomprehensible to the locals. It seemed strange, for just this morning and even earlier this day people had managed to understand him.
Andy too had difficulties understanding the staff at the restaurant so we were collectively reduced to gesticulating. When it became apparent that the problem was one of competence and not of understanding we moved on to another and another establishment encountering the same problem. Finally we met the son of a restaurateur who could speak actual Chinese and not dialect. We managed to order some food and drink before riding the last few kilometers to Nanning. The town was vast by most standards but just a \"middle-sized\" Chinese town according to one of the hotel clerks I'd meet later. We had some difficulty finding the center of the town it was so big.
Nanning seemed to have been built with some consciousness of its future growth. The streets and boulevards were huge, all designed to accommodate massive amounts of vehicular traffic \--including the throngs of bicycles that clogged the bike lanes. What they didn't plan for well is the pedestrian traffic that spilled into the bike lanes this Saturday afternoon, causing huge traffic problems. We wove through the streets in search of a hotel to rest at for two nights, finally settling on the stateliest looking of them. After an excessive amount of drama over the housing of our bikes we found our room and showered off our road grit.
We'd planned to take a nap before hitting the town but found it to be too late for that. Walking along the riverfront we found a beer and a game of pool in open air taverns there, causing much commotion among the locals who were decidedly unaccustomed to seeing white-faced tourists in their midst. We settled on dinner in our hotel hoping for an English language menu. There we found dinner in the grandest of rooms this side of San Francisco but no English menu, so we were reduced to pointing to the tables of those around us to choose our meal.
We decided to have a night on the town in Nanning after our dinner; it was, after all, Saturday night. Saturday night here was something to behold. All the cars save a few taxis had disappeared and the entire town seemed to be hoofing it. Here comes another chapter in my wonderment over time and space in Asia. Here it was nearly eleven o'clock and people were shopping for all kinds of goods in the streets. Everything from dinnerware to CD's to furniture was being hawked at impromptu stands. One woman was hawking plastic inflatable furniture. She had several air-filled samples on the street and all of them were full of families trying them out.
We ourselves were on a mission to consume some ice cream and nearly fell over in shock when we came upon a branch of Arkansas' own TCBY. There we had a yogurt sundae. We'd scoped out a bar called the Hot something-or-other earlier and descended the stairs to have a beer and hobnob with the youth of Nanning. The floorshow had just began as we entered. Two girls and a drag queen were lip-synching some \"B\" American tune dressed in rainbow colored Pipi Longstocking wigs. We were adopted by a group of Army boys celebrating another week without war. Another boy introduced himself and began speaking uncannily excellent English.
He admitted to have taught himself our language \--a fact that shocked both of us for he seemed to have a southern accent. I found sleep begging me to indulge it sometime around eleven. Andrew remained a few moments longer. In that short span of time he was introduced to a girl with a dress so short it caused some embarrassment. His English speaking friend told him to be careful, she is a \"shame girl.\" What we thought would be our only full day in Nanning was devoted to computing, relaxing and sightseeing. Since it was Sunday, I thought the park would be interesting to see.
But once we got there we were shocked to find it practically empty; have the Chinese abandoned wholesome family recreation in favor of shopping? The park was phenomenally well-kept and a delight to cycle around. After exploring its many lakes, gardens and vistas, we decided to check out a garish Disneyfied fake cave, which turned out to be the entrance to a former underground military post, since converted to the cheesiest attraction we've seen in a long time. Down an endless flight of stairs, dozens of tableaux of scenes from Chinese mythology fill dank hallways and cubbyholes. Most of these are hooked up to motion sensors, which spring the cheaply-costumed mannequins into life.
Back upstairs, we chatted with the extremely friendly family who runs the concession. They invited us to join them for dinner (we declined) and told us that yes, they actually live down in the cave among all the goddesses and Confuci. We had turned down a free and potentially hilarious dinner in favor of a buffet feast at the Majestic, the fanciest hotel in town. During the short pedal there, we noticed several white couples (the first Westerners we'd seen since arriving in China), all of them promenading little Chinese babies. One of these couples was carrying a pair of beautiful little girls, obvious twins, and we stopped to admire them.
\"We're taking them back with us to Ohio in a few days,\" the couple explained, telling us that China was a great place for Westerners to adopt babies, providing that they wanted little girls. Fifty years of supposedly gender-blind communism has not fully suppressed the traditional Chinese preference for male offspring, and many infant girls are still given up, abandoned or worse. While the dinner tasted all right, we wonder if we should have avoided the sushi. On our way back to the hotel, in the midst of battling Nanning's insane traffic, a friendly young man expressing a keen interest in our machines stopped us.
He introduced himself as Yin Ling and insisted we come visit him at his bike shop the following day. \"Well, there's always the chance that we stay another day,\" we stated as politely as possible, \"but our plan was to leave as early tomorrow as possible.\" Our plan, it turns out, was seriously compromised by both of us feeling ill the next morning, and we ended up staying six nights in Nanning all told. No longer can I gloat that I have yet to be afflicted by intestinal disorders on this trip. Was it the sushi? In any event, we did actually make it to Yin Ling's shop the next day.
He insisted on replacing my handlebar tape and cleaning both our bikes free of charge. All we had to give him was an \"honorary BikeBrat\" bracelet made of a bicycle chain. We hung out at his sweltering shop for a couple of hours, observing how the place serves as a meeting place for the young cycle-crazed of Nanning. We met several finely turned out young men who were provincial champions of mountain biking and cyclecross events, as well as a bird-boned girl who had won many long-distance road races. They invited us to join them on a sunset ride in the hills outside of town.
Had we not felt so lousy we would have accepted in a heartbeat. Instead, I asked Yin Ling about the state of cycling in China, explaining to him that our visit here was in some ways a pilgrimage, since China contains well over half the bicycles on Earth. He told me that while he and his friends were bike-crazy, the majority of Chinese would eagerly trade in their bikes for a motorcycle, and that Nanning has the highest percentage of motorcycle owners of any Chinese city. (I had been distressed to see in Qinzhou that a new motorcycle retails for the equivalent of \$350).
Eventually, I suppose Nanning and other towns like it will resemble the beeping, stinking, scooter infested hells of Taipei and Bangkok. Following our visit to Lin Ying's I felt worse and worse. Three days in bed followed, punctuated only by twice-daily visits to our hotel's (free) clinic. A sturdy, friendly doctor/nurse repeatedly took my temperature (it was frighteningly high) prescribed and supplied various traditional and Western medicines and jabbed my butt with a big scary needle. Fred felt only slightly better and we can only wonder what the housekeeping staff on our floor thought of us, holed up in our room like a pair of hibernating beavers.
Fred felt better before I did and developed a healthy dose of cabin fever. He couldn't wait to get out of Nanning, a city remarkable only for its hugeness. Since I wasn't yet up to riding a bike, the train looked like our best option. We scored a pair of tickets to Guilin with remarkable ease, told that our bikes would follow us on a slower train. It pained me to look out the window and see the picturesque countryside roll by, but I suppose the train ride was an interesting cultural experience in itself (one old dude had boarded carrying nothing but an enormous jar full of pickled geckos).
We were on the Beijing express, dozens of cars long and packed to the gills with people. While we had insisted on the most luxurious seats, our ride in \"soft seat\" was hardly comfortable. We were packed in six across on upright benches covered in vinyl, and we spent the entire ride providing entertainment for our fellow passengers. A guy sitting next to Fred was so absorbed by the book Fred was reading that when Fred began to turn the page, his neighbor stuck his hand in the book so he could finish reading. His behavior worsened when we played a game of cards, when he made comments on Fred's every move.
After enduring a couple of hours of this, we decided to escape to the relative sanctuary of the dining car, some twenty cars away from ours. I felt like a runway model braving the flashpods as we walked through the long series of crammed carriages (and we didn't even get a look at \"hard seat\"). When we got to the restaurant we sat down and said in unison, \"beer!\" The dining car staff was both incredibly friendly and brazenly familiar, sitting down with us to chat as we munched on the delicious chow. I found that my proficiency in Chinese increased with each glass of beer, and found no reason to decline when a group of drunk revelers next to us invited us to drink some of their rice wine.
They said they were from Harbin in China's brutally cold Northeast and were on their way back from a vacation in Yunnan. This meant something like a five-day train ride and they hadn't even booked sleepers. No wonder they were drinking... Our new friends had supplied us each with a healthy dose of *baijiu*, far more than we could drink in one gulp (as required by their repeated cries of \"*ganbei!*\"---meaning \"empty glass\"). Indeed, I was surprised to see that Fred had finished his while my own glass seemed bottomless. It wasn't until I had finally finished it off --feeling quite woozy---that Fred confessed to emptying the contents of his glass into mine while I wasn't looking.
Our Harbinian friends had seats several carriages away and invited us to join them there. After a few more minutes of playing performing seal for them (I looked up at one point to see a sea of heads of other passengers, hanging on my every word) and virtually exhausting my conversational repertoire, I was informed that a woman sitting right across the aisle was an English teacher in Shandong province. I relaxed and let her do the rest of the work, much more ably than I ever could. Though the train had only been in motion for a few hours, everyone on the carriage seemed to know each other, like a big family.
How is it that this largest nation on Earth is able to maintain this sort of chumminess? Sometimes it feels like one gigantic (and racially exclusive) private club. Somehow I made it back to our seats in time to get off the train in Guilin, but not before being heavily cruised and unabashedly groped by a young queen seated diagonally from us. He was wearing an outrageously girly outfit --not at all in keeping with the uniformity of most male Chinese apparel---complete with a pair of shoes so outlandish that they could only be homemade. Strangely, none of our fellow passengers seemed even to notice his non-conformity and apparent perversion, causing me to wonder what the general attitude is towards homosexuality here.
Unfortunately my rusty Chinese wasn't up to the task. I did try asking him where we should go out in Guilin (he said he was from there) but his response was so slang-ridden that I didn't understand a word. I suppose I should find a dictionary that includes the Chinese expression for \"gay bar.\"