Riding out of Shanghai this morning I never forgot for a moment that we were in China's largest city. The fact that Shanghai is also one of the P.R.C.'s richest towns was harder to believe, however. Our route (suggested in Roger Grigsby's \"China by Bike\") led us out of town on a nightmarish road paralleling the railroad tracks. The air quality assaulted our exposed orifices, our itchy eyes constantly treated to squalid sooty scenes out of Zola or Sinclair. The day's only saving grace was a serviceable tailwind. We had pedaled for over forty kilometers before we saw any signs of rural life, and these were only glimpses caught in gaps between factories --most of which were brand new and sporting flags of Western powers, indicating their J.V.
(joint venture) status. Shortly after negotiationg our way through the ghastly suburbs of Jiading, we stopped at a trucker-style restaurant by the side of the highway. A trio of young, heavily made-up girls beckoned us inside, promising all the dishes we craved. They ushered us into a \"box,\" a grimy closet-like room (available in virtually every restaurant and karaoke parlor in China). We ordered quickly but the girls --all three of them---kept pestering us. The most irritating of the three wouldn't stop shouting in my ear from a proximity that can only be described as intimate. \"*Guo le*\" --\"that's enough\"---I said until I was blue in the face, \"who's doing the cooking anyway?
We're hungry.\" They left us alone, but only for a moment. One or the other of the girls would come back in, thrust the menu in front of me and indicate a dish, asking, \"Don't you want this?\" This quickly grew tiresome in the extreme, but the final straw was when ear-shouting girl burst in with a plate of pistachios and proposed a number of things that weren't on the menu. She insisted we buy the pistachios not for ourselves but for our female companions, i.e. the tacky trucker whores who ran this bogus restaurant. Starving or not, we decided to take our appetites elsewhere and hit the road in nothing flat.
Pedaling away I thought how great it could be to be a horny straight man with some yuan in his pocket, as commercial sex opportunities in the People's Republic of China are truly ubiquitous. Massage parlors, karaoke bars, cafes, hotels, restaurants, even barber shops offer up prostitutes as part of their services. Given the proliferation of these kinds of businesses (to which Fred refers variously as \"whore salons\", \"whoretels\" and \"whoreoke\"), there are plenty of clients. A few kilometers further we saw a pair of \"drive-thru whores\" --thinly masquerading as hitchhikers---jump into a truck that had pulled over. Fred and I were careful to pick a restaurant in the next town that featured actual food.
A very friendly old woman set us up with a couple of bowls of greasy noodles and chased away the crowd in the sidewalk when it got too thick. We escaped the unpleasantness of the main road for twenty kilometers, turning onto a still-busy secondary road running alongside a barge-filled canal all the way to Kunshan, yet another large Chinese town. For the better part of an hour we fought our way through crowds of weaving, clueless cyclists, swerving to avoid all sorts of obstacles in this hectic city. Suzhou was still over an hour away, but we had already penetrated the far-reaching industrial wasteland that surrounds it, breathing in new flavors and smells with every push of the pedal.
Suzhou itself looked genuinely nasty until we crossed the circular canal that marks off the old part of the city. Suddenly we were plunged into a network of narrow tree-shaded streets positively swarming with cyclists. We stopped at the first place we came across --the unimaginatively named Suzhou Hotel---and checked in. An evening walk yielded few surprises. Like a lot of big towns in this prosperous area, Suzhou is abuzz with signs of rampant capitalism, especially along the wide main streets. The next day we made a concentrated effort at being tourists. In the morning we twisted our way through fascinating little alleyways to the Garden of the Master of Nets, supposedly the most exquisite of Suzhou's famous gardens.
Fred and I failed to appreciate the place, though, so swarmed it was with tour groups. We got out in a hurry and moved on to the much quieter \"Surging Wave Pavillion\", where only the occasional spit could be heard. We got our little lost on our way to an old preserved corner of town featuring old city walls and gates, a big bridge and a high pagoda. Here we watched amazing amounts of canal traffic jockey for position to pass under the bridge. Each vessel was piloted by a couple. While the husbands would take care of the tractor motor and steering from the stern, the wives stayed standing at the bows, using poles to measure water depth and push off from obstacles, and shouting out directions to boats coming the other way.
We walked around through an ancient neighborhood clinging to the sides of canals big and small. People cranked buckets of water up from fetid wells, watered their tiny vegetable gardens with urine (why?) and gossiped with each other in noisy dialect. It was hard to believe that KFC was just around the corner. From here we cycled out to the countryside in search of a 1700 year-old bridge. Since we had no map, we were at the mercy of the directions given us by passers-by. No two responses were alike and it began to feel like a wild goose chase. But since it was a lovely day we stuck to it, and finally caught a glimpse of our goal from a large bridge crossing the aptly named Grand Canal, an imperial relic still very much in use.
A couple of wrong turns later and we were there: a smallish bridge of many arches leading nowhere. As we started riding on the bumpy old thing, we came upon a pair of foreign devils, Amaury and Lala. Respectively French and Argentinian, they were studying Chinese in Shanghai and decided to visit Suzhou only for the day. They gave us their number and we said we'd call them to invite them to a party next week chez Yong et Nicolas. Back in town we treated ourselves to haircuts. It was my first Chinese haircut so I wasn't fully prepared for the elaborate pre-cut shampoo treatment/head massage, which took over an hour.
Afterwards we ate at our new favorite restaurant --featuring an English menu, friendly service and delicious chow. It was Saturday night and while we'd previously committed to check out the nightlife, neither of us felt quite up to it. All of the tourism had worn us out.