Bad wrap

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No trouble please.

A fine but smoggy morning.

Suburban sprawl.

Nice room.

Pretty tea strainers.

Red stairs.

Love-making supplies.

Last night I stayed up ’til four then slept in ’til nine, the Don't Trouble Please sign successfully deterring any interruptions.

I've been trying to get a blog post done each day, but it's time consuming doing the photo captions and assistive descriptions. There's also some code which I need to figure out before I can launch the website proper.

My room here is quite nice. Conspicuously, there's no control panel on the bedside table, but there's a TV, desktop computer and pretty strainers for the tea. Outside, there's a view of the back of billboards and the terracotta roofs of the suburban sprawl. Both the view and the room temperature suggest a hot sunny day, though it is undeniably smoggy.

Carrying my own bags down the red staircase at midday, there follows a lot of dialog between the cleaner and the concierge. I understand there to be an accusation that I have somehow put a pencil-sized hole in the plastic wrap encasing a packet of massage oil, part of the love-making kit on display in my private bathroom.

To understand the severity of this, you need to realise that most products in China (and Mongolia) are wrapped in plastic at least two and usually three times. There is the outer wrapper, which is the display packet that you touch in the shop, then there is often an inner wrapper, which wraps the actual product. Then if the packet contains multiple items, as in the case of biscuits for example, each biscuit or pair of biscuits will also be wrapped.

So puncturing the outer massage oil wrapper was a bond endangering offence, as certainly no right-minded Chinese person would consider using a product thus exposed to the elements.

However I stand my ground and insist that I've only used the 10 Yuan razor and the charge is eventually dropped.

Lost in translation

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My bread basket contains one-of-everything.

My Espresso came with this odd offset.

My daily budget intact I visit the bakery next door and buy one-of-everything.

The shopkeeper is really friendly and appears to throw in a few extras for free. A young and affluent customer speaks pretty good English and is friendly and supportive of my quest.

As I ride out of Fengzhen, I spot a coffee shop, the first since re-entering China 13 days ago. The coffee shop is on the edge of a square which seems to be teeming with life and small stalls. I try to order a mocha but they don't have cocoa powder, perhaps because the Chinese don’t like sweet things like I do. They offer to make a cappucino but I go for an espresso which tastes like filter coffee. I'm not bothered as it only costs 2 Yuan, which is less than the big bag of bread and cheap compared to Mongolia.

The coffee cup sits off-center on its saucer, which is odd. Also odd is the shop fitout, which is emblazoned with western phrases, inaccurately translated. Why bother at all if the clientele is predominantly Chinese?

In addition to the various types of coffee, the cafe also sells nice looking food. The kitchen has a large glass window which seems to be a common feature here, perhaps to give consumers peace of mind that their food is being prepared in an hygenic fashion.

There's a woman in there who is carefully preparing something. She looks up and catches my eye. I'm taken aback by her beauty and lock eyes with her for a few seconds, thinking that will be the limit of the encounter. But I'm dismayed to see her maintain the stare, with no indication that she will ever break it off! Chickening out, I look away. Clearly flirting here requires a great deal more knowledge about local customs than I currently have. That isn't how we flirt in New Zealand.

When I leave, as when I’d entered, the young ladies downstairs join in a chorus of choreographed well wishing. It feels a bit scripted and chainy, perhaps because the place is quite new and they're doing their best to be polite and on-brand. But I definitely prefer the more relaxed vibe of cafes back home.

Celebrity status

Perhaps like mine, the woman's stare was also unintentional - more to do with my celebrity status in these parts.

When I'm riding along, people on the other side of the road will stop their scooters or cars, get off/out and yell out Hey! Heeyyy!! Then I'm supposed to stop what I'm doing so I can attend to their surprise that I'm even there. Generally I do acknowledge anyone that I happen to make eye contact with. I know that my pronunciation of Nĭ hăo isn't great, but a lot of them just look back at me like, who the hell are you and what are you doing in my town?? Or, OMG! I've never seen an alien before!!

I actually just said Nĭ hăo to a guy back there who was pulling an old style cart with some stuff on it. He just laughed at me with one of those toothless old man laughs.

I think I'd get this reaction even if I didn't have the bike. People would probably still be curious, because there aren't many other Westerners travelling off the beaten track. Perhaps that's because I generally spurn the popular way in favour of my own.

I've probably already mentioned that I deliberately avoid reading Western guide books like Lonely Planet. They may well be written by someone who understands the culture very well but I feel like the best way for me to understand it is to experience it first hand and talk to the locals. I'd rather get an insight that way than blindly trust the opinions of some American or English author.

Having read my fair share of travel blogs, I can see the way that people make assumptions about what foreign customs might be or what people are meaning when they say things or act a certain way. While there's nothing wrong with sharing these personal opinions in a blog, it's a bit different when you put it in a paid publication like Lonely Planet, because people take that as gospel and use it as their bible for navigating the customs of a place.

Plus there's that book about Lonely Planet authors, which exposes the cracks in their rating system, for example a good rating because they had an affair with the waitress. There are many great places that aren't listed in Lonely Planet and you wonder how they didn't get in there. I mean obviously the author just didn't go into every place in town, or a few different authors went to a few different places and that's what got in the book.

It's odd, because in New Zealand I did start reading this stuff. Even in Russia I think I was reading about China. Or on the trains. Maybe on a train it's something you can do.

But it's different on a bike. I'm not sure if I'm doing it wrong - I don't know if there's a wrong way to do it - yet I feel that if I read books like Lonely Planet then I will be biased by the author's view of a thing. I feel like it will give me expectations which don't line up with my reality, whether a city is worth visiting, or the vibe of the city, anything like that. I want to make those realisations for myself, experience everything with fresh eyes rather than go to the same places that everyone else has been told to go to and post similar photos on my blog.

Through this lens the reaction from the locals isn't so bad. It may even indicate that no other Westerners go to the places that I go to. That's a pretty big win in my book.

Southern sights

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Fengzhen has several attractive bridges, including this one crossing a frozen river.

Tens of trucks.

Peacetime battlements.

I jump on my bike and head south.

There's an attractive bridge over a beautiful river, but this is followed by a dam and an untidy feeling which may just be down to the amount of mud and snow scattered about. My own stench may be contributing to the dirty vibe. I haven't washed my clothes in a long while and the plastic bags on my feet aren't helping.

Climbing a hill I reflect that this seems to be par for the course when leaving towns. It's hot and the big trucks are back with one forcing me onto the dirt shoulder as if I am not even there. But I'm in good spirits and it doesn't bother me today.

Further up the road I come across a gaggle of trucks numbering in their tens, all lined up and waiting for something to happen. I think they're washing their trucks, I'll try and get a shot of them. I've been shying away from taking pictures near people because inevitably someone will come up to me and be curious about what I'm doing there. That's not something that people do in New Zealand. They would give you a bit of a wide berth and wait to see if you approached them first.

And what's this thing? A tower sign - in 200m there's a tower… The sign is in a really weird set of languages. And then there's a battlement. Maybe there's bits of the Great Wall out here. Who knows?

Let down

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Only the second flat tyre of the trip.

The Troll is keen to get going.

In other news, the f*cking squeak is back.

It came back yesterday when the temperature plummeted as I was riding into town. Maybe it's cold or smog activated, I really don't know.

And I think I've run out of data. That's going to make things tricky since I've requested a place on Couchsurfing.com and am waiting to hear if it's actually available.

And I'm going to run out of money soon. I hope that my invoice is paid on the 18th. It's supposed to be but I haven't received acknowledgement that they received my updated invoice after they pointed out a couple of beginner errors in the original.

Before I know it, it's 2pm. I'm only 11km into my 40-50km journey and while this might be partially explained by stuffing around in town the more likely explanation is the bumping at the back of my bike, which indicates a puncture.

I hope that it's a ghost flat like the one I experienced in Beijing 99 days prior. Then, the tyre had been completely flat but when pumped up did not go down again. I'm wondering if it's a little trick that Chinese people play if you leave your bike unattended outside a coffee shop, as you have to go upstairs to have coffee. Maybe they let your tyre down or something, or undo the valve, because the back quick release was really loose as well.

However after testing my hypothesis I realise that it really is a puncture, so after getting off the busy road I combine tyre fixing with a relaxed picnic. Raiding my bread bag I learn through trial and error that my favourite is the dark brown sugar coated one, a sweet doughnut.

By the time I’ve unloaded the bike, wrangled the rear wheel off and fixed the flat it's 3:30pm. I've gone from having heaps of time to having no time. Once again I will be riding into a new city in the dark, where I don't have a place booked, little money to book one, and no internet access to do anything about it. I love to procrastinate but you really have to make hay while the sun shines or deal with the consequences.

Descent to Datong

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Orange moon.

Many miles to go.

Stopping for a dinner break.

The sunset features a majestic orange moon in stark contrast to the snowbound landscape.

It is odd that, despite looking cold, the landscape doesn't feel hostile as it had in parts of Mongolia. I wonder whether this is due to the volume of traffic and the relatively short distances between bustling Chinese cities, or perhaps because of the Bill Bryson novel humming away in my ear.

Night falls, and once again I am dodging large trucks on the road’s shoulder, serially squinting at the cars and trucks high-beaming me.

The road is pretty hilly and the descent to Datong fast and windy, but I brake often as I have no desire to encounter black ice at speed again. At the bottom of the hill there are several cool parallel tunnels, then the usual industrial outskirts with the blinding blue-and-red flashing police-lights-on-poles.

The road into Datong is busy and I'm forced to ride through a tight corridor of stopped and moving trucks to get anywhere. Once past the trucks the road widens and bike lanes and footpaths appear. They are covered with people and I am in the city.

Buildings rise out of the smog. People in road side stalls or on chairs use fiery gas stoves to cook kebabs. There are shops everywhere, a police car is taking someone away, but there is a good energy.

My bike cranks squeak and squeal. I am simultaneously ashamed that I have pedestrians’ attention and glad of the motorists’.

The back shop

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Faced with these walls, the GPS had to be abandoned.

My first ever Warmshowers host.

I follow the GPS but am surprised to find that the white line heading to the hostel area terminates in a massive wall.

Riding along the perimeter I find an archway to go through. There's a man walking along the footpath who greets me and asks if he can take my photo. I agree and we have a brief conversation which I will assume will go no further as neither of us speak the other’s language particularly well.

He asks me where I'm going and I try to tell him that I'd hoped to arrange a Couchsurfing host for the night but my phone is out of credit so I'm heading for a backpackers that I found on Booking.com instead. Of course this doesn't translate well, but the man turns around and says that he’ll take me to a backpackers, or a ‘back shop‘. I wasn’t sure where we were going or whether the place would be anywhere as good as the reviews that my fallback hostel was getting, but I decide that it would be rude to turn down the man’s offer.

I ride slowly and the man jogs next to me. After about 5 minutes we arrive somewhere and the man points out the ‘back shop’ – aaaaaah, it's a bike shop. I'm not sure what good a bike shop is to me when I'm looking for a hostel, but I'm curious to have a look inside and get to know this friendly man who is apparently a bike shop owner.

The man says that I can sleep in the shop. I have a flashback of sleeping on a kitchen floor years earlier, but once inside the man shows me a nice loft area equipped with a double mattress and various blankets. He gets me back online with the shop Wi-Fi, shows me where the bathroom is, how to boil some water and where to get some dinner. He hands me a lock to secure the shop while I'm out and leaves me to it. I can't believe how trusting he is, leaving a complete stranger in his nice shop with thousands of dollars of desirable stock on the floor below.

Before leaving he shows me his Warmshowers.org profile, which I'm surprised to see as I thought that all the hosts were in America. I learn that his name is Zhihong Gao. The Warmshowers connection explains a lot, though I still find it incredibly flukey that I engaged with one man on the street, in the dark, in a brand new city, and as a result have scored a free night’s accommodation - in a bike shop of all places!