Week 3

Sat 1 Jan 05

Another cold but sunny-blue-skies day today and we were very happy to finish 55km. I was expecting this to be a mostly flat road and Zoe and I were both pretty tired at the end in the slightly larger town of LuZhai.

While I was checking out the hotel room, a 16 year old student came up and started practising her English with Zoe and she offered to show us around the town in the evening. I declined - having spent too many evenings with students wanting to practise their English - but I said to Zoe, who is new to all this, that she might enjoy it - and she did. The student took her to the market and showed her a little of the town.

Sun 2 Jan 05

We started the ride to LiuZhou on the wrong road. Everyone I asked said 'yes, yes - this is the correct road' but the traffic had reduced to almost nothing and the road quality had reduced to almost 'off-road'. However, after a few km, our road suddenly joined up with what was obviously the right road - so we felt a bit more confident about where we were going.

However, as often happens on the approach to large cities, there was a large increase in traffic, gone was the 2-3 vehicle per minute we had been used to. Now there was almost constant traffic and no cycle lane. I wasn't particularly enjoying it and when Zoe's bike started to play up again - both the gear problem and a slow flat in the back tyre, we decided to call it a day and get the bus into LiuZhou.

In LiuZhou, we found our best hotel yet - Ping Shan Bing Guan. You really could think you were in a hotel room in a western country. We both had hot showers in a clean warm bathroom.

Mon 3 Jan 05

Rest day in LiuZhou. This is a really nice city. It has almost YangShou caste style hills dotted through it with pagodas on the top and wide streets and a river.

I spent the morning getting Zoe's bicycle fixed while she did some sightseeing. I found a good bike shop selling western style mountain bikes and racing bikes (all of them cheap at around 1000 yuan) almost opposite the hotel. They said that the problem was with the centre bit of the wheel (I don't know how to say it - you'd never believe that I studied mechanical engineering at university...) and a new one would cost me 150 yuan. I said OK and watched the guy work.

It really wasn't an easy job - he first took the tyre off the rim, then unscrewed and removed every spoke. When he put it all back together, he had to 'true' the wheel (I think that is what it is called - see, I do know some cycling terms...) to make sure it spun smoothly. It probably took him more than 1 hour. I was very impressed at his professionalism. He cleaned up everything as he went (the wheel was pretty dirty) and had obviously done it all before. I also bought a new inner tube (25 yuan - to stop that slow puncture) and outer tyre (50 yuan - as there were some long gashes in the old one) from them. There was no charge for labour but I left him a tip anyway.

Next I found an ATM (Bank of China) which would feed me some money and a bookshop where I bought Zoe some Chinese kindergarten level writing books as she is trying to learn the Chinese characters.

In the afternoon, I met up with Zoe and we found a bigger bookstore where I found a great copy of a Noddy book with Chinese characters, pinyin and English translation - exactly my level of reading.

We discovered MacDonalds and KFC in LiuZhou too - not very culturally adventurous of us - but they had heating (unlike most of the Chinese restaurants) and it tasted good to have a bit of western food again.

Tue 4 Jan 05

It was much warmer today - maybe 12-15 degrees C) and I happily shed my hat, warm gloves and one layer of fleece top. We had a slow start this morning. The map of LiuZhou I had showing the roads out of town bore no resemblance to reality. When we eventually made it out - the road was great for the first 20km. It was fairly busy but had 2 wide lanes in each direction so all the traffic left us with the 'slow' lane and passed us in the other lane. The road was also well made and smooth.

We passed a long distance passenger bus loading up a passenger and in the luggage compartment underneath where the suitcases usually go, a herd of live goats. Well, there shouldn't be any problem taking a bicycle on a bus if they accept live goats....

About 11am we stopped for a drink. As usual there was only free tea - so I thought we'd order a small plate of fried rice as a late breakfast so we could pay for something. There was a mahjong table with mahjong tiles in the restaurant so we had fun playing with that while we waited. Unfortunately the staff thought we'd need much more food than we ordered so brought us 2 large plates of (admittedly delicious) fried rice and a large bowl of soup. So we made it brunch and stayed much longer than planned.

Setting off again, we passed the expressway junction that most of the traffic was heading for and the road changed to a single lane with a stony edge. This road was not well-made and looked as though it had been repaired badly several times with tar spilling unevenly over the edges making them bumpy. I didn't enjoy this too much as I had to concentrate on watching the road all the time. In addition, it was no longer flat and there were the undulating rises and falls of small hills.

After another 20km on this road, I was knackered and had fallen off a couple of times. Meanwhile Zoe was full of energy and could easily have done another 20km. I was too shattered though so we flagged down a bus to take us to the next large town of WuXuan where we found another great hotel - one that had only opened a few days earlier and still had the stands of congratulatory flowers outside the front to prove it.

About 30 minutes after checking in, the receptionist came to say sorry but the police had called and said we couldn't stay there because they didn't have a licence for foreign guests and we'd have to move to the not particularly nice hotel down the road. I wasn't too happy about that and said that the policeman would have to explain that to me himself because I didn't want to move. I thought (correctly as it turned out) that the policeman would not want to talk to me and would change his mind about us having to move.

Meanwhile, another unicyclist French-Canadian (but living in Hong Kong), Jeff, arrived after flying in from Hong Kong and catching up with us in the evening. We all had dinner together. Jeff speaks excellent Chinese - way better than mine - and he reads Chinese characters really well too (my reading is mostly limited to menus, signposts on the roads and primary school storybooks) and can chat away with Chinese people he meets really easily. I don't often travel in China with other people who can speak Chinese so this is great.

We got back to the hotel about 10pm and the hotel staff said they had been worried about us being out so late (In fact, the streets were still busy with other pedestrians and many open shops and didn't appear dangerous in the slightest). They said that if we needed to go out we could be accompanied by a couple of private security guards (complete with ill-fitting uniforms and plastic helmets) they had. We thanked them for their thoughtfulness but explained that this was really over the top and unnecessary as we had travelled a lot in China already. As far as I was concerned China is one of the safest places to travel from a security perspective (although I was a bit jumpy after seeing a rat on the road earlier in the evening). I was to eat those words the next day - but I didn't know that at the time....

Now that Jeff is here, it doesn't seem to have shaken the perception that Zoe is my daughter - he has just become 'Dad'. Someone who we were asking directions from, mentioned in passing to him that his daughter was very cute. And almost everyone we met while we were together assumed we were a family!

Wed 5 Jan 05

Jeff's first day (and as it later turned out, his last day) of riding. Jeff's coker (large unicycle) only arrived a few days before he left so he hadn't had much chance to practise with it. He said that he was worried about being able to ride it - but I wasn't concerned....until the first few times I saw him try. It didn't trouble me that he couldn't mount unassisted - neither can I a lot of the time. But he didn't appear to be able to ride more than 10m at one time - This was going to be a long day.

Then we discovered that he had a problem with his brake - it was partially on. I'd also had this problem and it didn't take long to fix. The next time he tried Jeff rode over 2km without stopping - no worries after all!

We were riding today on a new road - I'd known it was new because it only appeared on one of my 5 maps. It looked like it would go through some nice rural areas - and it did.

The weather was perfect - almost blue sky and about 16 degrees C. There was excellent scenery - rock formations similar to Guelin everywhere with sugar cane planted on the flat areas between being harvested by ladies in conical hats. When we stopped for a break, Jeff asked one of the ladies if we could try some and she chopped one piece into 3 for us and we did our best chip-munk impressions trying to eat it.

I've seen sugar cane for sale in both Hong Kong and China but I've never actually tried it before. You have to strip the outer edge with your teeth. Then tear of a bit and chew the sweet inner part which you then spit out. It tasted good but it was really hard work - and tough on your teeth. Zoe made the best progress, working her way through 2 large sections. I gave up after only one but it was a fun experience.

As we cycled on, I thought about what a perfect day it was - a great road - flat, wide, very little traffic and great scenery. I cycled just behind Jeff and Zoe was ahead a little - maybe 1km.

Suddenly as we came over a rise in a straight part of the road, we saw someone, it looked like Zoe, in the middle of the road maybe 150m ahead. There was something on the ground too and as we strained to look, Jeff said he thought it was a dead animal that Zoe was photographing. I said it looked a bit like her bike but how would she have fallen there. Then a bus started coming towards us in the distance and Zoe seemed to lift something - the object in the road was her bike - but instead of walking calmly to the edge, she seemed to be staggering or crawling. Jeff said he thought she was injured and we both started cycling at top speed towards her. The bus slowed right down to look but didn't stop. I arrived first to find Zoe sitting, crying at the edge of the road with her bike. " What happened? Are you OK?" I asked. It turned out she wasn't injured but she had been robbed.

Apparently a motorbike with 3 guys on it had been following her for a while. She thought nothing of it - we get curious people on bikes, motorbikes and even trucks following us for a while all the time. They eventually get bored of looking at the funny foreigners and overtake, usually with a friendly smile, wave or a few shouted questions about where we are from and where we are going.

On this occasion, the bike overtook Zoe and drove on - but ahead in the road, she saw the driver let off his 2 passengers and then drive further ahead a little and stop. As she passed the 2 guys, they suddenly moved towards her. She cycled faster but too late, they pushed her off the bike. One of them held her shoulders down and took off (cut?) her bum bag - which contained her wallet with cash and a bank card and 2 passports (hers and Jeff's as he didn't have a place to keep it and had asked her to look after it). He pulled her shirt up a little to check to see if she was wearing a money belt (she wasn't). The other man took her camera bag from the front of the bike and tried to take the pannier off of the back of the bike but didn't know how it was secured so couldn't. Then just as Zoe was realizing what was happening and about to make a kick to his groin, they both ran off with the camera bag and the bum bag and jumped onto the waiting motorbike which drove off down a side road into a field.

Jeff and I both had mobile phones but weren't sure how to contact the local police so we flagged down the next passing car and the 3 businessmen inside helped us call the police and explain what happened and where we were. The police arrived in a small van about 30 minutes later and loaded up the bicycle and 2 unicycles in the back and gave us a ride to the police station.

The uniformed police we met were curteous, efficient and kind and took us to the nearest big town LaiBing - 41.7 km away (we know the exact location of the robbery because of the stone km markers on the road). Unfortunately the non-uniformed admin assistants who were put in charge of taking our statements - who I will call Dumb and Dumber, were unbelievably stupid.

Dumb and Dumber (D & D) kept asking us the same questions and lots of irrelevant information and got muddled with our answers. This was not a communication issue. Jeff's mandarin is really fluent and mine is perfectly comprehensible for simple questions. The questioning would go something like this:

"Where are you from?".

We would give the answers.

"So, she's from Canada?"

"No, he's from Canada. She's from Australia."

"So, you're from Australia?"

"No, I'm British" etc, etc.

Eventually a much more intelligent lady from the external affairs department came along to help. The difference talking to her - was like night and day. We told her the story and relevant information once and she remembered even without taking notes - This was hardly a complicated case.

So now the questioning went like this (all in Mandarin)

"What colour was the camera bag?"

"It was black" Jeff replied in Mandarin. D&D looked at the External affairs lady for confirmation - she repeated Jeff's words exactly and then translated them into the local dialect to be doubly sure. D&D would write it down. Then one minute later,

"So the camera bag was yellow?"

The lady would look at them without waiting for us to answer. "No, they already told you, it was black"... Even she got frustrated with them.

5 hours after the robbery D&D had finally put together several pages of handwritten statements - one for each of us. They asked us to sign every page and at the end write (in English) something like "certified true and correct" and sign again. I couldn't read what I was signing and they didn't read English so I wrote "I have seen this" and signed it. That was true enough - I did see it - I just couldn't read it and had my doubts as to whether it would be correct.

They said we needed to come back the next day as they didn't have the right paper to give us right now.

The uniformed policeman gave us a lift back to our hotel from the night before - 60 km away in WuXuan.

Thur 6 Jan 05

We just missed the bus so we took a taxi back to LaiBing this morning. It's a small town and the taxi driver knew who we were - or at least he knew that we'd arrived back at our hotel at 10pm last night in a police car. No secrets in China!

We needed 2 things from the Police. Both Jeff and Zoe needed certificates to say they had lost their passports. Without this, they wouldn't be able to get new passports, take a flight - including internal flights, or even stay at a hotel - which require seeing your passport. Zoe also needed something to list what had been stolen to show her insurance company. Unfortunately, neither of these was straightforward.

D&D had managed to list only one large item stolen - A camera worth 2000 yuan - instead of a camera worth 4000 yuan and 2000 yuan in cash. This was information they had asked us about several times last night but had managed to record wrongly. So that needed to be corrected.

The bigger problem was the lost-passport certificate. They now had the paper they needed but wanted to stamp it with a big, official looking seal from a franking machine that was broken. They spent some time trying to fix it and said that we may have to wait in LaiBing until tomorrow or even Monday to have the certificate.

Jeff called the Canadian consulate in Guangzhou to find out if it was possible to get a new passport issued without it. It wasn't. He was supposed to only be here until Sunday - he had to be back at work in Hong Kong on Monday morning. We pleaded with them to use one of the many other important looking stamps they had lying around - and suggested that another police station could stamp it for us. Jeff even offered to buy them a new stamping machine. But, no, the system had to be followed.

Eventually, the department head, and then the section-chief came down to see why these foreigners had been hanging around the police station for so long and see the status of the case. That seemed to help a lot. Suddenly it was decided that a different stamp could be used after all.

After another 5 hours at the Police station we were finally able to leave.

The robbery had somewhat shaken my faith in the honestly of Chinese people and safety of being alone and I didn't feel like riding alone in that area. Zoe and Jeff were due to leave in 3 days anyway and Roger and Martin will arrive then too. So I decided to have a break from cycling until then. We decided to all take a bus to Nanning where Zoe and Jeff caught a plane to GuangZhou to get go to their respective consulates to get new passports.

I had a really bad headache all day today so wouldn't have been able to ride anyway.

Fri 7 Jan 05

Suddenly alone in Nanning, I had a lazy day. I moved from the Airport Hotel (50km from Nanning) to a more central hotel (The Railway Hotel) and wrote up my diary. I managed to find an internet cafe with a fast connection - the first one I've found in China so I could read my e-mails much faster than before.

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