Week 5
Sat 15 Jan 05
Excellent view of the waterfalls from my bedroom window this morning.
It was Martin's last day. We spent the morning checking out the waterfall tourist site. We found some Chinese graffiti written on the bamboo - how very ecological of them. We also managed to cross into Vietnam by mistake - but there wasn't a sign so how were we supposed to know? The Chinese border guard made us come back very quickly.
Martin left at lunchtime to catch a bus back to Nanning. Roger and I thought we'd do a quick 30km ride along a secondary road in the afternoon - but it didn't quite turn out like that.
We started up a massive hill - so that was a 2km walk. The road then carved its way round and up and down near the tops of the karst peaks looking 100's of metres down into the enclosed valleys of rice terraces below. It was an amazing road - staggeringly beautiful and must have cost millions to build - and it was completely deserted. We were on it for more than 3 hours and only saw about 5 vehicles. We got a lift back to the hotel in a taxi eventually (after hitching a ride in a truck to the next town).
Sun 16 Jan 05
We set off walking up the 2km hill around 9am and started the day with a fun 8km off-road stretch which was mostly gently downhill. It was the first off-road I've done on my Coker (big uniycle) and I really enjoyed it. The mud and stone track was pretty well made in most places but took a lot more concentration (and a lot more falling off - usually onto my feet) than paved roads but made a change.
We then did 55km on lovely smooth tarmac. I got up to 20km/hr in some places and was certainly sustaining much faster speeds (usually cruising around 17-18km/hr) than I have before. However, these were my top speeds (and I'm knackered tonight) whereas Roger feels he had an easy day. There was one particularly long steep hill which Roger raced trucks up while I walked it. He enjoyed himself so much he actually cycled back down the hill towards me to tell me about it instead of waiting for me at the top - the guy is a mad-man. Incredible energy!
We got to JingXi about 5.30pm and stayed at the JingXi Hotel. We sent a taxi back to pick up our luggage which eventually arrived about 10.30pm.
Mon 17 Jan 05
Another record distance for me today 82km and I'm feeling pretty shattered. It was all on lovely smooth road and we really motored along. It was mostly flat apart from a couple of ups after lunch and a massive downhill at the end which was pretty steep in places and which would have been great on a bicycle but is not so easy on a uniycle.
I was really using my brake today (Roger doesn't use a brake - just muscles of steel instead!) - but had problems on the turns. The turns often have quite large cambers on them so the cars and trucks can corner at speed but I find them very unstabling. I swim around with both arms trying to stay balanced and I have to really slow down. Since I use both arms to balance I can't hold onto the brake on the turns and there were a lot of turns on the 10km downhill at the end. I fell off a few times (onto my feet) but luckily downhill is the one situation where I can free-mount so I didn't have to start walking.
Every time we passed people at the side of the road on the downhill part, after the usual whoops and cheers, I could hear the Chinese word for brakes (xia che) being spoken. Trucks having problems with their brakes is obviously a common problem in that area and they were fascinated by the fact that Roger didn't have any and they couldn't see mine either.
We seem to have finally left the Karst mountain area this evening. Roger was beginning to think that all of China looks like Guilin!
We used the same taxi as yesterday to bring our luggage to NaBo tonight.
Tue 18 Jan 05
Hills all day today - so I was at 'beginner speed' for most of it. After 20km (including a massive uphill) we saw the 'Welcome to Yunnan' sign on the road indicating that we were crossing into a different province. Roads are obviously paid for and built on a provincial basis because in line with the road sign, the quality of the road went from good to attrocious. To be fair, they were in the process of rebuilding it, but in the meantime the mixture of gravel, wet cement and stones was very difficult to ride on (and even Roger admitted that it wasn't easy). We also became filthy with dust and wet cement splashes on our clothing. In the end, we caught a passing taxi for 10km of it (making today's total 40km, not 50km).
The sun came out in the afternoon and made for some very pleasant riding once we hit paved road again, looking down over a meandering river .
There was a choice of good hotels in FuNing and we found a nice one with heating so we could do some laundry and it will hopefully dry by the end of our day off tomorrow.
We also got our cement covered unicycles cleaned by some young girls at the 'vehicle wash' for 2 yuan each.
We used a new system for our luggage today. Since there were no taxis in NaPo, we went to the bus statio and managed to arrange our luggage to be taken by bus and left at the bus station in FuNing. this only cost us 10 yuan instead of the 150yuan we've paid the taxi for the last 2 days. It is somewhat less safe from a security perspective but it worked well today so we'll probably try it again where we can.
We spotted a bar in FuNing, by the river. This is an unusual sight for towns in China so we thought we'd better take the opportunity to use it. A Chinese lady who is an English teacher here started talking to us, keen to practise her English as foreigners are apparently a rare sight here. She invited us to join her friends and Roger inevitably had to down many glasses of beer in various rounds of 'Gan Bei' from our new friends. Luckily for me, women are allowed to forego this tradition - or get away with swallowing a mouthful instead of a whole glass in one go anyway. Roger didn't seem to mind this hardship though. In fact, I think he rather enjoyed it!
Wed 19 Jan 05
Rest day in FuNing. Our new Chinese friends from last night invited us to visit their school this morning, which was interesting. The art teacher (looking much more sober this morning) showed us his art classroom where some students were drawing some statues of famous people. I was pretty impressed at their work - but since my drawing skills peak at 'stick men', this is probably not saying much!
The school seemed really well equipped and well decorated (no graffiti anywhere). I thought it must be new but they said it was 6 years old, so maybe Chinese kids are just better behaved. It was Number 3 Secondary School. Students are examined at 11 years old and streamed into different schools according to their results - The best students going to Number 1 Secondary School and so on down to Number 17 Secondary School which is apparently the lowest ranking for this school district. This means that the students often don't live near to their assigned school. Seventy percent of this school's 2000 students were boarders, staying at the school Mon to Fri and returning home at weekends. They stay in dormitory blocks on the school grounds, 8 to 10 students per room in bunk beds.
After lunch with some of the other English teachers at the school , I had planned to read a book (well listen actually, as I only have audio books, no paper ones to save weight) but ended up falling asleep for 4 hours. I think my body just needed some extra downtime to recover from all the exercise I've been doing recently.
Thu 20 Jan 05
We woke up to light rain but got ready to go anyway. Unfortunately, the rain just seemed to get harder so we ended up taking the bus to BaBao which I was actually relieved about when I saw the gradient and length of the hill we should have ridden out of FuNing.
BaBao is a strange small town - with lots of restaurants with bars and not much else. It did have a few hotels though - and we stayed in the best one - no heating (or air-con in the summer), hot water only after 6pm (and then it was too hot - you couldn't add cold) but otherwise not bad.
Roger got talking to an English teacher - or at least the English teacher was very keen to try to talk to him but actually he didn't seem to speak much English. However, he did manage to persuade us to visit his school the next day to talk to the kids. This must be our week for visiting schools.
The rain had cleared up by the afternoon and I decided to spend the time on the bus checking out the roads for the next few days (Roger opted to unicycle to a nearby waterfall instead). Buses and other vehicles were hard to come by - so I only managed to get 100km and back in 10 hours but at least I had some idea of what the road looked like.
On the way back in a bread-van bus (in Chinese 'mian bao che') - so called because the small mini-van looks like a loaf of bread), my driver was very chatty and good at using simple words in Chinese so I could understand. This was his second job - he was a policeman - but he bought this bread-van to use on his days off to supplement his 2000 yuan a month police salary). He really liked English football (he supported Manchester United) and was disappointed that I didn't. He told me that many girls supported Birmingham because the players were better looking - all news to me!
I got back around 9.30pm to find Roger drinking beers with his new English teacher friends (who despite Roger's trying to outwit them, had hunted him down). Since conversation was very limited, the night had turned into another 'Gan Bei' session in which Roger was easily out-drinking the teachers - who in spite of their enthusiasm clearly did not have much capacity for drinking alcohol and were both red-faced and much the worse for wear. Their wives had also just called to find out where they were so they had to go home when I arrived.
Fri 21 Jan 05
We visited the school before the ride today and found ourselves giving a speech to 250 sixteen to seventeen year old kids. We introduced ourselves are told them a bit about what we are doing in China. Then they asked us questions which included such gems as 'Can you tell us about farming in the UK'...Not exactly my (or Roger's) area of expertise. We were much happier talking about unicycling and Roger gave them a bit of a demo. They finished by singing us an English song which was impressive. They wanted us to stay all day (they even offered to pay us to do so ) but after 2 days rest we were looking forward to unicycling again - even though it is just a hilly 33km today.
We arrived in MaJie (also called Ma Gai (by the locals) or NanPing on some maps) around 2pm. We hadn't found any method to move our luggage this morning so Roger went back the short 33km trip by bus to pick it up while I went the other way to do some more research on the road ahead.
After about 30km on my bus the traffic came to a complete standstill. The 20 passengers on my bus took this fairly nonchalently - obviously a common occurence here. I took the time to write up my diary. After 2 hours though, without moving, it started getting dark so I knew I wouldn't have time to do any research on the roads and should head back - but how? The traffic in both directions was not moving.
I wandered up the 1km to the scene of the problem. A truck appeared to have a mechanical problem and was blocking the road. The road only had room for one vehicle in each direction - but people impatient at waiting in the queue had overtaken the vehicles in front (on the wrong side of the road) and were now waiting in a second line to get past the problem. Vehicles in the other direction had done the same. So, now, picture this scene. The road only wide enough for 2 vehicles has a queue of vehicles in each lane facing the same way and on the other side of the broken-down truck there are 2 queues facing the other way. So when the truck has been fixed, the traffic is completely stuck. How stupid can people get? The police turned up eventually and tried to get some people to reverse out - but it took a while.
I wandered past the problem-truck to the vehicles (mostly trucks and buses - there still are not many private cars in China) facing the other way. Every bus would be passing the town I needed to get back to so I just sauntered past the bored, waiting drivers asking the bus drivers if they had any free seats. They were all pretty surprised to see a foreigner in a rural area 2 hours into a traffic jam but the third bus I asked had a seat and said I was welcome. I boarded the bus and waited another 2 hours in the dark for the traffic to finally start moving.
I finally made it back to MaGai at 9.00pm thinking that Roger (who only had a short trip to do) would have been back for hours and might be wondering where I was. However, it turned out that he had had a very similar afternoon to me and had only just got back himself. His traffic accident had only caused a wait of 2 hours (compared to my 4 hours) but he certainly hadn't had the relaxed afternoon I'd envisaged.
Moving our luggage seems to be a real problem on this road and the hotels are not so good so we've decided to jump on a bus tomorrow to the next large town and try from there.