China Road - Preface

8/9/2019 China Road - Preface

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This is a draft of the preface to be published in the book The China Road

Motorcycle Diaries.

The China Road Motorcycle DiariesPreface

Carla King

The China Road Motorcycle Diaries 1 Carla King
http://carlaking.com/http://carlaking.com/


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PREFACE

In the summer of 1997 I received an email from an American

working in Beijing. It arrived like a fortune in my computer. There's a

bike waiting for you in a garage in China, it said. You could ride it all

over the country.

Bikers are a closely-knit group, especially sidecarists, and after my

1995 motorcycle adventure around the United States on a Russian Ural

sidecar motorcycle I'd had invitations to motorcycle in Europe and

Australia, Russia and Tiera del Fuego. But in 1997, China was suddenly

everywhere in the news: the restoration of Hong Kong to the Chinese,

the opening of the country to tourism and foreign investmentbold

capitalist moves in a tightly controlled society. The country was

interesting and unknown. At least, I knew nothing about it.

A certain memory of childhood came to me. Myrtle Beach in North

Carolina, digging in the sand, some adult asked me, "What are you

doing, digging all the way to China?" And of course I imagined kids like

me over there on the other side of the world, but upside-down, with

eyes slanted upward because they were fighting gravity from the other

direction.

The invitation appeared in my email again. "You could ride around

the countryside and talk with people about Hong Kong," it said. "But

Hong Kong isn't all that's going on here. It's overshadowed much moredramatic changes, out in the countryside."

I love the countryside. By October, I was there as a guest of Rick

Dunagan and the Beijing Chang Jiang gang, an eclectic group of

expatriate Americans and Europeans, and one Chinese couple who



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owned an adventure travel shop in Beijing.

The bike belonged to Jim Bryant, the owner of the Subway

sandwich franchise. The bike was black, just like my Ural, with a

Subway sticker on the back. Best of all, the license plate was 00069. I

rode it through the streets of Beijing to sights like the Forbidden City

and Tianamen Square, to the Dirt Market, the Silk Market and the

Russian Market, and right past the Kentucky Fried Chicken to the

Subway shop for lunch. The traffic was frightening, it seemed that

everyone had just got cars in Beijing, and that meant that everyone

had just got drivers licenses. It was like driving with thousands of

sixteen-year olds. In 1997, there were only thousands. Nobody had anyidea just how many more there would be.

But one day Rick took me out to the countryside where the

peasants were harvesting golden yellow corn to be dried on the road. It

was warm and sunny and the natives smiled and waved as we drove

over their crops, threshing their grain. We stopped for noodles and

beer at a roadside stand, bought persimmons and walnuts, and other

things you do in the countryside.

The grand finale was a group ride to the Great Wall. We left Beijing,

a city thats about the same physical size of Belgium, which in 1997

hosted 11 million inhabitants. We rode and rode under the clear blue

Indian summer sky. The high mountains of Inner Mongolia were visible

to the northwest, stark and raised in spiked brown peaks over which

laid the territories of the dreaded Barbarians.

Only ten percent of China is arable and farmland stretches right up

to the feet of these mountains, not skipping a crevice as it follows the

contours of the flatlands. In October, the peasants were busy

harvesting and used half the road as a drying surface for yellow corn.



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The farmers sat in piles of it, the men lounging, taking a break from

furrowing the fields, and the women were busy separating the husks

from the ears, piling the husks in the middle of the road, and the ears

to the side. Other women thumbed the kernels off into neat patches of

gold onto the black asphalt. Traffic, such as it was, drove around the

yellow patches and directly onto the husks to help with the threshing.

A farmer burned fallen willow leaves and twigs in his field, brown and

furrowed by as he led his donkey to plough the dirt.

We rode high into the hills breathing deeply of clean air, polluting

the silence with the sound of seven Chinese sidecar motorcycle

engines headed toward the wall.

The fields gave way to a lake and a road built up against a

mountainside, its gray granite cliff dripping with vines turning yellow

and red from the season and the sun, rapidly setting now, three hours

from Beijing.

The piles of corn gave way to roadside tables piled with fat orange

persimmons, luminous in the fading light. Amongst the persimmons

were baskets of cream colored apples streaked with red, boxes of

walnuts, pheasants in cages of wood-framed chicken-wire and, next to

the lake, tiny silver fish strung horizontally through their middles with

string and hung to dry on a line like rows of metallic windchimes.

We were racing the sunset and the sunset won so my first view of

the wall was in silhouette, an irregular line along the mountain ridge

that folded in close to the valleys but forever stretched on toward the

desert of Mongolia.

Watchtowers appeared regularly along the wall in intervals as it

twisted off into the distance and overwhelmed me with the enormity of



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the effort that must have been required over the years to create it. For

the first time I thought about the carriers of the stone to the ridge, the

strength required, the ingenuity, the tumbles and falls of people and

stone back to the bottom, the injuries and deaths and the constant

toiling. That this human-made dinosaur backbone rolled on for 4000

miles was simply unimaginable.

We pulled up to a gate and were surrounded by villagers. I'd barely

seen the low brick structures at the foot of the mountain. I sat

shivering in the fading light while the Chinese speakers in the group

negotiated with the villagers in what still sounded to me like random

nasal howling spiked with laughing, fake refusals, hand waving, morelaughter, and more shouting. I could make nothing of it at all, not from

English, nor French, nor from the little German and Dutch I knew.

Though Id studied basic Mandarin before I left on this trip, now I

recognized only the words for thank you.

The whole deal ended up costing about $16 for all 14 of us, an all-

inclusive package of admission to the wall and permission to camp on

it, portage of our things up the mountain, a boiled egg breakfast at

dawn, and a promise from them to leave us alone and save the

souvenir-hawking until morning. It was a deal both sides quietly

laughed about, each party certain that the other came from the

stupidest part of their country.

We hiked up to the wall. I imagined we would pitch our tents on the

ground at the foot of it but I followed the group into a watchtower and

up its staircase to the wide, flat top of it. We pitched our tents and

settled in just in time to witness the full autumn moon rise over

Mongolia.

As the rest of the group went about making dinnera weird



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combination of American, European and Chinese fareI stood on the

wall looking around at the countryside in what can only be described

as astonishment. Id really had no idea. And yeah, I could do this, I

thought. Cities are horrible to ride in, as they are all over the world, but

the countrysideI had not imagined such a vast, uninhabited spaces

existed here, I had not imagined that China would be so beautiful.

Id done my research about the wall, though, and the residents told

me more. Our our campsite was atop just one of the 90 watch towers

on this thirteen-kilometer stretch of wall at Jinsanling, a section that

runs through mountain peaks for 7.5 kilometers from Gubeikou Pass

which used to be a strategic outpost between Inner Mongolia andNortheastern China. The watchtowers on this section are built at 100-

meter intervals, except where the terrain is more complicated, and

then they are placed even closer because defense so close to the

capital needed to be strong. During the Ming dynasty the Mongols had

finally been ousted, but guards watched for them from the round

watch baysunique to this section of the wall. Horribly, the warning

signal for approaching Mongols was blue smoke made by burning

wolves paws.

It was a clear, chilly night and the stars sparkled. The Jiangs

stirfried lamb, onions, and green peppers on a flat-topped grill and

offered it from white paper plates studded with dollops of plum sauce.

Rick contributed chicken wings and a canister of Pringle's chips, John

and Susan had brought barbecued ribs, Walter and Ursula grilled hot

dogs.

After dinner, I fished through my backpack for the bottle of aged

Kentucky bourbon Id wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap amongst the

camera equipment, and put my hand on a velvet bag. It was a

selection of duty-free Ghirardelli Chocolate bars from San Francisco I'd



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forgotten I'd bought, to go with the bourbon. These treasures were met

with delight by the others and we sat sipping the whisky until the full

moon burst over a far-away mountain to wash us in its cold white light

and send our thoughts centuries through to the past.

Between swigs of bourbon there were silences filled with the

awareness of a place that holds generations of souls. Soldiers and

slaves, peasants and princes. A place of nightmares and sweet dreams.

Sleep came and went. In the middle of the night I crawled out into

a moonlight so bright that the zigzag of wall took my imagination to

the Gobi Desert where it ended abruptly in the sand. But here there as

a watchtower at the apex of each hill, a square silhouette in the weak

gray light. To reach the last one I would have to walk for hours in the

night, through dark passages under each watchtower and along

crumbling stones in a still cold air as dry as ice.

My boot heels clicked against the pounded earth surface and the

sound seemed to echo all the way into the craters on the moon. I

continued walking until I could no longer see the tents and then I

noticed the perfect silence. No nightbirds. No scurrying rodents. Where

are the animals in China?

In the morning I walked the wall again to take a photo of our tents.

From my vantage point I saw the villagers approaching, bearing the

promised boiled eggs and souvenirs, and I walked back to meet them.

Adorned in "I Climbed the Great Wall" sweatshirts they gently

pressed me to buy gourds inked with romantic scenes of ancient China,

and cheap ceramic necklaces scratched with symbols of long life and

happiness. I studied the gourds for a long time, selecting them

carefully. The scenes were mythological: a long-eared pig-man dancing



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with abandon, an offering to a goddess, two women in robes, their

black hair piled meticulously into three bundles, one atop the other.

One gourd with a handle was badly etched but unique in shape. I shook

it, laughed, and returned it to the bag, much to the amusement of the

toothless old woman.

In the end I bought more than a dozen each of the necklaces and

gourds and the old toothless woman smiled and rattled the gourd Id

put back at my ear, then pushes it into my hands. Yes, I paid too much.

I returned the next spring for a journey planned from Beijing to

Burma. But in four months, I never got out of North China. The roads

were bad or non-existent, and the maps were wrong. I got tired and

lonely and came home, not to return for a decade.

What a difference a decade makes! There were roads and cars

many of them. And surprisingly, I had companions, two women on two

motorcycles just like the one I rode. We swooshed out of Beijing north

and then west, and experienced all the extremes that define China

today.

So this is the story of two journeys to China, one made alone,

without companions, and mostly lost, and another ten years later, with

companions, and mostly lost, illegal, and broke down.

Copyright Carla King 2010 All rights reserved


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China Road - Preface