The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

Just as suddenly as it came upon us, the winter appears to have been left behind. The reasons for this are quite simple: we have left the mountains for much lower ground, and have taken a sharp change of direction. Our route now follows a course almost directly southwards, meaning that we are within ten degrees of latitude of the tropics. Hubei province, which we have just left, experiences temperatures of around 45º in the summer; this luckily means that November, much less warm than this, is quite a pleasant month for cycling.

In contrast to recent times, nothing very strange has befallen us during the last week. It could be said that extremes, of one sort or another, have given way to a comfortable if unremarkable neutrality. The weather is but one example, with the dramatic landscapes of the proceeding months having also been replaced by scenery which is not so very different to the earliest weeks in Germany or Poland. Even Jingzhou, the city where we have just spent a few days resting, is notable only by its being in most respects identical to every other large town we have passed through recently.

It is also hard to stay excited about China, having already spent two and a half months in the country – although there are constant surprises, there is so much which remains the same.

That said, it’s not entirely true that things are no different here to the rest of China. We are travelling through an enormous country, as big as most of Europe combined, and naturally there are subtle changes to be observed along the way. The food available has undergone a series of variations, with more emphasis on spices here, as well as a lot more deep-fried food. I have to say that I’m more of a fan of the things on offer earlier, in Shaanxi province, although I remain in general very enthusiastic about Chinese food. Soon, of course, we will enter the heartland of Cantonese cuisine, the type of Chinese cooking most familiar in the West. We shall see if it can still throw a few surprises.

And I’m afraid to say that yes, the stories are true – they do eat dogs here. I saw them being weighed and sold in tiny cages last week, next to the chickens and ducks. And I was horrified to see one yesterday, skinned and hung up by its jaws in the street. Since I do not eat meat of any kind, I suppose this should not be any more upsetting than the regular graphic scenes of carnage to be witnessed at open-air butchers all over China, but to Western eyes such a thing remains quite shocking. The Chinese must find us all terribly soft.

But aside from this horror, the people we have met along the road have been universally friendly and engaging. The Chinese really seem to have a lust for life, and are able to stay cheerful under the most difficult circumstances. Life here is for most people one of meagre subsistence and hard, manual work. They are also quite absurdly stoical – sometimes to a degree which defies reason. In particular, they seem to prefer shivering in their jackets while eating to closing the door (or sometimes doing without a door altogether), and in contrast to Central Asia, do not see the need to use donkeys for pulling wooden carts. Instead, they prefer to pull them themselves. All this with a smile on their faces.

They are also very eager to please, and, famously, have an aversion to saying “no” in response to a request. This has lead to some quite absurd situations.

One incident serves as an example of this. We had arrived one evening in a small town named Xixia, and had quickly found a cheap hotel (we needed a break from camping). We asked if we could park our bikes in the lobby, for safety, a question which the poor girl working at reception had a hard time answering. Instead of refusing directly, she assured us that they would be quite safe outside, since there was a security guard present at all times. We were prepared to accept this, but locked the bikes all the same to a lamppost.

I was thus most puzzled and annoyed to be woken up in the middle of the night by the same receptionist, who had come to tell us that our bikes should now be moved into the lobby after all, “for safety”. I guess they thought that this would please us, and were probably quite surprised by my irritation at being dragged out of my deep, deep sleep. It’s a classic cultural misunderstanding.

This same hotel did have one much more pleasant surprise in store for us. When we enquired as to why there was no shower in our bathroom, we were told that this was because we could use the bathhouse downstairs for free. This turned out to be a Chinese variation on the sort of sauna we visited in Almaty – complete with steam room, huge hot steaming pool to ease oneself into (great for the muscles after a day’s cycling), and massage. If only every hotel we visited had this, I would happily accept being woken up at any hour of the night.

There are almost three weeks of cycling still ahead of us, and then the about same again having a little holiday in Hong Kong, but all the same our thoughts have inevitably began to turn towards life after this trip. All too soon we will be emerging, shivering, onto the tarmac outside Schiphol and cycling the last few kilometres home.

I am understandably suffering from mixed emotions about this. Although I am looking forward to the certainties of normal life, in familiar surroundings, without the constant language barrier, and most of all with time for things other than cycling, I am afraid that the novelty of homecoming will quickly wear off.

There are various irritations of the road which I will be glad to be rid of, but I am quite sure that the countless everyday irritations in Amsterdam, which I have forgotten about during all these months away, will be equally irksome. Things always look rosier from the perspective of distance and time; already the months in Kazakhstan seem like a golden and almost mystical period, although there were plenty of worldly troubles there. I expect that China will be the same.

I have found myself adapted to life on the road more completely than I could ever have expected. The physical burden of early starts, laborious and repetitive chores, and of course cycling all day almost every day, has been easier than I had imagined. The wearisomeness of constantly having to find things over and over again each time we arrive in a new place, the difficulty in communicating, and the shortcomings of countries much less developed than our own, all these things are bearable. Difficulties which would earlier have been overwhelming become just another inconvenience to be dealt with. But none of this is any indication that life will be easy back home. It’s another life, totally removed from the time before it, and one which will drift into memory when it is gone. I hope that there is something from it that I can take home.

The encroaching winter about which I last wrote has caught up with us. We have just departed from Xi’an, having spent three days comfortably ensconced in about the nicest youth hostel imaginable. And I must say that we had earned it.

Two days before reaching the city, the neighbouring province of Shanxi experienced the largest snowfalls in recorded history overnight, with this province, Shaanxi (note the subtle spelling difference) being not far behind. As might be expected, this has caused us more than a few problems.

That same morning, having camped the night before quite high up in the hills, we awoke to find our tent surprisingly warm. The reason for this quickly became apparent – a thick layer of ice had formed on the outside of the tent, acting as a layer of insulation. This was of no consequence in itself, except that the same thing had occurred to our bikes. So much snow had fallen overnight, and subsequently frozen, that the gears, chains, and brakes were completely stuck fast. This was a new and most vexing problem, for which there were no ready solutions. After an hour of hacking away with a tent peg at the ice, we could at least move, albeit with only one gear working on each bike, and one set of brakes. We gingerly set off up the remaining few hundred metres to the top of the mountain.

There had been no grit or salt spread on the road, and the large volume of heavy goods vehicles had thus reduced it to a river of brown slush and crushed ice. The second of these was particularly dangerous because it looked just like lumps of snow, until the front wheel hit it and suddenly skidded to one side or the other. This was quite difficult and probably quite irresponsible to ride on, and in any case the bikes both began to freeze up once again every time we stopped for even a few minutes. I must admit that we were totally unprepared for such a situation, since even the cold period at the very beginning of the trip was nothing compared to this. The seasons have truly come full circle, and a bit further.

An hour or so later, at a restaurant next to a petrol station, we were able to get some boiling water to pour over the frozen mechanisms. Unfortunately, the effect of this proved to be quite temporary, since everything would simply freeze up again once again shortly afterwards. It was just about possible to continue moving, but the pace was very slow. We decided to cut the day short, and check into the first hotel that we came across.

A shower (the first in a week), a warm bed, and and early night worked wonders for us, and a night indoors did the bicycles no end of good too. The next day remained cold, although not as much as the day before, and we were finally able to make it to Xi’an. We discovered that numerous guests at the hostel where we were staying had been stuck in the city for several days; the airport had been closed due to the bad weather, leaving tens of thousands of travellers stranded. It certainly made me quite pleased with our progress.

This cold snap was very sudden its arrival. Just a few days before, we had been comfortably sitting in the sun drinking tea in the afternoon, oblivious of what was to come. But now, with this ordeal behind us, we are prepared for more of the same, and worse.

In the first few days after leaving Lanzhou, we had actually experienced much warmer temperatures than before our arrival there. Despite this, I bought some thick long underwear from a market in a village on the way. This makes me feel like quite and old man, but does the job nicely.

In addition to this, I bought a huge green coat of the sort frequently worn here by motorcyclists. It is extremely heavy, and feels as if your are wearing a warm woolen blanket. It will be great for our arrival back in Holland in the middle of winter, and hopefully I will be the only person in Amsterdam to own one. I later bought a hat with ear-flaps to complete the outfit, making me look like an authentic communist soldier.

I am pleased to say that I managed to haggle a bit with both purchases – contrary to my expectations, it has proven to be possible to converse in Chinese at a basic level. The numbers are in any case quite straightforward, and hand signals can be used when verbal communication fails. The only problem is that when you get a few words right, they immediately start talking very fast as if you understand everything. This naturally leaves me open-mouthed and staring in embarrassed ignorance.

What I particularly like about my new coat is that, in contrast to all the high-tech composite-fibre silicon-coated stuff we have with us, it is completely low-tech – it’s just a whole lot of cotton. In this respect it’s a typically Chinese solution, one of many such ingenious pieces of technology I have seen recently. Another example is the solar-powered water cooker (see photo), which consists of something shaped similarly to a satellite dish but coated in tiny mirrors, with an arm and metal hoop to hold a big aluminium kettle. The idea is of course to focus the rays of the sun onto one spot, and so get boiling water for free. In one village we passed through, it seemed as though everyone had one. And for keeping the tea warm without the need for fuel or electricity nearby, there is a small stove consisting of an outer jacket of O-shaped ceramic bricks, into the middle of which is dropped a stack of red-hot cylindrical bricks which have been heated elsewhere. Whatever needs to be kept warm is simply laid on top, and stays hot for hours and hours.

The landscape during these days was quite stunning, as the road wound first up steep hillsides, before diving back down through steep-sided canyons and over high viaducts. We were luckily able to find our way onto the new motorway which ran parallel to the old road – in fact it was so new that is was not even open. We were the only traffic besides construction vehicles on this wide, flat road, which was a very refreshing change from the constant blaring of horns and potholes that we otherwise have to deal with.

Another advantage of travelling along this new motorway is that an impressive series of tunnels have been blasted through the mountains on the route, cutting out a lot of climbing. Along with the rest of the road, these are more or less complete but not entirely so, which left me a bit apprehensive about suddenly coming across a wall of rock as we dodged our way in the darkness past loose concrete tiles and teams of workers installing lighting. But in all cases, sometimes after up to half an hour underground, we emerged safely once again into the grey light of the Chinese autumn. It felt a bit like cheating to have dodged so many high peaks in this way, but we have certainly earned it after all the hills we have climbed on this trip. We love tunnels!

Our luck with this new road finally ran out after about five days, when we found ourselves on a bridge high above a river valley, with a section as long as a football pitch missing from the middle. The resulting confusion as we attempted to find another route caused us to become quite lost and cycle for serval hours up a hillside in the wrong direction. This was our second major wrong turning since Lanzhou, and the source of much frustration. We are on quite a tight schedule in order to reach Hong Kong before our visa runs out, and we cannot afford the time for such mishaps.

But unfortunately there would be one more such occurrence before we arrived in Xi’an, leaving us and our bikes caked in mud and stuck on some unpaved road somewhere in the suburbs of the city. But since then, so far, so good.

As we arrived at the Xiang Zi Men youth hostel in Xi’an, I was suddenly surprised by the presence of Humphrey, the English cyclist whom we had met in Kashgar. I had the suspicion that we may run into one another once again on the road, although I had expected it to perhaps have happened earlier. It was certainly good to catch up and swap a few travel stories. He’s also heading for Hong Kong, so there’s a good chance we will meet for third time, if we all make it there.

Xi’an is the biggest city we have passed on the journey so far. It is also the most westernised of any we have encountered in China, possessing more familiar brands than ever before, as well as a surprising number of English speakers. It feels more and more as if we are slowly creeping back towards the known world.

But of course, there remain many, many new and strange things to be seen. What I find the most endlessly fascinating about China is the constant surprises available to eat – there are so many delicious things that I have seen once, and then never again. Often it can be something quite simple – the other day, I ate a small circle of dough with fried egg on it, filled with spicy sauce and some salad. Delicious. Even simpler, today I bought a block of tofu from a stall next to the road, which had simply been sliced halfway through in order to create small blocks which could be torn loose with chopsticks, with a little chili sauce on top. Very quick to serve, and very welcome on a cold afternoon in the mountains.

The day before we left Xi’an, I took a bus to see the other great Chinese marvel besides the Great Wall – the Army of Terracotta warriors. Naturally the whole experience is greatly prejudiced by the its fame as the “eighth wonder of the world”, and the subsequent high expectations threaten to lead only to disappointment, but I must admit that it is quite stunning – especially the view when entering the largest hall, and being confronted by the vast army of silent fighters, thousands strong. No two are alike, and it is hard not to be impressed by the megalomaniacal scale of the enterprise. I think that it is fair to say that only in China could such a thing have been done. Once again, I feel very far away from home, and once again, I find it hard to believe that I got here by bicycle. It makes the world seem not so very large at all.

A month and a half after crossing the border, we have now reached Lanzhou, approximately the midpoint of our journey across China, or Zhōngguó, the “Middle Kingdom”, as the Chinese call their country. If you have reached the middle of the middle, then you really must have arrived somewhere.

The descent from the mountains into the city was suitably dramatic, as the road suddenly curved around a corner to reveal the city in all its high-rise glory, sprawling out into the distance on the far bank of the Yellow River. The sight of this mighty waterway, cradle of Chinese civilisation, is in itself significant. It is our first connection with the faraway sea, to which it eventually flows, and which will also form the end of our journey. But that is still some distance away.

Things have improved a lot since my last post. We have had no more trouble from the police, aside from an incident which I shall shortly explain, and it does feel as though we have found our feet a bit more in China. It would seem that the secret of avoiding great frustration in this country, as in any other strange and foreign environment, is to adapt to the norms and realities of the place, instead of trying to defeat or avoid them. People will stare unashamedly at us from the side of the road and through the windows of buses, but all I can do is smile back, wave and try not to let it bother me too much. And while such things as bread, beer, and coffee are available here, it seems better to avoid them since they taste so terrible. By eating and drinking what the Chinese do, you are much more assured of something good.

Our first stop after Turpan was the city of Hami, the last major town in Xinjiang. The journey there was quite a dry, dusty and monotonous one, interrupted only by our meeting a group of three English cyclists, also heading east. Two of them were being sponsored by Nokia and various solar energy companies to cycle round the entire world, in less time than it will take us to get across just Europe and Asia. We camped together for one night, before they headed off at the crack of dawn with the aim of cycling 150km the next day. I did feel quite a bit deflated in the presence of such sportiness, although on balance I still prefer our more relaxed tempo.

The day we reached Hami, we came upon quite an upsetting discovery. We were cycling along the motorway through a very empty piece of territory, when we saw what looked like a man lying next to the entrance of one of the many small tunnels which run under the road. We had seen numerous construction workers bedding down for the night under blankets next to the road, and so it seemed like this was just another one of them. But something seemed not quite right, and so we decided to investigate in case he was ill and needed help.

It did not need much close inspection to see that we could offer him no more help, at least not in this world. Indeed it was quite obvious that his body had been lying there for some time, perhaps because the position he was in meant that drivers of cars and trucks would probably not be able to see. Either that or no-one cared.

I was less shocked and horrified than I might have imagined, but all the same, the sight of what was left of his face is one which will stay with me for a long time to come.

Clearly it was necessary that he be dealt with in some respectful way and not left to continue rotting in the sun for months on end, but ensuring that this was done was not so straightforward. We cycled back along the road a few kilometres to the nearest motorway toll, and tried to explain the situation as best we could. Eventually, a small cheery fat girl came bouncing towards us and asked us in English what was going on. “There is a dead man over there”, I explained. Her reply was quite perplexing – “only one?” (is that not enough?) – and in any case no-one appeared very shocked by the situation.

We were kept waiting for some time for the police to arrive, of course not our first dealings with them in China but in this case voluntary. Thankfully the motorway toll canteen had some food for us, although I ate more out of hunger than appetite, as can be expected. Eventually we were allowed to go, and on our way passed by the man once again, this time surrounded by a group of perhaps eight or nine policemen, who appeared quite indecisive about what they should be doing. We waved, they waved back, and we left the gruesome scene behind us.

The physical reality of what we had seen was not much more shocking than seeing a dead dog or cat on the road (and the smell was about the same), but I did later feel quite down about the whole event. It was just so sad – this poor man had died in the gutter, literally, hunched into the foetal position, just as he entered this life. Didn’t he have family or anyone else who had missed him? How long would he have remained there if we hadn’t seen him? How many others had seen his body and passed it by as not their problem?

Later that evening, I am a bit ashamed to say, we sat in KFC in Hami eating fries and ice-cream for a badly-needed injection of the Western lifestyle. I kept seeing Colonel Sanders’ stupid little face everywhere, and thinking, why is his face on plastic cups from New York to Beijing and everywhere in between, while the man we saw today gets his eaten off by flies in the roadside? What did he do to deserve such a pitiful end?

But such questions serve no purpose. Life is not fair, and we will all die sooner or later, one way or the other. But before then, let’s enjoy things as they are. That is what I keep telling myself.

And the journey onward towards our next stop, the city of Jiayuguan, put me in better spirits. A few days after Hami, we were finally clear of Xinjiang province, and were moving down the long Hexi corridor towards Lanzhou. Firstly, however, we stopped for a few days in Jiayuguan, where it was possible to check e-mails and catch up on the news for the first time since Osh. It turned out that nothing much had changed in the outside world, and that all was relatively okay at home, aside from my grandmother having suffered a heart attack. This was quite upsetting news, although I was relieved to hear that she is recovering.

One more strange incident on the way. We had stopped for something to eat in a grimy little village called Xingxingxia, and were quite puzzled by the thick, heavy fabric curtains which were hanging in front of the restaurant where we sat. As soon as we were in the door, one of the women working there rushed to close the door and the curtain behind us, and insisted that we stay inside. She made a wide gesture with both arms and imitated the sound of an explosion by way of explanation, which made me think that she was perhaps expecting thunder. This was quite confusing, as the weather showed no signs of turning stormy.

A short time later, an answer to this puzzle arrived in the form of an enormous explosion which shook the whole building and threw up a huge cloud of dust outside. It turned out that there were workers close by busy dynamiting away bits of the mountains to make way for a new road. Clearly the residents of Xingxingxia were simply expected to deal with the resulting disruption as best they could. The general attitude to health and safety here is a bit different from home, to say the least, and in fact in sometimes appears that people almost wilfully go out of their way to do things in the most dangerous way possible. Truck operators in particular seem to take it as a matter of pride to overload their vehicles to the point that they are constantly in danger of overturning and crushing whoever is unfortunate enough to be close by, which will hopefully not be us.

In Jiayuguan, we took the time to be tourists for once. As well as visiting the city’s fort, symbolic western endpoint of the old Chinese empire, we of course paid a visit to the most important tourist site of all in China – the Great Wall. Except, of course, that it is not quite as might be expected. Contrary to the expectations I had of a magnificent turreted, castellated structure snaking over the hills all the way to Beijing, it is in most places quite dilapidated and was in any case never constructed as much more than a muddy embankment for most of its length. The section here was in fact completely reconstructed in the 1980’s, displaying the same heavy-handed approach to conservation that we had earlier seen at the Kizil Thousand Buddha Caves (front concreted over and doors installed). But it certainly looks like the real deal, which is the intention I suppose.

After Jiayuguan, there followed a relatively uneventful week as we passed through yet more tedious dusty terrain on the road to Lanzhou. It was during this time, and particularly the more mountainous sections, that we began to experience freezing temperatures for the first time since March. I had been quite worried about this happening, given that all our visa delays meant that we had arrived in China more than a month later than planned. The coming weeks will be quite hard, I am afraid, although there is some hope: shortly we will begin heading more south than east, as well as downwards as we reach the vast, low coastal plane which comprises the eastern third of China. In this way, we should have reached the warmest part of the country before the harsh winter sets in. But this is all just theory right now.

China is cheap. All the hotels we have stayed in up to this point have cost us around €10-€15 a night, which is a nice surprise after paying 3-4 times this earlier. In Hami, we paid even less for a room without a window (it was already dark outside…). We realised that we could afford to spend a few nights in the most expensive hotel in Lanzhou for less than the dirtiest and cheapest of hotels in Amsterdam, a chance which will not be available soon. We thus decided to splash out (€50 a night!) for some luxury in the Lanzhou Legend Hotel, certainly the poshest I have ever stayed in. We even ordered room service, which is of course a sure sign that you are rich and have made it. Just like the fake wall, it’s nice to pretend. There is a huge widescreen telly, complete with BBC News, an even bigger bed, a fantastic view over the city, and about the best breakfast yet. They clean the room twice a day, and the restaurant serves pizza at any hour of the day or night. And even the chambermaids speak English.

Tonight it’s back in the sleeping bags, waking up shivering to find that all our water is frozen and that the tent is covered with ice. Soon, though, we will be toasting our arrival in the sunshine of Hong Kong, if all goes well. It seems so close, but it’s a while away yet.