A Change of Plan
河北省
May 3: Heibi Province Mountains
I'm alone in the mountains again, passing peasants hauling sticks in handcarts, forcing the big sidecar motorcycle around hairpin turns on a narrow road teetering along a rocky cliff. So when I come around a corner and have to break behind a long line of cars, I'm surprised. Until now I've only seen a handful of private cars, only government sedans, taxis, and trucks. These are small cars in candy colors.
On a two-wheeled motorcycle I could squeeze past traffic, but the sidecar is about as wide as the cars. On a two-wheeled motorcycle you can fly, shifting your hips and the weight on the footpegs to glide gracefully around curves, but this thing requires upper body strength. My biceps have already popped egg-shaped muscles.
We're all headed to the top of the mountain, and by the time I get there my left leg aches from shifting between first and second gear and my left hand is cramping from squeezing the clutch. It's relief to get off the bike and walk around. I pull over at the side of the road where cars are parked randomly, straight in and parallel, some blocking others, and join the crowd waiting out the traffic jam. Strolling to the edge of the dirt lot I am eye-level with an ocean of mountain peaks. They are green and lush. The weak spring sunshine barely warms the chill in the air. I'm still cold, despite the fleece and the snap-in lining under my heavy black leather motorcycle jacket, so I stomp around and shake my hands, cracking my bones and loosening the muscles in my wrists and forearms.
When people catch my eye I greet them, but only get blank stares in return. Back at the bike a small crowd of people stand a few feet to one side, and a young woman sits primly on the seat, with her beau leaning on the fender. I'd been wrong to assume that having a Chinese motorcycle would help me fit in. Most people ride small bikes - 125 and 250cc "ag" bikes popular with farmers. Bikes like mine are rare. The black license plate is unusual as well.
I wouldn't have minded the girl sitting on the bike, but her spike heels are jammed into the rubber air hose. She just stares at me when I motion politely to get off. I try again, with more dramatic hand gestures, but she just shifts in the seat and jabs her heels deeper into the rubber. Finally, I lose my temper and shout at her, with little effect. It's possible that she has no idea the bike is mine.
The girl finally slithers off and disappears in the crowd, but now others come by, attracted by the action, and guilelessly take their turns working the clutch and brake. One woman even lifts up the sidecar cover to take a peek inside.
All attempts at conversation are received with blank stares and it's pissing me off. After I've slapped a woman's hand away from the brake lever I notice that a man who has squatted down to look at the engine is playing with the idle screw. After I swat his hand I realize that's I'd just better get out of there. Getting pissed off is never a good thing to do in a foreign environment.
Traffic is still stopped going down the hill, so it's silly to keep riding. But across the street a row of shops and a restaurant are tucked into the cliff. I spot an empty parking spot and putt through the two lanes of cars that are still inching along the road, insisting on crossing despite their best intentions to close the space between bumpers. I pull in and a man sweeping the steps smiles and extends his hand. He helps me tuck my things in the sidecar and holds my elbow as we step up the rough wooden staircase into the restaurant, which is quiet and cool, and so dark it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust.
There are three large round tables in the center of the wooden floor are crowded with customers twirling the rotating trays in the center, picking from dishes with their chopsticks. High-backed wooden booths hug the front wall by the windows, each of them roomy enough for eight people.
All the tables are full except a booth occupied by two very good looking, young, and neatly dressed men wearing flashy watches and sunglasses. They would not have seemed out of place at a restaurant in San Francisco. The men, who had probably watched the scene with the girl and her spike heels across the street, wave me over.
I'm not hungry, but order noodle soup and a beer. The men, who are facing each other across the table, next to the window continue their conversation. Bored, I take my journal out and start writing at which point they abandon all pretense of being immune to the rare appearance of a foreigner, and take possession of my phrasebook, journal, and dictionary. With the help of these tools they tell me there was a spring festival earlier in the day, and they don't expect that the backlog of traffic will clear up for another hour or two.
The men are so clean and so well dressed that I suddenly feel self-conscious in my dust-covered jeans, boots, and leather jacket. My hair is probably matted from the helmet. I haven't looked in the mirror but I'm sure I could use a comb and some lipstick, at the very least.
These men are clearly educated, interesting people, with manners, too. A welcome change, in my current bad mood, from the blank-faced spitting, blowing, farting, staring peasants I have already become as scornful of as Chinese city dwellers.
The men had already ordered and their food arrives. They hand me a pair of chopsticks, insisting that I join them. I try to decline but it's impossible, and I'm glad, because it is delicious. There is a shining pile of thinly sliced meat marinated in soy and garlic cooked with a bitter, dark green herb, perhaps a kind of basil. The mound of stir-fried vegetables is crisp and fresh. A plateful of deep-fried leaves, still attached to the branches, mystifies me. Following their lead, I take a branch and stuff it into my mouth. The batter is as delicate as Japanese tempura, and the leaves are slightly minty. It's a spring specialty of this area, they tell me. The final dish is a shining heap of glazed pork. My noodles arrive, but I can't possibly eat them. We all look out the window, hoping that traffic is moving, but it remains at a standstill. We order another beer and fight over the phrasebook.
The peasants are stupid animals, one of the men tells me. He wipes his mouth with a white paper napkin and jabs his chin in disdain toward the crowd out the window. I will have to watch my things, he says. Not because they will be stolen, but because they will be damaged. But there are bad men in China. Outlaws. Bang bang.
Really? Bang bang? Their faces are serious. Bang bang again. They're so cute when they do that. I ask again, really? Bang bang? I try not to laugh. It is possible to reach Datong before nightfall, they say.
Datong? I reply. It didn't look that close on the map.
Yes, go there. I should not turn west to ride in the mountains. Very bad. Very slow. Take the Yellow River road instead. Very fast. Follow to Ganzu Province. Road very good. Many trucks.
I look at my map. They look at my map. They shake their head. No no. It's not right. I had suspected the same. Town names, distances... some of the towns had been on the roads, but others, not, and not in the distances stated.
Finally traffic starts to move so they wish me well and say goodbye, shaking hands formally. I watch them outside. They don their designer sunglasses and unlock the door of the silver luxury car, disappearing behind tinted windows. The car silently glides away.
I sit alone and reconsider my plan. Yes, I am tired of the mountains, the narrow roads, the curves, and being lost. The big sidecar motorcycle is heavy and awkward on the curves, it drives more like a lopsided sports car than a motorcycle. Still, I'm glad to have it, I'd have dumped a two-wheeler several times by now, skidding to stop for the asphalt that ends without warning and those unexpected potholes. I don't like falling, and I like access to places that can only be reached over rough terrain, so the bike is perfect.
Still, I need a break. I look for guidance in my Lonely Planet. It was written before free travel was permitted in China, and had been fairly useless so far, covering only areas that can be accessed by bus or train. These mountains I'm riding through are completely undocumented, but there is some information on the Yellow River region. The Yellow River is China's second most important river and it flows through Inner Mongolia. It seems that lots of actual Mongolians live along it, as well as Muslim Hui people and the Dongxiang minority, further up where it bends from south to west.
I am attracted by the idea of minority cultures as the Han habit of blank staring is getting on my nerves. I also imagine that now, in springtime, there will be well-irrigated farmlands by the river, guaranteeing fresh food and happy peasants. I hadn't considered it before because it had looked so far out of my way on the map. But if the road was as straight as it looked to be, it would definitely be an improvement over all this twisting and turning.
Okay then, enough with the mountains. I'd follow the Yellow River and maybe even ride into Inner Mongolia, though I'm more attracted to mountains than windswept grassy plains.
I pack up my guidebook, dictionary, and journal and ask for the bill, but it seems that my companions have already taken care of it. It's a sweet surprise, and it solidifies my plan to follow their advice.
The mountains end abruptly and the road stretches through a yellow desert fringed by low sandstone cliffs where I'm surprised to see brightly colored wooden doors and windows where people have carved out caves to live in. I pass by the colorful edifice of a temple that looks to be glued onto a flat cliff-face hundreds of feet above. It is the entrance to a vast Buddhist cave, maybe a series of caves, but it is too late in the day to explore, so I stop the bike to admire it from below.
Groping for the ignition key, I discover that it simply isn't there. My heart skips a few beats. I don't have a duplicate. The bike is still running, and I get off and look around on the ground, which is silly, because it probably wiggled out on the road somewhere miles back.
I think hard. If I stall out, I might be able to push start it again — with some help because there aren't any hills in sight — but then the battery would eventually die. I simply have to find a locksmith. How do you say "locksmith" in Mandarin? The word "lock" or "key" isn't on my list of mechanical words Jim wrote in my notebook before I left. I look through my phrasebook and find the words.
Lock. Key. Ignition.
I head up the road, hoping. There's nothing else to do but to keep going and hope. I glance down at the ignition. With the key, I've also lost the little rave toy fob that Michael gave me before I left, a silly little spaceship keychain, bright orange and green, with a fringy tassel that was already getting grimy. It was horrible, but it made me think of home, and what I'd be doing about now. It would be early Sunday morning. Michael and I might be just getting home from a party, or walking through the Mission to find an early morning breakfast spot, amusing the Mexican Catholics on their way to mass with our dance-weary faces and colorful clothes. We'd joked that the party had been our church. They always started with a meditation and sometimes yoga. There were altars with candles and incense, crystals and statues, Tarot cards, Rune stones, and Joss sticks. It seemed spiritual. With LSD or MDMA, even more so.
I was torn between a cosmopolitan life of the bleeding edge of art and urban culture with Michael, and my more natural state as a writer and adventure traveler. I had often chosen very social men, feeling they filled a gap in my solitary life. But I was getting tired. I loved the parties, but I'd rather have slept to spend the morning hiking Mount Tam or riding my motorcycle to the coast.
So many choices.
Despite my worry about the key, I do notice that the scenery here is beautiful in a windswept way, with cave villages dug into the low yellow cliffs and the mountains beyond. I'd filled the tank shortly before so with plenty of gas I concentrate on the landscape. Things turn ugly when the cave villages give way to a mining operation where men drag chunks of coal from holes dug into the sides of the cliffs. Here and there a man pokes out of his hole to deposit another chunk of coal outside. Another man pulls a wheelbarrow from hole to hole. He bends, picks them up, and moves on to the next, his hat sheltering him from the sun rising higher in the sky.
As I ponder the quality of life and the differing opportunities designated at birth I come upon a small market, a jumble of food and plastic goods and mechanical services set up on flattened cardboard boxes and folding card tables. I cruise slowly along, dazzled, not yet willing to believe my extreme good luck. I spy a tire-repair vendor manned by a teenager. He wears greasy blue pants, two sizes too big for him and cinched around the waist with a rope. He jumps up excitedly when he sees that I'm pulling up, and when I point to my missing ignition key, he says, "No problem!" or something like that, and waves me on down the line, shouting to a woman selling pot stickers who, in turn, shouts at someone else further down and so on until I reach an elderly, Mao-blue clad locksmith sitting on a stool next to a wobbly aluminum card table surrounded with boxes and boxes of keys.
I click the bike into neutral and leave it running. He hobbles over and, already forgetting the words for lock or key, I dumbly point at my ignition. He studies it a moment and hobbles back to his table and thoughtfully selects three small boxes from the hundred or more boxes set on and around the table. The boxes are all small, about six by eight inches on average, made of heavy cardboard in white, gray, and brown, streaked and dusty with frayed corners. As he picks through their contents I think, this is just stupid. How is he going to match the key without having one to compare it with? I set the foot brake and walk over to his table.
There are twenty to a hundred keys in each of the boxes, sorted by size but many different kinds of metal and shaped much differently, too. Some of them are rusty or corroded and there's a significant amount of dirt, metal filings, and even some nuts and bolts lying around among them. A metallic scent rises as he scatters the keys with his leather-thick fingers stained gray and blue with metal shavings. The metallic scent mixes with the dust of the road, calc, coal, soy sauce, grease, onions, and something pungent, like ginger and red peppers. Barely a minute ticks by when hobbles over to my bike with four or five keys in his hand. He tries one. Then another. The third one fits.
My level of astonishment is so great that I can barely respond other than holding out a handful of small bills. He picks out the correct amount — much too little, in my opinion. Fifty cents worth, perhaps. I hand him a few more bills, about two dollars worth, saying thank you thank you, but he just smiles a toothless smile and waggles his head. I can't possibly leave without thanking him more, he can't realize how important that is to me. Finally I remember my stash of little souvenirs to give away, tiny flashlights and keychains with scenes of San Francisco. Perfect! I rummage through the gray duffel in the sidecar and find the bag of trinkets, choosing a keychain with a scene of the Golden Gate Bridge, brilliant and sparkling in plexiglass. He turns it around and around in his leathery hands, the smooth shiny object looking as foreign as a spaceship, the spaceship fob from Michael I just lost. It wasn't really a going away gift, he didn't give me one, but something that somebody at a rave gave him. The locksmith inspects the keychain throughly and I realize that he's probably never seen the Golden Gate Bridge, even in pictures, and doesn't know where it is. It's pleasing, though, and he nods and smiles. I feel better to have given him something, and maybe someone who knows about it will tell him what it is. I ride off in a daze, still unwilling to believe my good luck, and it's not until miles later I realize that I should have asked him for a spare.
The tree-lined road leads straight to Datong where chimney stacks spew coal smoke forming a polluted dome that shines spectacularly red and yellow in the setting sun.
The Yungang Caves, my destination, is an hour north but the Lonely Planet guide says there is only one very expensive hotel on the site. Therefore, I will be forced to stay in this disgusting pit of a city. The guidebook mentions the pollution in passing, opting to focus on its beautiful ancient city gates, a drum tower and a marketplace. Any thought of taking a quick sightseeing cruise around town are overridden by the grit of coal dust on my cheeks. My nostrils are already clogged with it, and my lungs protest. It hardly seems possible, but it seems even more polluted than Beijing, which kills even the slightest urge to stay outside to enjoy any of the city's apparent charms.
The hotel is set off from the road by a huge unused parking lot enclosed by a chain link fence. Pulling up to the front, two uniformed men run out waving and shouting for me to move. I ignore them, and when they see I am a foreigner they smile and help me with my bags.
The lobby is huge with high ceilings and chandeliers, its floor covered with a thin red carpet. A dozen little shops line the second floor. The registration form, thankfully, is in both English and Chinese. Seizing the opportunity, I ask for another copy. The young woman shakes her head emphatically no. Her manager shakes his head emphatically no. I grab the form from his hand and try to put it in my bag. The woman grabs it back. I insist, smiling and shaking heads and pointing at the paper and my dictionary without any understanding. The bellmen join in. They all say no. I catch the woman off-guard and grab it back, shoving it in my bag before she can take it again. We argue and I remain good-natured but don't give it back. After a while the manager, worn out, pulls another one of of a drawer. Less "the customer is always right" than "possession is 9/10ths of the law," I figure, and he cannot possibly have a foreigner in the hotel without an accompanying form.
The bellman wears a bright red and gold uniform and accompanies me up the elevator which opens on the fourth floor where a scowling old woman behind a large desk guards a rack of keys. She is probably scowling because she is expecting, correctly, that I will require higher maintenance than the typical Chinese guest, perhaps more towels or extra toilet paper. Chinese hotels eek out toilet paper like it's made of money.
Though it doesn't match the opulence of the lobby, the room is surprisingly nice. It has new and slightly padded red carpet, a closet, armoire, desk, padded chair and a double bed with a padded coverlet. It doesn't yet reek of cigarette smoke. It's expensive at about thirty dollars a night, but I count it as my birthday treat. The bathroom even has clean modern faucets and a bathtub, with 24-hour hot water, or so they claim, and a tiny bit more than the usual amount of toilet paper.
When the bellman leaves I peek under the sink at where the pipes comes in, and smile when my theory is confirmed. The tile had been bashed in to let in the plumbing.
The shower is hot, and it takes a very long time to wash the black soot from my face. The steam makes me hack, snort, and blow coal dust like a local. More than anything else on this trip I worry about getting bronchitis. I have a stomach of iron, but delicate lungs. I hadn't imagined that the air pollution situation would really be this bad outside of Beijing. I'd been disgusted with all the seemingly-habitual hacking and spitting I'd seen in China. But now, I almost sympathize.
Sleep comes quickly, but at 6:42 am the hammering starts. I turn over and put the pillow over my head. I must be dreaming.
Again the hammering.
Maybe they're just fixing something, I think. Maybe they'll stop.
7:12 a.m. It hasn't stopped. I phone the front desk. The clerk speaks English. He says he will make it stop.
7:30 and it hasn't stopped. I turn on the light. On the phone, the desk clerk says they have turned off the electricity for construction. The floors above are being remodeled.
Directly above?
Yes ma'am.
Will they be doing this tomorrow, too?
Oh yes. Every day this month.
I shower in the dark, gather my things, and then suddenly remember that it is my fortieth birthday.
I run to the business office to check my email. I'd sent everyone a note the night before to let them know where I'd be today, even providing the hotel phone and fax number. I receive happy birthday emails from my sister, brothers, my parents, and many friends and fans of my writing, but there is nothing from Michael. He must have faxed me. Phoned? The front desk says no.
I pack my things to go find another hotel before visiting the caves. Maybe he got the dates mixed up, the time difference is confusing, he couldn't be so cruel as to purposely ignore me. Still, I can't help but be profoundly disappointed.
Datong doesn't look so bad in the morning. It's a bit hazy, and a flock of little red motorcycle taxis buzz everywhere. Realizing that I'll never find another hotel on my own, I hire one of them to lead me around town. But both hotels charge almost $200 night, no bargaining. At the second hotel the clerk sends me to a place I can afford, a Chinese hotel behind a row of retail shops. The parking lot is studded with rebar sticking straight up about a foot high at regular intervals. At the edge of the lot a man with a hammer and chisel patiently makes rubble of a statue set in concrete. I ask myself to let go of the idea that I should ever have a quiet moment in China and pay the taxi driver.
The lobby is modest and low-ceilinged with a linoleum floor, furnished with fifties-style Naugahyde couches, imitation wood coffee tables, and a fish aquarium bubbling with algae that gives the room a slightly moist but not unpleasant rotting scent. A very pretty young woman in a ruffly, low-cut white blouse flirts with two young men in worn polyester suits.
When she sees me she jumps a delighted little jump, along with a clap and a giggle. I am her first foreigner. Foreigners have been allowed starting this year, she tells me in broken English. But none had come yet. Why am I not in a tourist hotel? No money? A tourist with no money? Impossible! Really? The men, who don't speak English, melt away while we fill out the hotel forms. I fill out the information I can on the form I'd nagged the manager into giving me from the previous hotel, and then give it to her for reference. She thinks that's brilliant.
The room is threadbare but functional with hot water promised for two hours each morning and evening. For less than ten dollars a night I'm glad to have it. It's not a quiet place, there don't seem to be any quiet places, especially in a busy city with drivers who use horns instead of turn signals, and the rebar and statuary demolition. But I am assured that there will be no construction work inside the hotel itself. Renegotiating the rebar in the parking lot, I head out for Yungang, feeling very special on my fortieth birthday to be in China, visiting a spiritual site, something that I will always remember.