If the jimjilbang provides any indication, Koreans like to sleep on very hard surfaces, and tired and relaxed as I was from an evening of bathing, soaking, scrubbing and the like, my body is just too boney to sleep very long on a marble floor (even if it’s heated). The result of this condition is that I woke up rather early the next day. Scott was still snoozing.

I decided to head out to the spa balcony and spend a few hours typing correspondance for you, dear reader.

Scott woke up after a couple posts and came out to join me. We looked out over the city and discussed our plans for the day. We had to catch a train leaving maybe 5 hours from then headed for the inland city of Daegu. We were in no huge rush, but my growing hunger encouraged us to check out of the spa and head into the city.

We stopped just a few blocks down from the hotel to grab a little late breakfast-early-lunch. This was a hot pot place, it turned out, and like many of the restaurants we’d visited thusfar in Korea, there was but one item on the menu. I like this a lot; as it simplified what can be a bewildering ordering process. It also encourages us to order somewhat splashier dishes, which AsiaWheeling’s thirfty mentality would normally turn us away from.

We were the only people in the restaurant, so most of the staff just lounged and watched us. A huge mushroom and meat soup was brought out and placed on a burner sunk into the 1 foot tall table between where Scott and I sat cross legged on the floor.

We waited semi-patiently while it came to a boil. The staff tried to chat with us in Korean, and we tried to chat back with marginal success. Finally the soup was done… what a transformation!

Stomachs plenty full for the second meal in a row, we hopped back on the cycles grinning. It had not only been one of the most delicious, but also one of the cheapest meals of our time in Korea.

At the Busan railway station, we purchased two tickets on the next slow train to Daegu and commenced the usual purchasing of snacks and wheeling of bikes through crowded halls. Even though we were seated somewhere in the middle of the train, we were able to stash our cycles behind the rearmost seats of our car.It was nice to get on the train and just sit for a bit watching the scenery go by. What a journey it had been, and in these few quite moments, I could feel the experience begin to wash over me, my mind chewing over everything in the background while farms, cities, and industry flew by outside.

I after a while, I did my best shake the feeling off, and unzipped my bag to begin writing some more correspondence for you, dear reader.

And so the train rumbled on, making its way slowly across Korea as the day wore on.

It must have been 4  pm when we arrived in Daegu.

We unloaded ourselves from the train, strapped down our baggage and about half an hour of wheeling later were checking into a sort of random love hotel. Each room in this hotel was outfitted with its own windows desktop, which we promptly unplugged to make way for our electronic devices.

We were tempted to feast on the internet, but with the sun still up the call of wheeling was too strong.

Daegu was much more a working man’s town, compared to Busan. It was cluttered and active. People were buying and selling and getting things done.

Tourism seemed a nonexistent industry here. In short, it was AsiaWheeling’s kind of city.  Daegu was to be a fascinating and refreshing exploration of the inner-workings of Korea’s less glamourous economic machinery.

We wheeled our way through crowded markets and huge abandoned lots, walled off on all sides.

The more we rode, the more we began to realize this was a pretty huge metropolitan area, with gaint ring highways, canals, bike paths, tons of high rises, big wide roads. It felt great.

We didn’t want the sun to go down.

We continued to wheel through street after street of markets, specializing in everything from plastics, to seafood, to electronics.
We spotted a particularly dramatic looking barbershop and decided to stop in for a quick trim. The haircuts included massages and medicinal vitamin drinks. I read to Scott about the science of Volcanoes from the Wikireader while they finished his treatment.

The sun was beginning to sink behind the two huge towers of a downtown cathedral and a glorious sunset was spreading across the sky when the hunger began to flair up again.

We were wheeling through downtown as the golden light began to spread over Daegu. Why did this place feel so magical? Was it the proximity card based bike sharing business that seemed to be very popular here? Probably not entirely.

The sunset just refused to quit as we rode into a giant pedestrian mall, filled with brands from all over the world.

We noticed this coffee shop, whose branding spoke to us, but was closed.

Night finally fell, and we began to head back to the neighborhood of our hotel. We rode a few blocks past it to find another Korean feasting spot. We spotted this 24 hour joint, there were positively amazing smells coming out of it, and we were plenty starving, so we headed in.

Now it’s true, dear reader, that we had been feasting pretty hard already hitherto, but this meal really put the rest of them to shame.

All we ordered was a sizzling mollusk soup and a seriously giant pile of pork spine in thick spicy mushroom sauce, but the amount of food that came out of the kitchen was huge. We got at least two gift dishes, and mountains of Banchan.

We stumbled out, bursting at the gills, and headed back to our love hotel to sleep like kings.

The next morning I awoke alone for the first time in a while. I was in an orange and brown hotel room, filled with oddly shaped mirrors, oblong modern end tables and with scruffs of shag carpet glued to the walls. The bed frame displayed the company logo “elephant” in orange tinted reflective plastic letters. Outside the lay a chilly city in somewhere in the early morning of northern China. The sun was just beginging to spill across the pavement as I pulled myself out of bed and crawled over to my computer to map out my upcoming ride to the airport, and the subsequent one down into Qingdao. Both were going to be sizable; about 40km to the Harbin airport, and another 35 down to central Qingdao. And all these kilometers would be fully loaded.

Just then a knock came on the door. It was the hotel staff bringing the usual plastic bag breakfast. This one consisted of some steamy rice drink, sealed into a felxible plastic bag which I was encouraged by the hotel employee to puncture with a straw that she handed me from a pocket in her apron. There were also a couple of manufactured sweet buns, each in its own plastic pouch, and a hardboiled egg which I set to work shelling. To be honest, none of it was very tasty, but I shoved it all down, knowing I would need the energy.

I bid my thanks and farewells to the hotel staff, strapped my things down amidst a growing crowd of cigarette-break-taking construction workers, climbed on the cycle, and began to head across Harbin towards the airport. I was in good spirits. It was looking to be a bright sunny day, I had plenty of time to make mistakes (which I undoubtedly would), and riding from Harbin into the countryside would be no doubt enjoyable. Traffic was pretty dense wheeling from the hotel across town, but there were plenty of other cyclists headed in the same direction, and the bike lanes were wide and plentiful in a way that only China really does it.

I rode for a while side by side with a fellow on a scooter, who hung close next to me as I rode. We shared a conversation with very few mutually intelligible words. He seemed pleased with the amount of items I had strapped to my body and bicycle, and I was pleased to have a reassuring smiling character next to me. When we finally parted ways, I asked him to confirm that my route to the airport was still on track. It was, he indicated, and we bid farewell in Chinese (one of the few things I could say) before I took a right and he headed off straight. From Google maps, it had seemed as though I needed to only go over one block in order to get on the main road which would connect to the airport road, so I did exactly that and took my next left.

This turned out to have been the wrong move. I grew increasingly certain of this as the road deteriorated into gravel and then into less of a road and more an area of packed dirt in a rather ghostly construction zone. Construction seemed to have long ago been forced to stop, though, for people had come in to begin to build a kind of makeshift village amidst the half built foundation of what may have once been intended to be a skyscraper . The residents seemed genuinely thrilled that I was wheeling by, though, and we exchanged plenty of waves, and shouts as I pulled an uber-Liechtenstein and headed back to the road. It was not until I was well onto pavement again that the crowd of children running alongside my bicycle petered out.

A few more streets up, I was blessed with a Romanized version of the street name I was looking for, and following it had me heading onto a giant 10 lane road. It was right. I could feel it.

I was pedaling fast and hard now, knowing it should be a straight shot from here to the airport. Soon the farthest lanes to my right began to be filled with parked cars. The fellows in these cars were all climbing out and attempting to hitch a ride. I found this behavior puzzling and slightly unsettling.

Eventually, the cars on the right reached a peak, spilling out into three of the five outbound lanes, and sides were crammed with passengers looking for rides in vans and cabs, presumably bound for the airport. My unsettled feeling began to increase markedly as I began to notice the people by the side of the road were pointing and laughing at me.

Shrugging off the criticism in true AsiaWheeling style, I pulled onto a giant newly built airport expressway. There was a giant sign advertizing that tractors, motorcycles, and rickshaws were not allowed. There was technically no picture of a bicycle there, so I decided it was worth a shot.

It was a wild road. Mostly empty, but the few cars that drove on it were flying at breakneck speed engines winingin a doppler effect as they blew by me. Occasionally, a car would even honk at me as they passed. A few even slowed down to yell things in Chinese, most of which genuinely appeared to be inspirational messages, punctuated perhaps with some bits of sarcasm.

Then I heard the sirens and I realized I was being pulled over. I stopped my bike and leaned it against the concrete barrier. One cop opened the passenger door while the other sat inside the car. He approached me with a deeply unsettling look on his face, which as he grew closer distorted into a terrifying visage which could only indicate insanity. Once he was about 6 feet from me, the snarling mask ruptured into a grinning and before I knew it the man was giggling.  I realized I was sweating through my clothes.

The cop and I spoke in bits of English, bits of Chinese, plenty of hand gesturing. So comfortable was I in the conversation, that I even tried some bits of Russian. These he received as if they were a brilliant joke, letting out a belly laugh but then looking at me inquisitively. Over the course of the conversation, much was said, but the only thing which was really communicated to me was that what I was doing was not allowed, and that he would need to escort me off  of the expressway. I asked whether there was a different road I could take to the airport. He giggled again for a while, and said yes there was and that he would lead me there.

And so it was with full police escort that I rode to the old airport road. When i got there, however, I found it to be absolutely crammed to the gills with barely moving gridlock traffic. The traffic had spilled over onto the shoulder, even, which made cycling a death defying game of weaving around exhaust belching trucks to find the next bit of pavement that might let you get again a few vehicle-lengths. I gave it a real shot, and was moving faster than the traffic to be sure, but not fast enough to reach the airport which was at least 20 km away still. To make matters worse, I realized I was slightly suffocating. So finally I turned around and headed back to the giant cluster of people looking for a way to go to the airport and joined the crowd.

The crowd was huge, disgruntled, and boisterous. To make matters worse, sightings of empty cabs were rare. I decided that trying to catch a cab heading the opposite direction (coming back from the airport), and then convincing him to turn around and head back to the airport might be better than competing with the throngs on the other side of the road. And sure enough, after my third denial, a cab that had headed off shaking his head, slowed down, and, some 20 meters in front of me, threw it into reverse, changing his mind, and pulled back.

100 Yuan, he said (about 14 bucks). That seemed like a lot to me. But he assured me that it was not, explaining in a mix of pantomime and Chinese that it included the airport fee. I want the meter, I said pointed to the device. He continued to refuse, saying that 100 was fair. He explained that he would run the meter and cancel it at the end, and I would see he was being fair. He just wanted to avoid the cab company’s cut, perhaps. Regardless, I needed to get to the airport, so I agreed.

Then we were off, flying like crazy down the expressway. I told him my story of being pulled over by the cops and he found it hilarious. The effort of communicating all this with only a handful of mispronounced Chinese words and plenty of pantomime had exhausted me, so I soon fell silent and just rode, giving the driver a chance to call all his friends and tell them the story too.

Finally, we pulled up to the airport. The meter read 76 Yuan, which plus the 20 that he’d paid for the airport toll, would have totaled 96. The four Yuan extra was just fine by me.

I gave him a 100 Yuan bill and he piled my things on the curb of the drop-off zone. There was as good a place as any,  so I folded up my bike, strapped foam over the fragile bits, took off the pedals, and stuffed it into its bag. I grabbed a luggage cart and piled all my stuff on, heading for the China Eastern Airlines check in counter.

The gentleman of course, wanted to charge some extra money for the cycle, but we were able, after much discussion, and some repeated weighing of the bike, to settle on a bargain: I would head over to pay a friend of his 20 Yuan to wrap the thing in cellophane (normally a 10 Yuan service), and he would get half of the profits. Fine by me.

Then I was off towards my gate. The Harbin airport was impressive and just packed to the gills with shops selling sausage. Sausage, it seems, is a Harbin specialty. I should have bought some, but instead I spent the last of my cash on cans of sticky sweet canned coffee from an overpriced vending machine, and headed on towards the gate.

The flight was uneventful, though the chap next to me did explain a few times that he hated flying since it kept him from smoking. I attempted to express my condolences, but they seemed of little comfort. He then spent the remainder of the flight obsessively chewing and spitting out piece after piece of Wrigley’s double-mint chewing gum, munching away while fingering individual cigarettes in his pack. It was a little jarring to be next to someone so obviously suffering. By the end, I would have been in support of him just lighting up, so good would it have felt to see the relief on his features.

I landed in Qingdao right on time, and headed over to pick up my Speed TR and backpack  from the conveyor. They were already there when I arrived, reminding me what a cracker jack job the Chinese air handlers do. Furthermore, the bike was no worse for the wear. 1 point China Eastern Airlines 0 points to Go Air.

I unfolded and re-assembled the thing outside, attracting the usual crowd of people, interested in the retail price and country of origin of the Speed TR. Most of their questions, however, I was just unable to understand, lacking Scott’s Chinese skills. In the end, I just apologized for my lack of their language, and headed off.

I headed out onto the highway, and stopped near an under construction on-ramp to ask some of the construction workers for directions into Qingdao. Just then a cab pulled up alongside me, and began asking me questions in Chinese. I had no idea what they wanted to know, and apologized, but I was able to ask how to get to Qingdao.

Armed with that knowledge, I pulled onto yet another freeway, and experienced the same honking and shouts of sarcasm laced moral support as I rode. I was feeling great. I’d made it to Qingdao and my fellow traffic seemed thrilled to have me on their road. It was a straight shot to Qingdao and all I had to do was pedal these last 30 km! …and then there were sirens behind me again. Twice in one day! And in two different cities in China, 1400km apart!? Was wheeling illegal in China all of a sudden?

The cop was explaining, as the other had earlier, that I could not ride on the freeway. However, this time there was no police escort, or helpful directions as to how to get back to civilization legally, just a stern directive to head off the road. “Where,” I asked?

The cop just pointed off to the right, into what looked like a giant industrial wasteland connected by muddy gravel roads.

Fair enough. I walked by bike off the road, and began to hoist it over rivers of muck and piles of garbage to get over to the closest road.

Then I was wheeling again, this time through some very intense industrial landscapes.

I was soon joined by an auto rickshaw. The driver seems absolutely tickled pink to see me here, and though he said nothing to me, he hung out next to me and we shared the road for a while, pulling over from time to time to let a giant cement truck or semi by.

Eventually we entered a township and he pulled ahead of me, exposing the back of his rickshaw. The back door was open, and swung back and forth as he drove, exposing an interior of bright pink and red, like a kind of twisted Barbi motif.

I headed on, stopping from time to time to ask which direction was south, fording giant puddles of sewage, and traversing a stretch of land between two power plants.

Here the earth positively boiled, as both power plants were releasing boiling water into the dirt, leaving giant steaming puddles along the roadside. As I went, I noticed that there were men fishing things out of these boiling pools, and collecting them to large brown cloth bags. What they were harvesting I may never know, but if any of you dare speculate in the comments, I would invite it.

I was part relieved and part upset when my surroundings began to become more familiar and urban. This had been a fascinating wheel thusfar.

The urban nature of the landscape grew and grew, and with it things got cleaner and cleaner. Soon, I was riding through a kind of night club district.

What a wheel it had been. I glanced down at my watch realizing Scott’s train should have gotten in. I pulled over and purchased a kind of Chinese knock-off Coca Cola-type product, and gave him a call which rang out. He called back in about a second.

We decided I should meet him at the train station, which was about 10 more kilometers away. So while Scott headed off to find a hotel, I began to process of riding, then stopping and asking in terrible unintelligible Chinese where the station was, then riding some more and asking again. I kept meeting very friendly Chinese people, who were infinitely patient and helpful with me. I would speak some 8 words of broken Chinese with them, and they would leave with warm goodbyes and compliments on my mandarin skills. Crazy.

The closer I got to the city center, the more European things began to look, with narrower streets, and more imperial architecture. The European vibe was most likely attributable to the historical German colonial interest in the city, though it had long since fizzled.

When I finally arrived at the train station, which also looked just a bit like the one in Munich, I wheeled into the central pedestrian section. I was then stopped, for the third time that day, by the police. The officer explained to me that this too was not a valid area to cycle in.

So it was on foot, walking my cycle, that I finally was reunited with Scott.

“Wu Tang reunited?” I said and stuck out my hand.

“Reunited.” He replied, taking it. We walked our bikes out of the pedestrian zone, and wheeled off into the city.

It was to be our last morning in Harbin, and it began as any morning at the Elephant Motel does, with the surly knock on the door at 7:30am sharp, advertizing the arrival of plastic bagged breakfast. This morning was no different, and offered the same lackluster plastic cup of hot soymilk and a few steamed buns. I was pleasantly surprised by the addition of a salty tea-boiled egg, but still ate little of it. Time was flying as we sopped up the last few minutes of in-room ethernet. For some reason, Harbin had chosen that day as the appropriate one to test the city’s emergency siren system, so we were serenaded by shrieking tones, emanating from key points all over the city. We began to pack our things, and take our freshly washed clothes down from our makeshift in-room clothesline. With our bags almost packed, Scott unplugged his cell phone from the wall.  We had been sharing a SIM card, due to the inflated prices in Beijing, and I offered him a shift with the card, which had been in my phone. He obliged, snapping his phone open, whipping out the battery, and clipping the SIM in.

The sirens were still raging as we made our way outside to pick up our clothes and my Dahon bag from the pleasant old woman who had agreed to repair the many rips and holes which both had acquired throughout the journey. Her work was good, though she missed quite a few of the (admittedly dozens of) holes in my Dahon bag, and the price was certainly right. We walked out of the shop 3 dollars lighter, and unfolded the cycles for the short ride into the city. The sun was shining and we had plenty of time. As we rode we discussed revisiting the California themed noodle joint that we had enjoyed the day before.

As we pulled onto the main street headed for the station, traffic was thick and fast. It was a mild downhill, so I took advantage of the potential energy, racing ahead of Scott. I flew down the street, whipping around busses and cabs which were changing lanes to pick up passengers from the steady stream emanating from the huge soviet-looking train station.  I went by the noodle place on my way downhill, but in order to get there I needed to find a way around the large metal and concrete barrier which separated the lanes of Harbin’s main street.

At the bottom of the hill, I took a right and headed for a round-about, which would allow me to get at the noodle joint. I paused there, scanning for Scott. I could not make him out anywhere in the traffic. Figuring he may have discovered a better way to get across all the traffic and over to the noodle joint, perhaps by riding subversively, I took the roundabout and headed back up to the restaurant.

I waited there for 20 minutes. With no sign of Scott, I dropped my stuff off in the restaurant, exchanging smiles and a lack of mutual intelligibility with the waitress, figuring Scott would spot it if he showed up, and headed our unencumbered. Wheeling hard up back to the last place I saw him, and retracing the route again. Still no sign of Scott.

I returned to the restaurant, and waited another 20 minutes, finally leaving once again to ride through the front of the railway station, in case Scott had headed there. He was nowhere to be found.

Our train now left in about 40 minutes, so there was still time. I put my growling stomach on hold, and began digging through my wallet. We had been using the card which came with the SIM card to jam the device which regulated the power in the room into the “on” position, allowing us to charge our devices even when not physically in the space. Luckily, I had grabbed it. On the back was Scott’s cell phone number. I first went into the noodle restaurant, hoping against the odds that Scott had arrived there in the meantime. I spoke in bits of mis-toned Chinese and pantomime to the women there. They confirmed that they had not seen him. I asked to use the phone, but upon discovery that it was a Beijing number I wanted to call, they refused.

I headed out onto the street, walking my bike, and stopping strangers asking in bits of Chinese and Russian to use their phone. The Beijing number must have been quite expensive to call, for the first three people refused. Finally, I found a chap smoking cigarettes outside of an electronics shop who took pity on me. I called Scott’s phone, but all I got was a Chinese message indicating that this phone was out of service. Shucks.

The train was now leaving in 30 minutes. I continued to leave my stuff at the restaurant and headed to the front of the train station and set up shop on a kind of pedestal in the center. I began scanning, keeping my Vietnamese motorcycle helmet on so as to be more visibly AsiaWheeling. As cops passed, I would ask them in ugly bits of Chinese if they had seen a foreigner who looked like me around. All of them said no.

A Uyghur fellow wandered up to me, no doubt attracted by my strange behavior, and complimented my mustache in English. Revealed to meet someone with whom I could fluently converse, I explained my situation, and he offered to let me make another call on his phone. I did, but still no answer. Why was the damned phone off?! The Uyghur hung around with me, playing translator with a cop who had strolled by. We were begining to attract a crowd. This was good I thought. It would make us more visable. The cop radioed Scott’s description and last known whereabouts to his team. I heard them radio back one by one. None had heard anything about my freind.

Now it was getting down to the wire. With about 15 minutes left, I returned to the California Beef Noodle King USA and grabbed all belongings, strapping them back to my bicycle in what must have been an insanely sweaty an animated manor, for the staff of the restaurant exited to watch me, which caused another crowd to just begin formation by the time I finally wheeled off.  I headed for the station, sweated and grunted my way through security, and hauled my bike up and across a bridge and down to our train’s platform. I stood there on the platform, with my cycle and helmet, hoping frantically that Scott would arrive, but still no sign of him. Now the train was leaving in 5 minutes.

I had learned during our misadventures trying to get up Haba Snow Mountain in Yunnan with Stewart Motta that a passanger on the Chinese railway could exchange their tickets one time for no charge, but only if they had not been punched. Punching happens when boarding the train, so I refrained from climbing on.

Where was Scott?!

I tried not to think about the possibilities, but could not help myself. Traffic had been dense, what if he’d gotten into an accident? Or what if his bungees had gotten snarled in his wheels again… he could have lost control…

The train was blowing it’s horn. I could hear the engines revving up a bit. The attendants were doing their final dance and climbing one by one onto the train, eyeing me with confusion… or was it pity? I looked down at my ticket. To the best of my knowledge, Scott was somewhere in this city, maybe hurt, maybe even in an ambulance or hospital bed. I couldn’t get on the train.

Ans so I let it leave.

I headed back downstairs, carrying my cycle haphazardly down the escalator, with my technology bag strapped to it. At the bottom, I was sternly reprimanded by a station officer in Chinese. I stood and stared dumbly at him for a bit and then headed back out onto the street. My head was swimming with adrenaline and a lack of blood sugar.

What to do now… well, there was going to be no way to think critically without anything in my stomach, so I headed back to the same noodle place, still hoping against hope that I might find Scott inside. No dice. I ordered the beef noodles, and slurped them down in a hurried and joyless way, staining my shirt heavily in the process. I headed from there back out on the cycle. What I needed was a SIM card. That way I could send Scott a text with my number and once his phone was back online, he would be able to contact me.

So I began to wheel in search of a China mobile shop. A couple blocks into the wheel, a man called out, zdravstvuite! I was for one reason or another positively iraationally exctatic to hear Russian. Perhaps it was a reminder of being in a foreign country where I could more smoothly operate? Regardless, I pulled over and began babbling semi-coherently in Russian with a Chinese man who explained to me he was from Sichuan Provence. He introduced himself as Chai and flashed me a huge smile full of nearly Uzbek-style gold teeth. I explained my predicament, and he assured me that he knew of a very nearby place to buy a cheap SIM card. So I followed him, walking my still fully loaded Speed TR to a set of crumbling stairs that lead down into a dark basement shop. He helped me to stow all my worldly possessions in a nearby bush, which, after fluffing the foliage fervently he, assured me was an invincible hiding place. Strugging, I rather stupidly headed down the steps into the damp and cavernous mobile shop. The owner, a rather scantily clad young woman, perhaps 15 years old, snubbed a cigarette into an overflowing Disneyland mug, and  greeted my new Sichuanese friend warmly. I wondered whether my things were being pillaged above as the two barreled right into a furious explanation of my predicament.

The girl twirled her finger around in the air in a eeny meeny miny mo type gesture and then selected one of the many phones on her desk. She popped the back off and removed the SIM card from it, then made a few notes with a large smelly permanent marker in a big book of graph paper. I put the chip in my phone and paid her 30 yuan (about 4 bucks) and headed upstairs. I gave Scott another call, and sent him a text. His phone was still inactive. Hopefully when he did activate his phone, he would get the text, and then know my number and call.

I headed back to the Train station one more time, asking the same few cops if they knew anything yet. Still no nothing. I waited for a little while longer, and then decided that the next place to go would be the Elephant Motel. So I began to wheel back. I asked one more cop had seen any signs of Scott. I have no idea if he understood me at all, but he basically told me to get out of his face.

Back at the hotel, I attempted to communicate to the women at the front desk. She seemed to understand that I was looking for Scott, but not that he was missing, which I must admit is a subtler distinction. The going was tough, but eventually I was able to get the message across. They had not seen them, but with a little cajoling, graciously allowed me to plug into an Ethernet jack in the lobby. Once online I booted up Skype. I decided to call our dear Mekong Bureau Chief, Mr. Stig Motta, and began to type in his number. Just as my finger hovered above the return key, and at precisely the moment that my brain sent the signal to push down the button and initiate the call, an incoming call popped up and the icon turned from a “call” button to an “answer” button.

“Woody! How are you!” The voice belonged to Claudia, our most valued East Asia cultural liaison, and Scott ‘s sister.

“To be honest, Claudia, I am pretty medium…” my voice trailed off as I pondered how much information it would be appropriate to disclose…

“Hello? Are you still there? What’s wrong?” She sounded worried.

I decided to just be honest, and attempted to relay the story in the least alarming way I could. I explained that I was about to call Motta, who was versed in all things travel emergency related, and that we would together figure out the wisest next steps. She offered her help in any way that she could. And I thanked her, turning back to the task at hand.

Motta answered in a couple of rings. “Wai?”

“Motta, it’s Woody. I’ve got a bit of a situation…”

And so we began to work through the logistics. “Do you think he could have gotten on the train?” Motta asked.

“It’s possible,” I replied, “but I really don’t think it’s likely. I was around the train station, attempting to make myself pretty visible, and I never saw him. Also, to be honest, I just don’t think he would have gotten on the thing. Our seats were right next to each other, so he’d have to know that I wasn’t there.”

“Ok, Man. I hear you.”

“He’s an eagle scout after all, and I feel like during that training, they instill a Marines-like never-leave-a-man-behind-type mentality.”

“Ok… well I guess the next step is to produce some images of Scott for the cops to use.”

“So we’re taking it there?” I asked.

“I think Cops are the next step. The Chinese are going to be slow, but they speak the language and they have the power. If someone is going to be calling all the hospitals, it can’t really be you or me. And it should probably be them.”

Claudia had been of the same mind, so I agreed. I put Motta on the phone with the ladies at the front desk of the Elephant Motel, and he explained the situation. I continued to communicate with them through pantomime and snippets of text produced using Google translate. After a few false moves, I was able to procure an email address belonging to one of the receptionists, and sent 2 images of Scott that I took from this website and a Google map showing his last know whereabouts along with some translated text describing the situation to a woman upstairs who proceeded to print them.

Below is a copy of the text I sent along with the images:

中文翻译：

这是我的朋友斯科特。他失踪约上午11时，2010年9月18日，当我们乘车沿着在此地图中显示的主要街道火车站。

非常感谢。

Then they called the Chinese police. As Stewart had related to me, the Chinese police have adopted a 24 hour policy with missing people, due to the large population, but it had been suggested that Scott’s foreign nationality might encourage the police to hustle a little more sooner. When the woman got off the phone, she asked me to call Stew for him to play the role of translator again. He answered right away, relaying the message back to me that they were indeed going to observe the 24 hour policy, but that since he was a foreigner, they would begin collecting information starting now (fair enough). And that at any time over the next 24 hours, I should be prepared for a call or even a visit from the cops.

Well, that was it. The beast was in motion. I next got on the phone with the US embassy in Beijing. The phone line that I called gave me two choices, all spoken by a very stern male voice not unlike that of John Wayne, the first option was “if you would like to report the death, injury, arrest, or abduction of an American citizen, please press one.” The second was “if you would like to learn more about the services offered to US citizen’s abroad press two.” I guess mine fit best with “one” and so I hit it.

A Chinese woman picked right away. She spoke passable English, but I felt I needed to repeat and rephrase my communications a little much for a US embassy. Finally, I was able to get my point across, and she told me she would connect me to the correct contact in the embassy. There was a clicking and fizzing noise that came through my skype connection, then a stern voice picked up on other end, almost yelling into the phone.

“US Marine guard! Beijing unit 3!. How can I help you!”

I stumbled over my words a bit, “Hello… marine guard unit three, I’m calling to report a missing person.”

“Sir or Madam,” the man replied, “is the person in question a US national or citizen?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Are you, the individual who is reporting the disappearance?”

“yes” (sir)

“Are you a US citizen or national?”

“”Indeed.”

“Hold on a minute.”

A new choice came on the line. “ Equipment and Supplies. This is Ervin.”

I told the story again, this time with full detail.  Ervin, explained that he would begin putting the wheels in motion. He thanked me for calling, and told me I was doing the right thing. “I’ve got just a few more questions,” Ervin continued.

Just then, one of the front desk women from the hotel came over to me. She began to indicate that the police were on the phone. I explained to Ervin that I would have to call him back. “Can I have your direct line?”

“Ehh…” he replied “no can do. Against Policy.” Just call the front desk again and ask for the marine unit 3. The operator there will connect you to me.”

“Fair enough,” I said, and I hung up.

“The Chinese police officer was female, and sounded nervous. She barely spoke English, and did not know the meaning of the English phrase “sight seeing” and had a bunch of trouble with “tourism.” So when she asked me what I was doing in China, and Harbin in particular, she became troubled. “You are not valid visa for working job in Harbin.” she explained “Is your friend valid?” I was unsure how to answer. I took a new tack, explaining that we were just traveling on folding bicycles, seeing china.

She bagan to laugh. “You are travelers!” “Are you valid travelers! Have you registered in your hotel?” I was almost sure we were and had and offered to hand her over to the women at the front desk, who paled a little when I looked at them.

She began to ask about Scott. “Is he a Chinese American? What color are his pants? How tall is he? What is his passport kernel?” The kernel was tough, but his passport number seemed eventually to have settled it. “I will call you larger than one hour.”

Right back at you, mam, I thought. Then I heard a click. There was no goodbye.

I got back on the phone with the US embassy, then the marines. Marine Guard Unit 3 sounded almost happy to hear from me again, and furthermore had determined my gender by that point. Soon I was back on the phone with Ervin. We continued to talk about the situation, and to play out possible scenarios. Ervin seemed to think that the Chinese police were probably now calling hospitals, and would call back with more info. It was likely that Scott’s status as a foreigner was accelerating the process.

“What happens now on your side, I asked”

“Well, with the 24 hour policy in effect, we’ll need to stand by until tomorrow at 11am. Then we’ll get involved. You should stay in Harbin.”

“Of course,” I replied.

I hung up with Ervin, and transferred over to my email, refreshing once again in hopes of word from Scott.

There was a new email in my inbox. I opened it.

It was from our friend Kristin in Beijing. It seems Scott had called her brother, the one and only MCK… from the train.

Here’s the message:

This is Kristin. MCK just received a call from Scott. The phone is out of credit, but here is the number he’s been using 15011343792. We will
try to add credit if we can when we return to Beijing tonight. Here is the number from which he just called. 13708969060.

He was able to get on the train to Qingdao which arrives tomorrow at 4pm. Did you make it on the train? Hope you’re ok.”

Scott had gotten on the train! How? Why? When?

I was flabbergasted and confused. First thing I did was call text Claudia, who was no doubt asleep by now it being 5am her time, letting her know that her brother was ok. Next thing I did was call Scott. It was good to hear his voice. That feeling faded as I felt frustration rise up in me “You got on the train!? Where the hell did you go!?”

Scott explained that his technology bag had fallen from the back of his Speed TR, where it had been strapped, and he had stopped to repair it. Then, I believe he waited there a bit for me to turn around and come back. When I did not, he headed to the train station, and, not seeing me there, and being unable to recall which specific Noodle spot we had eaten at before (in his defense there were quite a few California Beef Noodle King USA branches in Harbin), chose one at random, and ordered a bowl of noodles. From there he headed into the waiting hall for our train, and not seeing me there as well, climbed on board at the last minute.  As the train was leaving, he decided to stay onboard, in hopes that I might have gotten on in a different car, and still be on my way to our compartment.

“We already had reservations on the ferry to Korea,” he explained “There was no obvious right decision.”

Scott’s phone had chosen just this day to run out of credit, and since we were roaming from Beijing was refusing to even receive calls.

Fair enough, I thought. There was no use being frustrated and flabbergasted at this point.  I needed to figure out how the hell I was going to get out of Harbin, and down to Qingdao in time to meet Scott and catch our ferry to South Korea. So I went online to look at airline tickets. A direct flight from Harbin to Qingdao came up on Kayak.com, it left the next day, there were still seats, and at 150 bucks it seemed like an easy solution. Scott was still on the line, using this other passenger’s phone. I explained to him that I would be landing in Qingdao about two hours before his train arrived, and would wheel into the city to meet him and then hung up.

What a whirlwind! Just then the Chinese police called again. It was a new officer this time, slightly better English. I struggled to halt what was no doubt going to be a serious barrage of questions and I explained to him that Scott had been found. “Where is he found?” the cop asked, sounding angry.

“He’s on a train to Qingdao.”

“You said to my other officer that he was not on the train. I will have to change the report.”

I frowned and looked at my shoes, holding the hotel reception phone, and feeling like crap. “My mistake, officer. No need for further action on your part.”

But the officer did not seem to want to hang up “Why he did not call you?”

“I don’t know.” (was he rubbing it in?) “It’s been a long day, officer. I’m sorry for causing trouble.”

“Where did he park his bicycle, then?”

What was this interrogation? “His bicycle is on the train. Again, I’m sorry to have caused problems. Bye Bye.” And I hung up.

He got on the train. Wild.

“US Marine guard! Beijing! unit 3! How can I help you, Sir or Madam?”

“Hi, it’s me again.”

“Hello, Sir!” The marine sounded happy to hear my voice.

“Could you just pass on the message that my missing friend is now found?”

“Alive? Excellent news. Do you need to make a report?”

“Ah. No no. All is well.”

I purchased another night at the hotel, and headed up to my new room. When I got up there, the electronic lock on the door was broken, so I left all my stuff in a pile and trudged downstairs and got a new room and a new key, then headed back up. When I finally threw my stuff down on the bed, I was begining to feel waves of hunger and exhaustion flowing over me. I plugged my computer in and decided to take one last look at my email before heading out to find food.  I was about to head out when I noticed that Orbitz had not sent me a confirmation for tomorrow’s flight.

I went to the website, and under the “my trips” section, it showed that the trip had been canceled. I immediately booked the flight again, and got on the phone with Orbitz.

And thus began an hour and a half long dosey-doe with the Orbitz staff. There was something about the transaction that was preventing the ticket from being issued. But it was too soon to get the full report, as the system takes a few hours to churn that data out. I didn’t want to wait around for hours before I knew if I would get to Qingdao the next day or not, so I pushed for an immediate solution. Piper, the Philipino woman that was helping me, thought that it was a problem with my Mastercard. Finally we canceled my current booking and redid it over the phone with a different card. By the time I got off the phone, I was very good friends with Piper, starving, dejected, baffled, and quite a few other things.

I threw on my leather jacket, as cold Harbin night was falling outside, and headed out in search of food. It felt good to walk, and I indulged in a little of the classic Russian gulyat. I bought a cold beer from a corner shop and sipped it while I strolled, allowing the events of the day to wash over me. After about 40 minutes of strolling, I found myself outside of a chicken head stand. I watched in a kind of stupor while the man battered and freind head after young chicken head. I got paper bag full of piping hot heads (spicy style) and headed back towards the hotel, buying another beer on the way.

Back up in my room, I had just put on Tom Waits album “Alice” (it had always been a soothing force in my life) and was just about to crack into the chicken heads, and open the second beer when I thought to look at “my trips” again. No ticket had yet been issued, and the itinerary was pending cancelation. I frowned and thew the chicken head I was about to eat back into its bag. And so began another hour an a half fiasco, involving booking and canceling a number of tickets. We finally identified the problem as being a request from the airline for valid ID, to which Orbitz had replied with my credit card number. Credit cards are not valid ID in China, so the tickets would not be issued. Elementary my dear Watson. The very nice Pilipino guy who I was working with, named Amman, assured me at the end of the call that this one would go through.

At this point, the beer was warm, but still tasty, and paired well with the heads, which were cool now but hit the spot more or less. I only got through part of both of them, however, before exhaustion took hold. I was sure to set a few alarms. Tomorrow was going to be another big day.

We woke up our last morning in Novosibirsk feeling we had spent way too little time there, headed down for another huge breakfast that couldn’t be beat, feasted on the internet for a good 4 hours, and then decided to head out for a bit of wheeling.

Part way through the wheel, we decided to stop in to a little cafeteria style restaurant to get some plates of meat, salad and Grechka. Grechka is a very Russian and particularly tasty buckwheat pilaf, which you can imagine playing a role similar to rice in many meals.

We then headed to the grocery store to load up on supplies for the trans-Siberian ride over to Krasnoyarsk. The grocery store ended up being full of fantastic products, like this apple juice, or these cream filled candies.

There had been some trepidations, mostly among my half of the team, as to whether we’d be able to find somewhere on the Trans-Siberian trains to store the bikes. Now AsiaWheeling is pleased to officially report that there is plenty of room for folding bicycles and the Trans Siberian Railway.

We were also, at the advice of our Siberian Bureau, riding Platzcart, which is the lowest sleeper class on the train. AsiaWheeling is also pleased to officially report its strong support for travel in Platzcart. One is given more room for one’s luggage, placed in an environment where one is more likely to make friends, and in our opinion given more security for one’s belongings. Due to the cheaper nature of the tickets, thieves are less likely to snoop around. Also, they are forced in platzcart to do so in the open, in plain sight of all the fellow passengers who you’ve just made friends with, and who are now offering you bites of home grown tomatoes and shots of cognac.

Some of platzcart characters include:

(More Here)

So with the bikes stored, we had nothing to do but sit back and watch Siberia roll by. And my goodness was Siberia lush and green as it rolled by. We understand that we came to visit during the few months when it is not brutally cold, but ladies and gentleman, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due.

As we rode along, the train would stop from time to time in cities along the way. When it did so, many of the locals would run out to sell things to passengers on the platform. We always made sure to run out and look for interesting food and drink, or savage bargains.

That evening, we retired to the dining car where we watched soviet cinema on the monitor there, and chatted with some of our other travelers.

One of them spoke English in fact, having traveled in America as part of the work and travel program. Which we were soon to find was extremely popular among Siberian youth interested in America. And as far as we can tell, most Siberian youth are interested in America.

After chatting with him about the best things to see and do in Krasnoyarsk, we returned back to our platzcart and drifted off to sleep.

We woke up that next morning in Novosibirsk, and headed downstairs to see what the breakfast was like at the hotel Novosibirsk.

And we are pleased to announce, dear reader, that it was a breakfast buffet unprecedented since the Hotel Puri in Malacca Malaysia. There were many kinds of meat, hot and cold, eggs to order, porridge of all kinds, fruit, many selections of breads and pastry, a large station just dedicated to a kind of mashed up cottage cheese called Tvorok, a made to order Blin station, and last but not least plenty of good strong coffee.

On top of that, there was some more of that blazingly fast wifi right there in the breakfast nook, in case we wanted to download copies of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan at 500 k/s. As you can imagine, we spent quite some time lounging around computing before heading out to do a little more serious Novosibirsk wheeling. And so we ran back up to the room to grab our Dawn Patrols, checked in once with the front desk to confirm that our registration had gone through without a hitch, and to ask the best place to buy leather jackets in town before then hit the road. Our first stop was the train station. We had purchased our train tickets online (way to go PЖД!) and so we had only to head over to the local e-ticket window to pick them up .Unfortunately, the e-ticket pickup window had a most complex schedule imaginable, and we had managed to come during one of the many 45 minute long hour e-ticket window closures which are randomly dispersed throughout the day. Rather than wait around, we decided to do a little wheeling and stop back later.

So we wheeled on, away from the train station, past a “Fennimore Cooper” branded wild west themed restaurant, and on towards the main drag, known as Krasny Prospekt, or red street.

The women at the front desk at the hotel Novosibirsk had directed us to a rather giant mal. Not long after wandering into the place, we began to become pretty sure it would not be the place to buy the AsiaWeeling leather jackets. It was very posh, in a way that only stores in Russia can be. There were, of course, your international name brands here and there, but what made it so startling was that all around us there were totally unheard of and completely wild domestic Russian brands selling for truly absurd amounts of money.

Just for fun we wandered into a leather jacket shop and tried on some truly intimidating specimens, double breasted, and covered in zippers and studs. The prices were in the thousands of dollars, through, despite stange and un-known brands emblazoned all over them. Eventually, we lost interest and headed back out for some more wheeling.

From there we headed down the road further in search of a more manageable market for leather goods. The sun came out as we rode, and soon we were bathed in that most uncommon and glorious thing, I beautiful warm day in Siberia. When we rode by this amazing umbrella concept doorway, we had no choice but to stop and appreciate it for a moment.

But a moment only, for there was much more wheeling to do, and the streets of this city were too inviting and  sparsely trafficked to resist. We rode on, then, by a giant central park, where old men played chess on concrete outdoor tables, and onwards past crumbling imperial style housing blocks.

We took a right onto a forested street the skirted the back edge of the park, and followed it until it brought us to a large church. It had been quite some time since we’d seen one of these… in Lebanon, perhaps? This one was of course a little different than any Lebanese church, with huge metallic onion domes and double perpendicular bars on the crosses.

We continued to wheel on past the church and into a more industrial neighborhood. We took a right turn once again onto a muddier and more crumbling drive, which took us through a neighborhood of sagging wooden houses and untamed prairie-like yards. We stopped at a kiosk in this neighborhood to purchase some water, but finding that it was well over a dollar for a medium sized bottled, we decided to wheel on.

I apologized to the woman, saying it was a bit too expensive for us, and just as we were about to go, she asked me to stop. “What do you want to do with the water?” she asked.

“Well, drink it.” I replied. She then told me to wait a second and went into the back of her Kiosk to dip a plastic container full of water from a large vessel she had in the back.

“Here have some of this. It’s free.” We thanked her and drank deeply.

The water tasted good. We have no idea if it was tap water or not, but it certainly did not make us sick. I thought then back to the Russian cyclist, Elya, which we’d met in Cambodia. She had said the water was safe to drink all around Russia… I hadn’t believed her, but maybe she was right all along.

We then ordered a couple of cups of coffee from the lady, which where were priced at a much more reasonable 12 cents per cup, and along with the coffees came two complimentary sausage rolls. “Please take these. For your health, she said.” We tried to refuse, Arab style, for a bit and then accepted them, for they smelled amazing. They were something like a cross between a croissant and a corn dog.

We munched down on those, and I did my best to make small talk with the lady in between customers. She was a new entrepreneur here. Recently having parted ways with her husband, she had bought this kiosk and erected it here. She explained that she did not have to pay for the land, here, since it was on the roadside, but that she did need to pay quite a lot to get a certificate of health approval from the powers that be. She pointed up proudly to here certificate.

“How often do you need to get a new one?” I asked.

“Only if a cop comes by and makes trouble with you.” She said smiling and winking. Quite a place, this one.

We hopped back on the bikes then, and headed back towards the heart of the city. Notice here, how differently Beeline advertizes in Russia as compared to the Uze and the Kaz, or even Vietnam and Cambodia.

We continued wheeling, past more giant cookie cutter housing blocks, and eventually noticed we were thirsty, so we wandered into a giant grocery store, bought waters there and investigated the giant selection of frozen Russian dumplings, called Pelmini. We drank deeply and talked about how every culture seems to have its dumpling. The Turkic cultures have their Manty, the Chinese their Jaotse and their Baozi, the Russians their Pelmini, England and America, their dumplings to name a few.

We headed back out to the street, unlocked the bikes, and spent a while staring at an amazing copper colored classic soviet car before climbing back on the cycles.

From there, we wheeled on to a more central market district where we continued the search for leather jackets. The jackets still proved difficult, but we were confident we’d find the right ones eventually. We did find this fantastic mathematically based advertisement for… we’re not sure… reading in the city?

Anyone that can unpack this in the comments is more than welcome to. Here’s their website… still confusing…

We dodged in and out of malls and shops, finding some fantastic huge Russian women’s boots, but still no Jackets.

We headed from there back towards the train station, timing our wheel to shoot the window when the e-ticket kiosk would open back up. In doing so, we found ourselves on the wrong side of the station, which gave us the opportunity to take a giant overpass above the tracks of this cities huge Trans-Siberian station.

We spent quite some time lingering above the tracks, taking in the operations.

The ticket office was indeed open when we arrived, and the woman who worked there was very patient and methodical as she prepared our tickets for us, showing us exactly how the schedule would work, and underlining that all the train times would be in Moscow time, and not to let that confuse us. Fair enough ma’am.

Tickets for the trains all the way to Ulan Ude in hand, we wheeled from there to a large park, where it seemed it had become city wide cocktail hour. Cocktail is also not quite the right word… It was more like city-wide I’m-off-work-it’s-time-to-Gulyat-with-a-beer-in-hand-hour.

We passed by this very loud and interesting statue.

Your guess is as good as ours as to what components of this are intended by the artist and what are graffiti. From there we headed out of the park, past an interesting geodesic dome and a large wavelike seashell opera house.

For dinner that night, we decided to sample the fare at one of Novosibirsk’s many Traktirs.

The Traktir is a kind of Russian Institution. It’s a theme restaurant that is privately duplicated thousands of times in nearly every Russian city. The algorithm goes like this: Decorate the interior of the place with tons of wood, or fake wood if you can afford it. Make it look as much like the inside of a log cabin as you can. Then fill the walls and ceiling with as much rural schlock as they can hold up; I’m talking hoes, buckets, ropes, saddles, chains, quilts, whatever you can get your hands on. Windows should be minimized, and the staff should be hired only if very attractive, blonde, and female, and placed in a truly ridiculous costume, bright red britches will do, excessive bits of lace and shiny clasps are preferred. Then after all of that is done, you can start thinking about the food.

This is the Russian way, in restaurants at least: concept first, then everything else.

The food should be homey, though, nothing too spicy, nothing too loud. Plenty of meat, plenty of potatoes, a few soups would be good. Black bread is a must, and above all else plenty of booze, for that Russian stereotype is not so far from the truth.

We ordered Borsch and Solyanka (both came with plenty of sour cream and fresh dill), and a large plate of meats which was from the “to beer” section of the menu, which featured dishes paired with beer. We got our giant plate, which turned out to be filled with 4 kinds of meat (sausage, chicken wings, lamb Shashlik, and roast chicken skin), fresh cukes, onions and tomatoes, and plenty of deep fried potato wedges. Petty darn American if you ask me. And it came included with a couple of large glasses of Siberian Crown Lager, a sudsy local cheapo.

We woke up that next morning in our rather filthy apartment in Astana, Kazakhstan and wandered into the kitchen to begin boiling water for breakfast.

As I fiddled with the single electric hot plate style burner that had been placed on the no longer operational and rather rusty soviet stove, I found myself scratching all over my stomach and sides.

A strolled into the bathroom and picked up my shirt to see my body dotted with bites… bed bugs. Well, I guess they would come sooner or later. Tonight I would need to figure out some kind of new strategy, but for the meantime, it would serve me better to focus on making this coffee.

That I was able to do, and soon I was joined by Scott, who also seemed to be rather covered in bites. We both grumbled a bit and sat down to a crunch audibly on mouthfuls of cereal and some of that delicious 3.2% milkfat Kazakh milk.  I have the not-so-enviable habit of salting my cereal, so we had purchased as well, a large 10 cent bag of salt, which I was happily utilizing.

The entire apartment had a dank mildew smell to it, so the evening before, we had also purchased some lavender scented candles, which we figured would be helpful in mitigating the smell. They turned out to do very little, however, other than provide a bit of flickering cheer to this otherwise soulless place. What we really needed was some heavy duty Sri Lankian or South Indian incense, but we were a very long ways (north) from that part of the world.

With stomachs full of coffee and cereal, we then went at the long overdue task of washing our clothes, which were positively filthy. The Uzbek and Kazakh washing detergents are some of the best in the world, we’ve found. They have a way of getting your clothes really, deeply, unprecedentedly, clean. The reason for this, we’ve heard, is because the regulations here in the post Soviet world allow for the use of certain chemicals which in America, Europe, and even China are illegal due to their terrible impact on the environment. Whatever the reason, we found ourselves the proud recipients of a batch of really, truly, clean clothes, and this was something to be proud of.

We strung them up in a system of clotheslines that we erected in Scott’s room.

With that task done, we set to wheeling. We began by heading out to the edges of the old Soviet part of town. You see, dear reader, Astana was originally a small soviet city, mostly populated by ethnically Slavic peoples. But when the new republic of Kazakhstan was formed, the new government felt that it needed to create a new identity and a new capitol city for itself. So, fueled by millions of oil dollars, it began construction of a concept capital in Astana, flooding the city with ethnically Kazakh peoples, and building a new city center across the river form the old soviet center (which is where the train station and our apartment were).

The soviet part of town was pretty hard scrabble, with crumbling single story homes, no sidewalks, and large plots of dirt playing the role of yards.

We wheeled on through the rougher parts of the Soviet section of Astana and on towards the river. The general quality of the buildings and the expensiveness of the cars on the street increased steadily as we approached the river. We rode past a giant stadium, with these magnificent air intake valves,

and the giant housing development of “Highville Kazakhstan.”

But it was when we crossed the river on the main central bridge that we began to see some truly gigantic and startling buildings. The first of which was probably this monstrous Wayne Manner style gothic behemoth.

We rode on from there onto a street lined with ridiculous themed restaurants, all of which were separated from the highway by a row of small trees. As we looked closer, we could see that the row of small trees was also filled with the bodies of napping construction workers.

We took a right to head into the strange themed restaurant development, and wheeled it thoroughly, gawking at the startling, over-the-top presentation of Greek, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, and Traditional Russian architectural styles. About half of the restaurants were completed, and the other half were still under construction. All of those that were finished were staffed by magnificently costumed workers, who scowled at us distractingly as we rode past.

From there we headed into a giant mall, where we ate lunch. The mall was uncomfortable, eerily quite, mostly devoid of people, and full of unused shop fronts.

We ate at a shockingly branded Russian style restaurant, where we ordered a meat cutlet, a piece of chicken, some beat salad, three thick pancakes with sour cream, a pickled herring and mayonnaise salad and two manty. The food was not bad, but not amazing either, and the plates on which it was served were some of the flimsiest and most untrustworthy pieces of dinnerware ever to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting diner.

From there we rode on to the Khan Shatyr, a huge shopping center, built under a giant translucent ger-style tent structure that was carefully designed to capture the sun’s radiation to aid it in staying warm during the brutally cold Kazakh winters. The ger, as I am sure you already know, dear reader, is the preferred nomad-friendly collapsible home popular among the Kazakhs and other Central Asian nomadic cultures. It looks like this:

Which is only vaguely like the khan shatir, which looks like this.

The closer we got to the Khan Shatir, the more gigantic we realized it was. We began by circumnavigating the thing, riding our speed TRs all the way through the huge oval of parking lot that surrounds the structure. Then, though we had already been in a mall that day, we decided we needed to go in.

It was really something inside there, bathed in light, and full of white paint and potted trees.

Like the mall in which we’d eaten lunch, it was full of tons and tons of unused retail space, but unlike the mall in which we’d eaten lunch, it was also full to the brim with Kazakh families out to enjoy the afternoon.

The first thing we did inside was stop into the architecture museum, where we could pour over the plans for the new giant indoor city that the Kazakhs are planning to build.

With oil money showing no signs of stopping, the government of Kazakhstan is planning to build an entire Khan Shatir style indoor city, complete with Venice style canals and a 3/4s size golf course!

The blueprint was really impressive, and reminded me of some of the none federation spaceships in Star Trek: the Next Generation.

From there we continued on, up to the next level, from which things were no less impressive. This level too was full of unused retail space, and also a new joint venture between KFC and a local company, which they were calling “Rostik’s.”

Nice one KFC.

Soon we found ourselves in a totally overwhelming video arcade/them park section of the mall, which made me feel like I was on some kind of none too enjoyable hallucinogenic drug.

We looked up at the sky and could see the sun beaming through the strange translucent roof above us.This place was too weird for words.

We needed to get out.

And so we did, but if we were thinking that would make this strange trip end, we were most certainly wrong. We headed next across the street towards the center of the new urban development in Astana. We stopped part way there when we noticed the locals were lining up to have their pictures taken in front of this giant statue of Luke Skywalker and a naked lady.

We couldn’t resist joining in as well.

From there, we headed on, under the giant overarching office-building-gateway of a  government building and onto the main drag, the Sheik Zayed Road of Kazakhstan, if you will.

Then the buildings became truly bizarre. For one reason or another, this place put us into a strange dreamlike state, and we rode through it as through in a trance, only half believing the things that we saw.

Part way through, we realized the physical part of us was thirsty and we wandered into a completely empty grocery store, where we wandered down unreal isles filled with all thousands of bottle of the same brand of water. So we bought some with the Technicolor currency of this strange land, and headed back out.

We continued further into the madness, past giant blocky structures, and slender towers, towards the central monument, a golden orb, suspended in the points of a giant crown, which is the symbol of this bizarre city.

We continued on from there, towards the large parliamentary building at the other side of this futuristic drive.  The government building is framed on either side by two truly unsettling golden rook shaped buildings.

Barely able to believe our eyes, we wheeled on. The parliamentary building was giant, and very impressive, seeming always close by, but proving always to be larger and further away than first estimate.

As we approached the gigantic government building, our fellow pedestrians thinned out and eventually disappeared, and eventually they were replaced by a very heavily armed and dense military presence.

With all the solders eying us as we wheeled, we decided it might be prudent to make a right turn and head over to investigate a huge turquoise curled up behemoth that turned out to be an opera house.

From there, we wheeled on, past the huge blocky center for measurements and standards, and the most monstrous Chinese business hotel of the entire trip. I imagined it being like a Mecca for Chinese business hotel connoisseurs, with the finest disposable slippers, the most delicious complementary toothpaste, the fastest in-room Ethernet jack this side of Seoul, and plenty of branded towels. I am speaking, of course, about the Petro-China Hotel. A place, no doubt, built for all the PetroChina executives that came to do business in Astana and couldn’t, until the establishment of this place, find a decent Chinese business hotel.

From the Petro-China hotel, we wheeled on over a newly laid and still quite sticky tarred gravel road.

When we saw a giant white mosque, we decided to turn onto their sprawling grounds to give them a look. They were quite beautiful, mostly gardens, with manicured and sporting raised cobblestoned paths for wheelers and strollers to utilize.

It had been a wheel for the record books and we were, I must say, a little burned out from all the wild things we’d seen. Astana was proving to be like nowhere else on Earth.

And so we wheeled back, stammering to each other, and attempting to find some previously constructed schemas with which to process what we’d just experienced, back down the giant newly paved main street of Astana and eventually back through the forest carnival area that we’d explored the day before. As I mounted the bridge back across the river to the Soviet side of town, I felt a wave of relief washing over me. Finally we were going back to a hard scrabble raw place, where things made sense.

We got back to our squalid apartment, and spent a few minutes just drinking water and attempting to relax. What a wheel that had been!

That evening we wheeled around hungrily for quite some time trying to find a restaurant that was less than 20 dollars for a plate of food. We finally settled on a pizza place, which made us this kielbasa and hot dog supreme pizza, with a side of corn and tongue salad.  It was none too tasty, but got the job done.

Once we’d filled our stomachs with matter, we headed over to the Radisson hotel, where we were able to, after a little sweet talking with the ladies at the front desk, manifest for ourselves two free 24 hour passes on the lobby wifi (Great Success!).

When midnight rolled around, we hopped on the bikes to wheel back to our apartment. As we rode, I realized that for the first time on the trip, the air was cold. I could have used a sweater, or a leather jacket even. The smiles of Indonesia certainly felt very far away as I covered my body in Ultrathon brand high intensity bug repellant and climbed onto the bed bug ridden couch on which I’d be sleeping for the next couple of days.

This morning began just as the last had, with a giant and savage breakfast at the Caravan Sarai Hotel in Samarkand Uzbekistan.

Stomachs plenty full, we climbed on the Speed TRs and started wheeling past recently build, bizarrely empty office buildings and unsettling water advertisements.  We decided for this wheel to just choose a direction and keep going in it, hoping thst as it usually did, this strategy would yield some adventure and insight into the city of Samarkand.

Eventually, we found ourselves in front of yet another giant ancient Uzbek complex. This one we’d never head of, but it was giant and inviting, so we locked out bikes and headed over to investigate.

It was some 50 cents to get in, so we decided it worth a look. The interior was delightful, and completely devoid of fellow visitors.

It had a very Registan-esque flavor to it, except that his one featured a number of fruit trees and grape vines inside the courtyard, which really made for a delightful change from the blue cloudless sky and the sandy desert tones of this ancient city.

We wandered in and out of the buildings that made up the complex finding them all quite deserted, all the more interesting, and very ornate.

And then we were wheeling again. Tearing down the road, and really putting miles between us and the complex. Suddenly, it was very obviously time to eat, we realized. Luckily, there were plenty of restaurant all around us, as we rode, and we had simply to select one. The one we did choose was a fantastic, truly epic place, where we were able to eat a delightful meal of Shashlik, soup, bread, and salad for about 3 dollars each.

They served the Shashlik there with the most delightful red pepper powder, which was made all the more come hither by it’s fantastic packaging.

After we got back into town, we decided to check out the Guri Amir,  which we’d just seen the back side of the day before. It was also impressive, and we took our time riding around it, taking it in from all sides. One could see, upon circumnavigation, that the restoration was still very much underway.

When we stopped outside the place to catch our breath in the shade, we quickly struck up a conversation with some of the locals who were doing the same.

This conversation soon turned into a kind of photo shoot, in which all the visitors to the Guri Amir, were invited to pose with the strange foreigners. We must have posed with 20 or 30 people by the end of it.

One of them even went and had the photo printed for us.

When we got back to the hotel, we found ourselves in conversation with the director of a school of industry, not far outside the city of Samarkand. After a brief introductory conversation outside next to the Speed TRs, which I believe added credibility, he informed us that he had in his possession some lamb, some cold chicken and some vodka that he would be deeply offended if we did not consume with him.

And so he called out to the hotel staff to prepare a table and we sat down with him. After perhaps an hour more of eating, drinking, and chatting, he announced that he was heading off to bed. We bid him good slumbers and headed off ourselves to find internet somewhere in this town.

That was no easy task, but 5 cafes, and 4 internet clubs later, we found a place that was willing to let us plug our machines into their network. Now if only the internet had been faster that 2 or 3 kb/s once we’d done so, it would have been a true victory.

Twas the night before Uzbek when all through the stan,

not creature was wheeling, not even a man.

Claudia’d been sent back to the States in a plane,

Meanwhile gifts from Santa and Elf had just came.

We ran to the door to see what could it be,

It was our dear friend Alp with a package for me.

T’was a big cardboard box, wider and fatter,

We shook it around and heard intriguing clatter.

By Santa and Elf we mean Allan and Tan,

The Speed Matrix Depot and My Bike Shop Man.

See, our tires were worm from eons of wheelin’

And our rear ends were chapped up and down right near peelin’

So we tore in with delight in our eyes,

To find joy in our hearts at savage surprise

For what to my wondering eyes did appear?

But new handles, new saddles and tires (front and rear).

Rido seats how they twinkled, Big Apples how merry,

If the trip were an ice cream, twas surely the cherry.

Thanks Speed Matrix and My Bike Shop!

And Merry Christmas, every one!

The next morning we packed up our things and checked out of our hotel in Aleppo. We paused outside to strap our things onto our bikes, while we dodged men rolling giant truck tires and wheel barrows full of paint.

We headed right back to the drugged-bunny-themed place that we had eaten at upon first arriving in Aleppo, and ordered a similar feast of pastes and salads.

As we ate, the flatscreen television above our heads blared  the music video of “The Job by Qusai,” a fantastic look into Saudi corporate thug life.

This time, the owner of the place came to sit down with us and chat for a while about his business, the politics of the Middle East, the city of Aleppo, and, of course, AsiaWheeling. He gave us redundant cups of free thick black Middle Eastern coffee, and lined up with some of his staff to wish us off when we were finished eating.

We packed our things onto our cycles, but were compelled to wait around, chatting about marketing techniques and the origins of the drugged bunny mascot of the restaurant, so that Claudia could converse in Arabic with some passing women.

We got to the bus station just in time to catch the last three seats on the next bus leaving for the Turkish border.

The bus left about 10 minutes after we arrived.  This fine luck with buses continued to be a theme of our journey, and this was just another strike against doubters of the AsiaWheeling angel of fortune.

The bus ride, however turned out to be not quite so straightforward. First we arrived at the Turkish border, which we, as American citizens, could cross with only a visa issued upon entry. However, executing the mission turned out to be quite complex. As Scott and Claudia waited with our passports at passport control, I headed off with the bus driver and crossed into Turkey, where he led me into a large administrative building and up to a small window on the second floor.

The man behind the window and our bus driver seemed to be very good friends, and the two of them joked about Israel in Turkish, while he scrutinized my passport photocopy. Normally, he explained, we would need to have all the passports present in order to issue the visas, but for me, he said winking at our bus driver, he’d make an exception, using just my photocopy to register all three visas.

I crossed my fingers that this little bit of smoke and mirrors would not cause us problems down the road, and proceeded to pay him all our remaining Syrian Pounds and a good many USD on top of that, walking away with three Turkish visas that I could have put into any passport I liked. I returned to find the bus had already left, along with my traveling companions. The Turkish passport control officer still had our books, though, and with the snort of a racehorse, wetted and applied the visas that I handed him and stamped each book.

Then the bus driver and I were jogging together, across the no man’s land toward where the bus was idling, baggage compartment door open, while guards with dogs and machine guns shined lights into the cavity. Scott and Claudia saw us coming and gave a cheer.

All the bags had been unloaded and were being scanned one by one. I found myself quite surprised to see that the official scanning our bags was a woman, and unveiled. In fact, not just unveiled but wearing a sleeveless shirt! After traveling in the Muslim world for so long, to me that seemed downright scandalous!

I was startled at my own reaction. In most of the countries where we travel, this would have been a completely un-noteworthy piece of professional garb. Perhaps it just underlines the degree to which women’s roles in Muslim society differ from those in more secular countries.

Once through the border, we began to work our way across an aggressively irrigated landscape, driving by many farms and ponds, all of which were unnaturally fed by large above-ground systems of pipe. Then we arrived in Antakya, where we were quite surprised to find everyone getting off of the bus. So we unloaded our things and piled them in the parking lot. Scott waited with our stuff, while I ran off with Claudia to figure out where we were and what we needed to do.

We managed to find someone who spoke Arabic, but it was not easy. Everyone seemed to only speak Turkish here. Once we did find the fellow, though, hurried investigation yielded word that our tickets were actually connecting on to Adana, as we had hoped, where we were to meet Scott’s mother, Diane. We needed with all haste to go collect Scott, and get him on another bus, which was scheduled to leave in seven minutes.

So we left our bags near the counter, trusting that the ticket sellers would keep an eye on them, and hurried up the stairs to find Scott.

In the meantime, Scott had made a terrible and drastic realization: he had left is Panama hat on the bus! With seven minutes to blast-off, he began hurriedly traipsing around the lot, asking frantically to try and locate our bus. All the buses looked the same, however. And just as he was about to get in a cab that may or may not have been about to take him to a secondary lot where the bus may or may not have been, we decided that we needed to just let it go, and climb on the bus to Adana, lest we miss it and strand Diane alone in a random Turkish city.

So now, dear reader, I’d like you to take whatever you’re drinking and hold it out in front of you. Be sure to pivot your body so that you are not directly over your computer, a loved one, or your favorite bearskin rug. If you really must, stand up and run outside with your drink. Now we’d like you pour just a small splash of the drink out onto the ground in humble respect for a great hat, and for what was to be the end of this fine tradition of the AsiaWheeling Panama hat.

Okay. Let’s all regain control. Moving on.

We began to drive now, into an even greener landscape. Suddenly we were moving through forests, and the ocean spread out to our left.  We rode by fascinating industrial sites and rich farming operations, as the sun sank low and eventually set into the Mediterranean.

We woke up the next morning and checked out of the Hotel Ziad Al Khabir in Damascus. We had developed quite a warm relationship with the place, its staff, and its grungy Sudanese vibe. We were none too excited to leave, but we had a whole bunch of Lebanon to visit. We would get a chance to see more Syria on our way back through, heading toward Turkey, but that doesn’t mean that our departure was not without some pulling on the heartstrings.

The owners let us leave our things at the hotel while we went out in search of breakfast. We ended up finding one of the best restaurants of our time in the Middle East. Furthermore, it was right across the street from our hotel, startlingly affordable, and downright luxurious.

The name of the place was the Al Negma, and it comes most highly recommended to any AsiaWheeling readers who find their way into Damascus. We sat down in the Al Negma and ordered a splendid feast of salads, pastes, roast chicken, and pilaf.

We ate and read about the history of Damascus on the wikireader, savoring our last meal in this fine town.

After paying the bill, we chatted with the owner for a while, and he directed us as to how to properly make our way to the bus station. We thanked him and headed back up to the Ziad Al Khabir to get our bags.

In the lobby, as we were saying goodbye to the staff, a particularly talkative old man appeared, and though he spoke no English, vehemently and perhaps drunkenly joined in the conversation. As he spoke, he would emphasize his phrases by reaching out and touching Claudia’s arm or thigh. She would brush his hand away, gently scolding him when he did this, but the behavior continued. The entire experience was becoming decidedly uncomfortable and inappropriate by the time we were happily surprised by the old man’s sudden departure down the stairs toward the street.

Glad to be free of him, we loaded up all our stuff and filed one by one down the few flights of crumbling stairs and hallways that lead from the Ziad Al Khabir out to the street. I was taking the lead and already beginning to sweat, lugging all my things down the ancient and slanting spiral staircase. As I focused on making my way down, I barely noticed the same old man returning up the stairs, passing me on my way down.

Once I got outside, I began to unfold my bike, looking up from my work to see Scott and Claudia appearing as well. Claudia looked upset. It turned out that the same old man had gone at her once again, this time in the stairwell, as she was passing. Hands full of all her stuff, and teetering on the stairs, she could do little to stop him from grabbing at her body. She yelled at him and eventually he stopped.

As she told the story, once again Scott and I found ourselves in a situation in which we were unsure what to do. Should we go track down this old man and give him a talking to in English, Chinese or Russian? The police would certainly be no help. The owners of the hotel also seemed happy to stand by and let this kind of thing happen as well. We also needed to get to the bus station. But the question still stood, at least, as to how we could prevent things like this from happening in the future. Perhaps we just needed to stay more vigilant, stick closer together when we felt things were unsafe. Whether there was a better response or not, we decided to focus on being supportive to Claudia , who while upset, seemed to be shrugging off the entire experience quite valiantly.

And so it was that in a mood somewhere in between anger, befuddlement, and pity, we climbed on the cycles and began to make our way toward the bus station.

We headed back out of town on the same streets that had brought us into the city, pedaling hard through now familiar territory. We were forced to stop, however, when a large red Land Rover pulled over in front of us, and four men in matching white polo shirts climbed out.

They ended up being a group of travelers from Bahrain who were doing their own adventure, Bahrain to England, in this shiny, decal emblazoned, Land Rover, and blogging their adventures on their website www.friendshiparabia.com.

We shared a little of our own tale with them, and had just enough time to pose for a group portrait (scroll to the bottom), before we apologized and explained that we needed to get to the bus station in time to catch a bus that wouldn’t get us into Beirut in the middle of the night.

So off we went, through a large roundabout, which seemed to be centered around a giant, ornate, stained-glass, upside-down cross. Claudia pulled over to ask a taxi driver with some obvious engine problems about how to get to the bus station. He was more than happy to point us in the right direction.

And so we began a long, but gentle incline that took us many kilometers up and out of the city, eventually piping us onto a highway that climbed, long and slow, up to the bus station. We knew we were getting near to the place when street began to be lined on either side with — of all things not stereotypically Middle Eastern — liquor shops.

Now, dear reader, booze is not hard to buy in Syria. It is easier and cheaper, in fact, than in Jordan, and about a thousand times easier and cheaper than in the Gulf. But this retail concentration was unprecedented. The street was just jam packed with booze sellers. It’s true, some of the booze they were selling was from Lebanon, but most of it was local… I just couldn’t fathom why such a strip might be conjured up here, in the middle of the desert outside Damascus. I continued to be startled, as we rode for about a kilometer of just roadside liquor shops. It was nuts.

At the bus station, there was plenty of conflicting signage, and a number of lying cab drivers who were attempting to convince us that the only way to get to Lebanon was by cab. All the red herring information had us riding around in circles for a bit before we finally made our way into the passenger terminal. Inside we were quite quickly approached by a one legged man, who hobbled toward us on a makeshift crutch.

“How the hell are you doing?” he said in what sounded startlingly like a Kansas accent. “Where’re y’all from?”

I’ll have to refrain from the transcription going forward, for his level of obscenity reached such heights that were I to publish it here, AsiaWheel.com might be banned in Singapore. But, to give you the gist, he explained that he was an old Syrian navy man, who had worked closely with the U.S. He learned to speak English and to swear like a sailor from the real thing. He now lived here in Damascus making his money helping English speaking tourists to haggle for bus rates.

He was just enough of an endearing character that we decided to give him some business. He showed us to a bus and haggled dramatically with the guy for a bit. Then Claudia and I loaded the stuff into the car while Scott took everyone’s passports and followed our galumphing one legged guide into the crumbling ticket shop to get the tickets validated.

We were, of course sopping with sweat from the wheel, and before climbing on the bus, we emptied our pockets of all our hot, sweat-coated, Syrian coinage, dumping them into his hands. He made no complaints as to the sweaty nature of the money, and tried only once to convince us that it was not a big enough tip, to which Scott replied, “It’s plenty big.” To which he replied, “You’re right; it’s plenty big.”

And then we were off. The air conditioning system of the bus began to ramp up, and the sweat began to dry off, leaving a salty crust all over our skin. It had been a hell of a wheel getting up here, but now we had nothing to do but watch the Syrian desert go by as we climbed over the Ante-Lebanese mountains toward Beirut.

I awoke from a nap to discover that we were at the Lebanese border. Everyone was climbing off the bus, and in the same way that we had observed in Jordan, rushing frantically to get through customs. Everywhere we looked, there was the Lebanese crest of the cedar tree and heavily armed military. Despite that, the vibe was not too threatening, and people bustled around like crazy, pushing each other in line and waving handfuls of currency around. We were once again some of the last to get through, having to first find an ATM, since the Lebanese border folks did not accept Syrian pounds.

It was my turn to Warbucks, and I stood before the giant red, cedar tree emblazoned ATM, guarded on both sides by men with machine guns, and wondered how much I should get out. We had neglected to consult any sources as to the proper exchange rate, and our questioning of the armed guards around us resulted only in gruff and inconclusive responses. Finally I just chose a number that I knew was significantly larger than the cost to buy visas for all of us. We’d heard Lebanon was expensive, and with Scott having lost his ATM card somewhere in Jordon, we would almost certainly go through all the money and more during our time here.

With newly printed Lebanese visas, entry stamps, and a nice wad of Lebanese Pounds, we climbed back onto the bus and headed into the country. Instantly, things became greener and more American. Signs began to show more English, and the numbers changed back to our familiar Arabic numerals. The sun was just setting as we drove into the outskirts of Beirut, but our way was well lit by long forgotten emblems, like signs for McDonalds and Pizza Hut. Also, the cars around us instantly became much more expensive, and the speed of traffic rose.

The sun had completely set by the time the bus dropped us off in front of a closed flower shop, somewhere in the hilly outskirts of Beirut. We looked around us, at the shining beacons of fast food restaurants and the xenon headlights of BMWs whipping past.

This was certainly a new country. We wheeled a couple blocks downhill to a gas station where we consulted the staff as to how to get to the city center. There were not many cheap hotels in Beirut, according to our research, but we had heard that searching in a neighborhood called Gemmayzeh might yield options, and there was at least one youth hostel there, which we believed to still be in operation.

The workers at the gas station were all dressed like frat brothers, in bright polo shirts, and Abercrombie shorts. They giggled at us when we explained that we were going to ride to Gemmayzeh saying that it was over seven kilometers away. Considering we’d ridden at least 20, uphill, to get to the Damascus bus station, we assured them it would be no big deal. We gave them all a chance to take the Speed TRs for a spin around the gas station before bidding them adieu.

So off we went, climbing uphill toward a large intersection, and following the gas station fellow’s directions, we took a left onto what was probably the most dangerous ride of the entire trip.

We pulled onto a giant unlit highway, and quickly realized that the drivers in Lebanon are unprecedented in their insanity. They soared by us, literally burning rubber, blinding us with ridiculous after-market super bright headlights, and blasting vanity horns that sounded more like police sirens than normal car horns.

As we rolled down this unlit highway, we struggled just to stay on our bikes as giant trucks whipped by us at over 100 kilometers per hour, pushing giant walls of wind, and honking deafeningly. To make matters worse, the advertisements along the roadside contained strobe lights that flashed at you as you rode by, perhaps to produce a paparazzi-like experience, but really just blinding and disorienting the poor wheeler.

Eventually I called a waypoint on what a generous person might have called the shoulder of the highway, and I turned back to the team.

“We need to get off this highway, before we die.” And I meant it with all my heart.

So we backtracked, heading up against the murderous traffic for 200 meters, perhaps, until we saw a spot where we could hoist our bikes over a barrier and into an active construction site. The entire construction site was flooded by some recent water leak, and so there was a kind or bright gray muck everywhere. As we began to climb back onto the Dahons, we were caught in the light of a giant steam shovel that began barreling down on us. Following the headlight beams of the steam shovel, we sloshed our way through the gray muck and made our way back down into the streets.

We pulled over at another a gas station, where the man behind the front desk spoke perfect, American accented English. He was more than happy to draw us a little map to Gemmayzeh, and assured us that we were not far off. He was also more than happy to expound on his views on American-Lebanese policy. He liked America, had even traveled there, but he was no fan of our presence in Lebanon.

“Lebanon is a government-less place,” he explained. “We are a weak country. We are a poor country. We have no oil. America gives us all this money to spy on our own people, but they won’t give our military weapons to defend our land.” It was interesting to hear his views. I don’t consider myself well enough versed in American and Lebanese policy or history to really comment here, but I invite more knowledgeable readers to chime in. I can say, however, that as we pulled back out onto the street, doing our best to dodge BMWs and not be blinded by strobe-covered Prada ads. It certainly did not feel like a poor place.

Indications of poverty continued not to present themselves as we worked our way into Gemmayzeh, which turned out to be a rather swanky, young night club district. After traveling for so long in strictly Muslim places, where most of the women were encouraged to dress quite modestly, it was downright startling to see the Lebanese all dolled up for a night out.

Lebanese women are naturally quite beautiful, but what really sets them apart from women elsewhere in the world is the presentation. They are unafraid to cake on the make-up or to squeeze themselves into startlingly skimpy clothes. The popular style of clothes in that part of town, at least, was pretty uniform, and very much in line with the types of things sold in American malls, at least when I was last at one: tight tee-shirts with names or slogans of businesses that don’t actually exist; tight shorts with brand names on the rear; designer jeans with bits of sequins and glitter; lacy camisoles; clothes that had been industrially distressed to provide a “on their last legs” look to them.

Frankly, the place felt like a strange manifestation of the dreams of American clothing manufacturers. People all dolled up, popping in and out of chain restaurants and swanky night clubs, fancy cars whipping around, lots of strobe lights disorienting people, and not a bicycle in sight.

Well, while this street was interesting, we were exhausted, and we needed to find a place to rest. We poked our heads into one hotel, which, while it looked like a totally shabby flophouse, attempted to charge us a startling amount. We wheeled on, looking for what had been, according to our research, the only cheap hotel in Beirut.

But try as we might, we just couldn’t find it. We finally stopped a couple of night-club goers, sporting quaffed hair, tight jeans, and glittering Dolce and Gabbana tee-shirts. They seemed to know where the place was, and led us down a dark alley and into an unlit building.

Scott ran in to check it out, and sure enough it was the place. Furthermore, by some strange stroke of luck, they had a room for us. The magnitude of our luck became all the more apparent as we made our way upstairs. This hotel had plenty of guests; most of whom, at appeared, did not have rooms.

People were sleeping on couches, on pads on the floor, on balconies and on the roof. Right outside our own window, we found a nest of Scandinavian backpacker women, snoozing on cots. As we threw down our bags in our own very strangely laid out room, we began to realize Lebanon was going to be a very unique chapter.

As I drifted off to sleep that night, I found head filled with many more questions than answers.  Hopefully the next day’s wheel would help to settle some of these.