Our second attempt at moving toward Haba was much more successful than the first. We woke up late and spent the day lounging around Kunming and working on logistics for our upcoming adventures in the Persian Gulf. Confirmation had just arrived that none other than the fabled and illustrious Mr. Jackson Fu was to be joining us. Along with Scott’s sister, Claudia, this was going to give us a powerful economy of scale, and introduce for the first time in AsiaWheeling’s history, a quartet of wheelers, all on Dahon Collapsible Speed Series cycles. The anticipation was dizzying.

Meanwhile nighttime grew ever nearer, and we collected our things and headed downstairs to find a cab. The driver used an alternate route this time, which circumvented much of the massive construction that had delayed us the evening before. In fact we arrived at the station in time to purchase a few waxed cardboard cups of road-side Chinese food and the materials to manufacture a round of (lukewarm) brass monkeys.

We made our way through the station and onto the train with little difficulty. The forked tongued ticket seller from the night before was nowhere to be found, perhaps better for all involved. AsiaWheeling is not a vengeful organization, after all. On board the train, our good spirits were only slightly dampened by the atypically mediocre quality of the Chinese street food. We talked through the logistics of how to get to Haba and back in time for us to catch a train to Shenzhen. You see, dear reader, we were leaving Kunming bound for Shenzhen in order to receive a tour of the very factory in which our Dahon Speed TRs were made. So attached have we become to the Speed TR, that such a pilgrimage had become an essential part of AsiaWheeling. This meant we needed to be back in Kunming by the following Monday in order to buy a ticket for Tuesday’s train. It was Thursday night. So, we thought aloud as we munched on over-salted bits of pork, clots of old rice, and tough bits of tofu. If we could get to the Haba base camp that next evening, we would be sitting pretty. This would even get us back to Kunming in enough time to spend one last night on Stew’s porch listening to trivia. All we needed to do was get to Haba’s base camp the next day. And with the train getting us into Lijiang at 7:00 am, such a task seemed perhaps not too difficult…

After a rotten night of sleep, punctuated by intermittent screaming from some child in the next compartment, the AsiaWheeling mountaineering team peeled itself from somewhat sweaty sheets and walked out the door into the misty morning and cool mountain air of Lijiang. The train was, of course, perfectly on time. Scott and I had last visited Lijiang as part of the pilot study, but the city now seemed almost unrecognizable. For instance, the entire train line that serves the city had been built in the two years since we had last been there.

Stewart quickly chose a van and haggled a price for the three of us that was less than the price that the one other person on the van was paying for just himself.

Our fellow passenger was a rich city slicker from Shanghai; the driver dropped him off at a very swanky hotel. From there, the van took us slightly down the road to a turnoff onto a somewhat crowded side-road filled with small restaurants and random shops.

On this street, we were able to find a fellow making knife-cut noodles, by slicing thin strips from a massive chunk of dough. This, it seemed, would be the perfect breakfast spot.

We sat down and ate heartily of the noodles, envisioning the upcoming day’s hike up to the base camp and all the calories that would require.

With hunger out of the way, we headed in search of rations to use over the next two days. While Stew remembered there being a large dried fruit and nut seller somewhere on this street, we ended up wandering the region for some time, finding only random tourist shops and restaurants.

In the end we purchased a few packets of Nescafe and a couple of extra giant purple Nalgene-esque bottles for Scott and me to carry water in.

We headed out into the city, walking more briskly now with the knowledge that each moment that we spent here in Lijiang searching for supplies pushed back our arrival at the base camp by that same amount. We made our way across a few busy roads and into a new section of town that proved to be slightly more helpful. Scott and I purchased long underwear at a local clothing shop, while Motta headed out to the market in search of snacks. Dried fruit, despite many inquiries, continued to elude us, but we were able to buy some cucumbers, a large sack of nuts, and a good number of bready and eggy baked goods, which promised, if not to be tasty, at least to pack plenty of calories for the upcoming uphill battle.

We thought even more highly of these stores when we added six Snickers bars, four more bags of nuts, and a package of crunchy freeze-dried durian bits to our supplies. Now we were cooking with Crisco. Scott picked up a pair of gloves as we were leaving the market, crossing off the last thing on our list. The gloves were not thick, but they were off-white, and made of cotton, perhaps meant to be extra layers or work gloves.

So it was, with these supplies crammed into our packs and hiking poles in hand, that we headed off toward the base camp of Haba Snow Mountain (哈巴雪山) as the locals call it. The first step, of course, would be to get ourselves to the city of Haba, where we would meet our guide. This city was at the end of a long winding road that ran through the Tiger Leaping Gorge. Normally anyone who does not live in the gorge is forced to pay a hefty fee upon entrance, but we had heard that since the road was currently under construction, the fee had been temporarily waived. Good for us.

What was not so good for us was the fact that when we arrived at the bus depot, we found that the entire bus route, which included Haba City, had been closed due to the construction. We were told, in fact, that the road itself was closed, and that there was no legal way to get to Haba. Feeling somewhat dejected, we sat down to contemplate our next actions. Haba, which had seemed so close, was now vanishing into the mists of what might have been. With the time constraint of the upcoming tour of Dahon’s facility in Shenzhen, we could not spare any more days to figure a work-around.

Just then, as if sensing our predicament, Stewart’s phone rang with a call from our guide. This was a guide that Stewart had worked with in the past with Where There be Dragons, and he thus came to AsiaWheeling with the highest and most ringing recommendation. He had also been calling us from time to time during our rather circuitous approach to Haba, to make sure that all was going well and that we had no further delays. Scott and I paced around the yawning and gleaming new expanse of the Lijiang Train Station, while Stew explained our situation to the guide. Stew came back over to us a few minutes later with a stern look. “Okay, guys. I think we have a plan.”

Our guide said that the road was technically closed, but he thought that between him and his friends he could get us through. All we needed to do was to take the next bus to a town called Qiaotou (桥头). This was the end of the line before the aforementioned winding road that entered the gorge. We managed to get the last three seats on the next bus (which was leaving some five minutes from then), and climbed on. It felt great. Despite all that had already occurred to keep us away from Haba, we were finally on our way. The feeling of elation, however, was short-lived, for soon we pulled up to a gigantic line of cars that were decidedly motionless, evidenced by the fact that almost all of them had deactivated their engines for some time.

We waited in the bus for a while, and as the frustrations of waiting grew more and more insistent, we ventured out on foot to explore the full extent of what we were facing.

We were on a beautiful mountain road that wove its way along the edge of a large valley, which would at one point or another connect to the beginning of Tiger Leaping Gorge.

As far as we could see, there were motionless cars lining the road and eventually disappearing into the mists ahead. We paced around outside the bus, and looked at our watches.

We could still get up to the base camp… but as time moved on, we would be faced with a greater and greater proportion of the journey being a night hike.

Finally, we decided to eat a little at a roadside café, not because we were particularly hungry, but because we were bored and frustrated. The café was positively packed with people, this likely being its best day of business since its inception. As we ate some delightfully oily and salty fried eggs and spicy broccoli, we chatted with the stranded travelers around us. During the meal, we discovered the cause of the great traffic snarl: there had been a reasonably bad accident ahead of us. The fellows we chatted with had already been waiting around for some time, and ate with the slow deliberation of those sure of no imminent departure.

With the reality of our stalled condition staring us in the face, we decided to climb back onto the bus and grab our belongings. Despite the skepticism of our fellow passengers, we headed out, in hopes of hiking along the road past the accident and to the other side, where we might catch a cab to Qiaotou. We hiked on for a few kilometers past car after bus after giant dump truck. All the drivers had turned off their engines, and many had gotten out to erect makeshift card tables and had even been playing long enough to begin to collect little piles of cigarette butts around them.

As we hiked past, we got many looks of both skepticism and solidarity from our fellow stalled travelers. After quite a few more turns, we finally came to the accident. From what we could see, it was indeed serious.

It had likely been a collision between an automobile and a motorcycle. The motorcyclist had been killed and his or her body lay in the street, covered with a bloodied white cloth. A rooster had been brought to the scene and tied to a rock securing it near the body. The rooster’s presence was presumably for some superstitious or spiritual reason.

The bird stood frozen near the body, standing on one foot and staring, moving only enough to indicate to us that it was alive. A crowd had formed on our side of the police tape, jostling each other to get a view of the carnage, while a large group of cops sauntered around the scene holding back traffic and waiting for some unknown event or person to arrive.

We tried a few times to circumnavigate the accident, trying first one route through the surrounding countryside, then another. Finally, we succeeded by scrambling up a steep grassy hill and cutting through what looked like a small fruit orchard. From atop the hill, we could see the accident in all its gory reality.

What was it about our mission to Haba that had caused the ether to manifest so many obstacles and danger in our path? A more superstitious person might begin to think that we were for some reason not meant to climb this mountain…

On the other side of the accident, we kept walking, stopping from time to time to ask gentlemen in cars if they would be willing to drive us to the city of Qiaotou. None of them were willing to bite, and after a while it began to rain. We sought shelter from the rain near a line of fruit sellers who made a point of hassling us. The rains came and went, and we paced around haggling with people about rides to Qiaotou, and finding no one who was willing to transport us for anything less than a downright predatory rate.

We therefore idled and paced, so long in fact, that the traffic began moving once again. Then, low and behold, our same bus came around the corner, and we flagged it down and climbed on. Our fellow passengers seemed happy to see us again, as was the driver. Comfortably back in our seats, we waited out the remaining half hour of driving and climbed off in Qiaotou.

The accident had cost us a fair bit of precious time. Now the sun was hanging startlingly low in the sky. As soon as we got off the bus in Qiaotou, we were met by our guide’s men, who we waiting with a small van. We climbed in and began the drive into the gorge.

I could see why the road was closed. It was not fit even for a modestly sized bus to travel. It was also actively under construction.

We drove along through a fog of rock dust, through large crowds of Chinese men and women hacking away at building a new road. From time to time, we had to stop and wait for a bulldozer or steam shovel to move out of the way for us to pass.

Finally, we came to a clearing where there was a cluster of people who were decidedly not construction workers. In fact they appeared to be tourists interested in heading farther into the gorge, but they were stopped by a large obstacle.

What was the obstacle, you ask? Well, it was something like a level from a 1980s computer game, except that it was very real.

You see, dear reader, there was a section of the road which had become more like a flattened out pile of large rocks, above which, some 50 meters over the road, there was a team of Chinese workers who had tied themselves to the side of the mountain and were hacking away at the rock face. Their work was sending a steady stream of boulders down the mountain, which would speed up and tumble, crumbling into smaller pieces on their way down, and finally flying headlong across the flattened out section one might call the road.

On the other side of this treacherous obstacle, stood our guide. He had parked his own van, and had been smoking a great number of cigarettes while waiting for us. He stood now next to his van and his pile of butts, staring at us across the hazard. He looked up at the workers, then back at us… then he made a run for it.

It worked. He made it across to our side unscathed. Once he was closer, we were able to get a better look at him. The man was wiry, dressed in army fatigues, and chain smoked cigarettes like few people I have seen outside of Indonesia. He greeted Stewart and then us warmly. He then looked back at the terrible trickling landslide. This was going to be tough…

Our guide stared up at the workers, and we watched the rocks falling. If we were hit by one of those, it would probably break our legs, if not toss us head over heels into the gorge. We looked at the guide, then at Stewart. Our guide squinted harder, looking at the motions of the distant workers, and timing the falling of the rocks. Then suddenly, he screamed “GO!” and we scrambled across. I was not sure which to spend more time looking at: my feet (so I didn’t trip and fall into the gorge) or the slope above me (so I could dodge a giant falling boulder).

Thanks be to Jah, we made it across in one piece and climbed into our guide’s van.

We then began a three-hour drive through one of the most hectic construction sites I have ever seen. Everywhere, people were hacking away at stone and blowing things up with dynamite. Meanwhile, the river which had carved the immensity of the Tiger Leaping Gorge tore on to our right, barely audible above the sound of busting rock and revving diesel engines. The steep rocky cliffs that formed the sides of the gorge tore upward at inconceivable angles, sporting impossibly green vegetated nooks and totally isolated plateaus of prairie grass.

It was so beautiful that we needed to climb out of the car and take in the view. Unfortunately, we were not prepared for the intensity of the wind that whipped through the gorge, carrying with it a peppering of rock dust and small pebbles. It pulled Stew’s Iowa Hawkeyes hat off his head and sent it spiraling into the gorge. It was all we and our guide could do to keep the man from risking his life scrambling down the steep and loose gravel after it.

When we finally got to the city of Haba, some two and a half hours later; it was well after dark. At the advice of our guide, we decided to stay the night there rather than attempt to climb up to the base camp in the night. So we stayed at a Naxi guesthouse that Stewart had used in the past during his work with Where There Be Dragons.

The owners of the guesthouse greeted us warmly and served us a splendid meal of roasted yak meat, yogurt, beans, eggs, and rice. It was one of the best meals we’d had on the entire trip. And once we had finished, we sat down to drink tea and chat with them briefly about finances. Our guide was suggesting to us that we might be interested in getting a second guide. It’s not a hard climb, but two guides might be helpful. We suspected that he was looking to spread some of the wealth among his friends, but we also earnestly promised to consider it in a more private meeting later that evening. We talked briefly about the cost of guide services, but did not hammer out an exact price. We also figured out how much a night and two meals, and a packed lunch from the hotel would be: extremely cheap. Once we had a good idea of how much this whole thing was going to cost, we headed back to our room and counted our money.

And then a shock of fear hit us. We had not visited an ATM before the trip, so we were left with just what was in our pockets, and it was not much. We worked furiously to put together a budget and tallied up all our expected expenses. It looked like we were about 500 Yuan short of being able to pay for this adventure. We looked at each other across the small room as the temperature fell outside. It was going to be a cool night. Probably the coolest of all of AsiaWheeling. I pulled a blanket around me and looked back down at our projected expenditures. Where were the huge ones? Where had we made too conservative an estimate…

One thing was for sure: we would need to completely refrain from eating anything at the base camp restaurant. Getting an extra guide would be completely out of the question. What else… Motta called the guide to get an exact price. When he hung up the phone his face was stricken. It was still too much for us. We were in the middle of nowhere, without enough money to execute this mission. But how could we turn back now? Would it be better to just go for it, and ask our guide to accept an IOU… that would not be so good for the guanxi…

Once again, as if sensing our predicament, the guide called Stewart’s phone. He was calling to lower the price. “We’re friends right?” he said.

“Of course,” Stew replied.

“And we are going to do business in the future?”

Stew replied with the same.

And then it was done. He reduced the price by just enough to put us 100 Yuan under budget. We were going to do this. But now we were yet another day behind, still with the hike up the the base camp to do tomorrow. It would likely be two days before we could summit. Things were tight, financially and temporally. We still could do it, but one more set back and we might have to scrap the whole mission.

The temperature kept falling, and we put on our new warm clothes, exiting our room to climb onto the roof of the bathroom complex. We idled up there for a while, taking in the stars. When was the last time we had even seen stars, let alone stars this dramatic?

Soon the chill of the night began to get to us, and we made our way back to the room to catch a few hours of shuteye before tomorrow’s climb.

Stewart greeted us in Kunming with a great many options for things to do in this fine city of his, among the more exotic of which were paragliding, going on a savage multi-day wheeling/camping trip around a nearby lake, and heading into the Tiger Leaping Gorge to climb a 17,400 ft-tall mountain called Haba Snow Mountain (哈巴雪山).

Our second morning in the glorious town of Jianshui began with a visit to a small Chinese Muslim joint, where we feasted on thick Hui noodles, in spicy tomato broth. Our bowls were served on a table that had been mostly converted into a large barbecue grill. As we sat down to the noodles, the owner of the shop took a seat opposite from us and began to make small talk over the large grill. On the grill were a great number of semi-fermented bits of tofu.

He shoveled a small pile of these over on to the section of the grill that was hot, and they began to slowly sizzle. He continued to chat with us as he poured a mixture of chili oil, vinegar and a salty orange powder in a couple of small bowls.

He handed us the small bowls of spicy dipping sauce and began taking the piping hot bits of tofu off the grill and giving them to us.

So as we ate our soup, we now were able to punctuate the experience with little spicy bits of oily crispy tofu. The meal was stupendous, and it turned out the tofu bits were a free and standard addition to any meal at this restaurant. With full stomachs, we felt compelled to execute a savage wheel.

We began by heading up and out of the old city, toward the western outskirts of town. On our way, we passed a large market at the opening of which was a gigantic crowd of mostly young men in the midst of an even more gigantic crowd of red Honda motorcycles.

After some in-depth investigation, we found that this was not what we had first guessed – some kind of a red Honda rally – but a mixture of bikes for sale, and motorcycle drivers who were offering their services as couriers of goods purchased inside the interior vastness of the Jianshui Sunday market.

We decided that such a hubbub at the entrance to the market certainly warranted some exploration inside. It was, of course, no Kashgar Sunday market, but it was certainly lively and filled with all kinds of interesting goods. We wandered the interior for some time, keeping our eyes peeled for possible project K9 purchases, but eventually settled only on a small 15 cent pair of folding scissors. These scissors would later prove to pay for themselves one thousand fold over the remainder of the journey.

We exited the market and headed farther uphill, cresting the highest point of the city of Jianshui, where we turned left and headed down toward the other side of the fertile valley which surrounded the place. Jianshui itself is on a hill, which rises like a fortress out of the fertile surrounding valley.

We began our descent into the valley, which took us through a large cluster of stonemasons, all of whom seemed to be in the tombstone business. Perhaps because of the proximate availability of stone, or because of elaborate local burial customs or perhaps even because of the centralization of industry by the Chinese government, it seems Jianshui had become a hub for complex and ornate tombstones, sarcophagi, and the like.

We wheeled down an endless street of masons, feeling compelled from time to time to cover our ears against the shrill cry of a circular saw or electric sander. More often than not though, the stonework was done by hand, at great expense of time, simply using a hammer and chisel.

Once we had made it through the street of stonemasons, we came upon a giant snarling traffic jam. The road was small and packed to the brim with buses and cars. All the vehicles seemed to be burning oil like crazy, and try as we might, there was not even room enough for a bicycle to make its way through the mess.

In place of a sidewalk, there was merely a sandy drop-off into an open (though rather dry) sewer. It looked like we were stuck. So we waited and sucked exhaust for about a half hour, as the traffic slowly worked its way along. Then finally there came an opportunity for a lichtenschtein.

We took it, and followed a tiny concrete path, much too small for anything but the tiniest of cars. Our road fell steeply from the main road, and then leveled off as it ran along the wet flat floor of the valley. We wheeled past a group of old women and men seeking shelter from the mid-day sun beneath the canopy of a solitary tree. A man straightened up from his water pipe to bark a greeting as we made our way past.

Now we were alone in a sea of green rice, wheeling along the brilliant white arc of this small concrete road. The colors seemed almost too intense for reality. The complexity of the rice and the blue of the sky all the more brilliant behind polarized lenses.

We could see the traffic still raging in a gridlock to our right, so when the concrete strip turned back toward the main road, we set out once again on the small raised-dirt pathways that separated plots of rice. From these, we found our way to a low-lying thick brick wall that acted as a separator between the rice fields and the stream of rubbish that came from the highway. We hoisted our Speed TRs onto this wall and made our way along it, eventually ducking under the highway.

In the space below the overpass, we encountered two Chinese children. It appeared we had interrupted a romantic encounter, and we apologized, quickly making our way onto a new road. This new road wound by two large swimming complexes, one was a vast and crowded chlorinated pool, complete with diving board and water slide. The price of entry was about 40 cents. The other was a large green pond, which sported a great deal of algal and lily-pad growth. Entrance to this swimming zone was only about 7 cents. However, lacking swimming trunks, we refrained from both of these tempting options.

From there we headed on, out of the greater Jianshui urban block and out into the open tranquility of the rice paddies. We now rode on a large, brand new, completely empty two-lane concrete road, which was suspended over an expanse of deep green agricultural land. The green of the crops was so saturating, and the fragrance of rice so thick in the air, that there was little we could do but allow the beauty of all that was around us to carry us forward.

We came around a corner and could see, nestled in the arid hills ahead of us, an ancient Chinese town. Once spotted, it seemed obvious this was to be our next waypoint. Taking only a few false turns, we successfully made our way into the center of the old quarter of this city. Inside the old quarter, we found a set of giant gates that marked the entrance to some kind of ancient walled compound.

Looked like an interesting wheel… We parked our bikes in the shade of the large wall and began chatting with a group of uniformed fellows to investigate whether or not we might wheel into the ancient walled compound. The answer was resoundingly “no.” Furthermore, we would be charged to enter, even if we followed their rules and did it on foot. Our interest in the ancient citadel diminished rapidly upon hearing this news.

So we took a water break in the shadow of the wall, and headed back out in search of more adventure.

Outside the ancient city, we decided to take a left and strike out on an old road that ran parallel to the highway which had brought us to Jianshui.

We were not sure of our next waypoint, but we were confident  there would be Chinese villages scattered along this road, some of which would contain establishments that were serving up noodles.

So on we rode. The first hamlet that we came to was very small and very poor. There were no restaurants in town, and we saw only two signs of life (apart from livestock). One was a group of old men, smoking water pipes and playing Mahjong, the other was a lone, totally naked, elderly woman, who was wandering the streets in an obviously drugged haze. We rode by her unsure of which way to look, and continued through the remainder of the town, which put us back onto the sun-drenched road, running roughly parallel to the large toll road that had brought us into Jianshui.

By this point we were becoming quite hungry and thirsty. We could see signs on the distant road, which declared to the traffic heading our way that there was another town, by the name of Ba Xin (坝心), not far from us. It would likely take less time to ride on to this city and find more food and water there than to turn around, so we headed on, through a cleft in the mountains. Soon enough, the road we were on swung hard to the right and became very sandy, the concrete mostly crumbled into gravel.

We wheeled under the highway and began traveling parallel to it on the other side now. The reason for the sorry state of the road became apparent as we approached Ba Xin. A large stone harvesting operation was in full swing outside  the city. We wheeled past huge crowds of men, breaking stone by hand using repeated strikes of a sledge hammer. They all had cigarettes clenched in their mouths and frowned into their work. Most of them took a break to scrutinize us as we rode by. Some waved.

A brief uphill section took us into the heart of Ba Xin.

There we found ourselves starving, rather parched, and quite thrilled to have arrived. The first problem we solved was the starving one, though it was initially more of a stop-gap measure. We called a waypoint at a local bakery, and for less than 25 cents purchased five pastries.

These hit our systems with a thrilling burst of blood sugar and lucidity, and propelled us on to the grocery store, where we purchased some similarly priced bottles of drinking water.

At the grocery store, we asked for directions to a street where we might find noodle shops, and armed with that information set out. Our search took us to the center of the city, where there was a vast round-about, in the center of which was what looked like a giant flying saucer skewered by a flagpole. From there, we were able to head up to the street of noodles. There were three or four restaurants to choose from, most of which were empty or contained only one or two people; but a restaurant at the end of the street seemed relatively crowded, so we chose that one. Outside was a small group of old men who appeared to be oscillating between smoking from a large steel water pipe, and engaging in schtick with one another. Inside were a group of school girls slurping huge piles of fried noodles from a plate.

We were warmly greeted by the advance guard of old, water pipe-smoking men. They paused from smoking 50 cent packs of Chinese cigarettes through the giant metal pipe, and smiled at us. They seemed a bit shy, and we were hungry, so we politely acknowledged them and passed on toward the kitchen, from which the tempting smell of fried noodles was emanating. The smell was intoxicating. I did my best to order a couple of the same. In the meantime Scott sought out a table for us.

As we waited for our noodles to arrive, we chatted with the school girls sitting next to us. They seemed interested in practicing their English, and even more interested in blushing, giggling nervously, and pushing each other. We did our best to be amiable, and after a short while, the children departed and our noodles arrived. In my supremely bad attempts at Chinese/pantomime communications, I had failed to order the school-girl special, but had successfully  ordered two totally different dishes of cold spicy peanut noodles. The noodles were delicious and startlingly cheap, likely hand pulled in the back of the shop.

Once we had finished the noodles, we rejoined the gents outside, to chat and do bicycle schtick with them. They were very interested to hear that the Speed TRs were, in fact, made in China, and glad to hear that we enjoyed the local cold noodles. We explained that we had come from Jianshui, and they tut-tutted about city folk, while heartily congratulating us on having made it this far. When the time was ripe, we bid them farewell, and climbed back on the Speed TRs headed for Jianshui.

The ride back was glorious. It was hard and fast, with some very good stretches of long downhill, followed by gnarly climbs. The sun was sinking low and the dry heat of the day was quickly being replaced by the comfortable temperatures of evening in the desert. We encountered a bit of traffic again in the same stretch of road we had on the way out, just before the street of the stonemasons. It was less thick, though, and we were able to take advantage of the small size of our steeds and weave through the traffic, passing hundreds of cars, and capitalizing on the breaks in traffic made by motorcycles. Soon we were through the worst of it, and climbing back up into the city.

We crested the highest point in Jianshui just as the sun was setting. I paused at the top to wait for Scott and watched as a dog that had just killed a chicken walked by with the corpse in its teeth, leaving a trail of blood drips on the pavement. Just then Scott arrived.

There was only one question: where to feast? And the answer seemed pretty straightforward. So we coasted downhill toward the same restaurant where we had eaten the night before. Our friend was thrilled to see us. Once we ventured with him over to the cooler where all the ingredients were on display, he insisted that we get four dishes rather than our usual three. This we were happy to do, since after such an incredible wheel, we were starving. And at the end, the bill was a fraction even of what it had been the night before. We tried our best to pay him more money but he became offended and gruffly refused us.

Once again, as new customers came in, he would show us off as his two American friends who were so Chinese. It felt great to be such a VIP.

We parted with warm regards, and headed back to the hotel for some much deserved sleep.

It was around 4:00 in the morning in Hekou, China, when the Sim City 2000 theme song rang out once again calling us to action. There was a slight mist falling, as we rode the still empty and glistening streets toward the bus station, which lay deep in the heart of the import-export/prostitution part of town. When we got to the station, our half-sized bus to Jianshui (建水) was idling, as though waiting for us. There was no extraction of extra luggage charges here. In China, it seems, people are expected to be transporting large things, and the Speed TRs were treated as a welcome addition to the belly of the bus. We climbed on and immediately fell asleep.

When I awoke, we were driving through wide open country, rocky and arid, with scrubby vegetation clinging to rolling and gravely hills. I wiped the sleep out of my eyes and looked around. It looked like Wyoming.

The roads were brand new, wide and inviting. As we rode, the bus passed through a great many tolls, demonstrating that it was also not cheap to drive this route. The cars that rode alongside us were Japanese and European and quite new-looking. This part of Yunnan had money… where it came from though, is perhaps best left to speculation in the comments.

We stopped at a gas station to refuel the bus, and a woman came on board, peddling from a steaming bucket of Chinese-style corn on the cob. I was quite surprised when the majority of people on the bus actually purchased ears, and for the price of about 13 cents an ear, Scott and I were finally tempted to do the same. As we munched away on what I must admit was a chewy and rather distasteful cob (at least by Iowa standards), we humored our fellow passengers who, now that the foreigners had awoken, were very interested in chatting, and in particular to hear whether or not we approved of the corn.

The roads grew larger, and the traffic denser, and soon we were swooping through a great clover-shaped round about, making our way into Jianshui. The bus stopped in the outskirts of town, not at a bus station, but just at the side of the road, in a large intersection. We climbed out, and the dry hot air engulfed us. After so many weeks of humidity, we had come to cherish these dry climates. The sun was exceedingly bright in the cloudless blue sky, and after unloading the cycles from the bottom of the bus, we were quick to put on the Maui Jims and Panama hats.

As the bus pulled away, we were surrounded by an interesting collection of characters, most of them equipped with small three-wheeled goods transportation vehicles. This fellow was particularly dashing.

We strapped our luggage to our cycles and headed toward town. We rode by a number of very tempting giant Chinese business hotels, many of them featuring large KTV centers. We were headed for the older part of town. You see, dear reader, Jianshui is actually a rather old city, known for its large population of the Muslim “Hui” minority.   Once walled and gated against outside attack, some parts of the wall and the great central gate still exist, and it was these that we were looking for. Unfortunately, we were not sure where they were. The city was large, by anything other than Chinese standards, and as far as we could tell it was just giant brand new boulevards and huge (probably mostly empty) business hotels in every direction.

We finally reached an intersection at the top of a long gently sloping hill, and saw a tree-lined street. There had been very little green for the entirety of the ride hitherto, so we decided to take a licht onto this road. It turned out to be serendipitous, for instantly not only were we granted a cool shady thoroughfare, but we began to see the telltale terra-cotta roofs of an old Chinese city. It was then that we realized that other than the corn, we had eaten very little and were seriously lacking in the caffeine department. To rectify this, we called a waypoint at a news stand, where Scott requested a recommendation for a tasty local noodle house. It happened to be that a passing Chinese woman overheard his request and offered to lead us to exactly such a place, if we would follow her on her moped. This we happily agreed to. As an added bonus, she took bishop and led us directly into the old city.

The noodle spot was incredible, specializing in a local delicacy called Mi Xie, which is a tomato-based, spicy pork noodle dish.

We slurped and fell quickly into the mists of noodle ecstasy. Once the mists had cleared, we were free to look at the city of Jianshui with new eyes. This part of town was markedly different from what we had seen earlier. The streets were cobblestone, and few cars dared venture in. The majority of foot traffic consisted of what appeared to be wealthy Chinese women carrying shopping bags. Basically, Jianshui was doing just fine.

Refueled and refreshed, though still drastically under-caffeinated, we headed out into the old city in search of a hotel. We found a great many of them with little difficulty. Most were of a rather distinctive style, which I had not yet had the pleasure of encountering in my travels. The exterior of these hotels was painted and carved with a great many ornate panels, mostly in shades of turquoise, yellow, and red. These panels covered each of the balconies and were removed or folded back once the room was rented. We toured a great many of these, all of which were quite affordable. We were, of course, interested in accessing the Internet from our room, so it took a fair bit longer to find the right place, but when we did, we were so thoroughly ecstatic about it, that the prolonged searching felt more the justified.

The place was of that same exciting new variant that we discussed previously, except with that Chinese business hotel flare that we had come to know and love during our time in Hekou. Our room was immaculately clean, with Internet, in-room water bubbler, startlingly white sheets and bedspreads, a delightful balcony, in-room tea set, a gigantic television, which we were able to hook up via RCA to our computers for broadcast of hi-fidelity American hip hop tunes, and all for about 16.00 USD a night. We threw down our things and wasted little time in climbing back on the cycles.

We headed out into the city in search of coffee. This proved exceptionally difficult, and finally we were forced to settle for a box of Nescafe packets. We headed from the Nescafe to search for a small Chinese restaurant that might be willing to grant us free hot water, or perhaps a cup of hot tea into which we might dissolve the artificial, though necessary, brew. We managed to stumble upon an unassuming little shop, where a tall Chinese man was lounging and reading a newspaper.

We sat down and ordered two teas and two cups of hot water. For the tea, he headed over to a very old and special looking greasy cardboard tube, out of which he pulled two large nuggets of fragrant dry tea. He filled our cups and we began to chat. Soon we had gone through many cups of tea, as the chap guided us through the arc of flavor which one experiences after many soakings of the leaves.

We found ourselves even getting somewhat embarrassed, as the punk Americans who had the audacity to try and drink coffee in Jianshui. We asked him a little bit about the restaurant. It was a very down-home version of one of those Chinese choose-from-the-bank-of-ingredients joints, and this fellow was the proprietor and chef. He had been running the restaurant for over 20 years, and seemed to be somewhat of a local wiseman, evidenced by a number of people who came to him to ask advice on unknown topics during our time there.

When we finally left to continue our wheel, the man refused to take any money from us. It seems he had taken a bit of a shine to AsiaWheeling, and we had certainly taken a shine to him, so we vowed to come back before we left Jian and eat dinner with him. In the meantime there was wheeling to do.  Back on the cycles, we headed north, out of the city into the surrounding countryside.

The natural landscape of this part of China is semi-arid, but the people of the city had dug an elaborate system of irrigation ditches that allowed them to grow rice, in addition to all manner of other plant life. I was very impressed by the massive diversity of crops which were being grown in this small fertile valley, and even more impressed with how heterogeneous were the crops that were being grown: greens, corn, herbs in greenhouses, beans, rice, livestock… they all seemed to be coexisting in this little artificial green zone. It was beautiful.

We were getting a little peckish just as we were wheeling by a group of Chinese gentleman who were harvesting carrots from a large muddy plot. They had a small flatbed auto-rickshaw that they were filling with carrots and we wheeled up to see if they might be interested in selling us a couple to munch on.

When we arrived, they were so delighted to see us wheeling up on the speed TRs that it was all we could to to walk away without a giant bundle of free carrots.

Jianshui was quickly climbing the ladder in terms of favorite places on our journey.

As we were munching carrots, and doing our best to relate to the carrot-pulling chaps, we noticed a large stone obelisk looming in the distance on the top of a hill overlooking Jianshui.

What was this, we asked our new carrot-pulling friends. They seemed to have little interest or knowledge of the place, but Scott and I found it rather intriguing. We decided it would be a good waypoint, and with hearty farewells, headed out in search of a means to climb up to its base for a better investigation.

To reach the obelisk, we had to make our way across the artificially fertile valley into which we had wheeled in search of adventure and carrots.This meant taking the Speed TRs across the web of raised dirt walkways that separated the plots of irrigated land.

Luckily the cycles were more than up to the task.

On the other side of the great irrigated valley, we found ourselves in a much older looking settlement. We took a number of wrong turns, climbing a number of crumbling brick roads, none of which seemed to get us any closer to our goal. We finally called an uberlichtenschtein near a small child defecating in the street, and eventually made our way from there to a dirt road that appeared to be the only remaining option which had any chance of getting us closer to the obelisk. So on we rode, sheltered from the afternoon sun by a canopy of thick, bushy foliage. The obelisk was now looming very close, towering over us in fact, but we had no idea how to get to it, save trespassing across what looked like a large fenced-in grape-growing operation.

It was then that we pulled over to ask a group of women and children about how to access the obelisk. The women seemed thrilled to meet foreigners this far out of town and were more than happy to tell us at great length that one had to circle around to the other side of the hill in order to get up to the obelisk.

And so we did. The dirt road we had been taking eventually became paved, and merged with a larger road, headed toward the other side of the mountain. The main purpose of this road, however, was obviously not to serve traffic to the obelisk. Our fellow travelers were all large mining trucks that lumbered by, clanking and emitting great clouds of smoke and dust.

The drivers of the trucks seemed thrilled to see us working our way down the road, and were more than happy to honk (deafeningly) and wave emphatically at us. We saw a giant unintelligible sign in Chinese and decided this must be the road to the obelisk, so we turned.

Now we were climbing uphill, over a rough rocky path. As we gained elevation, the mining operation began to spread out to our right, and the vastness of the artificial fertile valley on our left. Soon, the road we were riding became too steep, gravely, and hard to follow, and we parked the bikes.

From there we headed forth on foot, climbing up the last bits of rocky soil to find ourselves at the base of a giant obelisk. What exactly the purpose of this strange tower was, we will likely never know, but the feeling of finally reaching it was intoxicating.

We spent some time at the top of the hill, overlooking the valley and the mining operation, studying the tower, which itself turned out to be made of large stone blocks, and exploring the general vicinity.

With the sun beginning to sink low in the sky, we climbed back on the cycles, and headed back to town, cutting once again through the irrigated valley, and climbing back up into Jianshui’s old city.

At the top of the hill, we stumbled upon a large community effort to harvest great bucketfuls of water from the community well, which were carefully transferred into the kind of large plastic vessels that often contain gasoline.

We passed the people drawing water, and headed toward the same small restaurant at which we had enjoyed tea earlier that day.

The owner seemed to be expecting us, and met us at the door with a kind of knowing grin. We spent the rest of that evening feasting on pork and greens, associating with the owner and a few other patrons who trickled into the two-and-a-half-table restaurant as the night went on. The owner seemed quite proud of us, and with a large smile explained to the other patrons how we spoke very good Chinese, used chopsticks well, and could handle spicy food.

It felt great, like we had been invited into a kind of Jianshui secret society. At the end of the meal, the owner quoted us a price for the food that was so small, even by Chinese standards, that we felt compelled to reverse bargain with him to ensure that he was not suffering a loss due to our dining with him.

We parted on the very best of terms, shaking hands warmly with everyone in the restaurant and riding through the warm night air back to the air-conditioned luxury of our hotel.

For some time we had been contemplating a new strategy for wheeling fully loaded. You see, dear reader, up until this point, I had been consolidating my belongings by strapping my technology bag onto the top of my pack and wheeling with the entire thing on my back, while Scott would put one pack on his back and one on his front.  An illustration from Surabaya, Indonesia may be found below.

This system worked fine for short missions, but it had a number of marked drawbacks. We were rather top-heavy and as we rode, blood flow to our heads was painfully restricted at times. In addition to that, the weight of our entire inventory was concentrated on the points where our rear ends made contact with the seats. And as you, dear reader, can no doubt imagine, this develops into a painful situation after extended amounts of wheeling.

Back in Vietnam, we had just awakened and ordered the cheapest coffee in Sa Pa, which was true to advertisement, served at our hotel, followed by another down the block.

In order to get up to Sa Pa, we had taken a winding but steadily uphill road. The road was about 35 kilometers long, and originated in Lao Cai, the Chinese border city.

It was our plan that day, to strap our technology bags onto the rear racks of the speed TRs and ride with only our packs on our backs. This, we hoped, would alleviate much of the strain and top-heaviness. So in the courtyard of our hotel in Sa Pa, we spent some time working on properly strapping technology bags onto the rear racks. We shook the bikes back and forth simulating the g-forces of a downhill ride. It was a pretty smooth road, but based on our preliminary wheel on our first day in Sa Pa, we knew there were a few sections of construction that would test the security of our arrangement.

As we were obsessing over our bikes, a crew of five or six Vietnamese men came by and insisted on taking photos with us and the Speed TRs, trying on the Maui Jims, and generally assessing AsiaWheeling. We did our best to satisfy their appetites for documenting their interaction with foreigners, and stood for photos with each of them individually.

After checking and double checking our setup, we climbed on the bikes and began to coast downhill.

It was glorious. With about half the weight of my gear off my back, I was set free to enjoy the thrill of whipping down the road, drinking in the lush green of the scenery. Traffic was very light, and with the aid of all the potential energy that we had racked up on our ascent, we were wheeling at nearly the speed of the few cars and trucks with which we shared the road.

As we grew nearer and nearer to the border town of Lao Cai, we started to notice fellow wheelers as well, like these two women transporting a startlingly large load. They both greeted us heartily, sharing the camaraderie that only those riding long distances downhill through the mountains of northern Vietnam can.

As we descended, the temperature rose, and the cool thin mountain air was replaced with a thick humidity. As we leveled out into the outskirts of Lao Cai, we began to sweat profusely, and with it came the hunger. We had forgotten to eat, again, and madness quickly ensued.

With little more than knowledge of the general direction of China, we set out searching for a Pho place. And for the first time, it was difficult to find. For one reason or another, we had inserted ourselves into the industrial goods and paint-trading section of town. So it was with sweat pouring, maddening hunger gripping us, and serious delirium setting in, that we wheeled the last four or so kilometers, which brought us to the river that separates the two countries. There we found a restaurant.

It was mostly empty, with only the odd table of Vietnamese men, feasting on very Chinese-looking chicken and greens dishes, and ripping huge lungs-full of thick tobacco smoke from a long bamboo water pipe.

Though we shared no language, the owner of the shop was supremely determined to communicate. He helped us park our bikes and took us into the back of the shop to select our food from the ingredients he had stored back there. The meal was amazing, consisting of roast chicken, cucumber salad, and rice.

As we picked our teeth, the owner, and the rest of the fellows in the restaurant came over to join us and discuss (mostly non-verbally) our mission, the nature of the Speed TRs, and our previous and upcoming waypoints. We ended the interaction by all taking a large rip from the huge water pipe. This induced a giant fit of coughing and a brief period of delirium. After the effects of the rip wore off, it was as though we all were made brothers. Warm regards were exchanged, and directions to the border of China were drawn for us on a napkin.

We wheeled on, with the help of the napkin map, easily finding the border crossing, which was marked by two giant arches on either side of a bridge. We exchanged the last of our Vietnamese Dong for Chinese Reminbi and headed to the border.

Outside passport control, we were accosted by a large group of currency changers who, though we had no interest in their services, insisted on continued interaction and soon encircled me. One of them reached out and removed my Maui Jims from my face, placing them on his own. I prepared for battle, and called over to Scott for reinforcement.

Just then, a customs official exited the building and yelled out to the men in Vietnamese. The group began to disperse, and I grabbed my glasses back off the man’s face. That was twice now, that I had taken those spectacles from a would-be thief.

The border of China and Vietnam is not the friendliest of borders, and I believe very few tourists cross at Lao Cai. Officials are strict and gruff, and your fellow travelers are mostly scrubby Chinese and Vietnamese traders, chain smoking cigarettes and shuttling large loads of consumer goods across the bridge on large hand-pulled wooden carriages.

We waited in line for some time, and then even longer, as the customs officials scrutinized every stamp and visa in my passport, before allowing me to exit Vietnam. For Scott, the process was even longer. I was lazily doing laps around a large flagpole in the middle of no-man’s land when Scott emerged from Vietnamese passport control. “What was that about?” he asked.

“No idea.” Speculation, however, is invited in the comments.

On to China! We climbed on the Speed TRs and, with a great deal of gusto and excitement, wheeled toward the rather Klingon-looking archway that symbolized the entrance to China. Our attempts to wheel across the bridge, however, were foiled by a Vietnamese official who forbade riding into China. So it was with slightly less billowing sails that we crossed under the great angular concrete archway into China.

One thing was obvious from the very beginning: the Chinese run a very tight ship. We were immediately, and respectfully greeted (in Chinese) by a starched and uniformed official who showed us where we could park our bikes in order to enter the customs building, which was a large and brutally unassuming structure. Inside the customs building, we were greeted by two more immaculately put together chaps, who greeted us in polite and formal, though heavily accented, snippets of English. After seeing the many Chinese visas and entry and exit stamps in Scott’s passport, he was waved on to passport control. Mine, on the other hand, was carefully inspected, detected, and scanned stamp by stamp, presumably to confirm the authenticity of my documentation. Though it took some time, it was done with the utmost professionalism and politeness. Finally, I was ushered over to passport control, past a large door labeled in large English type “Further Interrogation Room.” It seemed their discussions with Scott had alleviated all skepticism of AsiaWheeling, and I was flagged through with no further problem. Meanwhile, Scott’s bags were being carefully inspected, at the culmination of which, the customs official removed a certain bottle of Burmese smelling salts, which we had acquired in Sanklaburi, Thailand. They seemed to pass inspection as well.

We were in China, but the bikes were still in no man’s land. We were beginning to confer about how to best retrieve them when the Chinese officials once again proved their organization and foresight, by showing us back through the customs and allowing us to ride our cycles around and out into China through the same entrance that large cargo trucks use.

And we were in, bikes and all. The city was called Hekou, and so far it appeared to be the usual AsiaWheeling border town. It was a jungle of import-export businesses, and bustled with small-scale international trade. Women who appeared to be prostitutes roamed the streets in short skirts and high heels, strolling in packs. We poured out of the customs building into traffic, wheeling our way through an immense gridlock of Chinese men and women, transporting all nature of goods.

There were a few important missions we needed to complete: we needed Chinese SIM cards; we needed to find a hotel; and we needed to wheel the city of Hekou. We were still in the jungle of import-export businesses, so we headed on toward the interior of the city. On our way, we passed a bus station. We had spoken to the honorable Stewart Motta since our encounter with him in Lao, and at his recommendation, our next waypoint in China was to be a predominantly museum town by the name of Jianshui. Jianshui was also positioned conveniently between the border town of Hekou and Stew’s current residence in Kunming.

Inside the bus station, Scott demonstrated his Chinese skills, quickly manifesting for us a couple of tickets for early the next morning to Jianshui.

We declined a number of offers from fellows at the bus station to provide us with professional female companionship, and climbed back on the cycles. We soon found our way to the riverside, where we called a waypoint at a roadside juice stand, where the owner came to join us at our plastic table, explaining to Scott in Chinese where we might find a cheap hotel, what price we should pay, and how to find SIM cards. We thanked him, and after finishing our freshly blended mango juices, headed off toward the hotel and SIM card district.

All around us China was just churning with activity. Men strolled the streets yakking away on cell phones while wearing no shirts. Construction workers furiously bent and welded metal in the streets. Beautiful women zipped around on silent electric mopeds, and everywhere things were growing, being improved, remodeled, or torn down to make room for the future. Acquiring SIM cards was easy, and the staff at China mobile was exceedingly patient and helpful.

Armed with newly active phones, we headed down the street where we saw a giant gleaming Chinese business hotel.

Scott went inside, and firmly bargained them down to the price that had been communicated by our juice-making friend. It worked, and after declining more offers for paid companionship from a woman who had set up shop with a large placard of optional women at the base of the elevator, we headed up to our room.

The room was stupendous and cheap. For about US$20.00 dollars per night we were enjoying a spotlessly clean room, with new shiny fixtures, and the solid kind of furniture one expects at a place like the Westin. We had free in-room Internet (Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter were, of course, blocked by the Chinese government). We took only the time to pound a little water from the in-room water bubbler, and change into our Speed Matrix biking jerseys, before heading back out for a wheel.

The staff of the hotel, which was no doubt used to Chinese businessmen and international traders who were mostly interested in feasting and paid companionship, seemed baffled that we would head back out into the heat of the day, after just arriving sweaty and disheveled from the savage wheel. But thus is the habit of the AsiaWheeler. China was just too new and fascinating for us to separate ourselves from it by a pane of spotlessly clean hotel window glass.

We wheeled down the road, stopping briefly to purchase refreshingly affordable water at a brand new giant supermarket, and then headed down the road that skirted the riverside. On one side was China, on the other was Vietnam. The Chinese side was clean, orderly, and marked by gigantic blocky, brutalist structures. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese side was mostly undeveloped, covered with mineral extraction operations and tent cities. It’s true that Vietnam has one of the fastest growing GDPs in the world, but China was the clear winner in this race. We wheeled on past another large border crossing, this one for rail only. On the Chinese side, there was a huge brand new facility, imposingly constructed from concrete and glass, which dwarfed its modest Vietnamese counterpart.

On we wheeled, the opportunity to explore the wide smooth roads that connected the brand new housing and administrative developments of Hekou was too tempting not to. The sun sank low and hunger took hold. We had just made it back into the neighborhood of our hotel when we wheeled by a street filled with restaurants, and the glorious smells coaxed us in. We dismounted and walked the Speed TRs, scanning for a place to eat.

We finally selected a restaurant at the end of the row. It was one of the standard kind of Chinese joints, with no menu, instead just a giant bank of ingredients in an open cooler. We were invited inside to select from the ingredients, and once we had selected some, were expected to enter into an involved discussion of how we would like them to be prepared. This, we unfortunately lacked the vocabulary to execute, so we just asked the waitress to choose for us, and headed over to the table.

The meal that arrived was amazing, a truly emotional experience.

As I leaned back from my feasting, I was overcome with the delightfully new vibrations of China. The traffic, the food, the attitude of the people, it was somehow perfect for AsiaWheeling. This was a decidedly new chapter, and I could tell already it was going to be a glorious one.

We awoke hungry  in our comfortable and roomy hotel room in Sa Pa. I guess the dinner of Bia Hoi and unborn chicken had not been quite enough for us. We headed out in search of Pho, and found and ate a fatty bowl of it with very little expenditure of time or money.

Now, escaping the Pho joint without letting everyone in a giant group of local Vietnamese men ride the Speed TRs and try on the Panama hats and sunglasses was a completely different story. It seemed that we spent easily double the amount of time spent on the entire Pho mission just navigating this little gauntlet. Finally, we were free to head out in search of coffee and more wheeling advice.

Both were quite easy to find at a coffee shop just down the road. Here in Sa Pa we were back in high tea country, so unfortunately the locals did not drink coffee as they had in Saigon and Hanoi. This made the black gold a little harder to find and more expensive than than it had been up to this point in Vietnam. As the result, this coffee shop was more of a tourist joint, and in it we met a Vietnamese-American woman, who told us of a certain waterfall, up in the mountains beyond and above Sa Pa. It would be a nice, easy, inclined ride, she explained, over her mocha-caramel-whipped-o-chino. Scott and I looked at each other. “Sounds great,” we agreed.

And we were off again, this time up and out of Sa Pa. And once again, with our departure from the city, the view opened up into a jaw-dropping vista of indescribable grandeur. As we grew farther and farther from the city of Sa Pa, the buildings that clung to the mountainside began to change, and the people who lived in them and worked in the land around us became more unique, less touched by the outside world.  The road simply got more and more beautiful, and the whole time we rode, we passed perhaps only one other vehicle. It was as though we had the mountain to ourselves.

We stopped at a particularly savage vista to take a few glam shots of us and the Speed TRs, when we were approached by a few young lads from the neighboring hamlets. One of them, presumably the leader, carried a small plastic bottle attached to his belt, in which he kept small snakes that he had caught and killed. On his finger he carried two small birds that, despite the fact that he waved them around , appeared to be permanently attached (live) to him. His crew were all younger, and were interested in, but wary of your humble correspondents. They came over to take a look at the camera when it was sitting on the grass photographing us.

We decided that these young lads might be, in fact, budding photographers and encouraged them to try out Scott’s Olympus, but they seemed nervous about the thing, and just getting them to touch it was quite a task.

Soon the leader of the gang began to give us the signal to get out, so we did.

We wheeled off the small road that we had taken out of Sa Pa and onto a large mountain road. Still traffic was very very light, but from time to time on this one we would pass motorcycles, and even the odd small truck. We were getting plenty hungry; our breakfast of Pho long turned into energy for cycling the elevation change, and just when we were starting to think about drastic maneuvers, a roadside fruit stand appeared on the horizon. We wheeled up to it and feasted on a kilogram or so of high country plums. These turned out to be some of the best plums I’d ever had in all my meandering life.

The scenery around us just never ceased to amaze, with a new type of farming taking hold. This consisted of large networks of rope and branches, hammered into the 45º pitch of the mountainside. In the safety of these networks, we saw people growing everything from corn to berries. As we came around the corner, we ran into a woman and her guide (a small girl) walking down the mountain from the waterfall that we were on our way to see. The woman turned out to be from Portland, Oregon, one of the wheeling capitals of the U.S. We talked wheeling for a bit, standing in the middle of the road. No cars came by during our conversation. And soon we warmly parted ways.

When we finally reached the waterfall, we were once again starving. There was a cluster of stands and restaurants around the entrance to the falls, but a price gouge was inevitable. We ate two lackluster and overpriced bowls of noodles at a nearby restaurant, and then bought a couple pieces of grilled purple yam from a woman at a roadside stand. The yam was tasty, and the noodles at least gave us new energy.

We looked at the falls from a distance, and at the cost of entrance from up close, and decided, as we often do: more wheeling.

<<pic of us near the falls>>

We kept climbing, seeking solace in the knowledge that unlike yesterday’s wheel, this one would terminate with a luxurious downhill. Up and up we went, making our way around a vast section of road that curved in on itself as it clung to the edge of a steep ravine.  It reminded me so much of a wheel Scott and I had taken at Colorado National Monument during our pre-AsiaWheeling tour of the U.S., that I found myself, for perhaps the first time on the trip, getting a little sentimental about AmericaWheeling.

And with that we reached the crest of the mountain road, the highest point of our trip to date. It was a glorious view, and positioned in the midst of appropriately post-apocalyptic bits of crumbling settlement and roadside advertising.

And then we had the downhill. Ah, to fly downhill. All that potential energy… more than you could ever use. We whipped down the mountain at the speed the road was built to be driven at. And with the ease of movement, the scenery around us seemed to come alive all the more. As if the parts of my mind that had been preoccupied with humping our way up the mountain could now be free to focus on the pure enjoyment of our enchanting surroundings.

We rolled into Haba, once again with the same thing on our minds: where to find more Pho.  Settling down for a few snacks at the same roadside stand as the night before, we encountered a Frenchman executing a “Tour du Monde,” who took particular interest in the WikiReader.

The air was cool and fresh, slightly thinner due to our high elevation here in Sa Pa, but very comfortable. The first part of the wheel was all to be downhill, which made it very easy, pleasant wheeling. We had both put on our SpeedMatrix jerseys, which added to the airy, fresh feeling. The sun was the brightest it had been since we were in Borneo or Bali, but the addition of the Maui Jims to our lifestyle even kept that cooled off. Basically, we were feeling great.

When we passed a restaurant that sported a big suckling pig, cooling on a spit outside, we decided to stop in for a bite to eat.

Inside, we discovered that this was the policeman’s haunt, and decided, after looking around at tables full of cops eating lunch, just to emulate their behavior, and order by pointing at what they had on the table. We ended up getting a very Chinese plate of crispy pork and greens (delightful though not nearly as good as those we had had in Lijiang during the pilot study), and a large pile of rather crispy French fried potatoes.

With eating out of the way, we climbed back on the Speed TRs and asked a local woman which direction she thought we should wheel in. She pointed down the road up which we had just climbed in the bus.

Okay, more downhill it would be, for now at least. We strapped a bunch of bottles of water to our cycles and headed off.

It is worth pausing to discuss here the strange trends we have observed in Vietnamese bottled water manufacturing. Aquafina, being the market leader, commands a high price for its H2O. So, following suit, all the Vietnamese bottled water companies have re-branded themselves to resemble Aquifina. We saw, among others “Aquaonly, AquahostA AquiMinimax, AquaSpa, ….”

The feeling was wonderful, just soaring down the mountain. As we coasted along, the scene opened up around us to display giant green valleys filled with terraced rice operations, dotted with little farmer’s huts. Morale was supremely high, so we just kept soaring on, stopping, of course, from time to time, to indulge a little of that old vice of ours… timed exposures.

We wheeled on past a large Colorado-esque sign indicating that we were leaving Sa Pa. And down through one valley and then another. On the slopes, everywhere we looked, people were farming various crops, presumably dependent on the availability of water and the quality of the soil. In the very bottom of most of the valleys, there were small streams, around which herds of water buffalo were being tended. Nearby the farmers would churn through the mud of their rice fields with giant devices, seemingly homemade, consisting of engines, connected to openly whirling blades, all mounted on a welded-together framework of metal. Looked like terrifying, but satisfying work.

On we went, farther and farther down, past fellows on mopeds transporting all manner of goods up to Sa Pa, and road crews hard at work maintaining the beautiful curves of bitumen that we so luxuriously rode upon. Finally, we came just to the edge of the clouds we had worked our way through on that morning’s bus. It seemed time to turn around.

And what a change it was. What had been an easy, beautiful, cool, dry wheel, suddenly became a punishing, sweat-drenched test of the human psyche. This mountain, which had once been so kind and open with us, became a cruel beast that had to be tamed. Up and up we rode, stopping from time to time to drink water like lost desert wanderers stumbling upon an oasis. No sooner had we quenched our thirst than we were back in the cycles, hammering up the mountain. We quickly digested all in our stomachs, and drank all our water.

With that came a new kind of challenge. We no longer had the excuse of water breaks. It was just us and the mountain. Even through the haze of struggle, though, from time to time the raw beauty of the landscape would captivate me. I would get lost in the curves of the terraces, or a herd of water buffalo wallowing in the muck at the valley floor.

We neared the top of the mountain and the city of Sa Pa riding a wave of energy. The heat of the moment was over and we were once again in the highest of spirits, and delighted with our recent trajectory, instantly dried and cooled by the mountain air. We wheeled to the edge of the city, where we stopped to take in one more drink of the stunning view. I sat on a tuft of green grass and Scott joined me. What a country this was!

We wheeled back into town past a table where two fried dogs heads advertised the availability of canine meat, and sat down at a hole in the wall Pho joint.

The soup was unsurprisingly delicious, and from there we wheeled slow and easy back to the roomy, Wifi-filled comfort of our hotel room. We spent the rest of the night working on correspondence for you, dear reader, stepping out only briefly to indulge in a small dinner of Bia Hoi and boiled duck eggs, each of which was filled with a deliciously fetal chick.

We spent our last day in Hanoi, perusing the giant indoor markets in search of more Project K9 goodies to send off to one of our readers with culinary inclinations.

For ourselves, we picked up a few of the famous and charming Bia Hoi glasses that were made from poured glass and featured a big H emblazoned on their bottoms.

A street-side cafe was eager to help pack them after we effectively communicated that we wanted 10 glasses of beer
(hold the beer).

With a large bag of spices and local cooking tools, and a heavy bag of Vietnamese glass, we headed to the post office, and made short work of dispatching the whole kit and caboodle.

Back on the road, we decided to indulge in a little bit of mid-afternoon wheeling through the steadily intensifying rush hour madness of Hanoi. This was enjoyable, but very high voltage. In fact, we were soaking wet with sweat and rather frayed at the nerves by the time we made our way back to the restaurant we had visited the night before.

The same adorably surly waitress was there, as though waiting for us. She gave us a huge grin and then snarled through the ordering process, pushing us to select certain foods and not taking no for an answer on the Bia Hoi. No sooner had our beers arrived than we were joined by yet another North Vietnamese veteran who happened to speak Russian. We sipped bia hoi, and ate with him, discussing his service as a fighter pilot, flying MIGs for the people of Vietnam, and allowing the conversation to deviate toward more relaxed topics whenever we could. In the end, we were all very good friends, and bid each other warm regards upon departure.

Back on the cycles, we returned to our beloved Liberty Hotel, where the staff bid us another warm goodbye, while we packed up our things and climbed on the Speed TRs, headed for the train station.

Our tickets that evening were on the “tourist train” to Lao Cai. Lao Cai is the border town between Vietnam and Yunnan Province, China. Since the train is really only used by tourists (foreign and domestic), it is a rather over-the-top train. Though not outrageously expensive, the train is covered with faux wood paneling; each room sports a vase full of fresh flowers, and the entire experience is groomed to be somewhat Orient-Express-esque.

We wheeled up to the station and waited outside for our train. While we waited, we passed the time joking around with the Vietnamese rail employees who had just gotten off their shift and were sitting on the steps of the station smoking cigarettes. A few of them spoke a bit of Russian, but they were less interested in chatting than they were in the folding action of the Speed TRs, and Scott and my own general pre-rail antics. When our train finally arrived, we hustled to get into our compartment and snag some of that prized under-the-bottom-bunk luggage space. This we were able to do with zero difficulty, for the train was almost empty. We were, in fact, one of perhaps four or five passengers in our whole car, and, of course, had a four-bed compartment to ourselves.

The beds were firm and comfortable, but for one reason or another, I did not sleep well. Perhaps it was the change in pressure as the train worked its way up into the mountains, or a strange but drastic oscillation in the ambient humidity in our car as we traveled. Whatever, it was, I awoke quite definitively, shortly before sunrise, and spent the next couple hours peering out the train window at the mountainous farm terrain that was being slowly but surely bathed in steadily increasing shades of gray sunlight. Despite the gray light, the land was startlingly green, reminding me once again what a splendid bit of land Vietnam had for itself. We snaked our way into the mountains, and the smell of pine and rice mingled in a refreshing bouquet.

We were pulling into a city that was large enough to be our destination just as the sunlight began to gain some hints of yellow. The train hissed to a halt, and Scott and I climbed out.

We showed our tickets to the ticket takers (here they use the Chinese system of showing one’s ticket only at the end of the ride) and exited the station into an early morning crowd of touts. It was a misty, drenching, muggy day here in Lao Chai. Just in the time it took to exit the train and make our way outside, Scott and I became completely soaked with sweat. We were getting hungry too, but the pushy nature of the many street vendors outside the station forced us to choose to simply unfold the cycles and head out in search of less pushy breakfast.

Pho was of course the goal, and since we were still in Vietnam, satisfying the urge proved quite simple. We were able to find a delicious spot, which was quickly filling up with locals catching an early morning breakfast before heading out to do whatever they did here on the border of China. It was also perhaps the cheapest bowl of Pho that we had during our entire time in Vietnam. The greens were fresh and delicious, and we were just finishing our bowl when a bus pulled up next to us.

A woman stuck her head out of the bus and called to us Sa Pa? Well… we were indeed trying to head to Sa Pa, and though on AsiaWheeling we usually decline solicitations for forms of transport, this one seemed legit. We made our way over and began the process of bargaining for a ride to the mountain outpost. Eventually we reached a deal, and Scott paid the Pho vendor, while I paid the bus driver and loaded the cycles in the belly of the beast.

The bus then left and we drove for approximately four minutes, before stopping again at the bus station, where our vessel duly waited for the next hour and a half, filling the rest of the way up with people. We were fine with this, for it gave us a chance to drink a can of coffee, use the truly hauntingly filthy bathrooms, and peer across the river into China, where we could see the border town of Hekou. From here it looked not dissimilar to Lao Chai where we were, except that the signs were in Chinese. Soon we would be wheeling in that glorious country once more, through that very border in fact. But first there was a little more to do in Vietnam…

Our bus wound its way up the mountain slowly but surely. The road steadily sloped upward and wound back and forth, climbing out of the sticky humidity into the clouds, which soon enveloped the bus, condensing on the windows, and running in thin streams down the panes. When we pulled out of the clouds, the mountain range was laid out before us, clear and bright, atop a bed of silky gray vapor.

The road wound a few more times around, taking us through an active construction site, and finally up into the village of Sa Pa. Most of the passengers on the bus were headed farther away to the city of Lai Chao. In fact, we were the only people to get off in Sa Pa. However, if you think, dear reader, that taking the local bus might have saved us from being swarmed by armies of touts once we climbed off, you would be sorely mistaken. One of them was so forthright as to even climb on the Speed TR and take it for a spin without asking! All said, though, it seemed to be a day for strange behavior on the part of the AsiaWheeling team, for not only were we swarmed by touts, but we actually selected one of them and followed her back to her guest house.

We pulled up, us on our Speed TRs and she on her moped, to a beautiful place, with an unencumbered view of the vast misty mountain range that surrounded us, and were shown to a room with three full beds, wireless Internet, and hot water all for $8.00 a night! On top of all that, they even advertised the cheapest coffee and cold drinks in town. Splendid.

Our tout brought us a thermos of hot water with which to make tea, and took our passports to go register us with the local tourist police. In the meantime, we slathered on a bit of sunscreen, cleaned off our Maui Jims and started preparing to wheel.

We awoke at the Liberty Hotel and made our way downstairs for breakfast. Getting coffee proved very difficult, and the resulting brew was manufactured before our eyes from some off-brand instant powder that looked like it had been manufactured around the time of reunification. Next, we headed out to a noodle restaurant for the morning’s sustenance.

The broth had been prepared with a tool for boiling beef bones and scooping noodles, almost identical to a Project K9 request we were about to ship off for our dear reader Laura.

Next we wheeled onward passing various vendors and fruit stalls.

Feeling much refreshed, we climbed on the cycles in search of more adventure. This day we decided to head north, in an attempt to get a perspective on the city not dissimilar from that we had gotten when we simply wheeled west in Saigon.

We took off heading north this time, working our way through the center of town up through an area that was filled with communist statues, large blocky headquarters, and Ho Chi Minh’s tomb (which by the way is rather similar to Lenin’s).  Onward, the architectural styles varied between communist-industrial, to modern, to French colonial in an enjoyable medley of colors under the overcast sky.

We kept working our way north, past a large cemetery, and into the suburban housing projects.

Suburbs don’t work in Hanoi exactly the same way they do in the west. What I’m talking about here is a sort of wasteland of giant concrete apartment complexes connected by giant highways. Like western suburbs, there is little in the way of pedestrian activity or small-scale corner stores. But unlike western suburbs, those around Hanoi are a little closer to the city center. No one has a yard, and the only real roads are giant highways. It was along the side of one of these giant highways that we were riding at the moment we saw a new construction project, which seemed to warrant further inspection. As far as we could tell it was another (slightly more posh) cluster of sky-scraping apartment buildings. This one was still heavily under construction, but it seems before they started any other part of the project, they had to first finish and polish off a giant central gate, which loomed in full monumental glory – something in between a communist monument and the Arc de Triomphe. Of course we were barred from entering, but it was certainly a worthy waypoint.

From there we did our best to keep heading north, though the roads seemed determined to keep siphoning us eastward. Finally, we found ourselves at another great bridge, across the same river that we had traversed the day before. At first we entertained the notion of skipping the bridge, and trying to head down the riverside back toward Hanoi’s city center. But this began to seem impossible as the road turned north once it reached the river rather than south. So we were met with a conundrum: should we…

1. cross the river and head south on the other side in hopes of faplungeoning our way back to Hanoi, or
2. head back south the way we’d come and experience that same ride in reverse

Option 1 seemed the obvious choice, but in order to execute that maneuver, we needed a little more coffee. This we were able to acquire in the form of a couple cans of Thai coffee from a large bulk dry goods shop along the road we were currently riding upon. Refueled by the coffee, we headed up and onto the bridge. This bridge had many large lanes for cars and trucks, and a separate smaller lane for bikes and motorcycles. This is the lane we took.

It was a hard, fast ride in the midst of swarming motorbikes. From time to time we would run up on another bicyclist, but he or she would be riding so slowly, on a cycle so laden down with vegetables or cement, that there was little opportunity for comradeship, and usually the situation necessitated a hair-raising pass during which Scott and I had to put our faith in our fellow drivers and our ability to accelerate into the region of the bridge one might call the fast lane.

On the other side, we pulled over to take a breather. We were badly in need of water, and a little shaken by the high voltage bridge crossing. Once we had caught our breath, we looked around. We were certainly in a new and interesting part of Vietnam. All the buildings here were very narrow and three or four stories tall. All took interesting architectural cues from both the French colonial influence and the blocky metal and concrete communist architecture of China and Russia.

We worked our way around the block, searching for a spot to buy water, and we found one right next to this strange metal device.

Speculation as to its purpose is heartily invited in the comments.

From there we began to wheel hard, right through this little city at the end of the bridge from the Hanoi suburbs and up onto another dike. It seemed so much like the dike that we had ridden on the day before that we thought it might in fact connect. So on we rode, into the wind, through a landscape that was ever-changing and so very different than I had imagined Vietnam to be. Take a look at these pictures and do your best to reconcile them with your views of Vietnam.

We wheeled on and on. The sun was beginning to hang low in the sky, and we were still yet to find that this dike was indeed the one we had wheeled on the day before. To complicate matters, it seemed that we had acquired a new river to our right, which had not been there before. We were now almost certainly separated from the city of Hanoi by two large rivers. We continued to head south hoping against hope that we might find ourselves near something that we recognized, but still all was unfamiliar.

Then we saw it… across the river, a large communist party building we knew we had passed the day before. So the good news was we were close to the road that we had ridden before. The bad news was that we were still separated from that road by a pretty large river, with no bridge in sight, and the spot we could see was still quite a way from Hanoi and our beloved Liberty Hotel.

The sun was sinking low… perhaps two hours left before it was too dark to ride. We pulled over to have a conference. We finished the last of a red bean and fig cake we had purchased at the water stand near the strange metal object.

We decided our only rational choice was to keep wheeling south in hopes of a bridge, and if it got dark before we found one, we’d need to come up with a new plan, most likely involving folding the bikes up and getting in a cab.

So we wheeled on hard, keeping our eyes peeled for a bridge. Not that much farther down the road, we passed a sign indicating that if we kept going forward we would reach Hanoi in 23 kilometers. This was a good sign, and it gave us renewed energy to pour into the Speed TRs. We started really pushing the pavement underneath us, as the road grew larger and more filled with traffic. Finally, this road T-ed into a larger road that almost certainly led to a bridge over the river. We pulled into the traffic and triumphantly rode over the bridge.

On the other end of the bridge, we found ourselves back in the place where we had turned around on the previous day’s wheel. The same woman was there packing up her stand after having sold all her crabs and ducks. We paused for a moment to catch our breath. We were on a giant busy street and staring down the option of taking this huge street directly into Hanoi, which would be faster and might even get us in before darkness had fallen completely, and taking the route we had taken the day before, which would have us on quieter roads, but would certainly have us riding at least half the ride in the dark.

Since our ill-fated misadventures with bearings in Cambodia, Scott was left without the use of his dynamo hub. This meant that he had no headlamp. And we had neglected to bring our Knog Gekko lights with us….

We decided to take the busier, but more direct street, and to do it at highway speeds. We exchanged one last glance and then raged downhill into traffic. Keeping to the right side at first, we pedaled hard along with the stream of motorcycles, joining the throngs and breathing the fumes of burning oil. We tore through the small city that we had encountered the day before, and followed the road onto a larger bridge than the one we had taken yesterday.

Now I was really thriving on the energy of the ride, feeling great, and flying along. I was passing the slower motor bikes, and ringing my bell like a maniac. Old men on motorcycles would turn to me and smile in approval.  If I came up on a cycle burning a lot of oil, I would just lay extra hard into the old Speed TR and pass it. It was amazing – like some kind of drug. I felt great flying along there, safer and more in control than normally. As I crossed the bridge, a motorcycle with two beautiful Vietnamese women on it pulled up alongside me. The one riding on the back turned to me and smiled, giving me a peace symbol, and yelling something in Vietnamese through the wind and engine noise. I felt like a character in Easy Rider, raging through the noise of motors, smiling and interacting with my fellow traffic. I was in a world without cars, where two-wheeled vehicles ruled the road. Ah, Hanoi, one of my favorite cities yet.

On the other side I pulled over to wait for Scott. He pulled up seconds later, looking similarly ecstatic. We were back in Hanoi. There was still light left; we’d made it and we knew where we were.

We wheeled back to our hotel taking only one wrong turn that put us onto this giant street full of even more motorcycles than before. Perhaps the immensity of it is best communicated using video and photography.

Once we finally made our way back to the Hotel Liberty, we decided to stop at a nearby place for a glass of Bia Hoi. It was the perfect beverage for the end of a wheel. Mellow and malty, cool, not too sweet, and not too alcoholic. As soon as we saw it, we knew the place. It was a grubby open-air curbside beer joint. There were about 20 men there already, all Vietnamese and between the ages of 35 and 65.

As soon as we sat down, we made friends with one of them, who insisted not only on buying our beers, but also in introducing us to his extended family, talking to us in English, Chinese, and Russian, and also leading me by the hand to the bathroom.

After finishing our beers and bidding our friend goodbye, we climbed back on the Speed TRs to look for a restaurant. Without needing to wheel too long we came upon a jam-packed restaurant that emitted the most delightful smells.

We sat down to a feast and took special pleasure in engaging in a fair bit of shtick with our surly but adorable waitress.

We crawled our way through Vietnam on the Reunification Express. At times I found myself unable to do anything but stare transfixed out the window.

Vietnam has a great piece of land. Really it does. It snakes along the entire eastern coast of southeast Asia like some great dragon, with mountains, productive plains, and biologically rich coastline.

The train line gives a most flattering view of this country, which already needs no flattering to be impressive.

Our compartment had emptied out early that morning, so for most of the day Scott and I had the place to ourselves. Eventually, a woman appeared, nervously offering us fruit. We refused a few times, and then accepted, to her great delight. The fruit was great. I believe it was durian, or another variety from that glorious family of gym-bag/fruit hybrids.  Then she revealed some sliced dragon fruit, which proved particularly tasty.

This woman kept returning to our bunk from time to time. Soon we began to suspect that she was, in fact,  a new bunk mate. We quickly rearranged our belongings to make room for her. She seemed to confirm our assumptions by sitting down, and we began attempts to communicate our welcome to her, offering food from our bag (all of which she refused), and posing together with her for a team picture.

The picture may have been a step too far, though it came from a kind place, for she began to blush uncontrollably and scampered off. She did reappear again and again, however, throughout our journey, mostly to offer us more fresh produce (sweet corn, dragon fruit, bananas, cucumbers). We felt bad about scaring her earlier, and did not want to eat her out of house and home, but at the same time she was pushing the food quite vehemently on us. We did our best to walk that line, leaving some food behind for her. But we never saw her eat.

Then all of a sudden, night was falling and she was still nowhere to be seen. The woman had been absent for some time. We never saw her again, though her plastic bag of fruit stayed with us for the next day or so.  To supplement the fruit, we ordered some of the tasty train food offered by the kitchen.

At about 11:00 pm, just as we were crawling into bed, a group of elderly Vietnamese people with tons of luggage made their way into our compartment. It turns out they were to be our bunk mates for the night, and were none too keen on our monopolization of the under-the-bunk storage. It was no easy task, but with some reorganization we were able to get everyone’s luggage into the compartment, and soon all concerned were once again asleep while the old magic carpet made of steel drew ever closer to Hanoi.