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Leaving Us Wanting More

Reunited with Scott, I found China quite a bit easier to navigate. It was empowering to have wheeled such a vast distance and overcome such a potentially breakdown inducing experience all alone in this chaotic and mysterious place they call China, but I was happy to relax into the comfort of Scott handling the communications department again, and even more so a bed at the maze-like Qingdao hotel that Scott had arranged for us.  The civil engineering of Qingdao had been masterminded by the Germans, who slipped in a number of gothic cathedrals and narrow zig-zagging streets.  The Germans controlled Qingdao from the late 1800s until the English and the Japanese ganged up during World War I and kicked them out, giving it an uncanny european feel.  Our  hotel had taken a cue from this design, requiring numerous staircases and rounded corners reminiscent of an M.C. Escher painting drenched in pastels to reach our room.  Where they found the artworks on the wall and the chartreuse wallpaper was anyone’s guess.

The next morning, we packed up our belongings and strapped them to the Speed TRs for the last time on the Chinese mainland. As we road through the winding European style roads of Qingdao towards the ferry terminal, I felt a tinge of regret at not having enough time to properly wheel this town (together at least). I imagined this city must look somewhat like Communist Germany did during the cold war, with it’s blend of soviet blocky buildings, and ornate turn of the century European ones. There were big clock towers, and even a steeple or two. This made sense, in a way, given Qingdao’s teutonic heritage.

Perhaps due to the German influence, Qingdao had a little of that beloved Bia Hoi culture that we’d so enjoyed in North Vietnam. Most restaurants proudly displayed a number of empty beer kegs outside their buildings, as if advertising how crazy things could get inside, and luring customers in with a 30 cent lukewarm draft.  Of course, the eponymous Qingdao (or Tsingtao) beer, China’s most popular, is brewed in the area.  Needless to say, the citizens are proud.

It was barely noon by the time we arrived at the ferry terminal, sweating in the growing heat and the oceanside humidity, and we were thrilled to roll our bikes into an air conditioned terminal, filled with well to do Chinese and Korean nationals, preparing for the Karaoke and Soju filled journey across the sea to the Korean port of Incheon. The not-to-scale map hanging above the officer’s resting quarters confirmed we were in the right place.

We picked over the heaps of checked luggage (cervical vertebrae retractors are predicted to be huge this year) and searched for the correct counter from which to extract our paper tickets.   As we produced them, we flashed back quickly to those morning sessions in Mongolia spent speaking broken chinese over Skype to the ticket booking office, and the relief of receiving email confirmation that tickets were indeed booked.

This we did with minimal stress, interfacing with a woman in a luminous blue uniform, and an impossibly tight bun of hair. After confirming that we could indeed take our cycles onto the boat and legally store them in our 50 person communal bunk area, we headed out to buy snacks and eat a quick meal before settling into life on the open sea.

We got a couple of draft beers (when else is Qingdao a local brew?) and some rice noodle soup from one of the aformentioned vendors, located down the street from the ferry terminal. By this point the humidity was quite high, and the day was looking to be a stifling one. We had lost some of our heat endurance, spending the last 4 months traipsing the fridged north of Asia, and found ourselves positively soaked in sweat as we waited for our food to arrive.  It was glorious.

The soup was excellent and quite cheap, full of kelp, big chunks of pork and a soft tofu. We had definitely entered a new culinary micro-climate here in Qingdao, which I would have liked very much to better explore, but AsiaWheeling waits for no man.

Our departure from China was smooth, enjoyable even, and we stocked up on a few extra snacks in the duty free zone, rendering us so laden with items that claiming the gangway with our many shopping bags, packs, and fully loaded Speed TRs was a source of entertainment for all around us.

As we settled into our quarters, a mischievous fog closed in around the boat, and with it a pensive melancholy befell its passengers.

Scott and I chatted about the shipping industry and the enormous Chinese demand for all manner of things as the fog swallowed the port of Qingdao behind us.

This, we would come to find, was not the Karaoke and booze filled cruise that we had experienced when we had taken an analogous ride on AsiaWheeling 1.0.

Coming across the main stairwell full of clocks, we fastidiously set our timepieces to match our destination.

A storm whipped up around us and rain and wind hammered our fair ship and she struggled her way across the yellow sea. Passengers were grumpy and vomited frequently into the specialized vomit receptacles in the on board bathroom.

We wandered the ship, attempting to join wireless networks, and plugging cat 5 cables into dubious Ethernet jacks. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that there was no internet to be had on this vessel. To make matters worse, though some error in our calculations, we managed to miss the small window of dinner service on the boat, and found ourselves forced to subsist on the many salted and fishy snacks we had brought from Chinese duty free, supplemented of course by some Korean treats from the on-board 7-Eleven.

Reunited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Marines And Missed Trains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where was Scott?!

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

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

Ans so I let it leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ok, Man. I hear you.”

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

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

“So we’re taking it there?” I asked.

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

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

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

中文翻译:

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

非常感谢。

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I replied.

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

“yes” (sir)

“Are you a US citizen or national?”

“”Indeed.”

“Hold on a minute.”

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

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

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

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

“Fair enough,” I said, and I hung up.

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

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

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

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

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

“What happens now on your side, I asked”

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

“Of course,” I replied.

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

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

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

Here’s the message:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s on a train to Qingdao.”

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

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

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

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

“Where did he park his bicycle, then?”

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

He got on the train. Wild.

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

“Hi, it’s me again.”

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

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

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

“Ah. No no. All is well.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

California Beef Noodle King USA

Our train to Harbin arrived plenty early in the morning, and we attracted quite the crowd as we unfolded our bikes on the platform, strapping bags down, and generally preparing to wheel.  It was a big station, this one, built in part by the Russians. Harbin is the terminus of another one of the three trans-eurasian trains. The Trans-Mongolian (which we rode) terminates in Ulaanbaatar, the trans-Manchurian terminates here in Harbin, and the famed trans-Siberian terminates in far eastern Vladivostok. So it was out into a giant open Soviet-style parade ground that wheeled after being released from the immense building. We spotted a place called “California Beef Noodle King USA” and decided that we might as well stop in there.
It seemed no meal during AsiaWheeling’s northern China chapter would be complete without the ubiquitous cucumber dish, so we ordered that and a couple of bowls of the house noodles.We also noticed that they had Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on tap… that must have been the “USA” part of the place.

With noodles in our stomachs now to fuel us, we headed back into the city, and began wheeling in search of a hotel. Hotels were abundant, but for one reason or another, it took us quite a few tries to hit one that satisfied all our criteria: cheap, in-room Ethernet, and a window. While they did not end up being places for us to stay, the initial hotels that we stopped into were certainly quite interesting. If there was any Russian influence left in this city (and we hadn’t seen much so far) it might have been detectable in Harbin’s “concept first” approach to hotels and restaurants, most of which were quite grand and strange.

 We finally did find a place, of course… and what a place it was! The establishment was called the “Elephant Motel” and it was a very 1970s, with angular plastic shapes, and colored in the orange, cream, and dark brown of yesteryear. It even sported included breakfast, which was not common at all in China.

We threw our things down, and headed downstairs to hop on the cycles. We wheeled away from the hotel, over a bridge underneath which a large canal ran. Not long after the canal, we spotted a Baozi (steamed pork-bun) joint, and decided we might run in and eat a quick few of whatever was hot. It was definitely the right choice, for they ended up being the tastiest of the entire trip.

From there, we wheeled on, out of the urban center and into a district of brand new, modern high rise apartment buildings. There was another canal running through this section of apartment blocks, except that this one was mostly dried up, and there seemed to be people working or harvesting something out of it. It seemed interesting enough to warrant lugging the Speed TRs down into the canal and wheeling it. We rode for a while, and the further we went, the larger the puddles of water became. Eventually we ran into a few people who were harvesting some kind of lifeform from the muck. We did our best to question them as to a more in-depth explanation of their work, but they were busy, and Scott’s Chinese was not quite good enough to collect the rushed full explanation of what they were doing. So I guess this encounter must be placed firmly in the “speculation is invited in the comments” section.

So we wheeled on, using the canal as a kind of bumpy puddle riddled highway. Eventually, the puddles began to converge and then it was suddenly no longer a dry canal, but one filled wall to wall with water, so we hauled the bikes back up onto a pathway that ran alongside the canal. The path was nice, and nearly completely empty for the kilometers that we rode on it.

It dumped us out into a kind of pedestrian square, with a large statue showing the globe being pierced by some kind of a savage halberd. You guess is as good as ours, and most welcome in the comments, as to what’s being communicated by this one.

From the park, we headed back onto a larger road. It felt good to be wheeling in real China again. Beijing had been like an price-inflated, calmed down, slightly neutered version of the China that we’d come to know and love in Cities like JianShui, Urumqi, and Hohhot. Now we were wheeling with the people again, like this lady, transporting a giant load of flattened out cardboard boxes.

We were up north again and was starting to get cold, but also we were up north again so there was plenty more light left in the day. This could mean only one thing: leather jackets wheeling. So we stopped back by the Elephant Motel to pick up our leather jackets, and headed back out into the fray of the extended northern sunset.

We passed a huge ferris wheel and continued to pedal on into new parts of the city. As we pedaled, we began to realize: this place was big. It was not quite as densely populated as some of the other Chinese cities that we’d visited, but it certainly managed to make up for it in terms of being vast, confusing, and spread out.  Unlike most chinese cities, it was neither gridlike nor structured with ring-roads. We continued to wheel through a pollutant-scattered sunshine haze, into one neighborhood, then through it and into the next.

We stopped to snack a little when we spotted a woman grilling up skewered sausages, and painting them with spicy sauce. She would grill the sausages, which honestly seemed pretty much impervious to the little charcoal fire that she had, then scrape them off the of the spit, and stab them with a chopstick, to be served up lollypop-style.

Now that we’d started eating, we realized we were a little hungrier than just one sausage lollipop could fix, so we purchased a few other things: a meat filled Chinese pastry, and a kind of egg roti that was being cooked up by a particularly grizzled fellow on the street.

We strolled around munching hungrily on what we’d gotten, and poking around in amongst all the goods that were being sold curbside.

Once we’d finished the food, we climbed back on the cycles, and continued in the same direction, passing some fellow wheelers who were really putting the “full” in “fully loaded”.

As we approached the outskirts of town, we began to notice things getting decidedly more raw, and the general level of filth began to spike upwards. Soon the tall buildings of the city were replaced with squat little shops and sprawling outdoor markets. We stopped at one of the larger intersections to catch our breath, which was none too easy so thick was the air with industrial pollutants and truck exhaust. While we were doing so, we spotted a road heading off to our right that appeared to be closed down for construction. But there were certainly people walking and wheeling the thing, so we decided it might be interesting to join them.

We hoisted our bikes over the barriers, and past a giant semi carrying metal piping parked right next to a huge pile of plastic sacks filled with chili peppers. There were stray dogs poking and scratching at the sacks of chillies, which I found particularly impressive since even from a distance the scent of chillies was very strong, even tearing the eyes a little. Were these dogs, then, also immune to pepper spray? Speculation is invited in the comments.

The street we wheeled along was fantastic. It turned out to be the connector between that part of Harbin and a small nearby town, which seemed to have sprung up as a home for workers in the nearby agricultural and industrial operations. We had no problem weaseling the speed TRs through the construction zone, once we hit it, and right on the other side we were awarded by discovering the factory that produces that same Chinese Kvas that we had decided not to purchase in Beijing. The smell of yeast and grain was very strong as we rode by, which an almost soy sauce like tartness to it.

The sun was beginning to set as we rolled by lush farmlands and crumbling villages, but the dusk light hung around for a while, making it easier to navigate our way back towards the city center. When we passed a giant metal piping and rebar sales yard, we couldn’t resist heading in to investigate.

The yard was huge, and filled to the brim with every kind of steel piping or bar that anyone could ever want, and we took great pleasure in piloting the speed TRs around it.  For a split second, we reflected how there were such few industrial yards  in the developed world that would be open enough for two curious mustachioed young men to investigate freely on bicycle.

Back on the road into Harbin, we were becoming increasingly unsure of our location and how to get home from there. We’d made it back into the city, but the city was gigantic, and it always felt like we were just a block or two away from somewhere that we’d recognize. We stopped multiple times to ask for directions, but the pedestrians were not very helpful, pointing us only vaguely onwards.

We stopped when we rode past a grocery store which which had hired a rapper spitting freestyle Mandarin to help coax customers in.

As the last bits of daylight finally fled the sky, we were still nowhere near our hotel. And so we wheeled on, asking for directions from time to time, and doubling back on ourselves plenty. The people of Harbin were very kind, and more than happy to give us their best idea of how to get back to the hotel, but we had learned now to trust only in the Indian system of polling many people and making a decision based on the group consensus.

In the meantime, the temperature was perfect for the leather jackets, and the wheeling was still feeling good as we paused at a stoplight next to this fellow wheeler who was transporting large metal frames. Wheel safe brother.

We finally got back to the hotel ravenously hungry. the small snacks that we’d eated had long since been turned into tire and break-pad wear, and we were excited to head out in search of more food. We headed onto a street that had no pavement, just a large wash of sand near our hotel, and soon found a restaurant, right across from where a family was burning their garbage in the street.

The food was, of course, amazing, and we stayed until it was only us and the staff chatting about what a fascinating city we were in.

Glimpses of Beijing

We were in luck the next day, for that international chiller, Mr. Stewart “Stigg” Motta, was in Beijing as well, preparing some fresh greenhorns to be taken out on wild adventure through Inner Mongolia and Qinghai. We were able to meet up with him for brunch at a fantastic Beijing-style restaurant where we ate under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao.

We ordered more of that fresh cucumber dish, which Motta was quick to point out to us is not as good here in the north as it is in Yunnan, for they they dilute the purity of the dish by adding hot peppers. I’ve never been one to complain of excess hot peppers, but I had to agree that there was something not quite perfect about this iteration of the dish.

In addition to that, we ate a large messy dish of cabbage with bean sauce, a mixed mushrooms and broccoli dish, and a dried mushrooms and bok choy dish. It was a very vegetable heavy breakfast, which was exactly what we needed having traveled for so long in lands where green vegetables were few and far between. We were sorry to not get to spend more time with the man, and embraced warmly before wheeling off.

We spent the rest of that day, wheeling around Beijing, comparing potential venues for our upcoming talk, which we had tentatively entitled “Choosing Freedom”.  MCK met us and guided us around to the possible locations of our presentation which he had in mind, starting in the posh San Li Tun district.

Our tour of potential venues certainly cemented one thing in our minds, Beijing was doing just fine , packed with expensive and posh places to bring a bunch of people together to discuss issues of Honesty, Freedom, and of course, Wheeling.

This city was also positively flooded with foreigners. As we wandered through modern-art-strewn, high concept bars and hotels, we could not help but find ourselves mildly disappointed, having for so long enjoyed the spotlight of being an uncommon sighting.  In Buryatia, people raised an eyebrow at us – we were just two more gweilos.

That night, we ate with MCK at a DongBei Restaurant.

MCK had been living in China for a number of years by this point, and his Chinese was top notch. During the ordering process, he began doing shtick with the waitress, refusing to tell her where we were all from, and asking her to guess. She first guessed France, but then hit America. I can see where she was coming from with the French I guess though.

It was another greens-heavy meal, with a garlicky squid and greens dish, a large plate of pickled bamboo, and some small, deep-fried fish, which we dipped in a kind of plum salt.

We realized as we were eating that we could have instantly solved any misconceptions about our nationality by just keeping the Maui Jims on throughout the meal. MCK in particular seemed now just one leather jacket short of being a serious chiller.

We spent a fair amount of our days in Beijing working on correspondence for you, dear reader, and preparing our talk on choosing freedom.

But we were able to get a little wheeling in each day, and to eat some fantastic food. So forgive me if I only relate some of the highlights:

Take for instance this, the symbol for Yong Jin bicycle company. If only one day we could have a company with a symbol that savage.

We ate a meal of Guangxi food, which delicious, including these fried rolls of pork fat, fried eggplant slices which we dipped in vinegary, chutney-like sauce, and some very loud and tasty dandelion greens.

We had a wonderful evening with a Grinnellian who we were introduced to through the Taiwan bureau. When I was first met Maggie, she spoke to me like we knew each other, and indeed her face looked familiar but I couldn’t remember from where. Then it all came rushing back to me, once she mentioned that she had built a dress out of feminine waste disposal sleeves and my mother had purchased it to hand in our living room in Iowa.

Along that same dresses-made-of-unconventional-materials vein, we also encountered this dress made of broken pottery near Mesh, the wine bar where we decided to give the presentation.

We were also able to do our first “dinking” of the trip on the Speed TRs. “Dinking” is, of course, a technical term for when you transport an extra person on the back of your cycle. Now in all technicality, some dinking had happened in Uzbekistan, but that had been during a time when the bike had been commandeered by a rogue pottery saleswoman.

We also went to the Russian district of Beijing, where they have a giant embassy and a few Produktis and Traktirs. We even considered for a moment buying some of this Chinese made Kvas, but it was the color of Urine, so we purchased Baltika beer instead.

We ate at the “White Nights” restaurant in Beijing which served up some very interesting interpretations of Russian food.

We also stopped in to Beijing Sidecar, the business run by Nils, the Danish fellow we met in a Hutong when we were last in Beijing.

His shop was quite amazing, and we ran into his associate, who we were not surprised at all to find was riding a Dahon to work. We even got to witness the proud new owner of a giant sidecar motorcycle come it to give it a first ride. We were sorry, however, to learn that Nils had had an accident and was actually back in Europe recovering in a hospital. We send our best wishes, brother.

The morning before we left for Harbin, we went strolling through a kind of hutong turned posh shopping neighborhood, where advertisements like this one for a laptop pretty well sum up the vibe.

We had one last meal in Beijing at a popular looking Sichuan restaurant. We made some mistakes in ordering, and ended up buying a giant and expensive fish, which was brought out to us flopping and live, in order to prove how fresh it was.

But perhaps the mistake was in our favor, for it was strikingly tasty, and served up in a huge chafing dish, just sizzling in oil and nestled in chili peppers.

And then we were off, racing through the steamy night, rolling fully loaded towards the train station. As we were rode, we were becoming decreasing startled by the presence of Brooklyn hipster-types on fixed gear cycles, riding amidst the traffic. Beijing was a shockingly globalized city.

During our time in Beijing, the crystal clear air that we’d wheeled through the first day, had steadily degraded the longer we spent, and as we rode now, sweating, and whipping along, the Beijing pollutant haze that we’d experienced our first time in the city had returned, giving the city a hazy and mystical feeling to it.

The Original Hot Pot

We woke up the next morning to find it still raining in Hohhot. Either it did not rain much here, which would make the flooding and torrents of muck filling the streets much more forgivable, it was that whenever it rained in this city everything just became a shockingly filthy mess. The streets turn to mud pits and each puddle seems a lurking disease vector. Just our kind of place.

Meanwhile, we’d been hard at work in our hotel room, churning away on correspondence for you, dear reader. When we spotted a break in the rain, we headed out with the goal of catching something easy and quick near the hotel, but as happens so often in China, we became fascinated with our surroundings and started strolling, which was worth it if for nothing else than to get to see a little girl wheeling around on an amazing device, something like a cross between a bicycle and a rollerblade.

We also found lunch, in a very crowded restaurant a few blocks over from our hotel.

We ordered a savage feast of boiled dumplings, fried eggplant, and Inner Mongolian meat and potatoes.

While we were eating, it began pouring outside, so we ran back to the hotel to wait out the rain.

When it looked like it might have let up for a bit we headed out again on the bicycles. As soon as we started wheeling, though, the skies open up once again. There was only one choice here: rain gear. And so we called a waypoint at a corner shop and purchased two large cyclist’s ponchos.

The Chinese have really mastered the cyclist’s poncho by designing a product which can be worn not just by the human being, but also by the cycle itself. You see, the front and back flaps of the Chinese cyclists poncho are enlarged so as to allow the user to place the front part over the handlebars of his cycle, turning he or she into a kind of waterproof bullet train on two wheels with a head sticking out the top.

Now armed with rain gear, we commenced some really serious wheeling, which sent us all over the city, getting completely lost, in the back alleys and muck filled streets of Hohhot.

The rain did let up by the time we were finishing the wheel, though, and allowed us to get out the camera once again here in a giant park dedicated to Chengis Khan, who unsurprisingly is also quite popular here.

From there, we wheeled on into the night, taking advantage of our new Chinese headlights, which were startlingly bright. We realized that we were hungry right outside of a very popular looking hot pot restaurant. Inner Mongolia is rumored to be the original home of hot pot, so we decided to give it a try.

The restaurant turned out to be absolutely jaw dropping, Each order hot pot was brought out with a variety of dipping sauces including chili pastes and thick sesame butter based condiments. After that the hot pot proceeds more or less as normal. Here however, the hot pot itself was particularly old school. It was a kind of all in one hot pot vessel, consisting of a round, hammered copper, exterior bowl, and a large cylindrical interior chamber which was filled with hot coals. The coals then boiled the water, and also heated up the edges of the chimney which could be taken advantage of by power users to fry little bits of meat.

As good as the hot pot were the people with whom we shared the restaurant. We were surrounded by some serious Hohhot ballers, most of whom seemed to be out to dinner on the company’s dime and determined to go for the wall.

Outshticked

We woke up our first morning in Hohhot and began by feasting on the ethernet connection, just sitting there in the room, drinking cup after cup of Nescafe, which we whitened with some bizarre Chinese sweetened milk. We were coming up with some interesting ideas for a presentation that we planned to give in Beijing, but once the rumble in our stomachs became too loud, we shut our laptops down and grabbed the bicycles.  We hit the streets of Inner Mongolia’s capital.

Outside, the city of Hohot was grey and inviting, churning with traffic, noise and filth in all its monstrous glory.  In reality the population of Ulaanbaatar might have been larger, but there was a feel to these Chinese cities, a certain rushed feeling to the pedestrians, an ugency in the voices of the street vendors. It was intoxicating.  It was China.

The first thing we did was get on the cycles and head towards the train station. We had every intention of snagging a ticket on a train sometime in the next few days to the northern Chinese city of Harbin. When we got to the train station, we found the place to be a total madhouse, with lines stretching well past the metal barriers designed to prevent cutting, and plenty of hurried and grumpy people hoping to get a seat on such and such train before it sold out.

You see, dear reader, we’d made a bit of a miscalculation and arrived in China during the mid-autumn moon festival. This meant we’d be trying to get around the place just at the time when all its transportation systems are strained to the breaking point with people heading home to celebrate the harvest. We, for instance, waited in two different lines for 40 minutes to find unsurprisingly that only hard seats were left on all the trains to Harbin. 16 hours overnight on a hard seat is doable… We’re not above it, mind you.. oh we’ve seen worse… but at least we thought we might as well check out the busses before resigning ourselves to such torture.

The bus situation turned out to be even worse. There were actually no busses originating here and terminating in Harbin. If we wanted to get there, we’d need to change in some intermediary city, making the entire trip way too long and tiresome for even your two callused correspondents.

So we decided to improvise. Standing right there in the bus depot, we reshuffled the AsiaWheeling Northern China Itinerary, switching Beijing and Harbin, and thus adding in on very long train trip (from Harbin to Qingdao), and solving the probelem. And with that, we bought tickets on a bus to Beijing, and walked away brushing our hands together.

There was of course the presentation that we’d been working on for Beijing as well, so the next thing we did was to get on the phone with our dear friend MCK, who would be helping us arrange for the event to confirm the days that we’d be there. The new dates seemed to work for him, so all was falling into place.

Now it was high time to eat something, so we headed over to a Uighur noodles joint, and ordered two big bowls of spicy lamb noodles, and a few kababs. Central Asian food, Ya Habibbi, with Chinese noodles.

Filled once again with noodles, the true fuel of AsiaWheeling, we were taking to the streets in a way he hadn’t in some time. We were back in a city where the traffic speed was low, where the drivers were used to having cycles on the road, and where the city was designed with wheelers in mind.  In fact, I might even go as far as to say that Hohhot had the highest concentration of wheelers we’d encountered on the entire trip.

The city was overcast, but very comfortable, and we whipped along the large sidewalk/bike lanes, snaking around trees and generally enjoying the increased nimbleness one gets when riding a cycle with 20 inch wheels. Like Mongolia, Inner Mongolia is a Buddhist region of China, and we passed by not a few temples as we wheeled.

We also passed by some even more interesting sights, like this huge pile of freshly painted blue cycle rickshaws.

When we spotted a flashlight shop, we stopped. Our bikes had been too long without lights, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to rectify the situation. Scott bonded quickly with the owners, and by the time we had narrowed it down to a couple of savage miner’s headlamps, they were already practically giving the headlamps to us as gifts.

With the new headlamps bagged up and strapped onto the backs of our bicycles, we headed out into some of the more remote parts of Hohhot to do a little exploring.

The road we were riding on terminated directly into this giant pile of raw coal,

at which point we were forced to take a left. The left took us along a particularly trash strewn sewage creek , which we continued follow.

Even the path on which we rode, which ran along the creek, seemed to be constructed mostly of filth and many multicolored old plastic bags.

That path of garbage lead us back out onto a main street, where people were whipping by, carrying all kinds of goods in that way that you only really find in China

We took a right on that rode and rode it as far as it would go. When eventually forced to turn, we took a right, wheeling on past a School which was farming corn and raising sheep in the side lot, I hoped as part of the education of the children.

Not long after the sheep, we found ourselves at another large Buddhist temple. This one was huge and stark white with a gold stupa. There were a system of paths around it, so we decided to circumnavigate the thing, which was only partially successful, dumping us out onto the other side of the block where there was yet another large temple, or perhaps it was a palace, outside of which a group of men had set up a little campsite out of cloth and baskets and were the process of burning garbage in the street. We could not quite tell if they were burning the trash to produce heat (it was not particularly cold) or to get rid of it. Regardless, it was producing an acrid smoke that soon pushed us to leave.

We then found ourselves in a new “old style” housing development, where we purchased a few of those delicious jars of yak yoghurt and a couple bottles of water.

As we were sipping it, a woman came by to do shtick with us in Chinese. Scott did his best to hold his own, but as you can see by her smile, Scott was outshticked.

And with the outschticking came the rain. It poured down on us as we hurried to get back to the hotel before we were so thoroughly soaked as to wipe the stamps out of our passports, which we were still carrying in our pockets, so fresh we were from the post soviet world. As I rode through the wet streets, I skidded against some slick stones and fell off my bike. I was fine, and so was the cycle, but it marked an important moment: the first time I’d ever fallen off my Speed TR. Let’s hope it’s the last as well.

Adventure Capitalist’s Notes: Hong Kong

Hong Kong has built its reputation as a city famous for transacting business.  Both an active market itself, and the great gateway to China,  the city boasts a fantastic cast of commercial characters.  During our time there, I met with a few old friends who are working on various ventures, in capacities ranging from entrepreneurial chief executive to dogged analyst in the largest transactions the global financial markets have ever seen.

Robert Neville – California Wine Supply

Rob, an eminent entrepreneur, rugby player, Brown alum, and childhood friend spends his time developing a business, California Wine Supply. He imports wine from our native California to the Hong Kong market.  Initially planning on selling to mainland China, Rob has chosen to start with the local market as a healthy foundation for the business.  Now his considerations range from logistics (how does one transport 20 cases of temperature-sensitive wine across the Pacific Ocean), to judging local tastes, to engineering price-points palatable for restaurants and retail, and securing available capital.  Luckily, regulations are on his side, as the import taxes on wine in Hong Kong have dropped considerably recently, allowing him a fantastic opportunity to build a new market.  What’s more, the most natural way he saw to market himself – social media – has become the darling medium of the consumer world.

Cool, calm, and collected, Rob serendipitously found himself in the position of the Social Media King of Hong Kong wine by releasing admittedly hilarious wine tasting videos from his time in Hong Kong and Shanghai.  Furthermore his Twitter feed attracts followers of the Hong Kong wine scene, and earned him a spot as an organizer of the Hong Kong Tweetfest and as the social media guru for upcoming wine shows in city.

What kind of an appetite will Hong Kong, and eventually mainland China, have for California wine?  In a market dominated by French vineyards, it will take a bold character like Rob to innovate and produce a product for sophisticated consumers.  Some prototypes now include blended varietals inspired by European tastes from regions in California previously wedded to wines consisting of single grape stocks.  Packaging too, he claims, could use a revamp, as that’s how most buyers, in conjunction with price, choose a wine.  Imagine a single piece of duct tape in place of the front label:  title optional, with only regulatory labeling on the rear.  Whatever the market demands, he’ll no doubt imagine and engender a set of imaginative solutions.

Mr. Josh Z. – Banker Extraordinaire

Mr. Z has quite a different approach to his career than Mr. Neville.  Mr. Z worked tireless summers in New York and Hong Kong during Brown University summer breaks at the finest investment banks in the business.  Upon graduating, he turned down admission to Stanford’s graduate school to take a job with China International Capital Corporation (en中文), the Beijing-based state-owned investment bank that co-underwrites IPOs for major Chinese corporations.  There, under a strenuous schedule, he worked on the initial public offering of the Agricultural Bank of China, which, if the bank chooses to exercise their full offering of shares, will be the largest IPO in history.

Completing that, he was poached by a global top-tier investment bank to work in Hong Kong under a senior advisor responsible for taking some of the most venerable firms in Silicon Valley (like Amazon, Google, and Cisco) public.  At this new bank, he takes responsibility for a swath of clients in the technology and media space, most of which are Chinese variants of western Internet super-phenomenons.  Curiously, these firms choose to go public as the successful firms of Web 1.0 did, while the largest western players in Web 2.0 tend to get acquired or stay private.

We met at his offices in Central and hustled over to a street of Lan Kwai Fong.  There, we sat down at the Luk Yu Tea House, one of the last surviving in Hong Kong with interiors ornately decorated in the Old Shanghai style.

After ordering an array of mouth-watering dishes, he began to describe the professional life that was now his own.

His schedule:

  • Monday to Wednesday: Work in office from 10:00 am to 5:00 am
  • Thursday: Fly early morning to Beijing to meet with clients; fly to Shanghai in evening.
  • Thursday night: No sleep – prepare meeting materials for the clients in Shanghai.
  • Friday: Meet with Shanghai client; fly to Hong Kong in evening
  • Saturday and Sunday: In the office from 1:00 pm to midnight, catching up on sleep while not at work

What exactly does he do during these many working hours?  Model financial statements, produce pitch books, proofread, prepare filings with regulators, and author massive investment prospectuses.  As we spoke, he punched away on his Blackberry, communicating with high-quality, highly confidential printers in Hong Kong and on the mainland whom the firm would pay $100,000 to print 10,000 three fingers books.  Some of these IPOs, he mentions, generate $1,000,000 in fees for printers alone.  “I should be in the printing business,” he quips.  Quite amazingly, these printers will reprint the prospectuses again and again for the bank if any changes need to be made in the text.

He admits that it’s putting a tremendous amount of stress on him, letting his body and social life deteriorate.  He flies first class on Cathay Pacific every week, and stays at the nicest five-star hotels in the cities where he travels, but he couldn’t care less about those perks.  Without much entrepreneurial freedom, and mostly fighting exhaustion, he quizzes me on start-up life and on getting involved with high-tech ventures.  While tense to witness, Mr. Z is admittedly making history, taking gigantic Chinese banks public and participating in the IPOs of the most notable Chinese tech companies.  It’s bankers like Mr. Z who empower entrepreneurs, their customers, and their users by providing providing the ultimate liquidity of a public stock offering.  China needs people like him, supporting these entrepreneurs in high-technology, high risk ventures.  Where he will go next? To the start-up side, or to the investment buy-side? It is yet to be seen, though we will no doubt revisit him on AsiaWheeling 3.0 as he continues to seize his destiny.

Ben Rudick – Doing Good and Doing Well

I originally met Mr. Ben Rudick by inviting him and Mr. Nathan Wyeth to join Woody and me for dinner in Tokyo at the delicious Korean yakiniku restaurant Ton Ton Tezi.  At this restaurant, the plate that fries the meat is slanted, with meat upstream and cabbage at the bottom of slant, thus coating the vegetable in delicious fatty oil.  In Hong Kong, we met for lunch, and I snapped this portrait of him outside his office in central, joking that he needed a photo for the back of his book cover.

At the time, Ben and Nathan were working for the Shoenfeld Foundation identifying projects for investment in the social enterprise space.  Now in Hong Kong, Ben is focusing much of his effort on being director of the program for “Empowering Chinese Social Enterprise Leaders” (ECSEL) This fantastic program provides full scholarships in the U.S. for young Chinese social entrepreneurs to develop their businesses and engender positive change.  The program was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009. Pictured below are two of the 30 scholarship winners, Jingji Zhang and Wang Jun, next to Ben Rudick, Bill Clinton, and Bill Shoenfeld (of his eponymous foundation).

Ben’s efforts continue to grow in the social enterprise space, with future possibilities for investment and further cultivation of Chinese social entrepreneurs.  Graciously, Ben provided some invaluable advice for my own ketchup business over don-katsu lunch from the delicious cafeteria in ThreeSixty (more below), and for this I am forever grateful.

Beyond these fascinating characters, there are a few other phenomena in Hong Kong worthy of an Adventure Capitalist mention.

Pick Your Poison – Signing with Currency Choice

My blue polo shirt became stained, ripped, and eventually lost at some point on AsiaWheeling and thus I was happy to visit my favorite Japanese clothing retailer, Uniqlo, to acquire an identical one to replace it.  At the cashier, I was surprised to see a receipt in which I was to circle which currency was preferable to pay with my credit card- U.S. Dollars or Hong Kong dollars.  Before this, I had not come across this, and wondered what the value was in giving the customer this choice.

The Hong Kong Dollar is soft-pegged to the U.S. dollar, so the discrepancy in values would not be great, though I wonder if credit card issuers may add fees to purchases in foreign currencies.  Thanks to CitiBank, this was not a concern, though I encourage more hypotheses for why this system developed.

A Day at The Races

Horse racing, the only legal form of gambling in Hong Kong remains phenomenally popular among the people of the city.  Cabbies have their favorite horses and study the odds published in the sporting press, while expats attend the races to socialize and punt on random horses, and all over the world gamblers can place bets thanks to the advanced online betting system set up by the Hong Kong Jockey club which organizes the races.

I was lucky enough to be invited by a group of expats to watch a race in Happy valley, which was quite a visual experience.  Elderly ladies with FM radios gather around each other to chat, while middle aged men swill skol beer and roll up their pantlegs.  All in all, it was most definitely a spectacle to see these beasts race, as well to consider the races a a popular point for socializing among the many expats, many of them British.

Brand and Retail Evolution

Hong Kong has also gained in retail sophistication since my time studying there, and while not all the below firms are new to the city, they warrant a mention.

Aesop, a Aussie line of skin care and cosmetics that AsiaWheeling highly regards has expanded to Causeway Bay.  Their scientific  presentation, black, green and white color scheme, and codified simplicity of packaging make them a joy to behold.  The brand respects consistency as the aesthetic extends from the product, to the marketing collateral, to the retail store design.  While much less complex and developed, they rival Apple in their ability to immediately convey calming value to the onlooker.

Another is Greenfingers in central, which provides plants and accessories for home gardening with a striking aesthetic.  With all the growth in urban farming, I’m curious to know trends about houseplant purchases in cities worldwide.  I remember colleagues of mine investing in Christian Tortu designed indoor plants at Tokyo Midtown and being quite curious about the market for these beautiful inanimate green pets.

Great Food Hall, City Super and ThreeSixty are three phenomenal gourmet grocers which have also continued to grow.  Focusing on the highest quality products and shopping experience for a market increasingly conscious about a natural and organic origin of their foods.

Ketchup Adventure

Finally, it behoves me to mention much of my time in the city was spent researching how to ply the local market for the gourmet ketchup which my partners and I market primarily in the states.  Serendipitously, ketchup, a cantonese word (茄汁-khe tsɐp), actually originated in the regions surrounding Hong Kong as a fermented fish sauce.

This experience involved a wonderful creative session at a local print shop to produce our pitch book, as well as meetings with retailers and distributors which led me all across the city.

From riding the trams of Admiralty, to meandering the midlevels, to late-night meetings in private clubs while wearing Sri Lankan sandals (the only shoes I owned), the adventure was a fantastic success in dipping into our first market abroad.

Refueling in Hong Kong

As it did during the pilot study, Hong Kong played the role of refueling station, a place for breathing, recouping, and preparing for the second half of the trip. And, as was the case during the pilot study, it rained most of our time there.

Though if I were to use the rain as an excuse for the fact that our cycles spent most of their time rusting on the balcony of our gorgeous apartment, I would be lying.  Most of our time was spent on foot, in fact, and much of it even apart, as I wandered the city with my mother and John, and Scott caught up with his many friends in the old British Colony.

So please forgive your humble correspondents for fast forwarding through a few days spent wandering through rainy city streets, folding and unfolding umbrellas, dashing in and out of shops, purchasing much-needed goods, and generally replenishing body and spirit. Though perhaps during the fast forward, it might behoove me to mention a certain mission.

Hong Kong has long been famous for its tailors, and AsiaWheeling happens to subscribe to a certain Mr. William Cheng (and Sons). When not traipsing across the globe, sweating profusely, or bargaining over provisions, even your humble correspondents at times need to look sharp. And for that we look to Mr. Cheng. My mother and John had been somewhat impressed with the shirts I had procured from the man during the pilot study, and had decided to have some items of their own made. For John, a few shirts and a jacket, for my mother replicas of her favorite shirts and blouses. The mission was an eleventh hour success, culminating in Mr. Cheng sending one of his minions to our apartment to do some final measurements and last minute alterations to the garments.

And then, quite unexpectedly, it was our last night in Hong Kong.

We made reservations at a certain hot pot restaurant, which had been recommended by Scott’s friend, Rob. The place was jam-packed with people when we walked in, and a table with a large hole in the center was waiting for us. Inside the hole in the table was a burner,  and onto the burner, of course, would go a large bowl of boiling broth. We chose a split broth, half pear and fish, and half spicy Sichuan. This meant that the boiling reservoir would be split by a metal divider into two separate sections, each of which would be filled with a separate broth. We also ordered a vast array of meats and vegetables to plunge into the soup.

With the ordering done,  we headed over to a section of the restaurant where diners were encouraged to create their own dipping sauces. Here, you could choose from a wide array of oils and sauces, chopped herbs and spices, and unknown pastes. We dove in.

As is the case with most Chinese restaurants, the food came fast, and it seemed we were no sooner back from the sauce-concocting table, than the hot pot arrived, already nearly boiling. Another thing about hot pot that is particularly enjoyable is that it takes quite a bit of time to eat. We enjoyed a few hours of slowly working our way through the vegetables and meats, burning our tongues plenty on the boiling broth, and managing to splatter bits of hot oil everywhere.

As the hot pot boiled, the spicy Sichuan section began to grow increasingly intolerable. It consisted of what I believe was a pork or chicken broth with a great many floating hot peppers, and a startling kind of numbing peppercorn called Ma La (麻辣 – literally meaning numbing and spicy). It seemed that as the peppers boiled, they released an increasing amount of truly corrosive chemicals into the soup. Now, dear reader, I would be the first to challenge a fellow world traveler to a spicy food eating competition, but this soup began to get the better of even me. My stomach became a boiling furnace of spicy oil, and I too was forced to throw in the towel, switching all focus to the pear and fish broth.

It was my first defeat by a spicy dish on AsiaWheeling, and I considered it a great success. As I rode back in the cab, breathing through my fiery indigestion, I gave a solemn tip of the Panama hat to those who dared concoct such a demonic broth.

The next morning, all was well again in my stomach, and I awoke at the crack of dawn to walk my mom and John to the airport. While John packed the last of his belongings for the flight back to Iowa, my mother helped to clean a heavy coat of rust from the chains of the Speed TRs. Then we were off. As we rolled their suitcases over the uneven pavement and into the metro, I thought back on the supremely comfortable nature of travel in China. Hong Kong seemed to me the epitome of a manageable city: well-organized, predictable, easy to navigate, well stocked. And in all honesty, mainland China is not so much more difficult, especially for those who speak a little Chinese. What a fine country this was. Hong Kong had been a good introduction, but I felt that next time I needed to take them to the mainland, where the noodles and the price performance easily eclipse the old British colony.

With my mom and John safely on the airport express, I returned to the apartment to find Scott hard at work on the Internet, feasting on the last few hours of megabyte-per-second connection. Our flight was that evening at the somewhat uncivilized hour of 00:05. As a major consolation, however, it was going to be a flight on Emirates, one of AsiaWheeling’s favorite airlines. As the hour of our flight grew nearer, the sun began to sink in the sky. With a fair bit of frantic searching around the apartment to ensure that we were not leaving anything of great value behind, we once again grabbed our bags and the Speed TRs, now with freshly cleaned and lubricated chains, and headed down to the street.

We unfolded the cycles and strapped down our belongings, pulling into traffic. A constellation of one way streets continually pulled us away from our destination: the Hong Kong Central Station. An attempt to ride “subversively” as it is referred to in the latest edition of the AsiaWheeling field commands, resulted in a stern talking to by a Hong Kong police officer. No doubt had this occurred in the post-Soviet world, such an interaction would have terminated in a fine (graft). But here the policeman only politely told us to ride on the roads not the sidewalks, and to obey the same laws the cars did. This seemed reasonable, and he also explained how we could get to the station.

Hong Kong sports a large central tram-line, and it was along this that we rode. The speed of the trams is significantly slower than that of even a fully loaded wheeler, so we were easily able to use these tramways as an effective mainline to the station, ever aware of the danger of putting a wheel into the rut next to the rail.

At the central station, we checked our bags (including the Speed TRs) at a dedicated Emirates counter. The service was complimentary along with the purchase of tickets on the speedy airport express train. So with the bikes folded, padded and bagged, now in the careful hands of the folks at Emirates, we climbed onto the train. All concerned were in high spirits and excited to embark on the next chapter.

We had certainly heard many stories about Dubai. A great city, built in a matter of years out of the desert. It had been called gaudy, unsustainable, reckless, and the epitome of “Nouveau Riche.” It had also been called one of the greatest achievements of human engineering, a fascinating melting pot of cultures, and one of the most breathtaking cities in the world. Certainly, we needed to wheel it.

Welcome to Hong Kong

We awoke a little after 7:00 am, in the grungy confines of our room at the Hotel Central in Macau.

We quickly packed our things, piled them in one corner of the room, and walked out the door to find an overcast, quiet morning.

We strolled quickly around the corner to a certain pudding restaurant that we had seen the day before . Forgetting that we weren’t in China, we ordered a healthy selection of puddings, which turned out to be nearly $5.00 apiece. Blissfully unaware of the mighty expensive nature of our breakfast, we chased them down with a couple of very milky and none too caffeinated cups of coffee.

From there, we headed out, strolling in search of more coffee and information about hydrofoil rides to Hong Kong. We would need to reach Hong Kong in time to meet with a certain woman by the name of Rose. She had in her possession the key to an apartment where we would be spending the next week.

You see, dear reader, my mother was on her way to visit AsiaWheeling in the field, if you might condescend enough to consider Hong Kong “the field.” So Scott, my mother, my mother’s partner John, and I would be living in an apartment, as we took a brief pause from the trip in order to recuperate, eat non-local foods, purchase nonsense, and generally behave in an un-AsiaWheeling-esque fashion.

So with stomachs full of pudding, we climbed on the cycles, bidding a none too soon farewell to the Hotel Central. Fully loaded and bounding over the cobblestones, we pedaled off toward the ferry terminal. A slight mist began to fall as we rode, but not so intense as to greatly hamper our progress. We rode away from the casino district, along tree-lined streets, past churches, and brutalist housing projects.

There was a decidedly European feel to this new part of the city, and the farther we got from the casinos, the stronger it was. There were lines of expensive, clean, European cars parked along the side of the street, under the shade of old overhanging trees. Men and women walked their dogs and engaged in your stereotypical western Sunday morning newspaper-reading and coffee-drinking traditions. Moss-covered churches and bronze statues of men in feathered hats seemed to dot every corner.

It was Sunday, which was in this city the typical day of rest for domestic help. This meant that a great many off duty servants were also walking the streets, shopping, or carrying large picnic baskets. Many of the domestic servants in Macau and Hong Kong are from Indonesia or the Philippines, and so we would from time to time smell the delightfully telltale Indonesian clove cigarettes as we rode by parks or ethnic grocery stores.

We exited the mossy residential neighborhood and could see the ferry terminal straight ahead. In order to get there, we needed to wheel briefly against traffic. This was unusual for Macau, I guess, for despite my lack of proximity to any of the oncoming traffic, the maneuver produced a fair bit of horn honking. The terminal was quite large, and made of concrete, glass, and turquoise painted metal. Inside, we were able to buy tickets quite easily from an automated machine, though when we attempted to board we were told that additional bicycle passes were required.

Our boat was leaving in just a few moments, so it was with haste that we rushed around the station trying to find the proper place to purchase such a pass. In our hurry, we almost checked the bikes into the extended storage room, rather than onto the boat, but after a bit of sweating and running in circles, each bike was tagged with a long receipt stapled like prize ribbon onto the handlebar post, and we were admitted to a new waiting room. One of the walls of this waiting room was a giant floor-to-ceiling window, which give us a view of the rain outside.

The sea was choppy and gray. Underneath us, a rather large red hydrofoil bounced empty on the water. Soon, a buzzer indicated that it was time to board, and we joined the jostling crowd as it headed down a long gangway and onto a kind of tugboat that served as an extension of the gangway, and from this onto the hydrofoil itself.

Not many people had brought luggage large enough to require the extra tag along with them, so we had the entire forward luggage space to ourselves. This was good, for it seemed two unfolded Speed TRs and both of our packs pretty much filled it.

The ride was quick and startlingly smooth for the choppy sea. We whiled away our time reading about the history of the hydrofoil on the WikiReader, and soon arrived in Hong Kong. We were, of course, by this point starving. A man can go only so far on pudding alone.

So as we hoisted our cycles onto the many flights of escalators that were required to get up to street level, we began taking stock of our available time and constructing a plan. Before we could call Rose, we needed a SIM card, and before that we needed to eat.

To my great surprise, the street level side of the Hong Kong ferry terminal was not a large station (as one might expect for a giant passenger service), but a huge multistory shopping mall. We began walking our bikes around the mall in search of food. The wheels were wet with seawater and rain, so they made a fair bit of squeaking as we traversed the waxed tile floor, drawing all the more attention to what strange beasts we were here in the Hong Kong ferry terminal mall complex.

We finally settled on a Japanese Ramen restaurant. The workers there were kind enough to allow us to store our cycles near the computer terminal they used to manage seating and orders. We sat down and ordered the two largest bowls of Ramen we could find on the menu. Each bowl was nearly $8.00, more than we had spent on 10 bowls of noodles in China.

I waited hungrily while Scott headed off in search of an ATM. He came back laden with plenty of crisp fresh Hong Kong dollars, and shortly after that our noodles arrived. The Ramen was pretty good, not quite as good as Tan Tan Men, our favorite place in Bangkok, but very good. And even as I write now, I find my mouth watering a fair bit over a certain kind of fried gooey tofu they served in the bowl.

SIM cards were easy to find at the 7-11, though not cheap. The Chinese obsession with lucky numbers was alive and well here, and as we had noticed in the advertisements in the mall, most prices were rounded to the nearest figure that contained many eights. The SIM cards were 88 HKD, which was, by the pricing of the trip up until this point, highway robbery, but connectivity was important, so we purchased a couple.

Rose answered after only one ring. She had obviously been expecting us. She spoke very good English, and explained that she had spoken with my mother and knew all about AsiaWheeling. Her son, she explained, was an avid cyclist himself, and on the phone she offered his services as a cycling guide. We thanked her heartily, and she explained to us that it would be very easy to find the apartment. It was essentially a straight shot from the station. Between her directions and Scott’s mental map of the city (he had spent a semester studying at Hong Kong University), we too felt confident we could complete the ride in half an hour or so.  We started the wheel by the Shun Tak ferry terminal in Sheung Wan, where Scott was able to snap this single photograph during the hectic and high-speed ride down Hong Kong Island’s main thoroughfare.

Woefully wrong we were. We ended up riding for quite some time, through gently sprinkling rain, taking turn after wrong turn. In the end, we must have circumnavigated Rose’s apartment some three or four times. Apart from the fact that we were making Rose wait, the ride was quite enjoyable. Hong Kong is a very interesting city to wheel through. It is one of the least cycle friendly cities that we had encountered so far on the trip. There were no bike lanes or shoulders to be found anywhere. The traffic speed was high, and city streets organically turned into highways and back into city streets with such frequency that it was generally impossible to avoid riding from time to time on highways. The system of one-way roads, and the sidewalks that were positively clogged with umbrella wielding pedestrians forced us time and again to be siphoned off our route in one direction or another.

Eventually, however, we found our way to Rose’s door. To be honest, we actually rode past it, and pulled an Uber-Lichtenstein when we heard Rose calling out to us. As we pulled up, we discovered the situation to be even more embarrassing than we had feared. It was not only Rose that we had kept waiting, but her whole family. Rose, a strong confident, Hong Kong-ese woman strode forward and stuck out her hand, introducing us to her family.

We folded up the Speed TRs, and managed to squeeze all five of us into the lift. It was a tight squeeze, and we were all too aware of our drowned rat-esque scent. After we had risen to the 11th floor, we climbed off the elevator, removed our shoes and entered the apartment.

It was like heaven. Cooled by multiple air conditioners, clean as a whistle, and sporting a truly fantastic view of the harbor and the city. We placed our cycles outside on the sizable balcony, and Rose explained to us how to connect to the lightning fast Internet. It was splendid, like a breath of fresh air. We were getting Megabytes per second down, and hundreds of kilobytes per second up. Amazing.

We hung around chatting about cycling and Hong Kong for a while, before Rose left us to our own devices.

Hong Kong. The perennial half way point of AsiaWheeling. We’d made it. It was time to take a deep breath before plunging into the middle east.

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