We left our room at the Hotel Central in Macau and headed down to the cycles. There was still plenty of space left in the sky for the sun to traverse, so we headed out in search of adventure. The traffic was thick with tour buses and taxis, as we rode back toward the hotel district. Our first mission was to buy bottles of water, but each shop that we stopped at seemed to sell water for a more ridiculous price than the last. Perhaps my idea of realistic pricing had been skewed by our time on the mainland, but I was aghast, rendered unable to bring myself to purchase that life giving and most basic necessity.

Instead we rode on, thirsty, pounding across the cobblestones, onto the smooth wide boulevards of Macau, past casino after giant glittering casino. There is a certain kind of architecture, use of a special kind of gaudy building materials, a certain relation of dimensions, which it seems is reserved exclusively for casinos. It’s somewhat distasteful, but also come-hither in a certain shameless way. Regardless, a landscape clustered with casinos is nothing if not interesting to wheel through. We decided, however, that the intensely casino-ed part of town might be, like Las Vegas, better experienced at night. So we rode on, stopping briefly for a delightful selection of famous Macanese egg tarts with iced coffees.

The island of Taipa lay in the distance, shrouded by ocean mists and connected to us by three elegant bridges. It was there, we decided, that we might be able to gain some perspective on this strange and expensive city in which we had found ourselves. We chose the central, and seemingly the shortest of the three bridges and headed out.

As soon as we left the spotless glass, giant chunks of pink marble, hideously golden, metallic painted shelters of the casino district, we found ourselves subject to quite a strong wind blowing off the Pearl River delta. In addition to the strong wind, the road had become rather narrow, and as we climbed onto the central bridge, the shoulder we had been riding on disappeared altogether. In a last-ditch attempt to avoid being killed by one of the many buses that flew by us, we decided to ride on the narrow and very high walkway that ran along our left side. This was much safer, but left us subject to a fair bit more wind, and was studded periodically with nasty obstacles, many of which required us to stop and hoist the bikes over or around them.

Once we made it over the crest of the bridge, we had gravity on our side, so I hoisted my speed TR over the two-foot drop back onto the road. From there, I did my best to cover the remaining distance in the smallest amount of time possible, riding in the center of the road, pushing with all my might against the headwind, trusting in the downward slope of the road, and hoping that my speed was close enough to that of a slow car to avoid too many nasty interactions with nearby traffic.

On the other side of the bridge, we pulled a left and began to ride along a much more relaxed seaside road. To our left, separated from us by a long thin stretch of salty marsh and a decent chunk of deep blue water, was the heart of Macau. Glowing and blinking in the afternoon sun. It was such a strange-looking city, full of bizarre buildings; it was easy to deem it nothing but a place to worship money and games of chance.

There had to be more to this place, we thought, so we rode on, toward the heart of the island. Here we found some more familiar Chinese characteristics: large blocky apartment buildings, noodle shops, and construction everywhere. In contrast though, it was strikingly clean, and the roads were all brand new and delightfully smooth. We could see what looked like the center of town in the distance, separated from us by a large cluster of identical concrete 20-story apartment buildings. Unfortunately, for all we could tell, the only way to get to the center from where we were required traversing a scrap metal yard, which it seemed would dump us onto a section of gravel roads through the back yards of these large apartment buildings. Since the dogs in this part of the world tend to be small and docile, we decided to head in.

It was a maze. As we crunched along on the speed TRs, we ended up many times staring at a peeling blue-painted sheet metal dead end. The thirst we had ignored earlier was beginning to return with a vengeance, and it was with great delight and not a tiny bit of desperation that we finally found the correct path and bounced off the gravel, over a curb and back into traffic. Luckily, right there, on our left was a circle K, the same chain convenience stores we had so often used in Bali. They were happy to sell us water at what I could at least consider to be non-predatory pricing. We bought six liters, and drained three of them there on the spot.

Refueled and full of new life, we headed out to explore this new island.  Though neither of us had any interest in gambling that evening, we nonetheless discussed the rules of various casino games, throwing around ideas about how one might hack them, given, for instance an unlimited number of plays or an unlimited amount of money. Could you develop a strategy that would be increasingly likely to make you money, or at least to break even for you in craps? What about roulette? We pulled the Speed TRs over near the island’s airport and sat down in the grass to work through our ideas on the Martingale system with a bit of paper.

Unsurprisingly, we found no such advantageous method. So we wheeled on, circumnavigating the island, through sections of dense urban residential structures, large open parade grounds, more casinos, and even a rather Providence-Rhode-Island-esque busted industrial section. As we made our way through the industrial section and found ourselves once again back at the bridge where we had started, we felt pulled toward the center of the island. It was mostly a large hill, on the side of which clung a fair bit of forest, a few parks, a cemetery, and what looked like a long snaking stretch of road.

But how to get there… We kept wheeling back toward the airport in search of an entrance. We tried a few paths, but once again found only dead ends. The sun was sinking low, and we began to discuss returning to the mainland for dinner when we passed an unassuming and very steep lane. We shrugged and gave it a shot.

Sure enough, this one poured onto a slightly larger road and that onto another. Then we were climbing on the main road. The purpose of this rather large, smooth, and spotlessly clean thoroughfare, it seemed, was to provide access to a large park and nature preserve on the top of Taipa’s central hill. The park was dedicated to the many ethnic groups in China, and as we rode, the sides of the road were decorated with statues dedicated to each ethnicity. Under each statue was the name of the ethnic group and a caricature of that type of person.  An ornately dressed woman represented the Naxi, while the Han man carried a trench-digging shovel.

The road was steep, and the sweat was pouring off of us as we climbed toward the top of the hill. I pulled ahead of Scott as he stopped to photograph some statues and we became separated. When I reached the top of the paved section, I kept riding, onto a packed dirt path, which wound its way around the crest of the hill and into the forest.

The sun was falling low in the sky, and the insects around me began to sing the approach of the night. The concentration of insects was, in fact, so great, that as I rode, they would hop across my path pinging against my spokes with a sound not unlike the country western spittoon.

At the end of this dirt path, I found myself at an outlook of sorts. It was a fascinating view. The sky was torn between light and dark. A fierce gray-blue rain was falling on the city of Zhuhai, which was just barely visible in the distance, while a golden ray of sun was spilling over Macau, which did its very best to reflect most of it back at us in radiant polished glass and gaudy golden splendor.

Soon the insects bouncing off of my legs on their miscalculated trajectories became an annoyance, and I began to wonder where Scott had ended up on his trajectory, so I turned back. I found Scott back at the trail head, gazing out at a similar view. We climbed back on the cycles, and allowed all that potential energy to convert to momentum, whipping down the hill and back onto the main thoroughfare at frightening speed.

The rain had moved from Zhuhai toward us and was beginning to fall in great cold drops, as the sunset spread orange and purple through the sky. We decided to take a different bridge back to the mainland, in hopes that it might have a larger pedestrian walkway, or even a decent shoulder on which to ride. And it was in search of this bridge that we worked our way from roundabout to roundabout, traversing the city of Taipa like Chinese checkers, and eventually following signs to the bridge.

It was a much larger bridge, which meant that cars had more lanes of traffic with which to avoid us, but we were still forced to choose between the shoulder-less traffic-filled road and a rather obstacle-laden, narrow, two to three foot high pedestrian walkway. It was raining now for real, and the sunset had faded into a dim pre-night orange gray. We chose the walkway.

It was the right choice, for the area on which we rode turned out to be much larger than initially anticipated, and even widened as we went. Cars whooshed by, and rain spattered against our helmets. All the while, Macau grew larger and larger, and the casinos began to light up with thousands of neon lights and LEDs. It was a glowing, pulsing, otherworldly light show, and we had the best view in the house.

I was suddenly forced to screech to a halt when I saw a large discarded television set looming, just barely visible in my path. It was perhaps the closest that I had come to a cycling accident on the whole trip to date. Crunching into that television would have no doubt knocked me off the three foot high path on which we rode, and likely encouraged the crushing of my body by a car. But let’s dispense with the macabre that could have been.

Back in Macau, the rain began to fall in buckets, quickly soaking us to the bone. We feared for camera and telephone as we darted through the narrow and traffic-clogged streets of Macau. The city was lit with that kind of surreal light that can only be produced by thousands of tiny moving and flickering sources. Traffic was mostly in a rain-related gridlock, and as tiny shadows danced on the periphery of each real shadow, we splashed across the pavement onto the cobblestone streets of the Hotel Central’s neighborhood.

We stumbled, sopping wet, and giggling uncontrollably into the lobby. It had been a great wheel.

By the time we had changed into dry clothes, the rain had stopped and we headed out in search of dinner. As we strolled, the streets glistened delightfully, reflecting the vast array of lights all around us. We ended up at a small Macanese restaurant, where we ordered dumplings, some eggy scallion pancakes, and a plate of sticky sweet pork. It was all quite delightful, and we chased the entire meal down with two ice-cold Tsing Tao beers.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering the streets of Macau, walking in and out of casinos, and studying the strange world that surrounded us. In the casino section of the city, every other shop is a jewelery shop, suggesting that when one feels they’ve hit the jackpot here, they immediately go out and secure the winnings in the form of gold or jewelry. Perhaps because such things are easily smuggled across borders? Regardless, it shows a more earnest attempt to use gambling to generate money for more than just one’s self. If I remember correctly our visit to Las Vegas during the AsiaWheeling planning process, that is far from the typical move in America…

Macau might be a place better described through images and video, so perhaps we should conclude this post with a brief gallery of our evening touring the casinos of Macau.

I woke up in our hotel room in Zhuhai and immediately grabbed our hot water pot from the shelf. I filled it with drinking water from the large bubbler in our room, and set it to boiling. We had by this point become quite accustomed to drinking vast quantities of sticky Nescafe in the mornings, while using the in-room Internet connection, and I saw no reason why today should be any different. While the water began to hum toward a boil, I took out my computer and began the endless journey of booting in safe mode, plugging a ridiculously long Ethernet cable into the machine, which sprung forth from a crumbling gauge in the wall.  I slid open our window and looked out onto the Zhuhai skyline. It was a good view we had, including the snaking coastline and the uphill sprawl of the hotel and brothel district. It was a big city, with an impressive number of uniquely styled hotels. Down below me, the streets were being cleaned by mobs of women with brooms, followed closely behind by men with hoses connected to a slowly driving water truck.

We feasted briefly on the surprisingly fast Internet, and headed downstairs. Our bikes were waiting for us where we had left them in a kind of interior courtyard. In the night, the activity of the hotel’s many air conditioners (which seem to have been concentrated above our small courtyard) had resulted in a fair bit of water falling on the bikes. This had the unintended consequence of us climbing aboard the cleanest set of Speed TRs that we’d ridden in a while. Perhaps five minutes into the ride, we stopped at another crispy duck restaurant for breakfast, and another three minutes later we were at the border of Macau.

We looked at the large entrance for trucks and automobiles and decided it was worth a shot. There was no line, so perhaps they might just let us through. As we approached the border, an official came up to us and requested our passports. He began to question us in English. “Where are you from? How long have you been in China? Have you been working in China?” and, most perplexing, “Are you leaving Macau?”

I felt somewhat like the Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket, wanting to respond “Sir, NEGATIVE, sir! Sir, the private believes any answer he gives will be wrong...” But instead, we politely and studiously explained that we were not leaving Macau, but headed there. With a frown, he continued to inspect our passports, and finally handed them back to us, telling us to go wait in line like everybody else. And so we did, wearing our packs and sweating like pigs.

The queues were cordoned off by large polished metal barriers, and in order to proceed with the Speed TRs, we were forced to push them ahead of us. A Macanese standing in the line next to me called out, explaining that I was doing it wrong. In hopes of not offending during my maiden Macanese encounter, I followed his orders, squeezing myself by my own cycle and pulling it now from the front. It was the wrong move, for now I had to continuously turn around to tend to the cycle, which meant that I was constantly in danger of smashing a nearby traveler with my pack as I swung around. Regardless, I thanked the chap and proceeded forward to get my passport stamped. From there, we walked across a meandering covered concrete walkway, past a number of duty-free shops, a fair number of advertisements for casinos, and then into the Macanese customs hall.

We filled out customs forms, which were available in English, Chinese, and Portuguese, and made our way through with little hassle. We walked out the other side of the immigration hall into a totally new world.

It was a decidedly different city. The wide Chinese cement streets were replaced with narrow, curving European bitumen. The largely undecorated Chinese walls were replaced with ornate European-looking facades. This section of the city consisted of small vertical structures, crowded close to the street, and most of the signs were in either English or Portuguese, with only the occasional Chinese character.

There were certainly no more bike lanes here, and our fellow traffic consisted of delivery men zipping around on motor scooters, and quiet expensive sedans that sailed scentlessly by us. We worked our way farther into the city, and soon began to see ahead of us a massive and far-reaching bridge, which together with a few other, quite majestic causeways, connected this part of the mainland to the nearby island of Taipa. The bridge extended over a futuristic ferry terminal. We were also riding on the left now, something we had not done since we left Thailand.

We began to see the gaudy facades and telltale giant gold windows of casinos, and decided to head toward that part of town, in search of an ATM and a cheap hotel. The ATM was no problem, but cheap hotels seemed few and far between in this gambling paradise. We laid our things down next to the bank of ATMs along a very European looking boulevard and sat down to open up the laptop and begin investigating our lonely planet PDFs. As we sat, we realized that we were strange beasts here in Macau, but for a very different reason than we had been in China or southeast Asia. These people were wealthy, well dressed, and significantly westernized. We were sweaty, filthy, with the beginnings of mustaches, wearing Vietnamese motorcycle helmets, scrutinizing the screen of a MacBook Pro, next to a large pile of all our reeking worldly possessions.

We found evidence in the lonely planet that there were indeed a few cheap hotels in this town, and after making note of the names and addresses proceeded forth, asking for directions in English and receiving cautious, grammatically perfect , and well accented responses.

These studious directions led us rather precisely to the hotel about which we had read, and a few circumnavigations of the steely gray building that housed the place led us eventually to a large, metal, barred door, which opened onto a dingy set of stairs. Scott ran up to investigate while I shepherded our fully loaded cycles. He came down with a frown, and explained that they were booked solid. We continued to ask the locals for recommendations for cheap hotels, and sure enough we found a most studious and helpful response. We rolled this time up to a crumbling behemoth of a hotel, by the name of the Hotel Central.

This place, too, required us to circumnavigate a few times in order to find the proper entrance.  The lobby was large and filthy, so we rolled the cycles inside. We leaned them against the front desk and began to haggle over rooms. There would be no more of that wonderful Chinese value for money, not for a while now. So we decided to get used to paying more than $20.00 a night, and settled on this place. A bellhop-like woman showed us where we could park the cycles, inside a kind of musty storeroom that showed signs of once having been a lavish smoking room, and after cautioning some Russian tourists in line behind us against the cheaper, windowless rooms that we had inspected and found to be too dark and foul even for your humble correspondents, we headed upstairs and threw down our belongings.

The room itself was filthy, but manageable, and most importantly had two windows, one of which was almost completely blocked by a giant inoperable air conditioner. It wasn’t a particularly hospitable environment, but we had no plans to spend much time in the room anyway.

Our last day in Shenzhen was spent, unsurprisingly, wheeling.

We had a number of missions to complete, not least of which was the production of Arabic business cards for Scott’s sister, a Ms. Claudia Norton. She was to be accompanying us for the next chapter of the trip, starting in Dubai and ending in Turkey.  Finding someone to print the business cards on good ivory card stock was not hard, and for just a little less than USD 7.00, we had 200 cards printed on paper that was nicer than the paper we had used in the States.

As two men and one woman traveling in the Middle East, we had been advised by our board that, depending on the city, we could expect difficulty in booking single hotel rooms, because it is technically illegal for unmarried, unrelated, and differently sexed individuals to be in the same room alone together. Therefore, in an effort to save money and maintain team morale, we had begun looking into the option of representing Claudia and me as man and wife (Scott being Claudia’s brother, of course, was in the clear).  At first, it seemed that the best move might be to actually proceed with a full marriage while in the Gulf. Perhaps Jackson Fu could be my best man, and Scott could present the bride…  Then, at the terminus of Claudia’s time with AsiaWheeling, we would use a common law that allows a divorce to take place upon the sending of three text messages. Unfortunately after looking into the process further, it proved prohibitively expensive to execute a valid marriage in the Gulf, as much fun as it would be. Getting married, upon further consideration, might be a rather disrespectful thing to do. So amidst a clamor of jokes between Claudia, Scott, the Illustrious Mr Fu, and myself, we decided to forge a new plan.

(Due to intervention of our better judgment, this document has been removed from AsiaWheeling.com… If you’re particularly interested in viewing it, however, we just might entertain personal requests, which may be made using the contact button to your right.)

You see, dear reader, through the advantageous use of proxies, we were able to find a scan of a marriage license from the fine county of Kent, in Michigan, and, with a small amount of Photoshop work, create a decent looking license, which featured, among other fictitious characters, our own dear Stewart Motta. This, we figured, would aid us in the event that we were denied access to a hotel on the basis of our chromosomes, but we hoped we would never have to use it.

With all our tasks in Shenzhen completed, we relaxed into a day of meandering.  One quick stop in the electronics market proved useful in providing a long-range external WiFi antennae complete with a the BackTrack distribution of Linux, which specializes in network security analysis.

Eventually we settled down to a interesting meal of spicy shrimp bathed in oil, at a favorite restaurant of Scott’s when he resided in Hong Kong.

Complete with lightly fried flatbread, green beans, and an unknown green noodle delicacy, it reminded us of how very much we adore the food of this country.

Wheeling home to our mod-marvelous hotel, we reveled in the mega-city that Shenzhen had become.

The next morning we awoke, feeling well rested and excited to head to the next city. We milked all the time we could out of our luxurious room, and its speedy Internet connection, boiling water with our in-room water heater, and drinking cup after cup of sticky Nescafe. Plenty hopped up on caffeine, and having listened to perhaps one too many late 90s smash hits while working, we checked out, heading for the printer. Halfway there, we realized we were starving and called a waypoint at a crispy duck restaurant.

For about a dollar per person, we were able to fill our bellies with warm and succulent pieces of duck, sticky white rice, and a small pile of wilted greens. Delightful. Back on the cycles, we picked up Claudia’s cards, which looked amazing, and sported our recently approved translation of AsiaWheeling into Arabic, and also a few copies of the fake marriage certificate.

With cards and forged documents, in hand, we headed out of the city, wheeling hard toward a certain port, not far from Shenzhen’s center, by the name of Shekou. It was well marked by the municipal signs, and the sun shone bright. Though the roads on which we traveled were more like large eight-lane highways, they were flat, and traffic was both light and accommodating. The 25 km ride slipped by effortlessly. And soon we were out of Shenzhen proper, and into a kind of seaside industrial netherworld, which might have been chilling were it not so richly foliated and bathed in bright sunlight.

We were, of course, riding once again fully loaded. However, strangely enough, it was not the weight of the baggage that was most uncomfortable, it was the fact that our packs covered our backs, reducing evaporation, and trapping a fair amount of sweat between the luggage and our bodies. This sweat had a way of running down our backs and out from underneath our helmets, stinging the eyes, and running down the back of my legs, drenching my pants. It was, of course, no help that the sun was blasting and the air was thick with humidity.

All in all, it was a positive wheel, though. And we arrived at the Shekou port after only a few wrong turns, a number of very helpful Chinese pedestrians, and no small number of water stops.

The port was large, but the boat to Zhuhai was small. We managed by luck of the draw to arrive there just as the next boat was boarding, so we quickly purchased tickets and folded up the cycles. On board the boat, we finally relaxed, plopping down, sopping with sweat into our seats.

As the sweat began to evaporate, we took a look around the small craft. There were maybe 100 people on the boat, and most were unlike any we had yet seen in China. It was hard to put a finger on what made them different. They were certainly richer and more westernized, broadcasting this with their dress and mannerisms, but also they were segregated by dress and mannerisms in a way that was more pronounced than we had experienced in western China. There were the vacationing families, the businessmen, the dejected teenage rockers, the studious bureaucrat… all quite fascinating, and all slowly turning greenish due to the choppy seas and the tiny boat.

Our dear Mekong Bureau Chief, Stew Motta, had, while we were in Kunming, explained to us how the Chinese had a very impressively incognito way of vomiting. We had, during the 45 minutes of this ride in a small boat on choppy seas, a fine opportunity to study this method ourselves. It was discrete, silent, and precise, a far cry from the noisier and more dramatic American hurl.

While our fellow passengers struggled to contain themselves, we remained unaffected. Perhaps the last six months of travel had hardened us. We decided to purchase a drastically overpriced bag of peanuts from a kind of bar/concession stand at the front of the boat and returned to our seats.

Thanks be to Jah, Scott and I continued to suffer no adverse effects from the motion of the boat, and climbed off in Zhuhai, quite invigorated and excited to continue the journey. We unfolded the Speed TRs, and strapped our technology bags on the rear racks, walking the bikes down the terminal toward this new city.

If you’ll allow me, dear reader, I’d like to take a moment to discuss the city of Zhuhai. Zhuhai was for us a stop en route to Macau. Macau is an old Portuguese trading city, formerly a colony of Portugal, until the year 1999, when it was returned to the Chinese. Macau has since turned into the largest gambling center on the globe, eclipsing Las Vegas, Nevada some time during 2007.

Zhuhai is the Chinese city that nestles up against Macau, in much the same way that Shenzhen nestles up against Hong Kong. And as such, Zhuhai has become somewhat of a tourist city, sporting over a million international tourists a year and almost 4 million Chinese tourists at the same time. Other than its proximity to Macau, Zhuhai is famous for its story of urban renewal. Not long ago, it was a filthy Chinese industrial port town. But in recent years, the streets have been re-paved and it has been developed for waterfront hotels to facilitate tourism to and from Macau.

It would no doubt be an interesting place. We hoisted our cycles onto the escalator and rode up from sea level to the platform above. There, we paused for a moment as Scott discussed our trajectory and possible hotel choices with the women at the Zhuhai tourist desk. They recommended a certain hotel, which would offer us a room, including a sea view for just a little over USD 30.00. After traveling for some time in China, this seemed not only run of the mill, but slightly overpriced, so we headed out on our own, climbing on the Speed TRs to wheel toward the city center. As we rode, it became increasingly clear that this was was a city unlike any we had been to in China. It was startlingly clean, with manicured trees and hedges lining the roads. The large, separated bicycle lanes were clogged with cars and motorcycles, recently unloaded from the ferry. The air was moist and cool, and dark gray clouds had rolled in. We rode on toward the city center, through the fresh sea breeze, doing our best to avoid  the odd car that thought to beat the traffic by riding in the bike lane. We rode on, fully loaded, skirting Zhuhai’s coastline and eventually turning in toward the city.

Our plan was to scan the skyline, find the most Klingon-looking hotel, then ride to it and price its room. In the event that the room was too expensive, even after bargaining, we would head to the next most violent looking piece of hotel architecture and try there. There were certainly plenty of candidate hotels here in Zhuhai. In fact, the only businesses here, it seemed, were hotels, restaurants, bars, and brothels. We made our way into hotel after hotel. All of them were shockingly expensive by Chinese standards, they all also advertised an hourly rate. “It’s the weekend,” the front desk would explain in Chinese, “We can charge this price, because we know we’ll be full by this evening.”

The hourly rates were quite high. Perhaps a third of the nightly rate, suggesting that hourly rental was a lucrative business here. There were also, of course, the prostitutes themselves. One can never be quite sure, but many of the women walking around on the streets, appeared to be there in a professional capacity, and as we rode from hotel to hotel, they would call out to us, inviting us into a restaurant or bar.

The sun began to sink low, and still we had not found a hotel. In desperation, we parked the bikes near a shop and purchased a couple drinks. While we sat on the curb, discussing our next plans, the security guard associated with the nearest hotel came over to us and explained, in quite a humble and apologetic way, that we were making his hotel look shabby and that he wanted us to leave as quickly as possible. This we did, but not without a fair bit of foot dragging and drink finishing. We headed back up the hill toward a new part of town, where, low and behold, we found our algorithm pointing us toward none other than the same hotel that had been recommended at the station.

In we went, and USD 30.00 later we were shown up to room 888. Eight is, of course, a very lucky number and such a room should only be given to valued guest and VIPs. That’s AsiaWheeling, I guess.

With our stuff finally off our backs, we headed out in search of food. We found it not far from our hotel, at a northern Chinese restaurant. We ordered a considerably large quantity of food and relaxed into the meal.

Lingering quite some time after we had already stuffed ourselves, we whiled away quite a few hours, discussing our views on China, on governments in general, on policing, on American immigration policy, and the like. It was a fine last meal, and as we strolled back toward the giant Klingon block that was our hotel, I bid a silent farewell to our first chapter in mainland China. It had been a wild ride. Our next destinations would be much tamer, more expensive, and more westernized. But perhaps that was what we needed.

We awoke bright and early in the luxurious confines of our room at the glitzy affordable Shenzhen business hotel. Today was the day we would be headed to the Dahon factory. It was a little too far out of town to be covered on the map of Shenzhen that we had bought during the previous evening’s search for a hotel. From our best estimates it was just slightly outside the scope of the map, at the last stop on Shenzhen’s Metro Line One. Scott remembered from his past travels in Shenzhen that this was at a place called Window of the World, which is a kind of amusement park in Shenzhen.

So we tore ourselves away from the Internet and headed downstairs. The woman at the hotel front desk explained to us that the fastest way to get to the Window of the World would be to take a bus from the stop just a few blocks over. So we hopped on the speed TRs and headed over to the bus stop. Sure enough, one heading for our destination came by and we hopped on.

Traffic was thick, and I found myself frequently glancing down at my watch as the time until our meeting quickly fell from three hours to two to one and a half. Then we were at the Window of the World. From our scrutiny of the Google map, we knew it would be a quick five km wheel up to the factory. We had plenty of time. But as soon as we got on the bikes, we realized that something was wrong. Very wrong.

None of the streets seemed to correlate with our understanding of how they were laid out on the Google map. On top of that, we had put nothing in our stomachs yet save four or five cups of acrid Nescafe. We needed to find this factory, and fast, but if we were going to do that we needed to solve the painful ache in our stomachs and the plummeting blood sugar, which had been mixing poorly with the adrenaline of a navigational misstep. We solved the hunger problem with a few rice balls wrapped in banana leaves and some eggs that had been hard boiled in salty tea.

From there, we headed out once again, wheeling like crazy, but unable to find any evidence of the landmarks we expected to find. Finally, with less than an hour left, we folded up the bikes and threw them in the back of a cab. The cab driver frowned at us when we explained where we wanted to go, but agreed and promptly got back on the highway, pulling into the fast lane. It seemed it was time to call Dahon.

It turns out that in the three years since Scott had last been in Shenzhen, they had added another 40 km of subway to Line One, and we were nowhere near the Dahon factory, which was located a much more significant a distance from  the city center than we had believed. We put our Dahon contact, Joan, on the phone with the driver, and she explained to him exactly where to go.

It was not a cheap ride, but we were able to make it to the meeting only 20 minutes late. Joan, and a man who introduced himself as Thomas, greeted us warmly, handing us Dahon VIP tags, and showed us where we could park the bikes.

Both Joan and Thomas were exceedingly gracious. For reasons including the protection of Dahon’s intellectual property we are not able to share pictures from our time in the interior of the factory, but I will do my best to relate our experiences there to you, dear reader, and where possible, we will illustrate with some of Dahon’s own (lawyer approved) photography.

Dahon actually makes a great number of sub-brands, and the nature of the bicycles that fall into these brands is as diverse as can be. While it is true that most of the cycles are folding or collapsible in some way, Dahon has everything from full-size, large-wheeled retro looking racing bikes, to hyper light, super collapsible, futuristic bikes with wheels only 16 inches in diameter. They make everything from extremely affordable bikes, branded exclusively for the Chinese market to the kind of multi-thousand dollar collapsible racing bikes that we saw at Speed Matrix and My Bike Shop in Singapore.

The factory complex is large, and getting only larger. The Shenzhen operation is a cluster of sizable multistory buildings, all covered in small tiles, in the two shades of Dahon green.

Thomas and Joan were kind enough to show us a model for the new factory they are planning to build in China, and which was designed in large part by Dr. Hon himself, founder and namesake of Dahon bicycles.

The more affordable of Dahon’s sub-branded bikes are made from steel rather than aluminum, and the factory is divided around the type of metal used for the frames. We began first in the steel frame section. Here it was, as we found to be the case in most of the factory, quite loud. Men and women wearing matching uniforms were arranged in lines around large welding, bending, and sizing machines. As the people worked, the machines shrieked and squealed.

Each person added only one change to the frame, and then passed the increasingly finished product on to the next person. To absorb the changes in the amount of time each worker took to do his or her job, the frames were placed on large racks, where they awaited manipulation by the next worker.

We walked around, looking at large neatly piled carts, filled with all shapes and sizes of bicycle frames. We watched men and women, welding, punching holes, bending, and checking for consistency as the cycles made their way down the line. At various points in the process, a red-hot frame would be plunged into water with a great hiss, to cool the thing down before passing it on to the next worker.

The aluminum frame section was very similar, though it was obvious that it was a slightly more difficult metal to work with. The machines and procedures on this floor were more intricate, and while the steel frames were a dull matte gray brown, the aluminum frames gleamed with the vibrancy of fresh untreated metal. We continued to walk around, noticing here and there frames for specific models of Dahon cycles that we had seen or even test driven during our time in Singapore.

We moved from the frame-building section on to the chemical treatment section. Here the frames are all attached to a great conveyor rack and sent on a wild ride through a number of different chemical baths, submerging completely, then being hoisted high above us to travel the length of the room (presumably to dry) before returning for a new chemical bath. All quite fascinating.

Painting takes a while, and a fair bit of baking, so we skipped that, heading instead straight to the assembly line. Here they had an honest-to-goodness, Lucy-in-the-Chocolate-Factory-style conveyor belt. Cycles began as freshly painted frames at one end, and piece by piece, they were assembled, all the while never pausing on their steady journey down the belt.

After riding the cycle for so long, in so many different places, I had begun to feel like my bike was something unique, something very few people in the rest of the world had. This is, of course true, but to be here in the factory, watching hinge after hinge get attached to the frame, reflector after reflector being placed on the bike, I began to realize how amazing this operation actually was. My bike was special, but it was also one of many. Each day they were cranking out hundreds and hundreds of bicycles, bicycles I had respect and love for. And all the workers were startlingly serious and professional. People were not joking or listening to music or goofing around. They were focused on placing this screw into that hole and drilling it in, or clipping this plastic piece onto this bit of the handlebar, and clamping it down. There were were craftsmen.

I thought of an argument I had once with a friend after physics class about whether to do something the same way time and time again, and do it perfectly or passionately, was not as much art as to create something once, for the first time. I still am not sure where I stand on that one, but I was arguing the former position, in hopes of exploring how I felt about it. I thought for a moment about being the fellow who attached every right handlebar grip to every Dahon cycle of a particular model. It must be a trip to see one of them go by, and have the thought: I put that grip on that bike. I saw that bike when it was just a chunk of metal in a pile. Incredible.

From there, we headed over to the offices of the Total Quality Team.  Here they were testing every component of the bike, to look for weaknesses. We saw front forks being bent and unbent again and again, tires being spun endlessly, chains being stretched. All of it was done by large and terrifying pneumatic machines, which hissed and popped with each flex of a bike component.

They Quality Control folks also showed us the x-ray room in the back, where they placed bicycle components in a large metal chamber and blasted them with x-rays to investigate the properties of the interior of the metal. It was a strikingly impressive laboratory, all dedicated to the investigation and preservation of the fortitude and safety of Dahon’s cycles.

After we left the Quality Control room, we headed up to the showroom. This is a large room where every model of Dahon cycle in on display in a dizzying array.

There are a number of small bar tables in the room, where we were invited to sit while the Dahon team went down to our Speed TRs, replacing any broken parts and tuning the components.

We spent a charming half hour with Joan before we were invited upstairs to the office section of the factory. There we met with some other members of the Dahon factory management and logistics team. We sat for a brief while with them around a large table, drinking ice-cold cans of coffee and then we were invited back downstairs to take a look at the bikes.

They had only looked better once before. And that was after Tan from My Bike Shop in Singapore gave them his twice over. Scott’s bike had, of course, been through the grinder during our misadventures with trucks in Bangkok, so an infusion of fresh parts was especially good for his cycle.

And with that, we bid our new friends at Dahon a fond farewell, and hopped back on the speed TRs. We were not sure exactly how far out of town we currently were, but it was certainly far. It felt unlike anywhere we’d been in China. It was factory land. Everyone we saw on the street was a factory worker. At most of these factories, the workers live in attached apartment complexes. The fact that they live and work in the same place, makes it so that China can never quite achieve the same kind of industrial wasteland that one might find, say, outside Chicago.

What I’m trying to say, dear reader, is that we needed to wheel this zone a little before we began tackling the task of getting back to our hotel. And this we did. With the bikes freshly tuned, wheels and brakes in alignment, the wheeling felt great. I would not describe this place as wheeling friendly though. Despite the fact that we saw many people on bicycles headed out for an after work beer or running errands, the roads were designed with cars in mind, and cars only. The sidewalks were crammed with people, so cyclists did their best to stick to the side of the road. There was no designated lane and the right side of the road had also been emergency designated as the lane for giant trucks transporting factory supplies or freshly made goods bound for the market. We did our best to signal our intent, and worked our way along, gawking at the endless expanse of factories around us. The factory land was situated on a large flat plain, punctuated by largish mounds of shrubbery enshrouded rock. The craggy green mounds rose out of the factory-related smog like gum-drop mountains out of the fabled south China mists. Meanwhile the sun was sinking low, spreading in orange and gold across the sky. People bustled and machines churned. Hawkers stood on the street corners next to large piles of watermelons, or in front of rugs on which a myriad of small electronic devices were spread, and called the nature of their wares into the torrent of humans. The air was thick with soot. It felt at once  both a new and very ancient place. We purchased some 20-cent bottles of water and kept wheeling.

Eventually we passed one of the stops we had traversed on the previous day’s train ride from Guangzhou. Here we stopped to scrutinize a map. While we were scrutinizing, two beautiful Chinese women came up and started speaking English to us. While becoming a more common occurrence day by day, this is still a rare treat (at least in the parts of China AsiaWheeling prefers to frequent). The women helped us to find a couple of bus lines that would help us to get back to the city, but by the time we had decided on a line, the traffic around us had ground to a halt. With the choice between sitting on a bus in gridlock traffic and wheeling staring us in the face, we made the obvious choice.

We pulled now onto the sidewalk and began pedaling. We were changing neighborhoods now, and with the change, pedestrian traffic was thinning out. We were riding on a sparsely trafficked, but wide sidewalk, whipping by the stalled drivers to our left, and doing our best to dodge the many low-hanging branches that threatened to knock us off our bikes in the post-sunset gray light, when suddenly we realized that our blood sugar had fallen to a near record low. This also easily explained away the twisted and stressed nature of our recent conversation. We called a waypoint at the next gas station, and went inside it to find a very American convenience store, where some cartons of sweetened Chinese milk and a few Mars Incorporated products brought us back into reality.

When we exited the gas station, we found traffic moving again, so we hopped the next bus.  On board, we whiled away our time chatting with a hair dryer salesman on his way home from work. He told us excitedly about his upcoming trip to Las Vegas for a hair products trade show, and we did our best to share his enthusiasm.

When the bus reached the city center, we hopped off and started wheeling in search of food.

We ended up finding it not many blocks away when we happened upon a street of Chinese Muslim restaurants. We selected a particularly delicious looking Uyghur joint, and headed in. We sat down at a table and watched in hungry astonishment as the fellow across from us ordered a giant feast, and then proceeded to nibble maybe a quarter of it, leaving enough food on the table for both Scott and me to stuff ourselves silly. I was in favor of eating and asking for forgiveness, but we decided after some debate, to ask the staff whether we might just add his food to our own. This, it seems, was against the rules. I was still able to grab one piece of chicken before the servers cleared the feast. The chicken was amazing, and only made it all the harder to wait for our own food to arrive. But when it did, it was well worth the wait.

We had lamb and yogurt, and that delightful Uyghur bread, Neng. We were even able to order a couple of our favorite Xinjiang brews, something which we had been unable to find in China up until that point. It was a fine meal, and a fine day.

We now had only to return to the luxurious confines of our hotel, crank up the air conditioning and feast relentlessly on the speedy Internet. Ah, China.

We got back to Kunming just in time. We climbed off the bus from Dali, surprisingly refreshed, having slept quite a bit, albeit spread between a hurtling deathtrap, the streets of Dali, and a non-reclining bus seat. We unloaded our stuff and hailed a cab to Stewart’s apartment. We didn’t even worry about walking upstairs to drop our stuff off, we just got right on the bicycles and headed for a massage parlor. We decided to opt for the foot massage, since our legs were way, way too sore now to endure the kind of punishment that we knew from experience this place could deliver. The massage was incredible, and I was quite glad to have shied away from the full body treatment, for as I was dozing, allowing the technician to rage on my feet, he decided to do a quick number on a piece of my quad, with the very best of intentions I am sure. The sudden burst of pain caused me to jolt upright, gasping, and nearly knock over the tray of tea and fresh pear that had been brought for us.

We stumbled out of the massage parlor, much refreshed, but still wincing and moaning with soreness, and headed out in search of dumplings. Dumplings were easy to find, and Scott dozed in a chair while Motta and I played 2/3 of a game of pool.

We called it early due to the arrival of dumplings and out of mercy for your humble correspondent. The dumpling place offered a king of a make-your-own-sauce bar where patrons could assemble their own dips from various oils and chopped herbs. It was quite an enjoyable opportunity for experimentation in dumpling feasting.

Filled to the brim with dumplings and tea, we dropped our stuff off at Stew’s pad, parted ways with our dear leader, and wheeled back to the train station where we were able to nab the last two seats on the next day’s train to Guangzhou.  Wheeling felt good. Really unexpectedly good. It was surprising how little overlap there was between those muscles that were so thoroughly destroyed the day before, and those required for wheeling.

Our remaining hours in Kunming were spent in the glorious surroundings of Mr. Motta’s apartment, which was somewhat unfortunately located on the seventh floor, requiring us to walk up seven flights of stairs. Our sore muscles had little trouble executing the climb up, but the descent was startlingly painful. So we only ventured out once, to wheel to a celebratory hot-pot dinner. Other than that we kept ourselves occupied feasting on the Internet and arguing over trivial matters.

The ride to Guangzhou was relaxing.

After the China railway staff’s initial trepidation about the presence of our bikes on board, we were left to idle our time away working on correspondence for you, dear reader, and returning to a long absent part of AsiaWheeling. I am talking, of course, about whist, the game of many notable adventurers, not least of which was of course Phileas Fogg. We, being two men only, play the German variant of the game. At one point during the ride, the fellow riding below us on the train was accosted by the rail police and asked to produce his  identification documentation. When he was unable to do so, he was berated by the officer, attracting our fellow passengers’ attention and then a small crowd. Eventually, after a great show of emptying all his stuff from his bags, the rail cop removed a smart phone from his pocket, and photographed the kid, making a note of the crime. He then disappeared, and the kid repacked his stuff. No more fuss was made for the rest of the ride.

The Chinese landscape changed slowly from luscious valleys and dramatic mountains to large fields of industrial equipment. It was night when we arrived in Guangzhou. We quickly headed to the bullet train section of the station  and purchased tickets to Shenzhen. The train left less than an hour later, and raced through a totally new, and strikingly futuristic China towards Shenzhen. The city that spread outside our window for the entire ride was like something from Blade Runner; it was lit with many brightly colored lights; it appeared to be occupied mostly by machines and smoke; and it spread endlessly in every direction. We ordered some startlingly expensive peanuts and two ice cold Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and watched the scenery fly by.

We climbed off the train in Shenzhen and began to unfold the cycles, attracting the usual crowd of passersby, ensnared by the majesty and mysterious beauty of the Speed TR. For the first time, when they asked where the bicycles are from, we were able to proudly report “Here. They are from Shenzhen.” This was, of course, met with no giant surprise, since it is very likely that if you, dear reader, were to take a casual inventory of the things that are present right now in the room where you sit reading AsiaWheeling, most of the manufactured goods, especially if they were made in the last five years,  would be from Shenzhen. It is a manufacturing powerhouse, which attracts all kinds of people from all over China and the world.

After taking a little break to allow some select members of the crowd that had formed around us to take a little ride on the Speed TRs, we bid them farewell and headed out in search of a hotel. It was already past 10:00 pm, and as we began asking at hotels, we soon found that we were no longer in the hyper-cheap part of China. After a few hours of riding around and comparing places, we finally found ourselves forced to pay nearly $30.00 (U.S.) per night for an immaculately clean room with a three-head deluge shower, hyper mod cubic beds and fixtures, and free Internet in the room. Believe it or not, dear reader, it felt like highway robbery.

Ah, China. The value for money you offer is astounding .

I was sleeping soundly under the massive weight of four heavy wool blankets in our small wooden hut at the base camp of Mt. Haba. The wind blew like mad outside, whipping through the cracks in the walls and whistling in a cacophony of dissonant rises and falls. It was strangely comforting muffled by the blankets. I drifted in and out of sleep, curled up around my hiking boots. I could barely hear the strains of the Sim City 2000 theme when it finally rang out at 3:30 am. I removed my boots and myself from under the covers and made a silent prayer that I would not freeze to death on the mountain.

We put on every layer of clothing we had. For me this was one XXL muddy orange tee-shirt that I had borrowed from Stew, which was followed by my father’s long sleeved button-down, gray wool sweater from the 1970s, our brand new fake fleece thermals, and finally my rain shell and pants. With all of it on, I felt surprisingly prepared for the elements. A quick look at Stew and Scott showed that they too were looking significantly more prepared than we had imagined we would be the night before.

As a final touch, I put a pair of socks over my own thin running gloves and headed out the door. Inside the small hut, a  fire was already blazing, and water was on its way to a boil. Our guide and the same friend we had seen the day before were there, scrubbing some bits of rust out of a large iron wok before throwing it on the fire. Due to our pre-Haba financial miscalculations, we would, of course, be unable join them in breakfast, so we settled ourselves down to enjoy some of the greasy egg pancakes that we had bought three days ago in Lijiang and wait for the water to boil. Meanwhile, our guide and his friend poured a good amount of oil into the wok, and began to break off frozen chunks of rice from a block nearby, tossing them sizzling into the now smoking dark pan. Once the rice was browning, they cracked a surprising number of eggs into the mix and began to stir the goo into a kind of hyper-ricey omelet.

We poured some recently boiled hot water into our canteens and a few plastic water bottles, strapped our crampons and ice axes to our bags, and with hiking poles in hand, headed out. I’ll be honest with you, dear reader: the first part of the hike was tough. We had definitely been feeling the lack of oxygen in the air already just ambling around the base camp, and even small tasks easily winded us. Now it was pitch dark, so windy that at times standing upright was difficult, and we were walking up a 45-degree incline on bare rock, ducking from time to time into slippery gravely ravines, and doing all this in what was by far the coldest weather we had yet encountered on this trip. We were panting like dogs, struggling to get enough oxygen to keep our brains and bodies operational. Overhead the stars began to fade out into the gray of predawn. We knew that the temperature would only grow more manageable with the appearance of the sun, so we slogged on, thanking Jah for each chance we had to pause and pant until we felt human again.  Meanwhile our Naxi guides were smoking cigarettes while they hiked. To me such behavior was nearly inconceivable.

The ascent was hitting Scott particularly hard. His legs were wobbly and imprecise. Sensing this, both Stewart and our second guide hung back with him, allowing Scott to set the pace, and coaching him on. As we reached the end of the first chunk of the climb, having completed the first section of steep scrambling over bare rock, I sat down with the guide behind a large jutting boulder. The sun was beginning to rise, revealing to us the vast expanse of mountains which surrounded Haba. Our guide lit up yet another cigarette, and I collapsed next to him to witness the sunrise and watch Stew, Scott, and our friend trudge up to join us. This was seriously difficult, and it was only going to get harder. We had only the impending sunshine and the increasingly breathtaking nature of the view to push us forward. I took a swig from my plastic canteen of very weak Nescafe instant coffee and noted that it was starting to freeze around the edges. Finally the entire team made its way to the shelter of the rock and collapsed. Our second guide lit himself a cigarette while our first guide indulged in a second.

Then we were off again, huffing and panting, putting one foot in front of the next, and hauling our bodies up the mountain. Soon we began to see the snowfields ahead of us. Then, after rounding a giant rock, the first open view of the peak itself, then masked by a large gray cloud, loomed impossibly high above us.

Perhaps an hour more of hiking, another five breaks to catch our breath, and at least a pack of cigarettes later (for our guides), we reached the beginning of the snowfields.

There we discarded our hiking poles, extra water, and anything else that seemed non-essential. With lightened packs, we clamped our crampons over our boots and headed out onto the snow.

I had no idea how to properly put on crampons, but our guide kindly assisted me, strapping them in an alarmingly complicated way to my boot, and cinching them so tightly that I would later find they had left thick creases in the rubber sole of my boot.

Now we were hiking up a 45-degree snowfield that spread ahead of us into the infinity of fog that was the summit. We were getting close, but there was still quite a way to go. I clutched my ice axe through the sock that covered my hand, switching hands from time to time in order to give the other hand a chance to spend time clenching and unclenching in an effort to warm up in my jacket pocket. As we moved up the mountain, we entered the midst of the clouds. Now there was no way to keep track of where we were, how far we had come, or how far we had left to go. There was only a plane of ice and snow that extended into the gray-white mist in every direction. My lungs burned with demand for more oxygen and my legs screamed for rest. Each step forward was a tiny battle. Occasionally, the cold and the lack of oxygen would  take hold, giving me a few moments of blessed numbness, but then the more logical part of my mind would kick in and I would stamp feeling back into my limbs, and with it the growing exhaustion and breathlessness of the climb. From time to time, the guide would stop, and I would collapse onto my ice axe, heaving giant gulps of all too thin air and slowly coming back to reality. Before I knew it, though, we would be moving once again. Frost was collecting all over us. I had taken my Cambodian krama and wrapped it around my face for protection from the wind. Now it was weighted down with snow and ice.

I will never know how long we walked up the God-forsaken incline. I had no perception of the passing of time, or of our progress up the mountain. I knew only the pain in my legs and the frustration of one who hikes up a 45-degree ice-covered mobius strip.

The ice, though, was interesting, quite interesting, in fact. The wind and mist had encouraged the strangest formations to grow out of the snowfield. Much like the bulbous dribbles of a melting candle, the ice grew upon itself, arcing out laterally into bizarre shapes that reminded me of Soviet spacecraft, perhaps viewed through the shimmering distortion that commonly occurs above steaming hot asphalt.

Then we were at the top.

We were still inside a dense bank of cloud, but the ground had leveled off somewhat. I stumbled forward a few steps, then collapsed into the snow, panting and reaching into my bag for a Snickers bar.

Stew and Scott headed forward until the guides yelled to them, indicating that the part of the mountain they were approaching was unstable.

We drank some partially frozen water and munched our Snickers bars. Our guides, propped themselves up on their ice axes and lit a few more cigarettes. The view was still completely obscured by cloud cover, but we had made it.

Then a sudden and fierce wind whipped up, causing my ice-encrusted krama to whip against my face. I looked down, struggling to secure the flimsy Cambodian scarf against the bluster.

When I looked up, (and I hope that you, dear reader, will recognize the gravity of such a statement), I forgot for quite a few moments to breathe.

When the clouds finally left, the world spread below us in jaw-dropping majesty. I gnawed on the frozen, crumbling, and painfully chewy caloric glory of my Snickers bar and grinned into the immensity.

We could see mountain range after mountain range, the bottoms of valleys where people farmed, and the craggy drama of the high country. It was amazing. The best. Hands down.

Stew, feeling extra energetic, shot up the mountain with the second guide as Scott and I continued to revel in the sights.

Then it was time to descend. The walk back down the steep ice slope was a thousand times easier and more enjoyable than the hike up had been. Now, as we walked, we were able to look out at the glorious view. And relieved of the endless veil of clouds, we could visually gauge our progress, tapping into that age old self-gratifying loop of self re-assurance. Our crampons dug into the ice and allowed us to move with startling confidence and speed. It seemed we were back at the end of the snowfields in no time, and in the final stretches, chose to sled down on our behinds.

There we stopped to snack a little more and remove our crampons.

By now the sun was higher in the sky, and it was becoming quite warm on the mountain. We removed a few layers and repacked our bags for the walk down.

The plastic bottle of weak Nescafe that I had left at the crampon-fitting stop was fully melted again and I sipped it as we scrambled our way down the rock face. All concerned were in very high spirits, and Stewart and our guides indulged in a little of the Tibetan tradition of whooping at the sky while hiking.

Weather this good, our guide explained, only happens on Haba ten or twelve times a year. We were lucky indeed.

When we finally reached the base camp, we were only mildly sunburned and in a great mood.

We had climbed a 17,400 ft. peak, but the day was far from over. We needed to get to Kunming, preferably that night. We had been scheming for some time as to how we would do this. Many hypothetical plans had been proposed. The most popular of these plans was one that we had affectionately begun to call by the name of “Sigma 12.” This plan had us making our way back down to Haba City that day, and then catching some form of transit back to Lijiang in time to catch the night train to Kunming. We did not technically need to be in Kunming the next day, for our train was not until the day after, but we had become somewhat attached to the Kunming lifestyle of feasting on Chinese food and arguing about trivia late into the night.

In order to execute Sigma 12, though, we needed to head down to Haba Village. And while we were just raring to go, our guides were already deep into taking a load off and feasting on a lunch we could not afford. We began to ponder our options, and finally decided that we needed to go into the lunch room and gain more information about possible modes of transit, as much as looking at gentlemen feasting might pain our starving bellies.

In the lunch room all were in high spirits, though perhaps somewhat confused by the fact that we continued to refuse to eat with them. We would, of course, have loved to, but our previously discussed financial miscalculations had rendered us unable to execute any even mildly non-essential expenditures. So we ate nuts and the last of our candy, while we discussed our plans with a crowd of weathered, noodle-eating, cigarette-smoking, Chinese mountain men.

After much discussion and deliberation, we finally settled on the following plan: we would wait for our guides to finish their lunch in the base camp kitchen, then allow them to lead us back down the tangled path to Haba City. Once in Haba City, we would arrange for a car or meinbaoche (“bread truck” — which is what the Chinese call the small vans that are used round the world to transport people), or we would pay our guide to drive us to somewhere from which we might reach the Lijiang train station. It’s true: we were still quite some way from the station, sitting in the bright sun, at well over 10,000 feet at the base of a gigantic snowy mountain. But it seemed achievable. We had just slogged our way through a nearly oxygen-free environment up to the top of a mountain that is higher than any in the lower 48 states. We should be able to navigate our way back through rural China – no problem. And our good spirits were only bolstered when our guides emerged from their lunch earlier than expected.

From there, we headed down the trail, bounding along happily, enjoying ourselves and the ever thickening and greening foliage around us. Soon we were jumping over mud puddles and drinking the luxuriously oxygen-rich air deep into our lungs. Our guide’s friend played bad Chinese pop tunes interspersed with classic American rock on the tiny, but surprisingly loud, speaker of his cell phone as we hiked. Sure enough The Eagle’s Hotel California came on, and we all paused to sing a little a capella rendition of that song.

Hotel California… this piece of music follows AsiaWheeling like a ragged mutt to which we once threw our leftover dinner scraps. So many times during our trip, we have noticed this Eagles tune entering our lives, almost always as a harbinger of good times to come. So its presence here as we hiked down the mountain was a most welcome one.

When we reached Haba City, we found that all the mienbaoche had stopped running, so we asked our guide if he would be willing to drive us in his busted microvan. He agreed to drive us at least to the jumping-off-town of Qiaotou, and perhaps all the way to the train station, depending on whatever price we would agree on. Trusting the man, we decided to do the price haggling part while we traveled, in order to maximize our productivity.

We allowed our guides to indulge in another couple cigarettes and some cups of tea before we climbed in the van and headed out. Our second guide jumped in as well, letting us know that he wanted to come to Lijiang as well. Fine by us. However, all of us climbing in the van was a bit of a premature move for the gravelly track that lead back to the main road through Tiger Leaping Gorge was a bit too steep for our guide’s little van. So we all loaded out once again, and hiked our way to the main road, where we met our man, all grins and grinding of gears.

We paused to buy more cigarettes, and a few of a certain kind of spam-like Chinese processed neon pink sausage sticks. The sticks were nearly inedible, but they were also nearly too cheap for that to matter, so they are a huge hit with many. We declined, but did our best to be supportive as we headed back into the beautiful madness of the heavily-under-construction road through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

We drove on through the beauty, as the sun sank lower and lower, working our way across huge potholes, waiting for giant machines to move out of the way and eventually making it all the way back to the section of the road that contained the Frogger-like stretch of falling boulders. We paused there. Our guide peered up. Indeed the occasional rock was still falling, but the men were not actively at work, and it seemed like it might be safe to traverse on foot.

Our first guide elbowed his friend who was snoozing amidst a sea of cigarette butts and red plastic sausage wrappers to his right. The fellow perked up instantly and grabbed the wheel. Meanwhile, our guide climbed out and headed over to the section of the road that stood in the midst of the flow of rocks. He grunted as he hoisted a few of the larger ones out of the way. Then he signaled to our second guide to gun it across the gap. Scott, Stew, and I were in still in the van. I felt my stomach clench in a terrible knot as we climbed off the road on the packed-down section of boulders. The sliding door of the van was still open next to me and I looked off to my left. We were less than half a foot from the edge of a cliff that plummeted hundreds of feet down into the raging brown water.

Then we were across, alive and well. Yet another obstacle vanquished in our mission to climb Haba and get back in time for a brass monkey and a bit of trivia. We drove on, now positively bubbling with good energy. The haggling process had gone well. We did not actually have enough money to pay them, but these men were going to drive us all the way to Lijiang, where we would visit an ATM and pay them.

Then we came around a corner to see a giant plume of dust and watched while hundreds of tons of rock fell from the side of the wall of the gorge, landing in the middle of the road. When the dust cleared, it became obvious to us that we would not be driving through to Lijiang in this van.

Now we were in a pickle. We did not have enough money to pay the guides, but we needed to climb over the rock slide and get another cab if we were ever to entertain the hope of fully executing Sigma 12. Stew switched once again into Chinese crisis management mode. He began to lean into intense negotiations with our guides. It was understandably emotional, for we were not just in monetary debt to these men, we had just risked our lives on the side of a mountain on three hours of sleep with them and we were now placed in a situation where we might need to stiff them and split across a recently active landslide. We finally struck a deal, though.

Our guide was to call his friends. We would pay him what we could before splitting, leaving us with just a few spare yuan in case of emergency. We would then scramble over the rocks, and in the meantime, our guide’s friends would drive to the opposite side of the blocked road, and meet us there. We would drive with them to the city where we would access an ATM, and pay not only their fee, but the remainder of our guides’ fee as well, to be transferred to him at a later date. So with that we grabbed our things, climbed out of the van, and bid our guides a fond farewell.

We had no idea if the landslide was about to restart, so we scrambled over it with all haste. On the other side, we began hiking, keeping our eyes peeled for our guide’s friend and doing our best to ignore our already painfully sore legs.

We met our new driver surprisingly soon. He walked us back through a partially built tunnel and another somewhat active bit of landslide to a man waiting with another mienbaoche, ready to take us into town. The fellow was earnest, soft-spoken, and obviously not a professional driver. Our attempts at bargaining seemed to send him into a stressful lather. Lather or no lather, we needed to get to Lijiang with all haste, so we bashed our way through the process and climbed into the van. Somewhat to our surprise, the man who had walked us to the van got in as well. As we drove out of the Gorge, the sun set, and Stewart and Scott chatted with the driver and the other man, who turned out to be a kind of professional concierge for people traveling in the region. We began to explain our predicament to him, and he quickly snapped into action, working with us to brainstorm ways to get back to Kunming.

Unfortunately, he also bore the bad news that to the best of his knowledge, we would not only be missing the bus to Kunming but also the last bus from Lijiang as well. Despite Motta’s memory to the contrary, we had to take this data into account. The possibility that he was right grew only stronger as repeated calls to the bus station corroborated his news.

We seemed to be up against a wall here. Sigma 12 was crumbling around us, and there seemed  to be nothing we could do about it. It was then that our nervous and bargaining-averse driver spoke up. There are sleeper buses headed south to Kunming from Shangri La, he explained. They stop in a certain tiny city on the way, and if they have space they will often take on passengers at that stop.

This then, would be our goal. If we could get to that city in the next hour, we would catch one of these buses. Both of our drivers seemed confident that there would be space left.

So off we raced. It was about an hour away, which meant that we could make it, but first we needed to access an ATM. We executed a bungled and circuitous ATM transaction, which involved Scott’s, Motta’s and my ATM cards, some white lies to a number of parties, and a mad dash to purchase a carton of cigarettes as a thank you gift for our guides. Finally, all these missions were completed, and we took off toward the middle of the night bathroom-stop city. We whipped through the night, crossing our fingers.

When we finally reached the city, our driver insisted on taking a ridiculous route through a partially built residential development project. Eventually, the road we were driving on petered out into a large pile of cement blocks. Stewart, who had been counseling them against this strategy from the beginning, began to melt down into a frothing torrent of Chinese rage. With the clock proudly displaying the time that we had been told the buses would arrive from Shangri La, we backed out of the construction site and went back onto the road.

The bus station was looming ahead of us. Stewart cried out in excitement, “I can see the bus; there it is!”

Just then, our driver took a left into yet another darkened construction site, explaining that he would need to access the parking zone somehow by way of this darkened path. Stewart began to reach new levels of irateness, oscillating between screaming at the men in Chinese, and turning to Scott and me explaining in all too flowery language the things which he would like to do to these men in the event that we did not arrive at the station before the departure of the Kunming bound bus.

Finally, we ran into yet another blockage. This one appeared to be made of buckets… perhaps of paint? Our driver and our concierge began to get out of the car, explaining that they were heading into a nearby shop in search of directions. This was it. Motta unleashed a new, never before witnessed level of vehemency. All anger faded from his voice and he began to plead, as a man before the gallows. Eventually, our two guides capitulated and brought us to the station.

Eureka! The bus was still there! Motta ran over to the counter and began to haggle for tickets, while we congratulated ourselves on our fine choice in AsiaWheeling Bureau staff. It was too soon to celebrate, though, for Motta came back to us with a pale frowning face. They were all booked. Even the next bus from Shangri La was booked as well. What was this curse? Why was this mission to Haba so plagued by logistical (or physical) roadblocks?

We climbed back into the car, and explained our situation to the driver and our concierge. We needed to come up with yet another plan. We decided to drive back to Lijiang and figure it out on the way.

First things first. It had been a long, long day, and we needed a beer. We stopped at a gas station on the way and grabbed their last three cold bottles of Dali beer and a bottle of orange juice. We mixed up three brass monkeys and climbed back in the van.

As we sipped our Dali brass monkeys, we contemplated our options. It was late now, nearing midnight. All the buses would almost certainly have already left. This left cab and meinbaoche. The beers were named after a city called Dali, which is a city in between Lijiang and Kunming.

As we drove, our man got on the phone with all his friends and began pricing cab trips to Kunming. Even split three ways, they were startlingly expensive. We must have somehow, through temporal means perhaps, communicated to them our desperate state. After we had exhausted our concierge’s entire phone book of cab drivers, we began to look into more drastic options.

Sigma 12 had to be thrown out the window. We would not be getting to Kunming that night, or even the next morning… But we might be able to get an early bus or train from the Dali of beer brewing fame. The cab would be much cheaper, since it did not cross the checkpoint entering Kunming. It seemed that most drivers in China did not actually bring their licenses with them, unless they were planning to cross a checkpoint. We were becoming exhausted and starving hungry. We had burned quite a few calories that day and eaten little in the way of real food. The stress of the logistical debate was beginning to get to us. We needed a solution. So we authorized our concierge to call one of his friends to drive us to Dali. We set the time of departure at 1:30 am. This would give us about an hour after we got to Lijiang to find a bite to eat.

We rolled into Lijiang a little after midnight, and our drivers were clearly not familiar with the bright lights and big city. We drove around for about 15 minutes, as they attempted to get their bearings, but soon our hunger and frustration levels got high enough that we just called a stop and got out of the car. We were on the outer edge of the famous Lijiang old city. It was a place we remembered fondly from the pilot study and our time there with the ravishing Goa Jie, but it now seemed manufactured and unimaginably touristy. It was also mostly shuttered up for the night. We wandered in search of food, but found little more than roadside grilled meat offerings. Finally we struck out in the opposite direction, walking away from the old city, and finally located a popular looking restaurant on a street a few over.

They served many of the standard Yunnan dishes, so Motta was completely prepared to dive into the ordering process. Unfortunately, outside the place they were also selling grilled meat skewers to nighttime pedestrians. The grill emitted a thick fatty smoke which, due to some strange wind tunnel effect, was siphoned directly into the restaurant, stinging the eyes of the patrons, and inducing coughing fits in the staff. You can’t win them all, we thought, and taking a look at our watches, sat down.

The food was good, but the flavors seemed somehow distant. It may have been my exhaustion or the stinging of the smoke, or perhaps the brass monkey, which had delivered a rather intense and unexpected delirium, likely due in large part to my exhausted and nutritionally depleted state. The restaurant also attempted to serve us a dish that consisted of a great many raw tomatoes, sliced and arranged, then positively mounded with sugar. They were so sweet as to be disgusting, and in a rare reversal, AsiaWheeling sent them back to the kitchen.

Then suddenly the meal was over, and we were climbing into yet another Mienbaoche. It was the middle of the night, the car was driven by two fellows. They were both men from a village near the opening of the gorge, and they did not know the area well. We were obviously the means to easy cash, and neither of them particularly were particularly interested in or experienced with professional driving. As a direct result of this, they drove fast. Very very fast. So fast it was terrifying. We tried to sleep in the car, but the swerving and sudden braking continuously woke us up. The two fellows chatted and chain smoked, working to keep each other awake. From time to time, Stew would shudder to life and yell at them in Chinese to slow down, but it seemed to do little. What was going to be a five hour ride that would have allowed us a little time to sleep was done in just over three hours. It had been a terribly uncomfortable half-sleep, punctuated by painful knocks on the head against the window as we would take a speed bump at 80 km/hour, and by the waking nightmare of our cigarette-fueled, mad drivers, speeding through the Chinese night with reckless abandon.

We climbed out of the car grumpy and stoned, at 4:00 in the morning in Dali. Our drivers dropped us off at a small obscure bus station from which no buses left for anywhere relevant. Still struggling to gain lucidity, we paid the men, and they drove off. It was not until they were long gone that we realized they had not even taken us to the right part of town. We chatted with a cabby for a while and found out where the right station was. The road to Kunming was under construction, he explained, so the four-hour drive might take as many as 12 to complete. At this point, though, we were so used to obstructions that we easily shrugged it off, laughing even. Regardless of the time it would take to get to Kunming, no buses would be leaving for some time anyway. In fact, the city was mostly asleep, so asleep, that we could not even find an open noodle shop.

We headed to the bus station like zombies, pausing only to call the drivers and give them a brief piece of our minds concerning their reckless endangerment of our lives.

When we got to the bus station we found that the first bus was at 7:00 am. So we had some time to kill. We first tried to sleep in one of the idling buses. The driver seemed okay with it, but when it began to fill with passengers, we were forced to climb off lest we end up in some unintended random Chinese city. Eventually, we just decided to sleep the last couple hours on the street. We found a nice clean stretch of low broad wall, put our bags under our heads like bulky pillows, and passed out.

The SIM city 2000 theme woke us up with just enough time to rush down the street to an open noodle shop and eat a few large spicy bowls of wonton soup before we climbed on the bus and slept the last five hours to Kunming. If there was construction on the road, we didn’t even notice it.

As our travelers sleep warmly bundled in the stone cabin at the base camp of Haba Snow Mountain, the wind whips and howls outside, distributing icy haze throughout the thin air of the night sky.  Before they wake up, we will pause for a brief intermission. We will step back a thousand years to explore the importance of these lands, and the traders who traversed similar mountain passes with far fewer amenities or modern comforts.  Brought to you by Mekong Bureau chief and international chiller Mr. Stewart Motta, we present a special report on the ancient Tea Horse Road.

Tea Caravan - Sichuan 1926

The Tea Horse Road, sometimes known as the Southern Silk Road, although silk never was a large commodity on the route, was first recorded as a major vein of trade during the Tang Dynasty (618-907).  The route was in operation long before tea and horses moved across it, and tombs found in the northern reaches of the route suggest that it has been a corridor of travel for 4,000 to 5,000 years. Over the millennia this road and its tributaries carried not only commerce, but also culture, linking a myriad of people, traditions, and ideas, from Southeast Asia, China, Tibet, and then further west into the kingdoms of northern India.

Both the Silk Road and the Tea Horse Road were mainly in existence to supply the empires of eastern China with ample numbers of horses. China’s military relied on acquiring horses from Central Asia, and both silk and tea became China’s main exports to barter for the four-legged beasts. The scarcity of horses in China was a significant advantage to the “barbarians of the north” (Mongols, Turks, Tibetans) who frequently pillaged and invaded the empire on horseback, and would eventually form the greatest cavalry the world has ever seen, conquering most of mainland Asia on horseback in the name of Ghengis Khan. The Book of Tang reads “Horses are the military preparedness of the state. If Heaven takes away this preparedness it will totter and fall.”

A death sentence was in place for any individual trying to destroy China’s monopoly on silk. However, silk worms, eggs, and even farmers, were eventually smuggled out of China to Persia, Vietnam, and Japan. This ended China’s domination of the world’s silk production, and caused concern over the ability to keep the flow of horses heading toward the capital of Xi’an. Fortunately for the Chinese, a taste for tea had developed among the neighboring states. Most of the tea being produced to meet this new demand was grown in southwest China, mainly Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces.

Tea is indigenous to the area around Pu’er and Xishuangbanna Prefectures in southern Yunnan, which is believed to be the birthplace of tea. Some trees found in the area can be dated back over 1,000 years. This area is a cultural cocktail and located near the juncture of present day Lao, Burma, and China. The tea derives its name from the prefecture and the mention of Pu’er will to this day bring creases of satisfaction and pride across the faces of Yunnan’s people.

Pu’er tea was exported into Southeast Asia and north all the way to Lhasa and beyond into India mainly on the backs of horses or mules, but tea porters did exist as well. The price of one horse was around 130 pounds of caked tea. Men and women would pack up horses and stack sacks weighing 150 pounds or more on their shoulders, before trekking through the treacherous terrain of western Sichuan and Yunnan. Eventually China was acquiring 25,000 horses annually in exchange for over 3 million pounds of tea. Exporting this amount of tea greatly increased the traffic on the Tea Horse Road, and multitudes of people hashed out a livelihood from the industry.

Tea porters - 1908

This toilsome travel required a certain resiliency of the tea, and a system was created to dry the tea and form it into dense cakes. The cakes naturally ferment and are treated in Yunnan similar to wine, as the tea becomes better with age and connoisseurs know which years posses the most desirable flavor. Some cakes do not reach their prime age until after 30 to 40 years of slow fermentation. A tea cake could take over a year to complete the journey to Lhasa, fermenting as it climbed up to the Tibetan Plateau. It was this dark earthy temptress of the taste buds that seduced the Tibetan Empire after its unification in the early 600’s. The tea culture quickly grabbed hold in Lhasa, and by the 1700’s the Dalai Lama was reportedly reserving 2,500 kg of tea for his court annually.  To this day, Pu’er Tea is the beverage of choice in most Tibetan areas, being mixed with yak butter to produce a frothy sour beverage that is consumed both morning and night.

Resurgence of the Tea Horse Road and Mr. Scott Norton’s Grandfather

Within months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Tea Horse Road began its revival. Japanese forces controlled Southeast Asia and the waters along most of China’s eastern seaboard. Japan then invaded British controlled Burma, cutting the military supply route to the Kuomintang forces on the Burma Road. With all the seaports closed, the Tea Horse Road became the main overland route to supply Chiang Kai-shek and the allied forces in Kunming, Yunnan. Many American and British pilots were stationed in Kunming flying over “The Hump” on their way to and from Assam, India.

Asia Wheeling’s very own Scott Norton had a grandfather who was stationed in Kunming. If his grandfather enjoyed a glass of foreign booze or cigarettes during his time in Kunming, it had mostly likely come all the way on the backs of one of the 20,000 yaks or 25,000 horses and mules from India, through Tibet, passing through Lijiang, before hitting his parched lips in a Kunming saloon.

Peter Goullart, a Russian living in Lijiang in the 1940’s, who later wrote a famous book on the area called “Forgotten Kingdom,” recorded, “articles were packed for delivery at Lijiang, especially the liquors and cigarettes which were worth their weight in gold in Kunming, crowded with thirsty American and British troops… Few people have realized how vast and unprecedented this sudden expansion of caravan traffic between Indian and China was, or how important.”

Fellow Asia Wheeling readers, this concludes our introduction to the Tea Horse Road, which these days sees minimal use besides some scattered tourism. But needless to say, the history and relevance of this road is one ripping good yarn.

We woke up bright and early in the unheated, but cozy interior of our room at the guest-house in Haba Village. We pulled on a few more layers than usual and made our way across the courtyard to the outdoor bathrooms and the large kitchen area where we had eaten the night before.

Our guide was already there with a friend of his. We were worried for a moment that this friend was to be our extra guide (which we could, due to last night’s alarming census of our coffers, of course, not afford). Our guide assured us, however, that he was not appearing in a professional capacity, and soon we all relaxed and laid into a giant breakfast of fried eggs and thick Naxi bread called “bing“.

Along with the bread and eggs, was some freshly extracted and boiled yak milk, and plenty of good strong tea. We feasted heavily, knowing that the next time we would be able to eat with abandon might be back in Lijiang.

So nearly bursting, but in very high spirits, we thanked our kind hosts and took from them a couple of large pieces of the Naxi bread and a few hard boiled eggs for each of us to eat later that day. And with that we headed up the trail. It was the lowest portion of the hike elevation-wise, but we could already feel that we were much higher up than we had been in Kunming. The trail began by cutting across agricultural land, heading steadily uphill over meadows and scrappy bits of pine forest.

From time to time, we would come up upon a small group of yaks, usually containing at least one mother and calf pair. Our guides seemed particularly wary of these, and went to great lengths to get them moving out of our way.

You see, dear reader, I have begun calling them our guides. This is because for all intents and purposes, they were. Our original guide brought along this friend under the pretexts of a normal companionship,  but in reality he was helping us almost as much as our fully employed guide in determining the way up the trail and avoiding negative interactions with maternal yaks.

The air was thin. That was for sure. We indulged in frequent breaks in order to catch our breath and take in the view. We were gaining altitude at a good clip though, for soon the entire valley began to spread out in all its terraced glory below us. Each time we took a break, and even from time to time as we hiked, our two guides would light up a cigarette. Indeed, the rate at which they smoked was only eclipsed by the degree to which they could outclimb us in this low oxygen environment.

As we climbed, the ecology around us began to change. Soon we were walking through large flowering forests of rhododendron. It was beautiful, and before we knew it, we had passed the highest point of this leg of the trip. To culminate it, our guide’s friend let out a savage whoop. Stewart explained to us that this was part of both a Tibetan and a Naxi tradition – screaming to the gods when you get up high. Delightful.

From there we had only a mildly muddy descent down to the base camp. As soon as we entered the grounds of the base camp, the temperature seemed to fall by 20 degrees. The wind whipped up, and clouds began to blow in. The camp consisted of a number of small low-lying, hand-made wooden buildings that were barely outnumbered by the number of donkeys idling around the premises, defecating and being generally ornery.

We ducked inside one of the small wooden buildings to seek shelter from the cold and the donkeys, and to eat the lunch that had been packed for us by the guest house. Paired with some salt from the base camp kitchen and some items from the market, we were able to make some positively delectable little sandwiches. As we munched and drank water from our canteens, people began to trickle down from the mountain.

It turned out that on that day there had been a Korean group that had ridden up to base camp from Haba City on donkeys and were currently climbing the mountain. They strolled one by one back into the base camp looking tired and windblown. “The wind is crazy up there,” they explained.

Some had made it all the way to the summit; others had been forced to turn back for fear of being blown off. They all appeared to be wearing very fancy cold-weather gear. I am talking North Face parkas, with elements of fur, giant gloves, fancy snow pants… all things that AsiaWheeling did not have.

We quieted any vestiges of fear of freezing to death with the notion that Koreans are notorious for over-equipping for their expeditions, and instead laid into our food.

Soon the food was gone, and then there was only the question of what to do for the rest of the day. We could not hike up to Haba, for expeditions could only be made in the morning. Our guides explained that in the afternoon, cold air and clouds came in, making the ascent too difficult.

So the only thing to do was to wait, and refrain from eating too many of our supplies. So we let the day go on, passing our time by chatting with the Koreans and marching around trying not to get too cold, for it was indeed cold, and the air was thin up there.

Finally all the Koreans had come down from the mountain, and we were actually able to check into our room. It was more of a leaky shack, but it was filled to the brim with blankets. We crawled under these and began to get warm. Now that we were not freezing, it was much easier to pass the time chatting and speculating about topics of trivial relevance. I had just regained normal body temperature when the sun sank low enough that we might safely eat our instant noodles, without fear of going to bed starving. So we headed over to the kitchen.

We found the whole crew in the kitchen, as usual, crowded around the small stove, chain-smoking inexpensive Chinese cigarettes and laughing about some jokes in Naxi.  We sat down and did our best to connect with them in Chinese and bits of English.

The noodles were delicious, though the little packets of spicy goo that are used to flavor the broth had frozen solid. They melted in the boiling stream water, that we were drinking and cooking with, and after our bowls were done, we began to discuss the logistics of the next morning.

We decided that we had better come clean with our guide and let him know exactly how much warm clothing we had. When he found out, he clicked his tongue disapprovingly. We could do it, he said, and as long as we hiked hard we would not be cold, but if we stopped, or needed to take it too easy, we would get cold and need to turn back.

This then tumbled us once again into a savage logistical debate. Can we do this? Is it safe? Is there a way we can modify the plan? Should we still rent the crampons (which were one of the most expensive things on the budget)? After contemplating many different  options, we decided that we needed to try to climb this beast. And in order to do that, we would need crampons.

The next day we would get up at 3:30 in the morning, meet the guides for breakfast, and head up the mountain. If we were too cold and had to turn back, so be it. At least we would have tried. Comfortable in our new resolve, we trundled off through the whipping cold wind to our unlit shack and piled five blankets over the tops of each of us. I took all my clothes, even my boots, and put them in bed with me dreading even then the thought of putting them back onto my body freezing from the night’s cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” Stew replied.

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

Stew replied with the same.

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

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

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

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