The Grip and the ride to Jiangyang

Our plan was to cycle from Chengdu to Chongqing. We chose this route for three reasons: it got us to Chongqing where we could catch a boat on the Yangtse, it had lots of towns along the way for accommodation, and it seemed like an obvious route. It runs east-west between the two largest cities in Sichuan Province. It's like riding from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia or San Francisco to Los Angeles (distance-wise).

Apparently few other tourists find this route so obvious. From the surprised looks we got in hotels and from what we heard from the few people who speak English, almost all tourists take a train or plane between the cities. Our 1,000-plus-page guide book, the Lonely Planet, doesn't have enough room to mention a single city on the route, even though some of the cities have over 100,000 people. One city has over 500,000 people. This appealed to me as much as anything. These were the Blue Highways of China.

The two bad things about the route: Chongqing is called the "furnace of China" because it is so hot. Also it has few bicycles because it is hilly. Hot and hilly. Hmmm.

Most of the time in Chengdu I suffered from The Grip. My grandma once asked me how I felt and she seemed like she meant it, so I told her I felt tired, lethargic, my bones ached and I had no appetite. It felt like I had the flu but didn't have the usually symptoms like a cough, running nose, or sore throat. She said casually, "Oh my mother used to call that The Grip."

We delayed riding out of Chengdu one day hoping I would escape the Grip. We did very little that day except play the solitaire game called Spider, which we learned from a Hoyle Book of Rules we had looked at in a cafe's library in Jinghong. Also we did most of our packing.

When we got on the bikes the next morning, I still wasn't out of The Grip. My head never really got into the ride the whole day. That meant when I saw something a little unusual, I didn't bother tot urn my head and look carefully to discover something. My curiosity was low. So this text is through the filter of The Grip.

No way to start an adventure, but maybe the best adventures are ones you're not ready for.

the hardest part of navigating in China (and most places) is always trying to leave or enter a city. WE followed the arrow at the edge of our Chengdu city map that said "To Chongqing." We had a great bike path the entire way until we reached the expressway. Suddenly instead of a special lane just for bikes, bikes were forbidden. We tried to ask a toll taker which way to go but we failed to communicate.

So we backtracked about 100 meters to the last turn before the toll gates. As far as we knew, this narrow blacktop road might just lead to a power station (though several passing buses encouraged us). We decided to ask for help. Here's a typical 'conversation' with some people hanging out in front of a food stall: Us: Jiangyang? (pointing down the road) Them: (no comprehension).

We tried various pronunciations but got the same response. Some people took lots of interest in the map but it was all in Roman letters so it didn't help.

We were stumped. No signs, not even in Chinese, and no one recognized the name of the next major town just 70km away. Finally Joan asked, "Chongqing?" Everybody recognized this and nodded their heads and pointed down the road. It was the right road. This was contrary to what we learned in Thailand, where you are better off asking for the next town, not the largest town. But it was a good sign that they didn't just agree with our assertion that Jianyang was down that road. (We have found that most people will affirm what you say just to be polite, even if you are wrong).

In the middle of the day we crossed a ridge of mountains. Near the base of the climb we saw a sign that appeared to be placed over a small dirt road that branched off to the left. the sign said, "Foreigners must be refused to cross border." The word "border" concerned us a little but since the sign hung above the other road we decided it just meant, "no foreigners allowed on this road." Luckily the sign was over the side road, not the highway.

High up on the mountain we looked back on hills covered with orchards and corn fields with small reservoirs here and there. In the distance we could see the five and ten story concrete buildings of the town at the base of the mountains. They looked so much nicer from a distance. A very thick haze dulled the view quite a bit.

We stopped near the top at a two-story concrete building with a few tables and chairs inside and an ice-cream freezer at the door. Fortunately, these rectangular freezers were easy to spot from the road. We got a frozen pineapple chunk on a stick. I thought it was pineapple flavored, but it was a real pineapple, just frozen.

While we ate an old man sat down at the table next to us. He was skinny, had a leathery face, and wore dark clothes. He never made eye contact with us but after a few minutes he started the long, grinding wind-up to a biblical spit that old Chinese men are so good at. In fact, he did it so well, with such bronchial dredging, throat scraping gusto that my choke reflex started tingling. A foamy white glob ended up on the floor at his feet. Right there in the restaurant. I managed to keep my pineapple down. But he sensitized me. Even now when I hear that grinding wind-up I think of that old man's practiced, truly brilliant performance, and I have to suppress a puke.

At the same place Joan got attacked by no-see-ums. They really bit her up, though they left me alone. We left fast.

We passed orchards but couldn't figure out what fruit they produced because they had wrapped newspaper around every piece. The trees stood only four or five feet tall but spread out wide and looked relatively old, as if they had been carefully pruned for years, so as to be short and easy to harvest.

We climbed 10km up and went 10km down. A Chinese man on his single-speed Chinese bike also climbed over the mountain. We leap-frogged each other all the way up. He started out wearing his nice polo-style T-shirt, then took it off and stuffed it in his basket, then put it back on near the bottom.

After the downhill ran out, the road gently rolled along the hills, which grew corn and rice. Many of the crops were drying on the road. I mean *on* the road.

The farmers used every available horizontal space, and some not so horizontal, to dry tier crops. roofs, balconies, porches, driveways, and the highway. They placed large rocks or bottles on the road to keep the drivers from milling the stuff before it was ready. Sort of like putting a chair in a parking space after you dig the snow out.

We reached a small town just five km north of Jiangyang and the road went to s-. The blacktop had been fine (though a little bouncy at high speeds, so I felt like I was riding a horse) but at Shiqiaozhen the blacktop disappeared and nothing remained except the coarse rock road bed. The blue Chinese trucks (almost every truck that passed was painted the same shade of blue, except a few pale green ones) and buses bounced down into big holes and back up again, all of them going slower than us. I laughed, watching the steep angles the buses rolled to in the holes.

I also found something depressing and scary watching all this. Even though they honked all the time, I felt they had no special sense of urgency to get over this rough patch of road. it seemed like the drivers were just going to keep going no matter what the road was like, or how slow they moved, like prisoners on a march. The scary part is that I was in it, too, and I had no idea how long it would go on. I did not want to submit. This feeling returned several times over the course of the China ride.

The road squiggled through a pretty sad-looking, dirty dusty town. Huge piles of loose bricks sat here and there. Nothing says entropy like a pile of loose bricks.

Fortunately this only lasted about 500 meters. We found out that the road often turns to hell in small towns and just outside large ones. It works like speed bu ps. In towns where the road is fine all the way through the cars don't slow down at all. Instead they just hold down the horn and speed on through like express freight trains.

After the road smoothed it wasn't long before we were wandering around Jiangyang trying to find a hotel. The volume of clatter in town exceeded even Chengdu. It didn't have many bike lanes and the streets were narrow so the rickshaws rang their bells (a metal bar attached to a spring that flaps in the spokes and sounds like a very loud old telephone) and cars honked their horns non-stop. Somewhat lost, tired, hungry, and, as every evening, desperate to find a home for the night, the clatter made a hard situation feel desperate.

The first hotel we found looked kind of dingy from the outside. I mimed I wanted a room by putting my hands together on my cheek and turning my head sideways. At first they said OK. then a minute later, they said No and sent us to another hotel down the road.

We read that in China tourists often get directed to the most expensive hotel in town. We read this was an awful conspiracy, and we were determined to get a room wherever we wanted.

But we actually wanted the expensive places. The "tourist hoteL' that we were directed to in Jianyang was one of the best places we ever had. It was a bit pricey at around US$19 but it was worth every penny and more. The cheaper places usually went for at least US$12 and were really disgusting. This place was great. Cush, clean room way up high so we couldn't hear the traffic and a surprise in the morning.

For dinner we found a little restaurant with about the friendliest waitress you could imagine. She smiled the whole time we were there and even sat down and talked to us, though our communication was limited to three pages of phrases in the guidebook. She took Joan to the kitchen in back to pick out what we wanted.

We had warned that the restaurants will try to give you the most expensive dish without telling you and then you have some outrageous bill. So we were on guard. But in Jianyang I felt like a special, honored guest. People wanted us to buy stuff, for sure, but I didn't sense anyone was trying to rip us off. Everything cost so little, if they were ripping us off, they weren't very good at it. Dinner was great and cheap.

We planned to have the "fried egg and tomato" dish for breakfast but at 8:15 the next morning the hotel delivered a great breakfast to our room! Two fried eggs, a large pastry, a good hot milk drink, some steamed dumplings and a big thermos of hot water. It was so pretty on the silver tray we took a picture.

Next: Zigong.

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