Friday 31 August 2012

Temple Life in 6 Shots

There is precious little to distinguish one Chinese city from the next. Vertical slabs of concrete reach for a grey sky; the avenues, though broad, are always clogged with traffic; monstrous department stores and fastfood chains spew out scores of happy consumers; the sound of pedestrians hawking their lungs out is never far away; and even the parks are a tumult of shouts, smells and shoves. The only place to escape the hubbub is a Buddhist or Taoist temple. These are often located in the unlikeliest places—among leering apartment blocks or on top of a mountain overlooking the sprawling city below. Enter and you'll find yourself alone at last, alone amid a whirl of colours where the silence is only deepened by the sound of a quietly chanting monk.

Yin is silence, yang is noise

Courtyard of a small Taoist temple

Guardian lion protecting a temple

Main gate of Dafo Si in Zhangye

The scarier the better

Prayer flags and Chinese Wall

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Clueless

One of the many delights of this trip is getting lost. It's not that I particularly enjoy taking wrong turns or putting in extra miles, but it often leads to pleasant surprises. I once asked a man in a shiny SUV how to get to Tehran. 'Tehran?' he said. 'Why go to Tehran?' Two small children in the back were giggling. 'Come home with us. We'll have lunch, I'll show you around. You can stay as long as you like. Please don't say no.' And I'll never forget that time in Spain when I wasn't sure whether the road I was on was in fact the right road. I stopped. There was not a soul in sight. After a minute or so a bus pulled over. An elderly lady dressed in conservative blue got off, her spine bent not only by old age but also by a leather suitcase she was carrying. I addressed her gently and asked for directions. 'Cross the river at the next bridge,' she told me in rapid Spanish, and in the same breath asked where I was from. I told her. 'And you've come all the way by bicycle?' I said yes. She tutted, took my hand and said something I didn't quite follow. Then she picked up her suitcase and walked off. When I opened my hand I found a plastic rosary. Now, I wouldn't even know how to say a Hail Mary, but that simple act of well-wishing touched me tremendously. I've kept it in the back pocket of my cycling jersey ever since.

Wherever you go, people can relate to a stranger trying to find his way. Language barriers aren't an issue. I always start with the local equivalent of 'hello' or 'good afternoon' to break the ice, have a go at the name of the place I'm looking for, and try to look a bit clueless. If this triggers a lengthy explanation in a language I don't know, which is usually the case, there's always enough pointing involved for me to get a sense of where I'm supposed to be heading. I thank the person who's come to my rescue, he or she says something to the effect of 'you're welcome' or 'don't mention it', and we're on our merry way again. It's human communication distilled to its essence, a successful exchange of information against the odds.

Chinese people doing Chinese things
Not so in China. The trouble starts when I try to catch someone's attention with a simple 'nihao'. I can see the panic flare up in their eyes. What, me? Before they get a chance to run I corner them and slowly state the place I'm looking for, taking care not to make it sound like a question. In Chinese, intonation is not the frilly thing it is in Western languages. My phrasebook has a good example of what happens if you get it wrong: mess up the tones of the word 'wàijiāguān' and you're introducing yourself not as a diplomat but as a rubber U-bend pipe. But no matter how hard I try, most people simply don't get what I'm driving at. Even if I do manage to get my point across, it often turns out to be a complete waste of energy. Not only is every syllable of their explanation lost on me, it's usually accompanied by such a confusion of gestures and exclamations that I end up none the wiser. 'So let me get this straight,' I will say. 'Do I turn left (I point to my left) or right (I point to my right)?' A single nod of the head. Yes.

More than ever I now depend on road signs. On main thoroughfares these tend to be bilingual, but on country roads they read like small puzzles. Several times a day I stop to match the Chinese characters I find on road signs with the characters on my Chinese map, which I then compare with the place names on my English map. Memorising them takes some imagination. The characters for the city of Xi'an, for instance, resemble a pi symbol taking a foot bath and a stick man crossing his legs. The trick here is to remember more than just the first character or you'll end up in, say, Pingyao rather than Pingliang.

This really is a wonderful country. The scenery can be stunning, the food is great and on the whole the people are nice. But in China even the most hardened traveller will sometimes feel like an illiterate deaf-mute left to his own devices.

Friday 17 August 2012

Homework

On foot, on foot, on foot, on foot, on foot. The boy in the pink polo shirt has nearly filled a page when he looks up. I sit down next to him and eat my ice cream. We're surrounded by stacks of boxes filled with soft drinks and instant noodles. The wind is playing with the tarpaulin overhead. I sigh contentedly, glad to be off the bike for a minute. The boy, however, is determined not to be distracted from his homework. His face a mere two inches from the paper he picks up where he left off: after 'on' the horizontal stroke of the f, then the vertical stroke, the two o's—clockwise—followed by the t, in the same vein as the f. What is he practising, I wonder. His English or his Roman alphabet?

One step at a time
Sitting there in the shade I try to relax a bit. No more desert, I tell myself once again, though that's only partly true. Physically I've made it to the other side. But my mind is still busy catching up with reality. Even though there are trees all around, and people working the fields, and villages with small convenience stores, I'm still pushing myself as hard as I did in the desert, when I desperately tried to limit the number of days spent in between towns, and I'm still carrying enough water to extinguish a wildfire. Beneath all this is the inarticulate anxiety that tends to accompany you in hostile environments. No matter how often I told myself it was all just a game, that I could hail a car in case I ran out of water or spend the night in a drainage pipe if I didn't make it to a settlement before nightfall, everything in me remained geared to survival. That in itself was as exhausting as the miles I put in.

The boy looks at me again. Then he pulls a small exercise book from under his notepad and indicates a sentence. 'How do you go to school?' I read out aloud. There are two options: by bus or on foot. 'Do you go on foot?' I ask. He smiles but doesn't reply. Then he points out another phrase, and another. 'These are my friends,' I say. 'This is our classroom.' By now, his mother, who sold me the ice cream, has started to take an interest. Sensing that here is a perfect opportunity for her son to practise his skills, she tries to bully him into engaging in earnest conversation. The boy, preferring the monastic approach, picks up his pen and resumes his work: on foot, on foot, on foot. This infuriates his mother, who now begins to shove him around. I try not to laugh. Only when I get up to leave do I realise how right this little boy is. Rather than the frenzied 'by bus' mentality of his mother, who wants him to seize every opportunity and get ahead, or, for that matter, of myself, having just crossed a desert as if chased by demons, here is someone who chooses to take life as it comes. One step at a time.

Thursday 2 August 2012

Buddy

I've always felt that people who treat inanimate objects as though they were live beings with thoughts and feelings ought to be put on some kind of medication. You know the kind. Loners who think only their stuffed toy really understands them. Sad souls who say 'good morning' to the coffee machine. But having spent so much time with no one but my bicycle for company I'm beginning to see what makes them tick. We are social creatures. We need someone to talk to, a sympathetic ear. And if there happens to be nobody around anything will do, even a chromoly frame on wheels. Tough days on the road become a bit more bearable when I tell myself that my bike is suffering as much as I am. And after a nice long ride I like to pat it on the saddle and say: 'Well done'. To which my bike replies: 'Well, I'd never have made it without you'.

Actually, it's a miracle how well we get on. When I first walked into my local bike shop two years ago I knew next to nothing about bicycles, though I thought I did, having spent a week or two browsing online bike forums for bits of relevant information. The conversation I had with one of the technical chaps who worked there went something like this. Technical chap: 'You know, those Edelux headlights are really nice, but you'd be better off buying a battery-powered headlight and investing your hard-earned cash in a Chris King headset.' (A headset is the set of bearings just above the fork.) Me, repeating what I had just read in Stephen Lord's excellent Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook: 'A headset is a headset. I'd rather have a decent light on my bike so I won't get killed in one of those unlit tunnels they have in Italy.' Technical chap, shrugging: 'Very well, have it your way.' Two years later, I still don't know what the added benefit of a Chris King headset would be. But I do know that obscene floodlight of mine managed to convince oncoming cars in many a pitch-black tunnel to stick to their own lane. Then again, my midrange headset could snap tomorrow and send me straight off a cliff.

And that's exactly what it is
What I'm trying to say is that, even though it was a nitwit like me who picked each and every component, the team at Van Herwerden managed to build a bike that turned out to be just right. There really isn't anything I would like to change, and for someone as finnicky as I am that's quite a statement. I love the way it becomes part of my body when I click my cleats into the pedals. I love the way it darts off when the traffic light turns green. I love the way it seems to suggest the right gear when the road suddenly tilts up or down. And I love the many faces it has. When it sits against a wall, basking in the sun, there is something unmistakably feminine about its curved handlebars, the delicate geometry of its frame, the dimples in the saddle. Sometimes it behaves like a grumpy old man who can't keep quiet about his ailments. Dry-dry-dry, it groans with every stroke whenever I've neglected to grease the chain. And when I turn it upside down to fix a puncture it's like a child holding up a bloody knee, patiently waiting for me to come up with a patch.

There is only one thing that worries me slightly. Unlike me, it doesn't seem to wear out. So far, I've only replaced the rear tire, the chain and a couple of brake pads. In fact, save for a few scratches on the paintwork it still looks new. If it weren't for me it could easily keep going for another two years, and probably much longer. I haven't yet broken the news to my buddy that we're reaching the end of our journey, that I'll have to disassemble it, put it in a box and ship it home. I'm afraid it will never forgive me.