Pedal power in China

By DENISE MCNABB

A typhoon has sliced through southwestern Guandong Province a week earlier, lashing orchards and impoverished villages, flattening vegetable plots and turning a stretch of unsealed motorway into mud porridge. By the time we arrive the road is carved into deep ruts by lorries.

Mud pelts us back and front as we career like bratty children on our bikes along the rocky grooves for nearly an hour before finding concrete slabs, China's answer to rural roads.

The next day the landscape is an altogether tranquil contrast. The sun crackles through low swirls of greyish-white as we pedal out from ramshackle Jiu Long across an undulating valley. Lime-green, waist-high rice paddies fan to the edge of the steep, karst, domed hills. We climb over them, every muscle in our legs and butts aching after the 7km of uphill toil.

For more than a few brief moments we eye our newfound pedal pals and bemoan our love affair with the low end of the gear range. Who is kidding who about the joys of cycle travel?

Truthfully though, apart from this stint - an excuse for a brief whinge - the route is not terribly taxing.

In any event you can cheat on the hill part altogether, because the trip has the luxury of a back-up mini-bus and a "sweeper", a guy in a truck who follows the slowest rider.

We are here because we are supposedly adventurers, not pikers, so we mostly make an effort on the hills. Two of our group even manage to cycle the entire route, such is the dogged determination of one and the experience of the other.

To be frank, it seemed surreal that I was cycling at all on these China roads. It was my first time in 27 years on a bike and the very notion seemed laughable and terrifying.







Our paddy landscape is on the fifth day of our 10-day journey which had started in Zhaoqing, a sprawling, smart city on Star Lake in Guandong Province and four hours by high-speed catamaran from Hong Kong up the toady tinted Xi River.

It is rice harvesting time. We stop and watch plants being pushed through little wooden threshers and women sitting patiently, peeling orange persimmons to dry in the sun.

We photograph toothy men squatting on village roads hawking chickens and rabbits, bundled in large nets. It is a common sight on village main streets to see trestle tables, stacked with produce, from mountains of tallow to unrefrigerated carcasses of goodness knows what animal.

Warm meat sits too close for our hygienic comfort near fruit and vegetables and caged kittens and puppies destined for the dinner table.

But the ubiquitous icecream carts have ready clientele, us included.

The air is hot and hazy and though rain doesn't fall much, the air often seems pregnant with it. Our bottled water percolates in the heat but we drink copiously. It barely touches our sides. Picnic lunch stops are our glorious homage to gluttony.

"Stony", our Chinese guide, piles tuna, jam and peanut butter, bags of bread, fresh melons, biscuits and fizzy soft drink on fold-out tables. We devour the food as if it's our last meal on earth. Such is the joy of cycling and hot days.



At Shan Tang we catch up with women carrying large bundles of fabric on their bikes. It turns out the entire town earns its livelihood from the rag trade.

They are washed and left to dry on large mats along the main streets before being shredded for stuffing into sofas and mattresses.

"Hello, hello," children yell to us every day on their way home from school. They run after us, eager to hone their English. In some larger towns blackboards are chalked with birth tallies as a monitor of the country's one-child policy.

On a back country road we pass a tiny man with his face buried under a large conical hat, rat-tatting his long stick on each side of his brood of ducks, ensuring the waddlers stay banded tightly together. He is not fazed by our gaggle, unlike others we meet along the way, who grin as we cycle by.

The warm concrete roads are favourite resting spots for water buffalo when they are not sloshing in muddy pools. Large beige-and-black spotted pigs also sun themselves on the warm paving and we cycle around them.

We laugh our way through southern China - on and off our bikes - courtesy of Ken, a Queensland dentist, who has a vast repertoire of jokes that have the knack of reaching punch lines when we ride past congregating throngs.

Locals look at us as if we are barking mad, if not for the jokes but for our funny gear (helmets and Lycra pants) and the mere fact that we are paying to travel on a bike.

Stony says a bike to the Chinese is just a functional rung at the bottom of the transport ladder, used by more than 300 million people. We see teenage boys on gleaming motorbikes, the new status symbol in the emerging economy.



We are given a descriptive, detailed itinerary and directions that include banyan trees, gas stations and tunnels as landmarks because the signposts and village names are in Cantonese. Stony and his assistant Vince take turns cycling with us.

Each day we ride between 40km and 100km, covering 620km in total, give or take a few kilometres for side detours. We stop often for water and food, to regroup, to take more photos, to watch a Yao dancing show, visit a monastery or swim under a waterfall.



Rural southern China is primitive and rustic, with its silvery fish ponds, paddies, persimmon plots and bosomy hills.

Sadly, poverty and a deluge of fast-track modernity have too often been the sacrifice for environmental kindness. Jo, an environmental consultant from Oxford, notes critically the pervasive vanilla smog, smoke-belching factories ringed by black pylons and a clothing plant on the edge of a ravine far below the road, spewing bubble-gum pink dye into the river.

The factories and the ubiquitous diesel-belching trucks are reality checks on progress swarming over this enormous chunk of map. Beauty and beast make palpable contrasts.

The cyclists on our trip are interesting people - educated adventurers who seek more than a snippy, bus-eye view of the countryside.

The group is on the large size - three Kiwis, three English and nine Aussies who include in their number Ken and his dentist mate, Mike, doing some bonding with their teenage daughters, one of whom prefers karaoke and bars by night and slumbering on the bus by day. Ruth, a computer technician from London, is the only experienced cyclist.

We end our journey in Guangxi Province at Yangshuo, a western slice of eastern pie, chock-full of souvenir touts, English menu cafes, endless bazaars brimming with gimcrack, surprisingly good shopping bargains and the scenically overloaded Li River running through its heart.

On the last day we ride to Moon Hill (literally a large hole in a hill high above 2000 steps cut into the hillside). It is postcard-pretty with its paddies and ponds and limestone hills, sunshine and blue skies.

Each of us is smug and euphoric as we pose for our group photo atop Moon Hill, simply because we have done it.

And that would have been that for me - a challenging holiday experience. Except that I was left with a feeling that this has to be one of the best ways to travel and really experience a country.

Even a deep gash in my left knee caused by a lost battle for road space with a truck doesn't seem so terribly bad in hindsight.

So now I have a new shiny red bike. My pre-China training group has regrouped and we are off to Vietnam.

* Denise McNabb travelled to China as a guest of World Expeditions, Cathay Pacific Airways and Dragonair.

World Expeditions