I cannot remember the last time I was as physically exausted as today. I am writing in my room in Xiaoshajiang Village. There is no hot water because the pipes froze, and no heating of course. There is a makeshift karaoke bar next door, filling the neighbourhood with off key pop songs. Nonetheless, I think I am going to sleep well.

Half an hour out of Xinhua this morning, I heard it for the first time: a sound utterly unfamiliar in China. It was silence. There were no honks, no beeps, no rumbles, no people talking. Just the soft whisper of the wind in the bamboo and cyprus. It has not always been quiet today, but that silence has been there in the background somewhere.

A few hours into the day these mountains appeared on the horizon. Mountains here are not like the ones I am used to in Canada. Chinese mountains have a rippling, serpentine shape, as if they bubbled out of a primordial icing pipe. 

I crossed a few pulse raising but manageable mountains, and ate lunch in Duckfield Village, which did indeed have many ducks. Something seems to be going on today. I have seen an abnormal number of firecrackers, weddings, and ceremonies of various kinds.

After lunch, I started up into a valley that never ended. Up the road would go into one fold in the mountains, and just as it looked like it was nearing an end, it would curve around a hill and head up again in another direction. This was, I would realize later, what I had seen on my map: the Snow Peak Mountains.

Every day on this trip, I have felt like the countryside is as rough and remote as it will get, but every day I have been surprised. The China that I saw up this valley was altogether surreal. The farmhouses are wooden, with some glass windows but not a hint of metal sheeting, plastic or paint. Aside from a motorcycle or three-wheel buggy here and there, there was hardly anything to suggest that the last two hundred years had passed. Through the wide, wood panelled doorways are ancestor shrines with incense and candles.
Above the immaculately terraced rice paddies, the mountains are wrapped in dense bamboo forest. I have seen bamboo before, but nothing like this. It feels like travelling through a giant bed of moss.

There is nothing I can say to describe four and half hours of bicycling up a mountain. There are certainly some bike enthusiasts or hikers who understand. Honestly, though, I am not even sure if my memory can do it justice. I may attempt such a thing again, but perhaps only if the mercy of forgetfulness wipes from my mind what it was really like.

I am writing in my notebook in my room in Xinhua. There are internet cafes here, but I cannot find one that will adequately run Weebly.

Last night, after I wrote my blog, I met Yang Xiaodong. She pulled up beside me in a silver prius and asked me who I was and where I was going. Then, of course, she asked me to dinner.
Yang has two children, a daughter my age and a son in his first year of university. Over dinner, she told me all about her children and how much she missed them. When she saw me, she said, she couldn't help but think of her son out on his own without a mother to care for him.
"What must your own mother think?" she asked with great feeling.
I ate with Yang and a friend of hers from the city government. He was a public official through and through, jolly and polite, piling my plate with food and clinking glasses every few minutes (tea, I passed on the alcohol.) The food was excellent. I absentmindedly nearly finished a dish, which would have obliged Yang by the rules of politeness to order another one.
After dinner, Yang got me to speak with her daughter on the phone in English while she listened in with delighted incomprehension. We exchanged email addresses, and I went back to my room and went to sleep.

I woke up this morning early, packed, and headed out for a morning of biking. Instead, I was greeted with pouring rain. I have raingear, but the weather report said it would let up later in the day so I decided to wait it out. I huddled in an internet cafe and watched Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I thought it was excellent. I know, Michael Cera is always the same. Now get over it and enjoy him. One of these days he will finally change, and then where will you be?

The rain stopped at 1pm, and I got on the road. Today was all highway, following the Cold Water River west. Rivers in China seem to attract heavy industry, probably because of convenient water and transportation. The pollution was thick all the way, and I found my right eye watering painfully. In areas as industrial as this, there is no getting away from the cloud of dust and exaust. I came across this kindergarten framed by ten story industrial cooling towers.

I want to take a moment to talk about the fantastic style of eating in these parts called the "quick meal." Instead of a menu, small restaurants just have a table of vegetables and a refrigerator full of different meats. You choose a meat and a vegetable, and they fry the two up together with however many fresh chillis you like. With this you get cabbage soup, and as much rice as you like from a giant pot, all for 10 yuan. Pure genius.

I am falling slightly behind. I rode a decent distance today, but I still lost a morning when I need to make up some time. On my map, however, the next stretch of road passes through an area called the "snow peak mountains." I hope I'm up for it.

Regards,

Niko

I am writing from an internet cafe in the centre of Liumutang Village, just outside the larger city of Lianyuan. I did not make it as far today as I would have liked. The road was hilly and the air full of ash, and by the time I got here I needed to rest for the evening.
The hotel I am staying in is 60 yuan, more expensive than the countryside, but comes with the luxury of real hot running water and its own toilet.

I followed today the realization that I had yesterday: country roads in these parts are actually better than large roads. Large roads are worn down by a river of heavy trucks and buses, but the country roads don't see much but the occational motorbike or tractor.

I took a shortcut through the countryside towards the city of Lianyuan. This area was poorer than I had seen, the red brick houses smaller and more worn down, the shops fewer and farther between. The demographic shift that I have heard about before is obvious here: the old people and children stay in the country while the parents go to cities to find work. Many of the younger men I have spoken to here have only just returned from a nearby city or as far away as Guangzhou to spend the new year with their families.


In the the marketplace of Longtang Village, this woman was selling candy for the new year. Brightly coloured sweets like these are given out to the many relatives and visitors that come around during the holidays.

I am writing this in my notebook in a guesthouse in Hutian Village (click to see a map of my progress). There is no internet access here, so I will have to wait until tomorrow to blog.

I spent 31 yuan today, only $4.60 CAD. 20 was for the guesthouse, 2.5 for breakfast, 4.5 for some emergency food to keep in my pack, and 4 on an iced tea that I just bought on my way home. Here is how I did it.

I woke up this morning seeing my breath steam in the air when I stuck my head out of the covers. As I left Ningxiang, the fish ponds were covered in ice and there were white fringes of frost on the cabbages. The sun and some steep hills soon warmed me up.

I passed through coal mining country in the morning, first through Coal Bank, then through a little village on a mountain top called Dacheng. I stopped in Dacheng for a haircut. Over a cup of tea with the hairdresser and his family, his sister joked that his nose was almost as big as mine. "The truth is, I am of mixed blood," he said solemnly. "My mother is from here but my father... he was from Coal Bank!." Despite my protests, they refused the 6 yuan payment for the haircut.

Around noon I emerged from a narrow gorge into the broad valley of Laoliangcang, or "old granary." I was hungry, and soon came by what looked like a restaurant. A group of musicians was playing loud folk music nearby a cluster of tables. I stopped and asked a young woman in white if this was a restaurant. She answered no, but asked me to sit down and eat with them.
Pretty soon, I realized something strange was going on. First, if this was not a restaurant, what were so many people doing here? Second, why were we eating so much meat? Country people usually eat mostly vegetables, but here was chicken, fish, tripe, and big slabs of pork fat. Finally, not only my host but also a number of others were wearing white clothes, scarves and headbands.
As the musicians trouped around the tables, my host saw my puzzled face and asked, "Do you know what's going on here?" I did not. 
"Well," she said, "my grandmother just died."

I had just crashed a funeral.

"Don't worry about it," she said smiling, "eat!"
In that phrase, she may have summed up the philosophy of many of the people I have met over the last couple of days.

I didn't take any pictures, but I caught this procession marching across the rice fields to crashing gongs and drums later in the day. The yellow stripe is a giant dragon puppet.

In the early afternoon, I chatted with a man on a motorbike advised me not to take the main road south because it was rough and potholed. He pointed me to a side road that would lead me through the rice fields to the east. It meant leaving the comfortable milestones of the highway behind, but as the Chinese saying goes: "Listen to advice and you'll always eat well."
Sure enough, he was right. The side road was smooth, even, and lead me straight south through tiny villages and rice paddies brown with dead cut stocks.

As the sun dropped, however, I was still in the middle of nowhere, near the ominously named "Shadow Mountain." My last hour of biking was a quadricep breaking climb up a pass, and then a spiraling drop into the next valley where at last I found a guesthouse just as the sun set.

I met Ms. Zhou as soon as I had put my things away in my room and walked out the door. She is 23, with a one year old boy. She invited me back to her house to meet her family and have dinner. Her house, like, most of the farmhouses I've passed, was big but bare. A few posters adorned the thin concrete walls.
The family sat around a wooden card table with a blanket draped over top and a heater underneath. Everyone sticks their feet and hands under the table to warm up.

Her husband gave me a nut, which further research tells me was called an areca, to chew. It tasted like a cross between a cinnamon stick, a piece of mint gum, and a shot of vodka. It also made me feel slightly like I was choking. Ms. Zhou told me it is slightly intoxicating, but I didn't chew it long enough to find out.

I am writing from an internet cafe in Ningxiang, a small town west of Changsha. It is 7pm. I'm exausted and full. Dinner was "larou," spice cured meat served with a big pile of winter melon and fresh chillis. Hunan food is fantastic if you can take the heat.
Hunan cooking tip: next time you eat rice, spare the soy sauce. Instead, mix a little bit of red wine vinegar with a good hot sauce or chilli paste. Dip your chopsticks in a little bit of the mixture before each bite of rice.

I am staying next door in a small, clean, cheap guesthouse. My room in Hong Kong was smaller, dirtier, and cost five times as much. Economics is amazing. 

It took lot longer to find a bicycle than I had hoped. In the past, I have only bought cheap bikes. This time I wanted a decent bike, but not too expensive. The first two shops I went to were only selling thousand yuan and up import mountain bikes. Other people pointed me to second hand places where you could get a bike for ten yuan. I wanted neither. Finally I found a place selling mid-range mountain bikes and a few other odds and ends. I picked up a normal looking, well made new bike for the comparatively hefty price of 500 yuan ($75 CAD).
I admit, I have buyers anxiety. Whenever I buy something important I worry endlessly that it may not be the right one. I doubted my bike, took it back to the store, nearly returned it, then decided to just get it adjusted. I'm glad I did; it has served me very well today. I forgot to take a picture, but I'll grab one tomorrow.

I had to cross town again to find a helmet; they are only sold in specialty stores here. On the way I came across a strangely familiar hotel. It turned out to be where I stayed two summers ago when I was attending a Chinese competition in Changsha. Maybe I'll have time to talk about this later, but suffice to say I went on television and became very slightly well known very briefly.

Two years ago Changsha was blazingly, insufferably hot. Today was chilly enough for a jacket, but not for long underwear or a scarf. It cleared up later in the day and I even got some sunshine.

I finally got on the road at about 2:00pm. I have realized an interesting truth about asking directions in China. Everyone knows how to get around a city, but nobody knows how to get out of it. Ask directions to a bus station half way across town: no problem. Ask how to get to a village two kilometres outside the city limits: you're crazy. I suppose most people travel from town to town by bus, so it pays more to know where the bus station is than the next town.
Either way, getting out of big cities is a mess. Downtown is simple, and the roads in the country are simple, but there is fuzzy world in between that body quite controls.

Speaking of control, I surreptitiously snapped a picture of these two on my way out of the city. These are chengguan, or city managers. A Chinese friend once told me, "America has terrorists; China has the chengguan." They are responsible for bylaw enforcement, some traffic law, zoning enfringements, and generally keeping everything looking harmonious. As a result, they are perhaps the most disliked public figures around. Here they are giving some poor motorist a parking ticket when all he wanted was a bowl of noodles.

Below is a view of the Xiang river on my way out of Changsha. Just before I took this picture I noticed a Daoist monk listening to an MP3 player. That must be a good omen. I wonder what he was listening to? Taylor Swift, I hope. 

The road today passed through soft rolling hills, scattered with a few factories, vegetable gardens and fish ponds. I passed one enormous construction crane factory, and one row of summer homes for the ridiculously rich, bedecked with bronze cupids and meticulously trimmed hedges.

I only biked for three and a half hours today before the sun began to creep threateningly towards the appartment buildings of Ningxiang.

As she showed me my room, the woman running the guesthouse picked up the TV remote and asked, "Do foreigners know how to use these?"

I know I'm in the country.

Regards,

Niko

It is about 7:30 in the morning in Changsha, Hunan province, People's Republic of China. It is just getting light outside. I rolled into town about an hour ago on the overnight K9018 from Shenzhen. I only bought a hard seat ticket, so I spent the night fitfully trying to find a way to sleep, dozing, or sitting awake imagining dozens of ways to engineer a more comfortable hard seat car.  

Before I go any further, let me explain why I am here. In about two hours, when shops begin to open, I am going to go out and buy a bicycle. I am then going to ride that bicycle to Guiyang, 645km away as the crow flies. I am going to do this in about 12 days. Or that's the plan, anyway.
And, internet cafes providing, I will share this all with you.

I am going to be biking through a region called Xiangxi (湘西). This simply means western Hunan province; 湘 is the character symbolizing Hunan and 西 means west. Xiangxi is much more than just a district on a map, however. In Chinese mythology, it is the center of sorcery and arcane mystery. Xiangxi is home to demons, ghosts and spirits. The bodies of the dead walk at night on a long march back to the place of their birth. Witches plant mystical worms in the flesh of their victims to control their every move.
Or so I hear.

My plan for this trip is to be as prepared as possible without actually knowing what I am getting into. I have maps, I have a route, I have clothes and supplies and emergency equipment. That being said, I have no idea what the road will really be like or what I will find there. That's the fun of the whole thing, really.

I hope you will stick with me,
and I hope I don't get eaten by Chinese zombies,
but it would be kind of cool if I did.

Regards,

Niko