Location: Beijing, China
Day 663

Following five months in Beijing, my bank account is a few pounds richer and my body a few pounds fatter. I arrived just as winter was setting in and made the decision to work and save for the season instead of immediately continuing north to Mongolia where the weather is significantly colder (Ulaan Baatar is the world’s coldest capital).

Many things have struck me during my time in Beijing. One of the most pleasantly surprising things is the ease with which a foreigner can arrive and quickly build a life. Admittedly, I did have one contact which helped but it took just two weeks of dabbling with part time English teaching/tutoring before I found a full-time, salaried job.

I saw an advertisement on an internet forum seeking an English-language creative content editor for an online retailer (selling cheap Chinese products on the internet). After a year and a half of constant motion and borderline vagrancy I was suddenly rooted in a large city with a full-time office job, a room in an apartment, more than five items of clothing and a pair of shoes that were not sandals or rubber boots. It was a culture shock.

While travelling in China I saw a different world to the city but everything I saw, I saw in little depth. I would cycle pass a place/person once, and then never see it/them again. Many things bewildered me but I had scant time to stop and delve deeper. When I reached Beijing and became stationary I developed a sense of familiarity with the smaller things. The same woman making the same jiăozi (dumplings) in her shop all day every day; the same old migrant worker sweeping the same patch of swept tarmac at the same time each morning; the same old toothless, outwardly-genderless ‘traffic warden’ standing – ignored – on the same road corner obliviously waving a flag as the rush hour surges by. Seeing these people doing the same painfully-repetitive minute tasks seven days a week made me appreciate just how accepting the blue collar Chinese are of their often pitiful lots. In my time here I have strived to further understand the mindset. However, I am hindered by my shamefully poor language skills.

It seems that for many Chinese, work is a place to go rather than a thing to do. Shopkeepers slumped lifelessly behind counters for 12-hour shifts; policemen sitting on street corners staring into space; receptionists watching back-to-back soap operas on the internet. In my office, the atmosphere was silent and often stagnant. When people communicated with colleagues they often did so using online messaging rather than their mouths, even if to someone just two feet away. It was not unusual to walk through the office at any given time and see four or five people with their heads on their desks taking a lovely little power nap. It seemed that few people were ever busy in the way office workers are in other countries. I theorised that this might be part of the national "communist" effort to create jobs for everyone: hire many more employees than necessary who then work half-hearedly for less pay. However, despite the city's absurdly swollen workforce, the government's approach to time off is unusual. Any national holiday days off are made up for by working extra days on the weekends. The company I joined offers workers only 6 vacation days in their first year; after 10 years with the company this reaches the maximum of 15 days.

The company's annual party was bizzare. It started (at 1.30pm on a Sunday) with 4 hours of speeches. Each department leader stood up and gave a sombre powerpoint presentation while the assembly of 500 disinterested employees openly talked, ordered-in takeaway food and played on phones/ipads. After this came the departmental entertainment performances. Ours seemed to have been coreographed with the marriage of a few random google searches and some LSD. Dressed in nuns' habits, we took to the stage and swayed (hands clasped in prayer) and mouthed to the opening of Handel's Messiah before flicking gold and silver pom poms back and forth to Little Peggy March's I Will Follow Him while four employees performed an awkwardly timed (and wholly incongruous) bit of dance from an OK Go! music video. The bizzare piece ended with chanted lines of Chinese which roughly translated as "56 ethnicities all walking forward and striving together for a brighter future. I love China, I love China...hey!"

The other departments mostly opted for 'raunchy' and we sat for hours while scantily-clad girls gyrated vigourously to the latest pop hits (both Western and Chinese) with fixed, bored facial expressions. Thankfully, there was some respite later in the evening when the tables were supplied with wine and things took a turn towards the more European tradition of office party.

As December drew on the days got colder until the temperature reached it's three-month winter hovering level of about -5°C to -10°C. The seasonally bare trees are colourfully adorned using ugly plastic flowers and hot-melt glue guns. The pavements became freckled with frozen, saliva-coated phlegm and all moisture becomes locked up in ice. The city gets amazingly dry and each day I received several static electricity shocks (I spectaularly dropped the office kettle twice as a result). It becomes usual to see people jump and shriek when their hand brushes a lampost or they press the button for a lift.

The week-long Chinese New Year holiday came in late January and the city emptied as around half of the 20 million population went home to their families in other provinces. The normally terrible traffic was non-existent and Beijing would have been gloriously quiet if it wasn't for the Chinese love of fireworks. A centuries old part of Chinese culture, the production of fireworks became a state-owned industry in 2005 as too many poor quality products were melting faces and removing fingers. Colourful roadside stalls spring up all over the city to sell the suprisingly expensive explosives which can only legally be lit during a couple of two-week festival periods each year. At midnight on New Years Eve (which is determined by the lunar calendar) the city errupted into a seething storm of light, colour and noise. From a 30th floor flat, I watched as every part of the sprawling view bubbled and broiled with countless varieties of explosion. When I closed my eyes I could easily imagine that I was in a trench during a particularly heavy shelling in WWI. The noise was genuinely overwhelming; smell of gunpowder and cordite filled the air. This barrage, carried out by individuals everywhere, lasted seven long days. Twenty-meter strings of 2,000 firecrackers were unravelled on the roads and I would have to cycle past with my eyes closed for protection.

As a result of the New Year fireworks, the smog was particularly bad. The problem being nanoscopic PM 2.5 particles (amongst others) that work their way deep into the human respiratory system and can lead to black lung. The World Health Organisation recommends that a city's daily air quality shouldn't exceed 25 (µg/m3) on the PM 2.5 meter. The US embassy measures and publishes the levels of PM 2.5 particles in the air and Beijing averages around 50. Often it tops 300 and on really smoggy days (when the building across the street is little more than a grey blur) it can reach 500. The first night of heavy fireworks saw the scale quivering at around 850. Unsurprisingly the lung cancer rate has increased by 60% in Beijing in the last decade.

During the New Year holiday I visited the Old Summer Palace (or "the Gardens of Perfect Brightness") which was the temporate retreat for the Qing dynasty emperors until the second Opium War in 1860. A British diplomatic envoy of 20 was tortured and executed leading Lord Elgin (son of the Lord of marble fame) to order the destruction of the palace, in which the British were aided by some very willing Frenchmen in an unusual demonstration of Anglo-Franco cooperation. Today the area is a collection of once-elegant rubble around which thousands of people strolled in the cold air. A game of ring toss was being played at a stall. However, the prizes people were trying to land their ring around were not toys or sweets but terrified little white bunnies in tiny cages. I dread to think of the fate of those rabbits that were won. On a frozen lake nearby, people struggled along in groups sitting on trains of metal chairs with sledge runners. Beijing leisure activities are always fun to watch. A particular favourite are the groups of old women slowly line dancing on the pavement at night with pain-inducing pop music blaring.

A twin daily irritation for a bicycle commuter is the terrible standard of both cycling and driving on the roads. The road system is spacious and relatively organised but the cycle lanes (which are often separated from the road with a foot-high fence) are filled with lolly-gagging pensioners (a bit of a misnomer in China as they are unlikely to be receiving any pension) who cycle at rougly walking pace and so must swerve often and dangerously to maintain their tenuous balance. I have blamelessly knocked off no less than two of these road hogs; their slow, swerving aimlessness was their downfall - literally.

The drivers are a different story. The driving test is a formality many don't go through and those who do are faced with an open tarmac area dotted with cones rather than a functioning road with moving cars and real situations. One of the questions you might be posed if you were to take the theory test is as follows: "If you have to suddenly jump out of an overturning vehicle, in which direction do you jump? And once you hit the ground, what’s the best way to roll?" It is hardly surprising that motorists often undertake, inexplicably stop in the fast lane, drive on the lines rather than between them, and ignore red lights all together. Going the wrong way down a cycle lane in a car is commonplace.

A couple of other things that have bemused me in Beijing:
-The trend of waring garish glasses frames with no lenses. Not with non-perscription lenses, but with no lenses. As in, not-protected-from-a-poke-in-the-eye lenses. Where I am from, glasses are an irritation and a hinderance which people often circumvent with contact lenses or, as in my case, an acceptance of never seeing the world with a crisp focus. On a train journey I asked a young girl why she wore these functionless things. Without a moment's hesitation she replied simply "because it's fashion," while her smile revealed an unattractive grey mesh of dental braces. "My braces are fake too".
-The polite, single-file queuing (as the arrows on the floor instruct) either side of where the doors will stop when waiting for the subway...followed by a mad every-man-for-himself bodily crush into the passengers desperately trying to exit when the doors have only opened half an inch.
-The stern refusal to walk, or even move, on an escalator. Beijingers nervously, and with great concentration, hop over the teeth-like point of origin of the strange folding steps before firmly planting themselves until it is time to make another fear-ridden hop at the other end. I have severally seen people, evidently late, rush down a subway corridor and then stand still and agitated for the duration of their ride on an otherwise deserted escalator. At the top they break into a run again and hurry off a few seconds later than they could have been.

As a short-term member of the roughly 100,000 expatriates in Beijing I must resign myself to never understanding most of these mysteries.

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Last week, in an upmarket apartment block, I saw a 5-year-old child urinate in a lift, a little less than a yard from my feet. The unreprimanding mother looked on nonchalantly while I edged away from the slowly approaching amber tide. The lift reached my floor and the door opened just in time for a panicked leap to dry land. Despite the great fun I'd had and the great friends I'd made, it was definitely time to leave this city. To that end, I will depart from Tiananmen Square on foot at dawn tomorrow for a 1,000 mile hike across the eastern Gobi desert to Sukhbaatar Square in Mongolia's capital Ulaan Baatar. I cycled this route in 2009 and so have decided to give Old Geoff (my bike) a further two months of hibernation.

I rode out of town with an American called Eric who had learnt fluent Chinese without lessons during his four months in the country. We cleared the modern streets and suburbs of Kunming and were soon climbing up lush, green hills in warm weather. It was a delight to ride in shorts, sandals and a vest after the tedious layers of Tibet.

The following morning Eric peeled off towards Vietnam and I continued for three days to Dali. The road snaked through various hill villages where people in conical straw hats worked the terraced land and waved enthusiastically at my soon-sunburned countenance. Some carried two buckets hanging from a stick slung across their shoulders like Victorian milkmaids. The weather developed from warm to hot and each day the headwind developed from a light breeze in the morning to a harsh gale in the evening. My high spirits were untarnishable.

Shortly after crossing a wide valley where wheat swayed fluidly in the wind, I reached the ancient fortress walls of the town of Dali. Nestled in a defensive crescent of mountains, Dali was the capital of the 8th-century Bai Kingdom and was the centre of a 19th-century rebellion against the Qing dynasty. Now it is a major tourist attraction and its ancient buildings and streets have largely been rebuilt giving it a nagging false feeling.

I found a hostel for the night and wandered around the segmented town that saw milling Chinese tourists in some parts and drinking expats with waist-length dreadlocks in others. Speaking to these smelly-scalped foreigners gave me mixed impressions. Some were simply using the town as a hedonistic hideaway but others said they were searching for something; an aspect of themselves perhaps. This brought to mind the reasons for my journey which seem to have become clearer since starting. A “search” for myself is not one of them and the more I see and experience, the more I confirm the views and opinions I always had of myself. I may sound unromantic and closed-minded but I seem to realise more and more that I am exploring the world, not myself.

That evening I watched the heavily-bearded Quebec Redneck Bluegrass Project frantically strum their guitars and howl multi-lingual lyrics (including a German song about a rat with swollen testicles). In the morning I caught a bus to the similarly ancient town of Lijiang. Its atmosphere was stifling as tens of thousands of Chinese tourists swilled though the narrow, cobbled streets, stopping to pose for photographs in front of neon-decked Chinese bars rather than the quiet waters of the 800-year-old stone canal next to them.

The city has a depressing abundance of Han Chinese crowd-pleasers clumsily plonked on top of the traditional Naxi culture. The Naxi are a fascinating minority in which the more lovers a women takes, the more prestige she has.

Waking before the sun rose over the jumbled rooftops, I walked through the deserted streets as the light filled in the grey morning gloom with a multitude of colours. When the neon is switched off, the crowds are absent and the clubs with throbbing modern music are closed, a picturesque little town remains. Authentic buildings with aged, mossy tiles running down to low eaves; narrow alleys with red lanterns hung for prosperity; small stone bridges hopping over the narrow canals that intersect everything. When the hordes awoke and took to the streets with plastic-wrapped snacks and foot-long camera lenses, I took a bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge.

The gorge brackets a 15km length of the Yangtze River between Haba Xueshan Mountain (5,396m) and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (5,596m). It has 2,000m high cliffs and legend has it that a Tiger leapt across a narrow (25m) part of it to escape a hunter. The sign at the entrance to the gorge has misspelled the word ‘scenic’ and instead reads: ‘Tiger Leaping Gorge Senile Resort’.

I met a Swede, a Canadian and a Dutchman in the afternoon and we set off for the two-day hike up the gorge the next morning. The path climbs up the mountainside via the melodramatically named “28 bends” and at the end of an overcast day we stayed at a hostel overlooking the craggy mountains on the other side of the gorge; a thick mist oozing from their tops. The next day was clear and the views spectacular. Waterfalls splashed across the path, near-blinding sunlight streamed down everywhere and we reached the end before walking back along the bottom. I left the next morning after the dormitory I slept in was struck by a sneak thief who removed cameras and cash from the pillowsides of an Australian man and two Danish girls. Luckily, my easily accessible valuables were untouched.

One night back in Dali and I was on the road headed south. I descended through long, fertile valleys where people lounged happily in the cool evenings. I was glad to be back on the bike and enjoy some solitude after the occasionally maddening crowds. I had two days of rain and mist while climbing through high mountains on impressively built roads, contenting myself with imagining the doubtlessly sweeping views that hid behind the clouds. Crossing the swollen, brown Mekong for the first time was an eerie experience as it seemed utterly still and disappeared after just 100 yards in each direction where a wet wall of fog clamped down on the silent waters. I imagined the long journey they had taken from the source high on the Tibetan Plateau and pictured the long route ahead, some of which I would be following, to southern Vietnam.

On one steep climb I grabbed the side of a slow-moving truck which instantly and deliberately swerved towards the gutter, forcing me to let go. Later that day I caught another one for the final mile to the top. The driver pulled over at the pass and invited me to eat with him in a restaurant. We sat and chatted incomprehensibly while tucking into oily bowls of cabbage and pig fat.

Punctures were a daily nuisance and I brought a cheap Chinese chain which snapped four times on a single hill climb before I replaced it with my knackered one from Kathmandu. At some point I crossed into the tropics for the first time on my journey. The weather grew accordingly heated and more humid. In one town a large gathering of 16-18 year old boys invited me to join them for lunch on the roadside. I ate while they passed around a small shard of mirror, taking turns to preen. At least three of them were wearing make-up. Due to the One Child Policy in China, there are significantly more males than females as girls are often aborted before birth or even killed shortly afterwards as they are less profitable than a son. Due to this there are roughly 25 million young men in the country who will never find wives. This statistic has given rise to extreme vanity (laboriously extravagant and ridiculous hairstyles abound) in the competition to snag one of the relatively few women who resultantly can afford to be exceedingly domineering and just plain rude. I often saw women screeching hysterically in public while there docile partners endured with heads bowed.

The next 120 miles of road was being rebuilt so detours on bumpy, makeshift roads were common. Trucks would bounce by, kicking up thick clouds of dust. Sometimes I would be stopped by a casual worker while car-sized boulders were loosened before clattering down the cliffs and rolling across the road with a deafening clap. On several occasions I witnessed the undeniably inefficient sight of two trucks passing in different directions bearing identical loads of rocks, earth or rubble. Surely a phone call would save a lot of time and petrol in these instances?

For one long stint I was turfed onto a winding old cobblestone road that zigzagged through steep rice terraces, neat tea plantations and quaint farmyards. I camped on hilltops and in the mornings enjoyed fresh air and golden panoramas during my breakfast of porridge and locally grown coffee (filtered though an old sock). Tropical birdsong lulled me to sleep at night and woke me gently at day break. The road workers were extremely friendly and I was invited to eat with them on several occasions. It struck me that they were always of the local (predominantly south-east Asian) ethnicity and that those keeping shops and driving cars were all of Han Chinese decent. I began to understand that modern China consists of the eastern heartland and several colonised hinterlands where the local people are ethnically, linguistically and ideologically different. Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Lijiang. All instances of largely exploitative colonisation. Admittedly, things are often efficient and infrastructure has been put in place but it is the Han who benefit from it. The local people are building roads for low pay and harvesting rice, often for export to the east. Regardless, the biggest smiles, friendliest greetings and occasional beers all came from the locals rather than the Han.

Morning and evening rides were a delight. Cooler air; clarity of thought; sun-dappled fir trees (the fragrance of which transported my mind back to a glorious Scandinavian summer); banana plantations; the sweet smell of wood smoke; children playing and giggling as I pass; washing my face in a cold stream; weathered old men with bare feet driving buffalo slowly along the road using thin sticks and oblivious to traffic. I would lie at night, sweaty, dusty, dirty and fidgety in my baking tent; a smile on my face.

The final 30 miles to Jinghong were downhill and I free-wheeled quickly, feeling triumphant and singing along to The Kinks who blared from my earphones. That evening I enjoyed cold beers with a bunch of expats who are starting up a hotel. Jinghong is the capital of Xishuangbanna Region; China’s slice of south-east Asia. With palm-lined streets and dissected by the Mekong, the town is enticingly relaxed and I unwound for a couple of days before taking a three-day hike with Ita and Dima (a couple of Israeli lads). We took a bus to the end of a road and ambled up valleys, over thickly-treed green hills, through jungle and past colourfully dressed women from various minorities working on the terraces. The first evening we stayed with a 70-year-old man and his wife in a small village of the Akhe minority. His traditional wooden house stood on stilts and consisted of one large barn-like room containing a slightly less traditional fridge and television. He spent the evening gathering in mats covered in tea leaves which had been drying in the sun. On our second day we passed a few modern, plastic-coated Buddhist temples. Depressingly, they looked like Asian Disneyland. We stopped for a break at a deserted hilltop watchtower which peered over into Myanmar, just a couple of miles away.

Back in Jinghong I sampled a Chinese disco where orange-robed monks sucked thirstily from bottles and I was given glass after glass of warm, watery Chinese beer by young Chinese men who all like to test the belief that white men can drink more alcohol than them. Curiosity in another of their beliefs about white men resulted in my crotch being unsubtly scrutinized every time I used a urinal.

A hangover and heavy, humid air accompanied my first day on the short ride to the country of Laos. Hills and tunnels. In the late afternoon I saw four cyclists slogging up a hill towards me. They were about to eat and camp so I backtracked with them for a mile or two and got to know them over dinner. Mike is from London and brought a bike in Bangkok, Manne and Tim are Swedish and on a long journey tracing the Himalayas and Canadian Loretta has been drawing a wiggly line through Asia on her bike for two years. We camped in the gardens of a science academy and swapped stories and information late into the night.

My last day’s ride in China was a chore. I put my head down and stepped heavily on the pedals. A series of winding and unlit tunnels provided terrifying interludes to the hard graft. The longest was an unventilated three miles with the roar of approaching engines filling the darkness all around me. After a brief encounter with two Swiss cyclists, also fresh from Laos, I camped near the border. On the last day of my three-month visa I crossed into Laos.

A new country always feels like a new start to me and is a refreshing experience. Returning the greeting cries of “Sabaidee!” from everyone I passed, I rode to the sleepy town of Luang Nam Tha and reflected on my time in China. The world’s most populous country, yet with vast areas effectively void of human life. I have now visited only five of the thirty-four provinces and the country remains an enigma to me. The more I see, the less I understand. It’s impossible to make generalisations as the huge country is really an amalgam of wide-spread and very differing cultures tied together by common government. The devastation wrought by the Cultural Revolution has left an unfathomable blend of old and new, fear and repression, beauty and hideousness, astounding efficiency and crippling inefficiency, waste and want. I’m no nearer to grasping it than when I first visited two years ago but I’ll be back in a few months to explore more and (likely) comprehend less.