I was just existing: No longer living

November 10, 2014

I find it difficult to write about these days in China now. I want to make this blog light-hearted and funny, but in this regard these days were sorely lacking. It began to feel like every day was the same, they all merge together in my memory now, days that would be better forgotten. Every day the weather was dull and grey. I didn't see the sun for more than a week, maybe two. Cycling through tunnels and up mountain passes filled my days, literally. There was no time to do anything but cycle. Camping places were getting harder to find. A bad nights sleep, a tough day of cycling, and repeat. I was just existing, no longer living. Cycling only to get somewhere better, a slave to a bigger dream.

Another car off the road because of the steep verge. I saw this same thing at least three times

Buildings which appeared to have been damaged by a recent earthquake - seen as I bypassed Zhaotong - put my own struggle in perspective

The scenery was at times an uplifting factor but the descents down from the passes were usually on wet and muddy roads, caused by trucks that wet their brakes to cool them. Going fast downhill on wet and muddy roads was bad for me and...

... I think it might be time to get a new front mudguard

Each morning I would begin to cycle and be presented with two noises, omnipresent throughout China, that drove me to fits of despair. The first, which I think I've mentioned before, would be the beeping of every single moving vehicle. I'd perhaps best not go into that again, but maybe I'll mention now the hooting of the trains, an equally annoying and perhaps even more perplexing problem when I happened to be near a trainline. The motor vehicle beeping made sense sometimes. I mean, if you're going to take a blind corner on the wrong side of the road, you'd better make a lot of noise about it. But the trains, why did they need to be hooting their horn every ten seconds? Extremely loudly? In the middle of nowhere? And it wasn't exactly regular, it wasn't automatic. There was actually somebody in that train pulling that horn every ten seconds to hoot at nothing, just in case. That was somebody's job.

Yeah, definitely time for a new front mudguard

But the torturous noises coming from the Chinese vehicles was nothing compared to the noises that would come from the Chinese people. Every so often someone would decide that they needed to clear their throat, at which point a ball of flem would be dredged from deep in their esophagus with a long, drawn-out, and very loud noise that, were it to occur anywhere else in the world, would be greeted with the perpetrator being asked to leave whatever establishment they were in and never return. A gob of spit would then be extricated floor-bound with almost as much verbal insult, the whole operation representing the human anatomical equivalent of nails on a blackboard. Somehow this disgusting habit is completely socially acceptable in China and even little old ladies would think nothing of doing it. I heard it at least a dozen times a day.

I tell you all this only to try and make you understand how miserable cycling here had become. Day after day I was just riding, eating crappy food, and not talking to anyone. Nobody could speak English and I had no time to talk to them anyway. No time but to ride under grey skies getting beeped at. My focus became entirely on just getting to the border. Once I got to Laos everything was going to be different. I would have no more deadlines, no need to cycle anywhere, and I'd been told good things about Laos. 'People are so nice there' and 'people speak English' and, crucially, 'people don't beep their horns there!' Oh yes, Laos was it, Laos was the promised land. I daydreamed all day about it. It was all that kept me going. All that occupied my mind. All that I thought about. Laos. Laos. Laos.

10/11/14 - 115km

11/11/14 - 119km

12/11/14 - 94km

Today's ride: 328 km (204 miles)
Total: 33,210 km (20,623 miles)

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