Lanzhou: Honk! Honk!

October 21, 2014

After a couple of really very nice days together I said goodbye to Dea as she had to continue her own travels and catch a flight to the Philippines. After she left I found myself feeling extremely lonely, wondering if I would ever see her again, and I must say that if there is any one thing I've learnt during this long tour so far it is this - dating whilst riding a bicycle around the world is REALLY DIFFICULT!

I needed to stay in Lanzhou myself as I wanted to extend my visa and so I moved to the hostel that the Australian woman had told me about in Zhangye. All I had was an address and I wasn't able to look it up on any maps, so I settled for just asking people in the street. Two lovely girls walked with me halfway across the city to show me where it was, an act of kindness which made me feel a bit better. And the hostel was really great too, with all Chinese guests apart from me and it was surprisingly clean and well furnished considering the price - I paid 16 pounds for a five day stay.

There was one other guest who could speak a bit of English - a middle-aged man who was in Lanzhou working for a week. I needed to go to a dentist because one of the root-canal fillings that I'd had done in Iran had cracked, and I asked this man if he could accompany me so that I would have a translator. Well, no, he couldn't as he had to work, but "don't worry," he said, "Uncle Lee and Miss Liu will accompany you tomorrow" and he pointed to an old man and a young woman lying on (different) beds in the dormitory.

And so the next morning myself and Uncle Lee and Miss Liu headed off together to the nearby hospital, me wondering just how much use these two non-English speakers were going to be as translators. But they at least helped me find the dental department of the hospital where I had to pay a fee to see the dentist (an extortionate 60 pence) and was then welcomed to take a seat in the dentist chair. I was relieved to see that it did look like a proper dental surgery and the man who poked around in my mouth looked like a real dentist. He couldn't speak English though, so his diagnosis remained unclear until another dentist turned up and sat next to me. I was quite pleased when he spoke to me in good English:

"A part of your tooth is broken. It must be removed" he told me in an American accent.

"Okay. Can you replace it?"

"No, it is too difficult. Most of the tooth is okay. It is strong. When will you go back to England?"

"Erm, not that soon."

"When you go back to England they can maybe replace the tooth. Here we cannot do it."

"Okay."

"But you should have the piece of broken tooth removed now, so that it won't become infected."

"Yes okay."

I was relieved to finally be talking to this professional English-speaking dentist, and I had great confidence in what he was telling me.

"I am an eye-doctor," he added, and then walked off.

I let the first, hopefully real, dentist remove the bit of broken tooth. It wasn't going to cost much, was it? It came out very easily, it had been very loose. Then I had to go and pay some more money and went back to the payment desk. "203 yuan" Uncle Lee announced. Twenty quid! Twenty quid! Are you kidding me! Twenty quid to remove a bit of tooth that could have just as easily been removed by eating a carrot!

This was my favourite guest. He never stopped smiling and kept saying "cool" all the time. From sign language I took him to be a singer, but when he left he gave me his business card: 'The best home karaoke entertainment systems' An easy mistake to make.

The visa extension process was very easy. "Another cyclist?" the officer at the PBS asked as I walked in. Evidently Lanzhou is a common visa extension point for our kind. I applied on the Tuesday morning and was able to collect my passport with extension on the Thursday afternoon. In all I spent a much needed week off the bicycle. I didn't do an awful lot. Lanzhou is not the nicest place in the world, mostly because of the terrible traffic. I'm trying not to write so much about the terrible traffic these days, but here are a bunch of pictures:

This man turned around in surprise to see a motorcycle going along the narrow pedestrain walkway. He must have forgotten he was in China.

"Excuse me officer, I've got myself trapped in the middle of the road. How do I get out?""Don't ask me mate, I've been here for a week."

Lanzhou = Big buildings and lots of traffic

A bus blocking the junction having moved out before the exit was clear = very normal

There were lots of 'no beeping' signs, perhaps an attempt to turn China into a slightly more peaceful and civilized place. Alas, these were the least respected traffic signs in the history of traffic signs.

Down by the Yellow River was relatively nice, although the river was disappointingly not yellow. More buildings being built on the north bank.

I accidently found myself in a waterwheel museum on the river. It was nice.

At least 2,000 kilometres from the nearest coastline

The area around the hostel was a bit nicer with a mostly pedestrianised area and a little playground for the kids. There was still no getting away from the horn beeping, even when I sat out here though, for when one child became scared at the top of the slide and hesitated, the kids behind him broke out into a chorus of "HONK! HONK!" They learn early.

So I now had 29 more days to get to the Laos border and I knew this second half of the 'China Challenge' was going to be much harder than the first. Instead of flat desert I was now facing endless hills, and if other reports were to be believed there seemed little hope of getting a second visa extension from the Chinese authorities these days. Before I left Lanzhou I thought about what so many other cyclists that I met in Central Asia, that had come from China, had told me - "I had to take a train, it's not possible to cycle across China. There's no way you can do it in 60 days!" But then I thought about what Will Smith had said to me once - "People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can't do it. Don't ever let anybody tell you that you can't do something!" Damn right Will, damn right. Lets go!

Actually, now I think about it, Will might not have been talking to me when he said that. Was it a movie? Yeah, maybe it was a movie. Still valid. Lets go!

Today's ride: 3 km (2 miles)
Total: 31,376 km (19,484 miles)

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