by Carla King

Pagoda at Yinchuan

View from the top.

There's a temple at the pagoda. I got in on a service and had my tape recorder with me. Great music. Live! Will update this dispatch with audio upon return.

Food for the road. A tofu, seaweed, vegetable, hot red pepper pocket sandwich. 1.50 yuan. I'm not going broke on food, at least.

Leaving Yinchuan. Irrigation along the river.

FIRST, A MECHANICAL UPDATE...

Dual carbs sure are a drag.... the right one doesn't slide very well, it's developed a rub spot, and it's not sliding up and down easily like the left one. I'm going to stop by a motorcycle shop tomorrow... interesting how you find them. Look for three or four broken down bikes lined up neatly in the dirt and there it is. Never mind looking for Chinese characters. I only recognize about 10 by now. Anyway, I've just had it trying to deal with it all by my lonesome, and the friendly people here at the guesthouse would like to help but they don't know a thing. It was getting a little dark when I was raising the needle on the carbs and one guy helpfully lit his zippo right next to it so I could see. No one could understand why I was so unappreciative. Finally I said KABOOM! and they understood.

The new jugs are probably broken in by now. I rode 227 km today -- WHY does 227 km take 7 hours? -- I know, I know, it's CHINA! The roads are awful! I was sometimes riding slowly because of the engine break in, then fast, then slow, and so on, to vary the speed a lot, but then I stopped to eat, stopped to take a picture, stopped to get an ice pop, stopped to get gas, stopped so that big blue truck wouldn't hit me head on, stopped when that hay truck dumped its load of hay in front of me, stopped at that big pile of bricks.... gee, I guess that's why.

Day before yesterday I was freaked because I pulled the spark plugs and they were both sticky and oily. Called John, he said the engine wasn't broken in yet and the pistons hadn't settled. I've never seen such a thing! Tonight the plugs are pretty clean. I didn't raise the needles until tonight because I thought I didn't need both oily and carbony. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

The bike started complaining after km 200 -- always with just a few km to go it starts acting up. I guess it's tireder than I am. So what it does is hesitate a lot, and backfire when I accelerate in the low gears. I stop and have an ice pop and let it cool off for half an hour, then it's okay.

The bike is almost getting more looks than I am. I've seen absolutely none like it since only one I passed in Datong. It's the old model Chang Jiang and it has those black expat plates with the Beijing character on it, and all I hear when I go somewhere is "Beijing! Beijing!" and they ask me something and I say Beijing - Datong - Hohhot - Yinchuan - Lanzhou - Xian - Beijing. They all nod happily as if that is exactly what they really asked and look at the engine, tough things, look under the sidecar cover. I'm tempted to put a booby trap in there of some sort. I wish I had an automatic water squirter or something. And they just won't leave the controls alone. Will ctually turn the key and kick start it. They think the ignition button is the horn so that gets pushed a lot just for fun so I never leave the key in even if I'm standing right there. They work the clutch and the brake and have no problem sitting on it and mashing the gears down without pulling in the clutch. They laugh and bounce up and down on the seat and say whatever the Chinese equivalent of "vroom vroom" is to their friends. Sometimes - when I'm in a good mood - I just laugh along. Others I want to tell them to just please give it a rest. The clutch has been working overtime and it doesn't need to be worked any more. But I catch my tongue and just let it be.

They really are sweet people. Always wanting to help, always interested. I suppose it's because they never seen foreigners, travelers. Can't imagine what Beijing is like out here, much less America. People know I'm American here, I hear "megwa" murmured behind me all the time. Closer to Beijing I was asked what nationality I am, but not here. I guess Americans have the reputation for traveling.

I think, though, that a Chinese man on that bike from Beijing would attract a lot of attention, too. I remember that during "Borders," even in America the fact that I was from California and was riding through Ohio was a big deal, so I guess I shouldn't be claiming that the Chinese are all that isolated. Although they've never heard of California. You turn on the TV and there's no Hollywood there. Only China.

AND NOW, WHERE I AM...

Anyway, tomorrow my task is to fix up those carbs and to get to Lanzhou. Though I'm at this really cool little guesthouse right on the banks of the Yellow River. It's isolated. I have never seen anything like this place. I was riding not far from the river for a long time, on my right (northwest) were mountains with the vestiges of the Great Wall of China decorating the ridges from time to time. Really they were larger than usual piles of rubble, with the occasional restored watchtower. Didn't make my heart go thump thump like in the east. Here though, the dunes of the Tenger Desert poked through occasionally, yellow-white in contrast to the brown red of the mountains. On my left were farms between the road and the river. Lush small lots of rice paddies or grains. Women worked them, mostly, some of them wading through the paddies, others crouching between rows of grain to plant something else, perhaps corn. Their labor is awesome, they look as if they're poking the ground with a toothpick to plant their seedling. They must do this all day every day for a month to get the entire field planted.

Between the rice paddies are fields and some greenhouses with mud and straw walls over which are fixed reed roll-down roofs to hold down great wide sheets of opaque plastic. I gues these are where the seedlings come from. Sometimes there is one of these long greenouses per plot, other times there is a huge number of them all in one plot, one long mud wall after another, the reed roofs rolled up and neatly placed on top now that it's warm.

ALONG THE WAY...

Near Qingtongxia there were women selling something from big white bags at the roadside. They were those red dates you see everywhere here. I don't like them. They're dry and rather tasteless, but they put them in things -- in the tea, for example. Ningxia Province has the most wonderful tea. In Yinchuan I bought tons of it to bring home. It's the tea leaf and a chunk of rock sugar and some of these dates and other dried fruits, including a slice of dried apple. Its very tasty and very beautiful in its individual cellophane packets. I have taken to the Chinese custom of always carrying a plastic jug of tea. Anywhere you go they'll fill it up with hot water for you -- at the gas station, at the little store where you stop to buy cakes or bananas they see you drinking from it and always get the thermos or the teakettle that's sitting on the pot-bellied coal stove.

Once today when I stopped to rest and have a drink from my tea bottle, a freight train went by. There were at least 50 hobos distributed amongst the goods lashed to the flat cars, all raggedy disheveled looking people, dirty, with bags of things, and obviously not railway workers. I've seen homeless people wandering at the side of the road, a big bag strapped to their back and carrying things, very dark looking, tan and dirty and old, just like in the U.S. Not nearly as many but they certainly exist. Beggars, too, a lot of them in Yinchuan which was a beautiful clean dream of a city, all marble and tile and glass, with a charming shopping area with many foodstalls and other places to congregate, with even a covered food market. It reminded me of Europe, perhaps a small town in Italy, like Ventimeglia, with a clean modern city center and on the outskirts the poorer section with the jumbled markets and interesting little crooked alleyways.

FOOD NEWS...

Some gourmand friends were curious about what I've been eating. I think I've never eaten so well! There are so many interesting things here, and each area has a different specialty. In Datong there was mutton, huge plates piled high with boiled sheep heads, horns and all. I never found out what they did with the bodies. I'm supposing they shipped them to Beijing and other high class places.

Everywhere you can find something that's pronounced "jowza." These are little steamed white buns with fillings. The fillings are hit or miss. Many times they're meat and some are green vegetable. Others are vermicelli (remember Marco Polo brought pasta from China!) mixed with onions and hot peppers. In Yinchuan I had some lovely little dumplings filled with some fresh chopped dark green vegetable cooked with a little bit of onion and garlic. Five of them cost 1.50 yuan. I was also served a bowl of a kind of porridge made from rice and mashed red mung bean (I think) with a few of those red dates thrown in. I started eating it, and the woman sitting next to me threw a soup spoon full of sugar in for me because I obviously didn't know what I was doing. Sometimes they really do treat me like a child. Actually, it was much better that way. And the things I say do sound a bit like goo-goo ga-ga to them.

On my way out of Yinchuan I stopped when I saw a woman filling pocket bread with a variety of ingredients for a customer. It turned out to be a soft round bun that she poked open and filled with 1) marinated chopped tofu with very hot red peppers 2) sliced zucchini and onion 3) sliced cold ribbons of marinated tofu with cucumber, and 4) seaweed strips with mixed vegetables. Very yummy.

I think she was Hui -- the Muslim ethnic group common in this area -- and I think it's thanks to their presence that I am not constantly surrounded by 50 curious staring people out here as I have been in areas where they've never, ever seen anyone but Han Chinese. It was a delicious sandwich, and I took two. One to eat there, and converse with her (sort of ) and one to take along to eat later. She was a lovely short old wrinkled thing, with laugh lines all over and had no problem babbling on to me in Chinese while I babbled on to her in English.

Breakfast has normally been something like white cakes or even "jowza" with eggs or meat and vegetables. I've also discovered a heavy flaky pastry filled with sweetened red mung bean mush that I like very much. And finally I nabbed a jar of Nescafe in a department store to augment the little packets of semi-coffee which are mostly sugar and dried milk.

Everywhere you see glass carts with a number of blue and white enamel bowls and a neat pile of large clearish thin white pancakes sitting in a stack that look kind of jelloish. I had no idea what I was getting the first time I asked for one. The woman took one of the pancakes and folded it into thirds, then cut it with a cleaver into noodle-sized strips, dumped it into a plastic bag and added ingredients from all the bowls. I guess I could have customized but I just let her do it until she almost put a tablespoon of hot red pepper in it. Some of the ingredients are cilantro (coriander), hot red pepper... oh, I can't remember the rest. A lot of healthy green stuff and herbs. She then tosses a little tied off corner of a bag of soy sauce in, closes the bag and hands it to you. This is the first time I thought maybe I ought to get my own bowl and chopsticks. When I got back to my hotel room I couldn't find anything bow-like to put it in, so I ended up mashing it all up in the bag and slurping it up from a hole I made in the corner. Didn't take me long to figure out I'd better eat it in the bathtub then take a shower. Would have been nicer in a bowl but I had no time to adventure out for that. I was starving.

(Later I found out that this is called "me-in--tea-in." Maybe it means cold noodles.)

For drinking there is bottled or boiled water, cans of pineapple juice, bottles of soda or sugared flavored water, including one bottle orange drink with flecks of orange rind in it, and beer. It's always interesting to get the local beer because it varies so much. My favorite so far has been the Inner Mongolian beer, very nice, light, golden beer. They're all light, you get a huge bottle and they're not very strong. You can forget the wine. It's vile.

My favorite place for food so far has been Yinchuan. (Yinchuan has been my favorite city yet.) There are foodstalls serving all kinds of things: skewers of cooked quail eggs or wild mushrooms or triangular slices of marinated tofu. Vermicelli noodles with mushrooms and squid and beans and peppers. Small ceramic pots of bubbling hot herbed shrimps or mutton or chicken. Green beans and meat tossed in herbs. Jowza filled with all kinds of things, vegetables, meats, vermicelli and egg. Some loaf kind of thing with rice sliced and dolloped with honey. Small jugs of sweetened yogurt. Pocket sandwiches. Coffee ice pops. Caramelized peanuts and dried fruits of all sorts. Icy blended orange and pineapple juice. Pastries filled with mashed sweetened mung bean. Angelfood cakes. Bananas, oranges, apples, tomatoes, cucumbers, pineapples, and beautiful white peaches with orange tips that look exactly like little pink nipples.

THE LANDSCAPE...

Out in the countryside here you see lots of rice paddies in various states of growth. Some are only large brown lots of mud, other are just planted and look like hair transplants, some are lush and thick and green. The villages are made from mud and straw, their roofs are now piled high with hay and all their donkeys are fat. Narrow mud streets lead straight to the river. All is irrigated. Sluice gates open and muddy water rushes bubbling into hand shoveled ditches.

Then there is nothing but sand dunes peaking like yellow whipped cream for about a kilometer between me and the banks of the Yellow River. Only the river isn't yellow, it is absolutely pink right now from some kind of mineral it's brought from upstream. On the far side of the river side rises jaggedy sharp red-brown mountains, and the sky is ever so blue, now that it is nearing sunset. Every color is super saturated -- yellow against pink against burnt sienna against blue.

SANCTUARY...

I may have to stay here another day and just chill. The people who run this place are all very young and very bored and I am the only guest. There was a little argument though when they tried to charge me 60 yuan when the rate is clearly 30... it's written all over the place on the wall in the sign-in area, and the guidebook says so, too, plus they said the showers don't work. I said there was no way I was going to pay double the Chinese price now since the president eliminated the foreigners double-price policy and furthermore if there are no showers I'm going to be really pissed of if they argue with me. They didn't really know what I was saying but they knew what I was saying. I paid 30.

Then they helped me work on the bike, which means it took twice as long to adjust the carbs as it would have alone. (I keep thinking of that classic mechanic's sign: This is the price; this is the price if you watch; this is the price if you help.) But they've at least brought me three big silver thermoses of hot water and a basin, and are very disappointed that I've already eaten.

I'm alone again! I've really learned to treasure my little hotel rooms, sanctuaries from the staring and beeping. The room is large and airy, simple, of course, and so very quiet. I'm not used to quiet in China, but I've found another of those surprising wide open spaces. This one has the Yellow River river rushing outside.

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