by Carla King

Does this man look like an amped up demon truck driver to you?

The Yellow River (Huang He) is so named because of the great amount of silt it carries turns it a yellow hue. It is China's number two river, beginning in mountainous Qinghai province and becoming a serious water flow by the time it reaches Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province (my next destination). From Lanzhou it flows north past Yinchuan in Ningxia province (where I am now) and into Inner Mongolia past Wuhai and Wuyuan and Baotou, and then south into Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces.

I followed it along since Baotou, and saw a lot of industry going on on the river banks, very ugly places, as well as a lot of beautiful farmland, and one place where coal mining was as easy as sticking a pickaxe in the ground. There were literally rivers of black coal lying on the surface of the ground. But again, those coal trucks... bleah.

The crops here grow neatly in small plots: wheat and cotton, corn, sorghum, panicle and foxtail millets, sweet potatoes and watermelons which are piled high in marketplaces right now. Seasonal vegetables are Chinese cabbage, leeks, Chinese radishes, turnips, celery,eggplant, tomatoes, peppers and beans. The irrigation system is extensive and there are as many people digging ditches as there are tending fields. Everything is done by hand. I have seen a very few tractors, there is more donkey power, and even more human power, even people dragging ploughs through the dirt.

Homes I passed were mainly made of adobe and straw, though many were of brick. (I pass many many small blue trucks hauling trailers of bricks.) In the yards there are chickens, geese, and pigs.

Yinchuan

The road ends, you ask the nearest worldly looking soul (a man around 40) where, please, is the road to Yinchuan? He thinks you can speak Chinese and begins a three-minutes dissertation on the methodology of A to B, all the options, and his personal opinion on each, after which you get a word in edgewise to let him know you aren't understanding anything except for his gestures, which are enough but he insists upon getting on the back of the bike anyway and showing you... it's around the nuclear power plant and left at the factory spewing yellow smoke, what I need to do is make a big U, but he'll go with me, it's no trouble, he can walk home from the other side of the U just as well as this side.

But.... a motorbike pulls up with two guys on it who want to look at the bike, because even though I thought I was traveling like a local by taking this machine across China it gets strange looks now no its own accord. I have learned to tuck my blond braid carefully inside my jacket because too many people pull up in passing position to look at me and not the head on collision that's coming, or almost running me off the road), but the bike is creating it's own audience, because it is the rarer older model and it has black expat plates from Beijing which is now pretty darn far away.

So, one of these guys wants to go to Yinchuan with me for some reason I can't get. It's a three hour drive and it will be dark, and I think I'll probably be better off for the company, I've been starved for company, any company... he just wants to stop by home (I think) and get a couple of things it's that apartment building over there in the middle of a bunch of identical six-story apartment buildings which are all clustered in the middle of the factory.

We run upstairs, and at home he is so agitated I'm getting a really bad feeling about this. He lives on the top floor, there's a pile of bricks laying there (there's always a pile of bricks laying somewhere nearby in China) and I think that if there's something weird happening I could grab a brick and use it as a weapon. How stupid. But it's running through my head that he's one of those highway robbers I've heard about, he's terribly agitated, it came off as charming before, but now he's really in an awful hurry. Too much of a hurry. And I have no way of finding out what's going on.

I point to "hurry" and "trouble" in the phrasebook, and he thumbs up at "hurry" and down at "trouble" and finds "friend" and "guide" and "no money" to make me feel better.

His apartment is very nice, similar to a small 2 bedroom apartment in the U.S. He runs around, shows me his driver's card, holding it up to his face and pointing at the photo, pushes a pair of black leather gloves into my hands, they have fur linings, he shows me, and he also throws a pair of red cotton gloves and two tins of tiger balm and some perfume at me, it smells vile, like mint and turpentine, and I guess it's something to keep truck drivers awake.

He takes out a plastic model of a drag race car and says something that must be the Chinese version of "vroom vroom", runs back into the bedroom, which is kind of red because of the red lace curtains on the windows, and rifles through drawers and runs to the kitchen to get me some hot water and back into another room... he is so nervous that my bad feeling is growing... a maniac, I think, schizophrenic, or dangerous, and I think about leaving.

I look around. The apartment is very nice, top floor, flush toilet, neat, a wedding photo of he and his wife (he barely looks 18 but I have learned that that means he's about 25 probably) on the wall, he is a tux and she in a red lace dress. (Red is the color of marriage and white is the color of death in China but even so many brides choose white because it is the western way). This photo calms me for some reason.

The phone rings. He has a hasty conversation. I use the flush toilet. LETS GO! he says, and shoves my helmet and gloves and the two other pairs of gloves and the balm and the perfume into my hands and runs in circles a couple of times looking for something as I stand there slightly astounded.

LETS GO! We are off, then, except his wife bicycles up and there is an astonished exchange. She is about 8 months along, only second pregnant woman I've seen in the mass of humanity since I've been here, and she looks from him to me and back again and he says LETS GO! and we go, leaving her with a friend who has just cycled up and gapes at us equally astonished.

I have no idea what's going on and no way of finding out. But I am glad his wife and her friend knows that I am taking him to Yinchuan. She definitely isn't happy, but he says goodbye and jumps on the back seat and says LET'S GO! I nod apologetically to his wife and put it in reverse.

It is colder that I had thought it might get here in springtime, and he is shaking, I see that when he points, like a traffic cop in crisp jerks in front of my face, right or left or straight ahead. And then I get it. He is a driver, his truck is in Yinchuan for some reason and it shouldn't be, he took it there and will be in trouble if his boss know, had talked his friend into taking him on his little 125 bike but then they saw me, obviously touring because they sure hadn't seen me in that factory town before.

Truck, nervousness, shakes.... drugs. He is running around like a manic because he's a speed freak trucker.

oohWHAAAH! he yells in my ear when it looks like I may go straight instead of left.

oohWHAAAH! he yells when I get too far in the middle of the road. oohWHAAAH!! he yells when a truck jumps on the highway ahead of us.

Then he starts pointing at the ignition button. at exactly the wrong moment, when a truck is passing in my lane dead ahead, I'm passing two bicyclists who are riding astride and a taxi is hot on my back bumper and beeping like crazy this guy is jabbing at my ignition button.. After about the fifth time it dawn on me that he thinks it's the horn. I beep the horn, which is on the left side.

YYYYEEEESSS! he yells in glee. YYYYEEEESSS!

He is a trucker. He beeps all the time at motorcycles.

It is night. Pitch black. We freeze and I am in 4 shirts a leather jacket, wool scarf, helmet and a rain suit. He is wearing slacks, a white shirt, dinner jacket and a windbreaker. It becomes so dark that even the people who think that lights eat more gas turn on their lights, and then the truckers start their sadistic little light game power trip.

I have no idea why they're flashing their brights at me. I have the lows on, they flash their brights. I flash my brights and they blast me with brights. They leave the lows on and when they get 10 feet away they turn on their brights to blind me. All this while I'm trying to miss potholes, pass tractors and motorcycles and bicycles, and deal with oohWHAAAH! on my back seat.

Why can't they just put their dims on when they see an oncoming vehicle? It seems a simple rule but it doesn't work here. I experiment. Dims on when I see them coming. Nope. They bright me. I bright back. They dim and bright back again. Okay. Brights on until they flash. But then if that happens they seem to get pissed off and bright me 10 feet from touchdown. Too late to bright them back. Okay, so wait until we're about in irritation proximity, then dim. Seems to work best, but I still get blinded. JERKS! I yell.

WHAAAH! I'M SORRY! from the back seat. Oh yeah. He's a trucker. Getting a little taste of his own medicine, here.

So I let them see my brights and then dim before they do. Seems to work, though I still get blinded sometimes. I can't figure out the rules.

Two hours later my left thumb is sore from hitting the bright/dim switch, and sometimes I turn the lights off entirely, because the switch gets momentarily stuck between. When that happens I get a "oohWHAAAH" and then a hysterical laugh. I WISH I knew what this was all about. I didn't like the way he treated his wife, but then in China there is no display of affection between husband and wife, none at all.

Two hours into it he's still giving me directions on how to miss potholes and pass tractors. I think I've come long enough without your help, I yell through my helmet and the wind, and he says YESSSS! in delight. He weights maybe 100 pounds, maybe 90, not much heavier than the extra cylinders I have in the sidecar. But then he starts the massage. Fabulous. A little chop cop on the back, a little squeeze squeeze on the shoulders. Some pieces of song that might be in English, another oohWHAAAH!

Though I was riding at 40 km/hr the engine began to overheat 18 kilometers from Yinchuan so I insisted we stop for a while. He babbled about this and that, (boshe, fellali, new yok) smoked, shook his head, paced, and occasionally shouted in glee, "YINCHUAN - ONE - EIGHT - YES!" Thumbs up. When arrived in Yinchuan at 11 pm, he helped me find my hotel, get the motorcycle safely parked, locked, and covered, ran ahead of me to open the door, helped fill out the check-in form, all accompanied by a non-stop dialog to the confused reception clerk. Then he brought my bags to my room, barked at the floor girl, washed his face, made sure I had hot water in the thermos, told me his name, left, came back again, let me take his photo, asked me the time, turned on the TV, and then he was gone. I will never know really what was going on with him. I don't care. I obviously saved his butt and I was glad for the help but now I was glad for the privacy and the flush toilet and even the loud Chinese TV blaring in the next room.

This morning Yinchuan is the Emerald city. Blue sky and sunshine and a beautiful clean city. Clean streets, clean air, light traffic. Heaven. I walk to the department store and then to the shopping street and ate noodles with mushrooms at a canvas covered food market with 50 woks all going at once under canvas roofs, pots bubbling with meats and seafoods, and squewers of quail eggs and triangles of marinated tofu. I sit in the shade and drink sugared yogurt cream from a straw stuck into a ceramic pot covered with tissue paper rubber-banded over the top, then have a cup of the region's special tea with dried dates and apples and lychee and a lump of rock sugar.The theme of "Titanic" blasts from loudspeakers of clothes shops record shops video stores, and I have not been crowded around even one time. There is only the occasional "hello" and a giggle in passing. There is a huge covered market with piles of meat of all kinds, large glass tanks of fish swimming perpetually upstream in artificial rivers. There are boxes and bags neatly arranged: fruits, dates, spices,nuts, and cellophane packages with individual packets of that special tea. There is a park where old people sit in the shade and children play in the fountain. It looks a little like Italy. I go back to my hotel and pick up email messages at the business center's fax line, then read them in my room with a bathtub and toilet and the requisite sledgehammer and pick axe team outside the window and witness again that China is a developing country. It is developing right before my eyes. When I return to Beijing I am sure there will be five new high-rises visible from Teresa's 45th floor view.

Next... the road to Lanzhou.

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