China Road Dispatches

Credited as author/photographer, this dauntless 40-year-old woman - she's a San Francisco-based travel & tech writer - presents an utterly engaging narrative of her adventure "riding alone through mountains and deserts and river valleys from Beijing all the way to the border with Tibet".

King's bike; offered up to her by admiring expats living in Beijing - was BMW by design, though Chinese by manufacture. Called a Chang Jiang, it's a modern day copy of BMW's 1938 750cc, 38-horsepower motorcycle with sidecar, born anew of the original German molds in a factory on the banks of the Yangzee River. King's prose is often gauzy as Chinese verse. "The road," she writes, "is a jumble of people and donkey carts and blue flatbed trucks piled high with the harvest...I pass slowly, invisibly...They are too preoccupied with their harvest to notice the motorcycle." Being both blond and American, at other times - most often in cities - she was girdled by pressing mobs of curious spectators. Rather than suffer bewildering stares in restaurants, Carla frequently dined at roadside stands, where she "could simply ride away" on her twin-cylinder CJ whenever crowds collected.

Previously, Carla King had ridden another BMW double - her Russian Ural motorcycle and sidecar - all over the U.S., chronicling those travels in her American Borders on the internet. For her recent China Road dispatches, she made daily journal entries on her laptop, seeking out that country's better hotel business centers to electronically relay her words and downloaded digital camera pictures to the rest of the world.

A disciple of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, she did what she could with her own tools and wisdom, but some repairs to the often pesky CJ needed a true craftsman's hand, or, at least, trusty guidance. When suspicious blue smoke appeared in her bike's exhaust, she found a shop that "smelled of dirt and motor oil, soy and ginger" - where the Chinese mechanic's admonition was, in any culture, a classic: "Add more oil! Lots of oil!"

Through mud and straw villages, teeming cities, in coal towns where her face quickly turned black as the residents', and to the faraway monasteries of quaintly amorous Tibetan monks, King rode on and on - without either Chinese drivers license or official provinces travel papers, requirements mired in hopeless complexities - until she'd done what she meant to do. "Not that it was easy," she notes. "It was hard, and I was glad to be going home." Landing at San Francisco, once again drawn "into the arms of familiarity", she dropped to her knees to kiss the airport carpet - her flight's only passenger to do so.

King's City Bike article also carries excerpts from some rather famous navigators of human aspiration, ideologists as diverse as Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, Robert Pirsig. Perhaps the quotation by Helen Keller is most telling of King's own character and of what virtually all of us motorcyclists know in our hearts to be true. Her Keller quote reads: "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

Carla King's words and images can be found on the internet at http://www.motorcyclemisadventures.com.

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Will Edgar, editor of the newsletter, has been a documentary filmmaker, a writer for Cycle News (the Cycle Dreams columnist), and is co-author of a just-released book called "American Sports Car Racing in the 1950's" for Motorbooks International in Wisconsin. He currently rides "a techno-marvel BMW R850R/ABS, kindred in root design to the somewhat earlier and less swift Chang Jiang."