This is a draft of the preface to be published in the book The China Road

Motorcycle Diaries.

The China Road Motorcycle Diaries

Preface

Carla King

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 PREFACE

In the summer of 1997 I received an email from an American

working in Beijing. It arrived like a fortune in my computer. “There's a
bike waiting for you in a garage in China,” it said. “You could ride it all
over the country.”

Bikers are a closely-knit group, especially sidecarists, and after my

1995 motorcycle adventure around the United States on a Russian Ural
sidecar motorcycle I'd had invitations to motorcycle in Europe and
Australia, Russia and Tiera del Fuego. But in 1997, China was suddenly
everywhere in the news: the restoration of Hong Kong to the Chinese,
the opening of the country to tourism and foreign investment—bold
capitalist moves in a tightly controlled society. The country was
interesting and unknown. At least, I knew nothing about it.

A certain memory of childhood came to me. Myrtle Beach in North

Carolina, digging in the sand, some adult asked me, "What are you
doing, digging all the way to China?" And of course I imagined kids like
me over there on the other side of the world, but upside-down, with
eyes slanted upward because they were fighting gravity from the other
direction.

The invitation appeared in my email again. "You could ride around

the countryside and talk with people about Hong Kong," it said. "But
Hong Kong isn't all that's going on here. It's overshadowed much more
dramatic changes, out in the countryside."

I love the countryside. By October, I was there as a guest of Rick

Dunagan and the Beijing Chang Jiang gang, an eclectic group of
expatriate Americans and Europeans, and one Chinese couple who

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owned an adventure travel shop in Beijing.

The bike belonged to Jim Bryant, the owner of the Subway

sandwich franchise. The bike was black, just like my Ural, with a
Subway sticker on the back. Best of all, the license plate was 00069. I
rode it through the streets of Beijing to sights like the Forbidden City
and Tianamen Square, to the Dirt Market, the Silk Market and the
Russian Market, and right past the Kentucky Fried Chicken to the
Subway shop for lunch. The traffic was frightening, it seemed that
everyone had just got cars in Beijing, and that meant that everyone
had just got drivers licenses. It was like driving with thousands of
sixteen-year olds. In 1997, there were only thousands. Nobody had any
idea just how many more there would be.

But one day Rick took me out to the countryside where the
peasants were harvesting golden yellow corn to be dried on the road. It
was warm and sunny and the natives smiled and waved as we drove
over their crops, threshing their grain. We stopped for noodles and
beer at a roadside stand, bought persimmons and walnuts, and other
things you do in the countryside.

The grand finale was a group ride to the Great Wall. We left Beijing,
a city that’s about the same physical size of Belgium, which in 1997
hosted 11 million inhabitants. We rode and rode under the clear blue
Indian summer sky. The high mountains of Inner Mongolia were visible
to the northwest, stark and raised in spiked brown peaks over which
laid the territories of the dreaded Barbarians.

Only ten percent of China is arable and farmland stretches right up

to the feet of these mountains, not skipping a crevice as it follows the
contours of the flatlands. In October, the peasants were busy
harvesting and used half the road as a drying surface for yellow corn.

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 The farmers sat in piles of it, the men lounging, taking a break from
furrowing the fields, and the women were busy separating the husks
from the ears, piling the husks in the middle of the road, and the ears
to the side. Other women thumbed the kernels off into neat patches of
gold onto the black asphalt. Traffic, such as it was, drove around the
yellow patches and directly onto the husks to help with the threshing.
A farmer burned fallen willow leaves and twigs in his field, brown and
furrowed by as he led his donkey to plough the dirt.

We rode high into the hills breathing deeply of clean air, polluting
the silence with the sound of seven Chinese sidecar motorcycle
engines headed toward the wall.

The fields gave way to a lake and a road built up against a

mountainside, its gray granite cliff dripping with vines turning yellow
and red from the season and the sun, rapidly setting now, three hours
from Beijing.

The piles of corn gave way to roadside tables piled with fat orange
persimmons, luminous in the fading light. Amongst the persimmons
were baskets of cream colored apples streaked with red, boxes of
walnuts, pheasants in cages of wood-framed chicken-wire and, next to
the lake, tiny silver fish strung horizontally through their middles with
string and hung to dry on a line like rows of metallic windchimes.

We were racing the sunset and the sunset won so my first view of
the wall was in silhouette, an irregular line along the mountain ridge
that folded in close to the valleys but forever stretched on toward the
desert of Mongolia.

Watchtowers appeared regularly along the wall in intervals as it

twisted off into the distance and overwhelmed me with the enormity of

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the effort that must have been required over the years to create it. For
the first time I thought about the carriers of the stone to the ridge, the
strength required, the ingenuity, the tumbles and falls of people and
stone back to the bottom, the injuries and deaths and the constant
toiling. That this human-made dinosaur backbone rolled on for 4000
miles was simply unimaginable.

We pulled up to a gate and were surrounded by villagers. I'd barely

seen the low brick structures at the foot of the mountain. I sat
shivering in the fading light while the Chinese speakers in the group
negotiated with the villagers in what still sounded to me like random
nasal howling spiked with laughing, fake refusals, hand waving, more
laughter, and more shouting. I could make nothing of it at all, not from
English, nor French, nor from the little German and Dutch I knew.
Though I’d studied basic Mandarin before I left on this trip, now I
recognized only the words for thank you.

The whole deal ended up costing about $16 for all 14 of us, an all-
inclusive package of admission to the wall and permission to camp on
it, portage of our things up the mountain, a boiled egg breakfast at
dawn, and a promise from them to leave us alone and save the
souvenir-hawking until morning. It was a deal both sides quietly
laughed about, each party certain that the other came from the
stupidest part of their country.

We hiked up to the wall. I imagined we would pitch our tents on the

ground at the foot of it but I followed the group into a watchtower and
up its staircase to the wide, flat top of it. We pitched our tents and
settled in just in time to witness the full autumn moon rise over
Mongolia.

As the rest of the group went about making dinner—a weird

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combination of American, European and Chinese fare—I stood on the
wall looking around at the countryside in what can only be described
as astonishment. I’d really had no idea. And yeah, I could do this, I
thought. Cities are horrible to ride in, as they are all over the world, but
the countryside—I had not imagined such a vast, uninhabited spaces
existed here, I had not imagined that China would be so beautiful.

I’d done my research about the wall, though, and the residents told
me more. Our our campsite was atop just one of the 90 watch towers
on this thirteen-kilometer stretch of wall at Jinsanling, a section that
runs through mountain peaks for 7.5 kilometers from Gubeikou Pass—
which used to be a strategic outpost between Inner Mongolia and
Northeastern China. The watchtowers on this section are built at 100-
meter intervals, except where the terrain is more complicated, and
then they are placed even closer because defense so close to the
capital needed to be strong. During the Ming dynasty the Mongols had
finally been ousted, but guards watched for them from the round
watch bays—unique to this section of the wall. Horribly, the warning
signal for approaching Mongols was blue smoke made by burning
wolves paws.

It was a clear, chilly night and the stars sparkled. The Jiang’s
stirfried lamb, onions, and green peppers on a flat-topped grill and
offered it from white paper plates studded with dollops of plum sauce.
Rick contributed chicken wings and a canister of Pringle's chips, John
and Susan had brought barbecued ribs, Walter and Ursula grilled hot
dogs.

After dinner, I fished through my backpack for the bottle of aged

Kentucky bourbon I’d wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap amongst the
camera equipment, and put my hand on a velvet bag. It was a
selection of duty-free Ghirardelli Chocolate bars from San Francisco I'd

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forgotten I'd bought, to go with the bourbon. These treasures were met
with delight by the others and we sat sipping the whisky until the full
moon burst over a far-away mountain to wash us in its cold white light
and send our thoughts centuries through to the past.

Between swigs of bourbon there were silences filled with the

awareness of a place that holds generations of souls. Soldiers and
slaves, peasants and princes. A place of nightmares and sweet dreams.

Sleep came and went. In the middle of the night I crawled out into
a moonlight so bright that the zigzag of wall took my imagination to
the Gobi Desert where it ended abruptly in the sand. But here there as
a watchtower at the apex of each hill, a square silhouette in the weak
gray light. To reach the last one I would have to walk for hours in the
night, through dark passages under each watchtower and along
crumbling stones in a still cold air as dry as ice.

My boot heels clicked against the pounded earth surface and the
sound seemed to echo all the way into the craters on the moon. I
continued walking until I could no longer see the tents and then I
noticed the perfect silence. No nightbirds. No scurrying rodents. Where
are the animals in China?

In the morning I walked the wall again to take a photo of our tents.
From my vantage point I saw the villagers approaching, bearing the
promised boiled eggs and souvenirs, and I walked back to meet them.

Adorned in "I Climbed the Great Wall" sweatshirts they gently

pressed me to buy gourds inked with romantic scenes of ancient China,
and cheap ceramic necklaces scratched with symbols of long life and
happiness. I studied the gourds for a long time, selecting them
carefully. The scenes were mythological: a long-eared pig-man dancing

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with abandon, an offering to a goddess, two women in robes, their
black hair piled meticulously into three bundles, one atop the other.
One gourd with a handle was badly etched but unique in shape. I shook
it, laughed, and returned it to the bag, much to the amusement of the
toothless old woman.

In the end I bought more than a dozen each of the necklaces and
gourds and the old toothless woman smiled and rattled the gourd I’d
put back at my ear, then pushes it into my hands. Yes, I paid too much.

I returned the next spring for a journey planned from Beijing to

Burma. But in four months, I never got out of North China. The roads
were bad or non-existent, and the maps were wrong. I got tired and
lonely and came home, not to return for a decade.

What a difference a decade makes! There were roads and cars—

many of them. And surprisingly, I had companions, two women on two
motorcycles just like the one I rode. We swooshed out of Beijing north
and then west, and experienced all the extremes that define China
today.

So this is the story of two journeys to China, one made alone,

without companions, and mostly lost, and another ten years later, with
companions, and mostly lost, illegal, and broke down. †

Copyright Carla King 2010 All rights reserved

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