Chinese roads have a myriad of different types of vehicles or should I say modes of transporting people and goods? People walked with baskets and buckets suspended from poles carried on their shoulders. Outside of cities and Holland, most non-Odyssey cyclists I saw rode racing bikes and wore lycra jerseys and shorts. In China, riders wear regular clothes and their bikes are utility vehicles. People carry ANYTHING on their bicycles: other people, baskets of chickens, a pair of propane tanks, you name it. Motorcycles carry one, two, three and even four people. "Trucks" with a tractor-like open engine slowly and noisily with black choking smoke billowing out carry too much for their meager engines. An inexorable number of buses carry people from town to town.
Everything with a motor also has a horn. Drivers use the horns extremely frequently. I have a hard time determining when someone is honking as a friendly ear splitting greeting and when they are announcing their presence with authority. The horns are of the same volume and high pitch as the annoying shrill horns on industrial park lunch-wagon trucks.
It seems that for many people outside of towns, the road also serves as a form of entertainment. A lot of school-aged children and adults called out "hullo" to passing riders. It took only two hours into the first day for one rider to happily comment that he was tired of saying hello. Unlike Europe where people in villages tended to be indoors, it seems like everybody is outside in China, when it isn't raining.
The towns reminded me of Mexico with the stores in garages set off from the street by 50ft of dirt. Each town or village seems to specialize. One village had all furniture shops. Others were one type of fruit. The town of Huan Tian had a bunch of places sawing blocks of limestone for tabletops, sheetrock and for whatever else marble-like limestone is used.
The reason Tim chose this area of China to bicycle is because of the scenic limestone carsts (or karsts). These leftover crags spring up from the otherwise flat landscape like scattered giant's teeth covered in green. Sticking with that description, I guess our route followed the "floss" line.
Rice grows year round so a field would have rice in several stages of growth with its different colors going from green to yellow. The limestone carsts rising 200 to a thousand feet above the multi-colored multi-tiered rice patties was an awesome sight. In a few days Odyssey's route goes to the Long Gi Rice Terraces (one of the wonders of the world). This kind of different scenery and culture is why a lot of riders are on Odyssey2000. I'm here because even in the tourist town of Yangshuo, China, I found Belgian chocolates! But, alas, the Chinese don't know rice about ice cream. They do provide, however, a one-hour foot and leg massage for $6!
Happy Trails,
Bruce