China blog #63

China blog #63

  I made many more roadside stops last week. I usually rest in small restaurants and grocery stores and I continued to converse by way of Google Translate with the ordinary people of China and on their own patch. Sometimes literally in their own backyard. There were some rainy days and a couple of mild weather days with the daytime temperature in the region of 10° C.  

Fruit is cheap in China and when I can I like to support the roadside vendors that sell from their houses. One day I had a basket of strawberries for breakfast and another day an omelette fried in a cake of batter. For dessert, I picked up a massive bag of tangerines for a little more than a Euro and I couldn't believe there must have been at least 25 in the bag. 

I took a day off in Dong Keng and mingled with the locals and like everywhere else I have been in China I'm always offered cigarettes. If I was a smoker I could smoke a dozen a day. Instead, I show my Google Translated cancer awareness message in a non-pious manner. 

I have pretty much fallen in love with the Chinese people and remember how many foreign cyclists previously told me that they think its an unfriendly nation. Well, that's definitely not so. My experience is the contrary. Heartwarmingly, I have come to realise that behind the same sometimes, stone-faced expressions that there is a deep warmth. More often than not when I bid a greeting to someone on the road I am ignored. People continue to stare in astonishment. On country roads in the western world, we rarely pass a stranger without exchanging a pleasantry. I don't take offence here, I just accept it as a cultural difference. On several occasions, I stopped for a rest break and the same people who had ignored me at the entrance to their village or store and then flash forward a few minutes later they open up with curious smiles and hospitality. One such woman absolutely refused my lunch money on the day I walked towards the unfortunately named Shitang. Usually when I stop I love to create a bit of banter or madness by doing something daft like taking my toothbrush out of my pocket and stirring my coffee with it, that usually gets laugh.  Or sing along in my pretend Chinese to a song on the television.

 

I continued to walk through the mountains with mist-covered skies. I walked through as many as five tunnels a day which ranged from 150 metres to 2.5 kilometres. Sometimes there was a wide path. Other times I had to struggle along a narrow one. When it was safe I dashed with my flashlight in hand. I often get a couple of hundred metres like that and then I pushed Karma back onto the path when I heard an approaching vehicle. I had ample warning as I could hear them coming more than a kilometre away. If it wasn't too busy I could cross to the opposite side of the tunnel when a vehicle came towards me.