China Part 3: Racing to the Vietnamese border

Cycling out from our hostel on Chinese New Year’s Day seemed a fitting way to start the next stage of our journey. After six weeks off, we felt a bit wobbly and unbalanced with our fully loaded bikes. However, things soon smoothed out, and we cycled through central Guilin grinning, happy to be on the road again and feeling like we were having a special send off as the Chinese New Year’s celebrations went on around us – small fireworks, red lanterns hanging from trees and a generally merry atmosphere. We even passed a Chinese Dragon nonchalantly making its way down the street.

As we left the city, buildings were replaced by the spectacular karst formations for which the area is famous, and the streets turned into rice paddies and vegetable plots. We began to pass little stalls selling delicious looking strawberries straight from the fields, and after the tenth stall our resolve finally broke and we stopped to buy a bag. We then spent a very happy half hour sitting by a little stream, stuffing our faces with these plump little berries, drinking coffee from our thermos and being gawped at by Chinese families out for the day.

With the sweet taste still lingering in our mouths we set off again, and had a slightly stressful couple of hours after missing our turning and having to cycle back up a long grinding hill. However, when we reached the top we were rewarded with breath-taking views across a valley that was surrounded by karst peaks and populated by alien-looking trees with long, spindly trunks topped by little balls of foliage.

This detour, along with inaccurate distances on our map, meant that when we finally rolled exhausted into the town of Xingping, we had cycled over 90km on our ‘short’ first day. Two pizzas and a couple of beers helped to bring us back to life and ease our aching bodies.

We took the next day off. Leaving our hostel, we pushed through the throngs of Chinese tourists, and went down to the river where we were met by the sight Xingping is famous for – peak after peak of craggy karst formations soaring up into the sky straight from the river’s edge.

However, the long lines of traffic and endless tour groups rather took the edge of our enjoyment. We decided to try and escape the melee, crossing the river on a concrete walkway and diving through a large copse of bamboo before popping out onto an encouraging-looking track. Fifteen minutes later we were walking through sweetly scented orange groves, vegetable patches and small hamlets, all dotted through with the jagged karsts and, to our great pleasure, no other tourists in sight.

Setting off early the next day, we were met by a queue of traffic several kilometres long coming in the other direction. Everyone in China, it appears, comes to Xingping for Chinese New Year. The Chinese driving style we had got used to over the last couple of months was shown to good effect, with cars jumping the queue, pushing us off the road, and then, when they couldn’t go any further because of oncoming traffic, creating great clots of cars three vehicles deep that stopped anything getting through. All this was accompanied by much incredulous honking. The busy roads continued all day, and we breathed a sigh of relief that evening when we discovered a perfect little clearing in the middle of a bamboo grove in which we could set up our tent.

We celebrated with some single malt which Ed had kindly presented us with on our departure from Hong Kong, and listened to the New Year’s fireworks going off all around us.

We emerged from our little grove at sunrise, much to the astonishment of a young family who had come down to the stream to wash their spring onions. An uneventful morning culminated in us eating two extremely large plates of greasy chow mein – fried noodles with egg and vegetables – a spectacle which apparently has no parallel, as we were soon surrounded by a crowd of people busily taking photos of us on their smartphones.

After saying goodbye to our ‘fans’, we set off again but soon came to a stop as the greasy food worked its magic on Harriet’s insides. She spent a queasy forty minutes lying by the side of the road, while periodically letting out little groans. An enjoyably flat afternoon’s cycling then ensued, before we rolled our bikes into a small wood, where we were partially hidden from, but in still sight of the road.

After waiting for the sun to go down, we started to put up the tent, at which point, much to our surprise, we heard a tremendous thump, before looking over and seeing a poor man in the ditch in front of us with his motorbike on top of him. As we steeled ourselves to break cover to help, he pulled himself out, appearing remarkably unscathed. Twenty minutes later a car load of people arrived and joined him, while we prostrated ourselves as low as we could get, trying to stay hidden. After an anxious hour, another vehicle with a winch finally appeared and took the offending motorbike away, at which point we finished putting up the tent, and went to bed chatting about how unlucky it was that the accident happened right in front of our camping spot. You can imagine, then, our somewhat incredulous surprise when, half way through packing up the next morning, a moped broke down in the very same spot. No longer concerned about being discovered, we finished getting our things together under the astonished gaze of an elderly couple.

Over the next few days the landscape around us, and the people with whom we were coming into contact, kept giving us little clues that we were approaching South East Asia – the terrain flattened out into an endless lime-green sea of rice paddies worked by farmers in conical hats, the bakeries became more delicious, and the people simultaneously became less interested and a bit friendlier towards us, with one incredibly generous family insisting on paying for our lunch.

We began to feel that we were already in Vietnam. However, after an exhausting 105km day we were reminded that we were still very much in China when, after finally rolling into a city as the sun was going down, we couldn’t find a hotel that would accept us. Dispirited and rejected, we cycled further into the city centre and passed a very grand looking building, calling itself the “Vienna Hotel”.

We turned to each other with a shared look of “what the hell”, before a mud-splattered, and crazy-eyed Jonathan walked into this pristine establishment. Ten minutes later, he emerged triumphant, having managed to haggle them down to giving us a room for £20. The room turned out to be sumptuous, in a tacky sort of way, with lots of pseudo-antiques dotted around, and brightly coloured frescoes adorning the walls. Unsurprisingly, the receptionists’ faces cracked into looks of absolute horror when we wheeled our muddy bikes into their gleaming foyer, and we were quickly directed to the underground car park.

We woke up the next day initially puzzled by our renaissance-like surroundings, before setting off excitedly for the last town before the Vietnamese border. We were making good time when, late in the day, an army checkpoint blocked the road in front of us. After handing over our passports for inspection, we waited calmly, safe in the knowledge that our visas were all in order. We were therefore slightly perplexed when the stern-looking officer began to frantically flick through our passports, before whisking them away with him into a small office and only returning to make repeated phone calls on a big, red telephone. As we spoke no Mandarin, and none of the guards spoke English, we didn’t have a clue what the problem was. After a worrying forty-five minutes, however, the big red telephone rang, and someone higher up the command chain appeared to tell our dour officer that our visas were all in order, and our passports were duly handed back to us.

Cycling away from the checkpoint, we realised that we only had just enough time to make the last town in China before the sun set. So, of course, it became hilly. It’s at moments like this, when there’s no choice but to make the distance, that the adrenaline kicks in. Harriet powered up and down the hills like a crazed Duracell bunny attached to a metronome, with Jonathan riding behind in her slipstream. We rolled into Dongxian just as it was getting dark, and after some initial ‘fun’, managed to find a hotel that would take us for the night.

The next day should have been lovely and easy – just a gentle 2km potter to the border, before completing immigration formalities and riding straight into the Vietnamese town of Mong Cai, our terminus for the day. But China had one last test for us before it would let us leave. Instead of the laidback day we had expected, we ended up cycling in circles around Dongxian for several hours, clocking up over 20km as we desperately tried to find the appropriate border crossing. We had found a crossing point, but only official vehicles appeared to be allowed to go this way, and we had been shooed away by the unsmiling soldiers stationed there. Cycling up and down the river and around the city asking various people for directions, all we got were conflicting answers. In desperation, we eventually decided to chance the pedestrian crossing, pushing our bikes up the insanely steep ramp onto the bridge, preparing ourselves to be turned away by the soldiers. But nothing happened! They didn’t bat an eyelid about our bikes, and nor did any of the immigration officials seem to care as we lined up to have our passports checked. Soon we were through immigration and standing on the bridge, looking down at the river in no man’s land, no longer in China and not yet having entered Vietnam.

It felt very strange to have finally left China. We had spent the last 3 months living in, and cycling through this vast nation, more time than in any other country on our trip. However, to think of it as one country we now found misleading: we had come into contact with a myriad of independent cultures and traditions – from the Uyghur’s of Kashgar, whose way of life had been far closer to the peoples we had met in Central Asia than the Han Chinese, to the Miao, whose language, dress and traditions were more closely aligned with those of South East Asia than those of Beijing. But we had seen time and time again how the government’s ‘One China’ policy was trying, and succeeding, in suppressing the cultural and literal independence of these groups. Vast swathes of Uyghur townships had been levelled, and the inhabitants of Kashgar were subjected to demeaning body and bag searches just to enter underpasses or supermarkets; government-owned corporations charged entrance fees to visit the ‘minority ethnic groups’ in the south, but none of this wealth went to the villagers themselves. Even the term ‘minority ethnic group’ we discovered to be misleading: these groups were often the majority in the area in which they lived, only designated minorities in China as a whole because of the overpopulated Han Chinese cities in the East.

We therefore left China with mixed emotions. We had cycled through some amazing landscapes, and had had our cultural comfort zones pushed further than anywhere else on our trip. Even so, we couldn’t shake our general feeling of unease that this powerful totalitarian regime was being allowed to commit some fairly extensive cultural crimes, while the international community looked the other way so as to not to jeopardise their individual trade agreements. It was with these conflicting thoughts that we crossed over the bridge to Vietnam, only to have our reverie broken in what seemed like quite a fitting manner, by a Chinese tourist asking for a selfie.