Push China and it pushes back.

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Yesterday was tough, long, beautiful, frustrating, grueling, rewarding.....

We took advantage of the two free mountain bikes available at our hostel to take a bike ride to some of the small villages North of Guilin. The bikes were in pretty rough shape but still better than a lot you see people riding around China. Many bikes you see people on here are the same bikes you'd see on top of a scrap metal heap in the back of a pick-up truck in Chicago.

We had a great ride getting out of the city, riding with the morning rush hour traffic. Because the traffic flow is so crazy in town you really just have to look ahead and concentrate on not hitting the people in front of you. We got lost probably five times before we even left town. Then my derailleur caught a spoke and bent into the wheel. I locked up and had to stop. I carried the bike across eight lanes of traffic across the street to where a guy was doing some metal work of sort. I pointed to the problem and he found a pair of pliers. After ten minutes of him and I bending and wrenching we got the bike back to a ridable condition.

We finally found our way out of town and ended up not in a village but in the middle of farm land. We rode some footpaths that were only about a foot wide until we found a concrete septic canal and then rode along the side of that. We were the Chinese equivalent of being on bikes in the middle of farm fields in Hillsdale County. We encountered a lady working the fields who was very entertained at making our acquaintance. We were able to say the name of the next village we were looking for and she happily pointed us in the right direction.

We found our way through a couple small villages. It was very weird that there were no signs. The roads through the villages were mostly only big enough for a bike, motorcycle or small cart to wind their way through. Except for the chickens, dogs and occasional worker in a field there were almost no signs of life.

We kept heading Northwest in the hopes of hitting Jiangtouzhou and ended up walking our bikes up the side of a mountain which afforded some pretty great views. It was so nice to be outside of the city and the constant honking. Even the countryside isn't immune from the noise of China though. At least once an hour we saw military jets flying overhead and we could hear dynamite blasting away mountains. We rode past some of these mountains and it was sad to see a beautiful mountain with caves and formations on the top with half of the side completely blown away.

We rode down the mountain, our first true mountain biking experience and found an old abandoned school house. We snuck inside and got some great shots of the compound and had fun being somewhat mischevious. After that we rode through some more villages and had some fun interactions with very old villagers who pointed us back to a main road to get back to Guilin.

It was disheartening to have to ride the fifteen miles or so back to town on the main road. It's so dusty and noisy. I now understand why people wear masks here. It's not because of the smog but because of the particulates... all the dust and concrete you inhale while on the street. After dragging our sorry boney butts into town we had a nice dinner at the first place that had English on the menu. A welcome relief.

Today we're going to relax, see some more of the sights around Guilin and plan the next few days.

I'm giving up on trying to upload photos to here for now. If you have or download the Instagram app, that's where our photos are for now. We've had the most luck with that. Our usernames are norahess and midwestimon. Nora has also still been uploading some to http://www.flickr.com/photos/norahess.

From crazytown, cheers!

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