Robert Beal

I decided to take a break from the bike having cycled part of eastern China, given how poor an experience it had been. I was still staying at Jingwen’s apartment in Shenzhen. A few days after I had arrived she was heading off to her home village for her mother and grandmother’s birthdays and had kindly invited me to join her. I gratefully accepted as the opportunity to immerse one’s self in local surroundings and life is often a rare one. We booked a sleeper bus from Shenzhen to Guigang, a city near her home village (at a cost of 200 yuan each). The bus left at 1900 from Futian bus station in Shenzhen. It was a typical Chinese sleeper bus, in that I was too wide for the bed (my shoulders had to rest on the frame rather than go between it) and fractionally too long to sleep straight. So it meant sleeping on my side with my hip digging into the thin cushion with my legs sprawled out in the aisle.

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My first day of cycling from Fuzhou to Putian was the worst cycling of the trip so far. Fuzhou was a busy city (7 million people) and to the south (the direction I was cycling) it was surrounded by industry. It took me 35km to leave the city, houses, factories etc… and get out onto the open road. It didn’t last long though as 10km further on I reached the town of Jingyang. This became a common theme and the countryside I had expected to see was hidden behind a concrete jungle of factories, mines, offices, and houses. After 40km I pulled over and for the first time on the trip so far, wanted to quit and go home. It was tempting to return to Fuzhou and take a train back to Shanghai and fly home from there.

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Within my first couple of days in Shanghai I already had enough material to write a post. Coming from the idyllic Japan, Shanghai is virtually the opposite in every way. Gone are the polite greetings and thank you’s, the orderly queuing, clean streets, and high ratio of beautiful girls walking around. Instead it’s replaced with bad smells, litter, barging, crossing on green lights, driving on red lights, street touts (no I don’t want massage or lady sex!) and beautiful girls but at a far lower ratio. Carrying my bike-in-a-box into central Shanghai was an interesting experience, one I don’t intend on repeating (it blocked up the metro scanning machine as the box was too big and a staff member had to crawl in to get it out) as the metro is often as busy as a typical London rush hour on the tube! Despite all the above, it’s what makes Shanghai not necessary a beautiful place, but an interesting place. There are few sights to see, rather the experience is in the people, the streets, the prostitutes and the vast array of shopping.

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