Edelweiss Bike Travel tourenfuhrer Werner Wachter wants to go to China. More exactly, he wants to market motorcycle tours in China. Are Edelweissers ready for China? Is China ready for Edelweissers?
To get answers, Wachter turns to Franki Yang in capitalism in-extremis Hong Kong. Franki rides a BMW Rll00GS. Franki distributes motorcycle parts and accessories. Franki chairs the Hong Kong Cruisers Motorcycle Club, a sizeable fraternity of young, successful Chinese guys, many of whom own ninety horsepower motorcycles and who have no place to ride, well, really ride, on the most densely developed island on earth.
To solve this problem for his friends, most of whom are also his customers, Franki, a native son of Qingdao, turned to his contacts on the Chinese mainland last year. In China, more than any other place in the world, it's who you know. Bingo, Hong Kong bikes are crated and shipped two thousand miles to Dalian, a major port on the Yellow Sea in northeast China, and the boys enjoy a wild couple of weeks riding the Shandong Peninsula like birds freed from a cage. Franki is pulling strings to do it again as Wachter enters the picture. Can Wachter tag along with his daughter Anne, 20, and one much older Rider ex-publisher? Do fish swim in the Yellow Sea?
As I board our China Air flight with the whole group for the three hour flight from Hong Kong to Dalian, I take note that the airplane is a Boeing 737. It lands safely. Ah, I think, an auspicious beginning.
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I am riding a red BMW Rll00R way too fast in a deep rural artery of the Shandong Peninsula somewhere between Yantai and Weifang dodging paving stones and potholes and Chinese grain farmers and apple growers -- who are damn good given the green effulgence of their fields and their rows of bursting trees -- but who scare the bejeezus out of me by suddenly materializing in my crosshairs driving ancient one-lung diesel tractors hauling the most appalling loads. I'm trying to the keep the tight squadron of Hong Kong guys riding ahead of me in sight but they are wicking it up into a dangerous video game. I'm fading fast, grateful that Franki is considerately riding tail, because lost is one thing, lost in China is another. At a gas stop I ask Wachter, who indeed himself straggled for a while and required rescue, are these guys nuts or what? No, Mr. Rouse, he says in that good-natured Austrian daggertone of his, they ride better than you and know much you do not.
Point A on your China tour. Truth is a dog from hell.
Ok, here I am in the world's most populous country, one out of every four people on the planet is Chinese, and I'm having trouble pronouncing thank you in their language. Great, I'm the only American on the tour, and as my friend Hartmut Heiner put it to me so gently once in Berlin, I'm deaf and dumb. But not to worry. Lots of perfect english spoken here, especially Franki's. He was a commercial diver for an oil company in Southern California. He lived in Wilmington near the docks, where he tells me he observed social conditions more degraded, more violent than he has ever seen anywhere in China.
Point B on your China tour. When criticising Chinese human rights, get your head out of that place where the sun don't shine. Weifang. The City of The Kite. International Kite Festival held here annually. Amazing and often huge handmade creations displayed for sale, flying dragons everywhere. It's my third day in China and I'm so constipated I'm turning green. All the guys go out after dinner for massages; I go to bed with my constipation. Wonderful. You need jiangtianbinjucha, Franki says, a special herbal tea, I'll get you some. He does and it's a Chinese medical miracle from four thousand years of trial and error. It works.
The foyer of the hotel restaurant in Zibo where we have lunch hosted by members of a local riding club, friendly and generous people whose enthusiasts' hearts are much bigger than the small bore domestic machines they ride, is a terrarium. Several steel reinforced glass tanks each containing a cobra or two with something in Chinese on a small sign in front of each. That one, says Franki, is a one-stepper. He bites you and you take one step and die. Very expensive. Very tasty. Cool, but no snake today, just a reminder as we toast each other at the table (Gombei!) that riders are riders, and in China, just like everywhere else I've been, they're the best.
I'm between heaven and earth on the top of Taishan, the most revered Taoist peak in China. We have come up here to walk amidst ancient stone temples in the pewter light of a full moon, and get up early to watch the sun rise from a sea of clouds. In legend, in culture, in history, very Chinese, as are the two guys closest to me at dinner in the hotel that is our aerie here. Yin Yong Bo, a burly Manchurian Goldwing rider from Dalian, to my left, pours me a full water glass of Taishan Te Qui, a local 35% liquor called lighter fluid on the street. He expects me to down it. I take a few sips and start to feel stupid. Just then, to my right, Mr. Liu, the People's Republic of China police official who heads up the formidable security team accompanying us, in full uniform as usual, hands me a tie clip. Thinking it's a gift, I smile and clip it to my shirt. Seconds pass before I realize I've done the wrong thing. The American Secret Service presented the tie clip to Mr. Liu after he assisted guarding President Bill in Beijing recently. Mr. Liu treasures it. He merely wanted me to look at the emblem and hand it back to him, which I finally do, but not after feeling I've got ten pounds of sweet and sour pork hanging off my face.
Point C on your China tour. Stick to the beer.
Twenty five hundred years ago, Confucius dedicated his life to the belief the end of human suffering required government reform that would make its objective not the pleasure of the rulers but the happiness of their subjects. I am in Qufu in a courtyard of the great temple where the master lived and taught. I am with Wachter and his blond, blue-eyed daughter Anne, who I have come to see rides her bike, a BMW F650GS, far more judiciously than we do, and she is a lot prettier than we are, and the fact is I'd rather look at her than think of China's greatest man and unrealized dreams.
Lam Siu Kai rides a Honda GLl500SE. He's a principal in an engineering firm and in his spare time a prime mover for the Caring For Children Foundation, an orphanage and clinic in Hong Kong. He misses his dog, a much loved family pet that died. In our conversation over lunch that includes many Shandong specialties besides roasted silkworm larvae, subjects range from dog meat ("It's the best, only tiger is better") to Chinese government crackdowns on the Falun Gong ("Street demonstrators make their choices and take their chances; the kids I know don't have that luxury"). Lam knows Chinese medicine too. When a spasming back muscle threatens to destroy my joy on the bike, he applies a deep heat herbal balm with a few minutes of digital deftness, acupressure I think, that relieves my pain and sends electrical currents down to my fingertips. Lam warns me to ride with extreme caution in China and then runs his Goldwing into the left front fender of an oncoming Suzuki minivan while attempting a blind corner pass on the winding road that skirts coastal Qingdao. He's unhurt, thank God. But looking at the Wing lying there hemorrhaging coolant, I ask him, now what? Fix it, he says, like new, and sell it. I suspect frame damage. That can never be fixed.
Are you going to tell the buyer about the accident?, I ask. He looks at me with wide-eyed amazement. What, you think I'm stupid?
Wachter has his day on the down too, same day, same venue as Lam. He trades bikes with Art Zawodny, chief engineer for a Hong Kong camera manufacturer. Great trade. A BMW Rll50GS for an overloaded Yamaha SR500 burdened with everything Zawodny owns. This China thing he says is only a practice run for his dream tour to Vladivostok. Whatever. Wachter isn't on Zawodny's bike with its crushed suspension five minutes when he meets a moped that, surprise, dosen’t get out of his way. It’s the flaw in the Hong Kong riding style. Shit happens fast. Result: No human physical injury of which to speak, but one creamed moped, one slightly abraded Yamaha, one quietly pissed off Polish guy, and one very embarrassed Austrian.
Yang Zhong Sang, an ex dock worker from Dalian, rides a Honda CB400F. He manages shipping now, but despite the white collar promotion, retains a stevedore’s forearms. He is a very happy guy, horses around frequently, but quickly becomes the man when anyone needs a hand. As we have our usual group lunch fit for an emperor’s court, this one at a big round table in a first class hotel overlooking a spectacular Laoshan seascape, he wants to arm wrestle. We have an epic go at it, and in the process nearly send a twelve-course meal crashing to the floor. Yang and I and everyone laugh uproariously. Whoever advised, never stop acting like a kid, was probably Chinese and very wise.
Penglai, coastal castle town of legend, of gods crossing the sea; of violent naval history, a huge statue of a Sung Dynasty admiral in full armor gazing imperiously over the harbor to emphasize it; of fantastic mirages so detailed they seem more real than illusory; and of wharfside cafes with sloshing tubs of live ocean fare from which to choose (we take a pass on the sea slugs). After lunch, Wachter gets a rare ok from Franki to take off on our own, to ride old slow roads that link timeless Shandong farm villages of cottages and overgrown garden walls hewn of grey slate, of gravel paths well picked by chickens, of shaded squares where men sit on weathered wooden benches smoking cigarettes and sipping tea. Wachter, Anne and I, by gracious spontaneous invitation, find ourselves on a page right out of Pearl Buck, seated with a local family in their home, a home small but rich with life communing with The Good Earth, the land, enjoying tea, rice cakes and apples with them, talking with them (a granddaughter speaks English), exchanging gifts, and realizing again as I say goodbye without a dry eye that connection, human connection, is everything.
In the elevator in the Asia Hotel in Yantai, an upbeat voice says, Hey, are you Denis Rouse? He's longtime Rider reader Gene Arth, Goldwing rider, consultant to the Timken Company in Canton, Ohio. He's in town regularly since Timken has a factory here in joint venture with the Chinese government, one tiny spearhead of the market economy that's coming to China as ineluctably as the Taishan sunrise.
Gao Xu Xian owns a Mercedes Benz service and parts store in Dalian. He rides a black Honda Valkyrie very aggressively and very well. Gao says his mother makes the best dumplings in China, and to prove it, he brings two huge platters of them to our dinner party in a famous Manchurian restaurant where also an entire sheep and lamb and all relevant organs are brought to our tables, and we eat with relish. I don't care if the kidney has a little bit of that taste if you know what I mean, because Gao is driving me back to the hotel, a Holiday Inn by the way, and the Northern Bright Pearl Red Beer is so good I'm ready for Baa Baa's eyeballs.
Behind the bandstand in the lounge of said Holiday Inn where a duo of Filipino girls in miniskirts are doing Tina Turner proud, there is a large wall mural upon which likenesses of Bill and Monica are separated by an imposing image of the Statue of Liberty. Floating in the scene, Daliesque is a charred U.S. dollar bill, and bordering all this, in a final touch of surreal, are several Las Vegas gambling scenes. Note from D. Rouse to Beijing: Have a word with the hotel manager. The guys from America coming here soon to negotiate their deals aren't going to like this.
Taoist master Chuang Tzu (399 - 295 B.C.) said this: Because all beings and everything are fundamentally one, opposing opinions can arise only when people lose sight of the whole and regard their partial truths as absolute. They are then like a frog at the bottom of a well who takes the bit of brightness he sees as the whole sky. When you argue there are some things you are failing to see. In the greatest Tao (Way), nothing is named. In the greatest disputation, nothing is said. The greatest Tao is supreme acceptance.
Point D on your China tour. Confucius said mankind, womankind too, girls, is one big family. On a shrinking planet, we better start acting like it.
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