Max buys a bike (this happened last month)
Trip Start
Unknown
1
2
Trip End
Ongoing
Kaifeng, China
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
used (read:stolen) bike market. Its fading,
chipped paint, wobbly impalation-waiting-to happen seat and loose definition of
"brakes" make me feel a real Kaifenger. City-bored decided to bike to the Yellow River, 10 K north of town. Pleasant ride, besides the chafing seat and
the feeling that my lungs had been covered in some carcinogenic
liquid.
The images: leaving the city, brown-gray-gold fields worked by wirey
Chinese farmers without machinery.
Harvest time. Along the blacktop road, piles of yellow corn. The dark hands of the sun-wrinkled
farmers husking slowly, methodically. A
man and his herd of goats walking under the concrete highway overpass. A village off a dirt turn-off. No people to be seen, unless you peek inside
the courtyard door: they are there, squatting and husking. And one mysteriously naked man walking outside. Small towns with
loose dogs, chickens and corn husks that shuffle about in the wind. Motor-trikes piled high with materials and people. The place where Kaifeng goes to die: several blocks on the edge of the city with yards of old doors, windows and scrap wood. The Yellow River itself, wide and mud-colored. The dry loess plain on the opposite bank.
Two thumbs up for Chinese biking.
