The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [93]
That afternoon my friends back in Beijing, the four Chinese bikers who formed my send-off party, led me through Beijing in a complicated route into these mountains. They turned back at the Beijing-Heibi province border with regret in their eyes and I rode on. They were tied, without specific government permission to travel, to the province where they lived. Before I visited China I’d had no idea that people living in one province were forbidden to travel in other provinces without special permissions and special license plates. Their plates were the blue provincial plates, mine was the special black plate that allowed me to cross borders. We said goodbye and I traveled on, alone.
I had spent the previous week in Beijing trying to get my papers in order. Permissions. Signatures. Chops. Both the American embassy and the Chinese government proved useless in helping with permits. I was required to obtain a Chinese driver’s license to ride outside Beijing province, but that required residency, a driving test, lots of paperwork. First of all, I had no residency. It seemed that, though the Chinese government was newly eager to welcome independent travelers, they didn’t know how to accommodate them.
My expat friends, people I’d met through the embassy, explained that since the tourist policy was in a transition period, the lawmakers wouldn’t know what the rules were. It would probably be safe to go, even without papers, they said. “They won’t put you in jail for more than a day if you get caught,” one explained. “And you probably won’t get caught…at least not for a while.”
It had been a hot, humid Saturday, a particularly auspicious day for weddings, it turned out. Brides in layers of white silk and chiffon perspired in the back seats of economy cars trailing red and white streamers, their drivers honking incessantly in celebration.
My new friends rode Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycles that belonged to two Chinese members of the international CJ motorcycle club in Beijing. We crawled along Beijing’s third ring road until, right in front of us, a truck plowed into a taxi and slid out of the intersection. For a moment, all was still. Then, suddenly, traffic on all four sides lunged toward the center. Within seconds every car was touching the bumper or door of another car, resulting in a tightly woven fabric of glittering metal.
We escaped by riding into a shallow ditch and onto a railroad track that our sidecar bikes easily managed, for they were designed for use by messengers through the rough terrain where World War II was fought. They are essentially carbon copies of the 1938 BMW motorcycles, built hastily with inferior materials, yet still robust.
I was sweating in the deep heat of polluted urban Beijing, though I’d stripped to my tank top. Our leader, Jiangshan, had to be steaming in his Harley Davidson jacket, but he kept it zipped up. His girlfriend, Yang Xiao, sat slightly away from the leather back of the sidecar chair, one hand gripping the edge of the car and the other held up to her aviator glasses. Every so often she’d turn around to smile and give me a thumbs up. Her glossy black hair tangled in the fringe of the brown suede sleeves of her American-Indian-styled motorcycle jacket. People driving, riding bicycles, waiting to cross the road, stared. Beautiful, wide-eyed Yang Xiao. She always had a slightly haunted look, except when she was riding, and then her black eyes sparkled, and her movements were almost careless. Jiangshan, an unusually tall, dignified man of around fifty, also brightened when he rode. His movements became larger, his voice louder. On the motorcycle, they seemed almost American.
Lee and Liu followed on another Chang Jiang through the