Update:

Some good news and bad news.

The good news :we are only a day away from Hangzhou, where we plan to visit an orphanage and volunteer for the day. Also, my left knee is holding up just fine.

The bad news: While leaving Nanjing, the roads were very hilly and after not biking for two weeks, my conditioning was pretty off. It has also been more than 100 degrees here every day with some pretty heavy humidity. Needless to say, I wasn’t used to it. On the first day back on the bike, we rode a short 50 km, which felt great, even though I was slightly tired. On the second day, we biked 80 km, which was great until the last 5 km, when I felt a little soreness around the right knee. However, this was unlike the other soreness that plagued my left knee. Today, we biked another 85 km. About 20 km into the ride, the right knee gave out and I rode another 60 km with some pretty rough pain. But, we made it.

The bad bad news: I’m back on the battle cruiser again.

 

Biking: Days Eighteen and Nineteen

Day 18:
Start: Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province
End: Jurong City, Jiangsu Province
Daily Traveled Distance: 50 KM
Total Traveled Distance: 1263 KM

Day 19:
Start: Jurong City, Jiangsu Province
End: Liyang Cty, Jiangsu Province
Daily Traveled Distance: 80 KM
Total Traveled Distance: 1343 KM

We hope you enjoy reading about and watching the adventures that we are having as we traverse China on our bicycles. It has already been an experience of a lifetime, and we are not even halfway complete. It’s a bit daunting to think of all the things that are still to come, but we are very excited to share it with all of you, our readers. This specific blog entry is one of the more important ones. It has been long overdue, and I hope that you will take a few minutes of time to read through it carefully.

Red Thread Charities

The Lanxi Social Welfare Institute, which we will be visiting and volunteering at in about a week and a half, is one of the rural orphanages that receives very little government funding. Prior to the intervention of Red Thread Charities, the remaining fifteen children, all of whom had special needs, never received any kind of medical attention and severely lacked personal contact and stimulation. Day after day the children would sit around idly while showing very little emotion or interest in their surroundings.

I was fortunate enough to follow the 2007 volunteer group on a trip to China as a translator and baby coddler. The goal of Red Thread Charities, from what I could gather during my two week long stint, can be broken down into three basic progressive steps:

1) Bring in the necessary medical professionals to diagnose the children and set up regularly updated development files. This ensures that dire medical conditions are attended to immediately and that any abnormalities in growth and development can be spotted readily.

2) Bring in the occupational and physical therapists to teach basic rehabilatative techniques to the orphanage’s caretaker staff. This ensures that the children in need of therapy can receive it only a daily basis instead of once per year.

3) Bring in special education teachers to train local Chinese instructors on effective methods of instruction and interaction with special needs children. This ensures that the children in these orphanages will be able to receive not only physical stimulation but also mental stimulation.

Now, after just two years of help, not only are the children in Lanxi much happier and more engaged in their day to day lives, they are readily being adopted! One of the great added effects regarding the work that Red Thread Charities is doing is that potential adoptive families are more willing to adopt the children at these orphanages due to the vast amount of extra developmental and medical information available to them.

An old adage says that if you give a man fish, he can eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he can eat for life. With the three-year commitment RTC promised to the Lanxi Social Welfare Institute nearing the end, it is clear that the orphanage personnel are now well-equipped with the knowledge necessary to provide rehabilitation and attention to the special needs children in not only the orphanage, but also the surrounding communities.

This fall, RTC will be starting a new partnership with the Yiwu Social Welfare Institute, which is a two hour drive from Lanxi and has around seventy children.

And so with all of this said, we come back to the goal of our trip, which is two-fold. First, we want to raise money for Red Thread Charities so that it can continue its mission to “provide training to orphanage staff and facilitate medical and developmental care for children so that they can reach their full potential.” Second, we want to raise awareness to the fact that there is an incredible need for trained medical and educational personnel in the rural orphanages of China.

Because RTC is such a tightly run organization, every penny is budgeted appropriately and your donations go a very long way. And in case you were interested in being a bit more hands-on, RTC organizes a volunteer trip every October where nurses, physicians, special education teachers, physical and occupational therapists, translators, and general volunteers go to the participatory orphanages to check up on the children and continue training the local staff members. All volunteers pay their own way, although some donors have offered to pay part of the way for certain necessary therapists and specialists.

For more information regarding Red Thread Charities please visit the webpage at…

www.redthreadcharities.org

And before I end this post, I just want to leave this note to everyone:

THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR DONORS AND SUPPORTERS!

 

Biking: Days Sixteen and Seveteen

Day 16:
Start: Chuzhou City, Anhui Province
End: Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province
Daily Traveled Distance: 64 KM
Total Traveled Distance: 1213 KM

Day 17:
Nanjing City Rest and Relaxation Day

Worlds Apart (Part B)

China is very much so a “2nd world country.” In the glitzy and glamorous cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing, one would not feel out of place sporting the latest fashion trends while playing with the most up-to-date technology. In the rural farming communities of China, however, one may be hard pressed to find running water and electricity. The wealth disparity is vast, and reliable access to properly educated medical personnel is near impossible for the majority of special needs orphans. And without access to proper medical care and physical therapy, many of these children lag far behind developmentally compared to their counterparts in the larger Chinese cities, and even more so compared to those in the West.

Orphanages in populous cities (such as the Tianjin Orphanage) tend to receive a lot of financial support from the government. The children in these large and well-funded orphanages often times have their own classroom teachers, physical and occupational therapists, doctors and nurses, special education specialists, and receive plenty of personal attention and stimulation from the ample caretaker staff. Life in these institutions, while by no means a substitute for a real family, may be as ideal as one can expect.

Orphanages in the smaller cities and the more rural areas of China usually do not receive very much support and funding from the central or provincial governments. Due to this, many of these institutions do not have the financial means necessary to provide the children with an environment to thrive in. More often than not, an orphanage with a majority percentage of children classified as special needs will not have nearly enough caretakers to attentively look after each child, let alone have the training necessary to provide rehabilitative therapy. Because of the gross lack of resources available to these orphanages, it is not uncommon to find special needs children unable to crawl at two or three years of age, and unable to walk at five or six years of age.

 

Biking: Days Fourteen and Fifteen

Day 14:
Start: Suining City, Jiangsu Province
End: Ming Guang City, Anhui Province
Daily Traveled Distance: 140 KM
Total Traveled Distance: 1078 KM

Day 15:
Start: Ming Guang City, Anhui Province
End: Chuzhou City, Anhui Province
Daily Traveled Distance: 71 KM
Total Traveled Distance: 1149 KM

Worlds Apart (Part A)

A plate of freshly prepared crayfish cooked “Thirteen Flavors” style is set in front of my dad and me. The aroma of the various spices used to create the dish wafts slowly towards my nose kicking my salivary glands into high gear. “To hell with Duck’s Blood Tofu and Stinky Tofu,” I think to myself, “this is the Nanjing specialty that wins my heart.”

Being that I had missed lunch earlier in the day, I immediately grab the nearest crayfish and start to pry away at the shell. After eating three or four and finding only a tiny edible morsel in the tail section, I begin to worry that I am wasting a large portion of meat. I look around briefly and quickly make eye contact with our waitress, whom I give a small beckoning wave to.

“How may I help you sir?”

“How does one eat crayfish properly to get all of the meat?” I ask, rather naively.

The waitress shakes her head apologetically and mutters: “I’m very sorry sir, but I have never eaten them before.”

 

Biking: Day 16 and 17: Nanjing

 

Biking Days 13, 14, 15: Xu Zhou, Ming Guang, Chu Zhou

 

Biking: Days Twelve and Thirteen

Day 12:

Start: Wenshan City, Shandong Province

End: Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province

Daily Traveled Distance: 80 KM

Total Traveled Distance: 853 KM

Total Discounts: 500 Yuan

Day 13:

Start: Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province

End: Suining City, Jiangsu Province

Daily Traveled Distance: 85 KM

Total Traveled Distance: 938 KM

Total Discounts: 524 Yuan

An Average Day (Part B)

12:00PM – 02:00PM (Post-Ride)

Once it appears that we have reached the downtown area of whatever destination city we happen to be aiming for, I begin to ask for directions to the nicest hotel available. We are able to afford the nicest place in most of the cities we hit because they are all pretty small towns and the prices are very affordable.

Two quick side notes here… 1) A future post will detail our daily spending 2) “Small Town” means around one hundred to two hundred thousand people in China.

Upon arriving at our hotel, we try to use our Golden Ticket to negotiate down the room price (this is the only time we use the GT in order to get discounts, and all discounts on our meter are from the GT). We then store our bikes either in our own rooms, the offices on the first floor of the hotel, a secure shed in the back of the hotel, or the dorm rooms of the hotel’s staff.

After we get settled into our hotel rooms we shower to cleanse the many layers of dirt and debris that has collected onto our bodies, wash our clothes in attempt to maintain a semblance of civilization in our currently nomadic lifestyle, and head off to lunch in order to satiate our growling stomachs and growing appetites.

02:00PM – 06:00PM (Sight-Seeing)

Almost every town we hit, no matter how big or how small, seems to have some kind of tourist attraction. Two vastly different experiences immediately pop into my mind: majestic Taishan Mountain and quaint fishing boat town. I won’t detail our experiences at these two spots in this post, but will definitely write about them in a future entry.

06:00PM – 07:30PM (Dinner)

We head out again in search of the cheapest eats in town. Whereever there are a lot of locals gathered, those tend to be the places we also flock to. Most of these eateries are not what one might deem as “sanitary” according to Western standards, but they have for the most part been delicious. There is a trade-off, however, as all three of us have had some variety of stomach problems along this trip, but all occurrences can be safely classified as “the jogs.” We have yet to encounter “the runs,” “the sprints,” or “the hundred meter dashes” and hopefully we won’t on this trip (or ever again in life).

To give you a small glimpse into the kinds of places we’ve chosen for our meals…

We have eaten sizzling clay pot potato noodles under thick plastic tarps with hundreds of working locals and dined on fresh seafood al fresco for less than the cost of two movie tickets in Minnesota or one movie ticket in Los Angeles (regular admission, not including matinees or student and senior citizen discounts).

We have eaten at an expensive Peking Duck restaurant where the chef comes out to delicately slice the golden fowl right before your eyes, and we have feasted at run down Uighar hole-in-the-wall joints where beer caps litter the floors and flies drop dead onto the table and the food (I counted four during the time it took for us to eat lunch).

07:30PM – 10:00PM (Blogging)

Steven and I wander the streets in search of an Internet Cafe in order to update the blog. In China, web cafes are controlled in order to prevent minors from spending too much time playing games as opposed to studying like good little children (this is the reality I subscribe to as I am not really sure what the real reason is). In order to enforce this rule, a Chinese ID card is required before access is granted to a computer. In most small towns the enforcement of this rule is either non-existent or very laid back. In larger cities, however, controls tend to be tighter and attaining access to a computer requires quite a bit of diplomacy and sweet talking (not really my specialty, but practice makes perfect).

In fact, my Chinese verbal communication skills have become so adept that I have been able to convince an Internet Cafe owner to swipe her own ID card to grant us access to the web, negotiate a room down to less than half of the original stated price, persuade a police officer to escort us to the nearest hotel in his cruiser, and cajole a gas station attendant to fill an empty water bottle with gasoline (TERRIBLE IDEA).

However, as soon as someone asks me to read or write something in Chinese I immediately turn into a quasi-illiterate boob.

 

Reflections

We just arrived in the city of Suining, where we were greeted by the locals with the news that their town apparently has nothing of cultural value. This is actually good news, because it gives us a chance to rest. The last few days have been a whirlwind of activity. Just a short recap of things I couldn’t put on the video:

Taishan — I will shortly be writing about our encounters with the Chinese people. Throughout our journey, we have been assisted by countless people on the streets who have gone through some great lengths to help us. I have tried to photograph every single one of these people, but needless to say, we would probably still be lost somewhere in Tianjin were it not for this friendly assistance. When we arrived in Taishan, there was a young man who saw the three of us lost and stumbling around for a hotel. This man called out to us, asked what we were looking for, and biked with us for several miles, where he directed us to a hotel. The hotel was only for Chinese citizens, so he not only bargained a hotel room down to 100 yuan for us, but he also used his Chinese ID to allow us to stay there. Needless to say, he didn’t know who we were or what we were doing, and yet he helped us anyway. Awesome.

After arrived at our hotel, we rode up to the top of Taishan mountain, which is one of the four sacred mountains in China. The view was spectacular, and there was something incredible about visiting a temple made in the 1100s that had been visited by emperors of China. Even though we had a hotel room down in the city, we decided to stay on the mountain, where we woke up at 4:10 a.m. to view the sunrise before heading out.

Qu Fu: This city is the birthplace of Confucius. Billy and I headed to the national park where we hired a tour guide to walk us through the Confucius Temple, Confucius Mansion and Confucius Forest. I asked a lot of crazy questions, but I also got a lot of answers. Did you know that Confucius was not famous when he was alive, and it wasn’t until after his death that the emperor of China saw his writings and decreed that it was worth studying in China? Also, there is a giant compound exclusively for the decendants of Confucius to live in and to be buried in. Anybody with the last name Kong is apparently a decendant of Confucius.

Wei Shan: Those little old ladies who rowed us across the lake were actually outlaws. You see, they were illegal tour guides, and so we had to walk to this way-out-of-the-way place to find the rowboats. I was actually convinced that we were going to walk right into the little old ladies’ grandkids who were going to beat us up. But, as it turns out, it was just three old ladies who wanted to row us across the lake. Very cool experience, although a little bit strange and emasculating to be rowed by a 60 year old woman.

Xu Zhou: This city was actually where the Han Dynasty started, and they have terracotta warriors, just like Xi’an. The reason why you might not have heard of these terracotta warriors though, is because unlike the ones in Xi’an, these little guys were literally little guys. As in 12 inches tall. They could only instill fear in the heart of Billy.

Small tech note: Regular viewers of the blog might have noticed as well that the quality of the videos vary drastically in both content and clarity. If any of you are thinking about doing a video blog in a country run by a government that can censor the internet, you’re in for a wild ride. You see, in every location we have been to, the computers and quality of the internet has varied greatly. Some of the best quality videos have been edited with Windows Movie Maker, back when we had laptops–for some reason, the video encoding works very well with that program. However, NONE of the internet cafes have this program, and I’m convinced that the reason why is because all of the software on these computers are pirated, and thus, they can’t update the software. As such, I’m using another video editing program, which works sort of well, but the output of the files is humungous. I once waited in a web cafe for two hours after I finished a video to upload it to the internet. The file was 115MB, and when I saw it on youtube, the quality had drastically decreased.

In short: I’m still figuring out the best way to edit and encode all of these videos. At every web cafe, I am learning and trying new programs and output settings…and as a result, none of the videos are consistent. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a good solution soon though. It is definitely starting to come together :)

We have 3 days before Nanjing!  I’ll be biking on days 7 and 8 of this 8 day stretch to test out the knee. Hope all goes well.

 

Biking: Day 10, 11, 12: Taishan, Qu Fu, Wei Shan

Note from Steven: Billy is totally lying about the toilet. I forgot to add that at the end, and I would hate for people to think that we really pooped in the workers’ wells.

 

Biking: Day Eleven or Billy’s Losing It :)

Day 11:

Start: Qufu City, Shandong Province

End: Wenshan City, Shandong Province

Daily Traveled Distance: 96 KM

Total Traveled Distance: 773 KM

Total Discounts: 420 Yuan

An Average Day (Part A)

05:45AM – 06:30AM (Pre-Ride)

We (Steven and I) begrudingly wake up after the cell phone alarm sounds for the second time, wash our faces and brush our teeth to shake off the morning stupor, pack up our panniers in a vastly inefficient manner, stuff our faces with a motley assortment of three day old breakfast pastries, stretch out our legs in order to avoid further injuries, check out of the hotel to get our deposit back, and set off for another day’s ride.

06:30AM – 08:00AM (Early Ride)

After getting a solid seven to eight hours of sleep and rest, my legs are fairly happy and compliant in the mornings. I say fairly because there is always a tinge of soreness from the day before. Even though we have the entire ride ahead of us, I am happy (perhaps foolishly so) to be able to pedal with force again. Due to this newly instilled feeling of optimism, I am able to get through the first 30 KM fairly easily while enjoying the scenery pass by me on both sides.

08:00AM – 10:30AM (Mid-Ride)

These two and a half hours (approximately, depending on the day) tend to be the most brutal. My legs are no longer fresh, which is not surprising considering the first 30 KM has been completed at a fairly rigorous pace against winds and up hills. My body is no longer clean due to the dust and grime that has been slowly collected (though I am rarely ever sweaty because the winds immediately dry up any moisture that happens to escape from my pores). And finally, my mentality is no longer optimistic.

Now… I can’t really say that I become pessimistic. It’s more like… I become… crazy. Three hours with nothing to do but pedal is a long period of time. I now sympathize with prisoners locked up in solitary confinement. During this time, I start to sing songs to myself about random things I see. I start to make up tunes in my head. I try to avoid looking at the odometer on my bike for as long as I can and attempt to guess how far I’ve gone (usually I tend to over guess by quite a bit… an occurrence that never fails to bring tears to my eyes).

The following is a song I made up during today’s bike ride about the traffic that we encounter on a daily basis:

Hello Mr. Truck,

I know you are there.

There is really no need,

to keep your horns on blare.

Hello Mr. Car,

You sure are going fast.

Why do you feel the need,

To pass me in a blast.

Hello Mr. Tractor,

Your engine is mighty loud.

Please do not come near me,

With your monstrous exhaust cloud.

Hello Mr. Motorbike,

Don’t turn to look at me.

Keep your eyes on the road,

And you shall remain accident free.

10:30AM – 12:00PM (Late Ride)

With our destination less than 25 KM away, I get a renewed surge of energy and hope. I can once again pedal with a ferocious amount of energy in anticipation of the shower that will be able to enjoy once I step food into my hotel room. I just realized that I typed “food” instead of “foot” in the last sentence. I am not going to change that mistake because clearly lunch is also an important piece of the recovery puzzle. Mmm… Lunch…