Today is 端午节 (Dragon Boat Festival) so I didn't go into the lab today. Theoretically its a "three day" holiday, which means that you get three consecutive days off. What this really means is that you work on Saturday and Sunday instead, and then get Monday through Wednesday off. I took the weekend off, but went into work the last two days. I guess its nice to group the days off, but a seven day week sounds quite tiring. I wonder what companies think of it...it must be disruptive to business.
Anyways, that isn't the important bit. I had no idea what to do today, as there isn't that much to do. I've heard something about dragon boat races, but I have no idea where they would be taking place, and I doubt I would have gotten to participate. Luckily, last night I was talking with my old roommates from the hostel last night (we went to a bar to watch the soccer) and I discovered that they were going on a bike ride, so I decided to join them. There wasn't much of a plan, but apparently the new guy (who replaced me as the fourth roommate) loved to bike, and had heard that there were "forests to the northwest of beijing."
Around 11 today, off we headed to the forests. I was a bit nervous because they had all just bought new or reasonable quality mountain bikes, and I had an old rusty one gear tank of a bike that I had bought used for 100 RMB (6.6-1 exchange rate, so about 15 dollars) at the beginning of the summer. Since then I had replaced the chain (which had snapped within a week) and the tire (which had popped due to a thorn...and the gaping hole in the outer tire) so I figured anything that would break had already broken. I brought my helmet (which I had taken with me from the US), a bottle of water, and my wallet and cell phone (which was almost out of batteries because I had forgotten to charge it), loaded it on the back of my bike and went to meet them.
After biking for about 11 km we were just outside the fifth ring road (a major highway surrounding the outskirts of the city). We saw some promising hills to the north, so we took a turn into the residential district with the hope of passing by the buildings. It turns out that it was a private residence, but the guard directed us to a path to the right which he said led up the mountain. We decided to give it a shot, so we locked up our bikes and climbed the falling apart stone steps. The path was quite steep, as apparently they build paths for efficiency not ease of climbing around beijing (this would be confirmed later). We climbed for maybe a kilometer when we got to a stone wall, with barbed wire on top. As this was between us and the top of the hill, the intrepid one (my replacement) suggested we climb the wall using the conveniently located trees. I was game, but the other two members of the party weren't, so after dithering around for a bit we decided to go further down the wall. Sure enough, about 50 meters down the hill there was a huge hole in the wall, as if someone had driven a bulldozer through it. Walking through felt almost magical, like an old gate into a imaginary land. Anyways, we continued up to the top where we were greeted with a wonderful view of both the city and the surrounding hills. This view only further whet our appetite for getting away from the city, so we quickly got back down to our bikes and continued on our journey (after a delicious lunch at a Xinjiang restaurant).
We decided to follow the signs for 香山 as I had previously heard of it and the road appeared to be heading away form the city. After maybe another 3 km we got to the base of the mountain, as evidenced by large parking lots and the impending hill. We started up the hill fine, but I quickly realized that I was going to have problems, as single gear bikes are really made for flat surfaces. Indeed, once the hill got going, we all gave up on our bikes and pushed them along. After a kilometer of this I noticed a path on the side of the road and convinced our by now rather weary travel mates to abandon their bikes and the paved road to take this hiking trail. It turned out to be even steeper than the last path, complete with small cliff faces. It was quite fun to climb up I felt, and we took a relaxed pace as Jaab (a Dutch computer programmer here for five months doing an internship) was very out of shape. Along the way we met up with two middle-age chinese guys who apparently climb the mountain about twice a week. They were quite nice and chatted with us for a bit before moving on.
We quickly realized that we had forgotten both snacks and extra water, but decided to push on towards the top. This turned out to be a good decision as the view from the top was beautiful, even if (and maybe because) everything was covered in haze. There was also a China Mobile tower and accompanying fire tower where a nice lady sold us ice cold water for only 4 kuai a bottle (normally water is 1 kuai a bottle, but at that point we would have happily payed 15 kuai). At this point it was clearly going to rain soon, so we decided to head back down (it was also around 4:30). We had a minor problem, however, in that we felt the path we took up was too steep to take back down, and we didn't know how to get back to our bikes. Luckily we ran into the one of the guys from before again and he agreed to take us down. He led us a down a path in the opposite direction, which admittedly had us quite worried, but he knew exactly what he was doing and we got back to our bikes quite easily (though our knees were killing us).
At this point we ran into some difficulty, as Jaab had managed to lose the keys to his bike lock. After trying out various sharp objects we decided we would have to drag it down the mountain. The other problem was that my bike didn't really have brakes. It had some in the front, but the back brakes were useless. On the whole this meant that once you started going downhill, you really needed to perform a ski-type turn up the hill to stop (I hadn't really noticed before because Beijing is so flat there are barely any hills at all). So the two Peters (one my american replacement, and the other the Dutch colleague and classmate of Jaab) rode on ahead while we walked our bikes (or dragged) back down the mountain. Eventually we got back to town and found a guy who happened to industrial strength lock cutters lying in the rafters (I think he worked in construction). That did the trick for the locked bike, but still left my bike without brakes and about a kilometer of hill left.
American Peter volunteered to switch bikes, as apparently he was unafraid of being unable to stop (he in fact quickly bemoaned its lack of alacrity), and so we headed off all on bikes once again. All was smooth sailing until we got back to the highway when it quickly became clear that we were going to be stormed upon by the recently violent Beijing weather. Then my bike chain snapped...again. Apparently it couldn't handle Peter's power, and snapped right in front of where we had eaten lunch. One of the workers lounging around quickly came over and started giving us useful advice such as, "you can't fix that without tools" and "you should fix it quickly before the rain comes." After we still tried unsuccessfully to snap it back together, this guy offered to give us a ride in his van for 150 RMB. After bargaining it down to 130, we were still hesitating (a normal cab would have been about 30, but obviously wouldn't have taken our bikes), when his case was helped by the pouring rain. We gave in and took his van back, trusting that he wasn't kidnapping us and taking us out of town.
After dinner, I walked the bike back 40 minutes to my apartment, and will now return in embarrassment to the same guy who fixed it last time...Next time I'm renting a mountain bike!
