Biking in China in the Rain

I am currently in the city of Dinghai on the island of Zhoushan, a few hours away from Shanghai. I am visiting Mary and revisiting the city where I first started my trip in Asia almost seven months ago, a fitting close to my travels. She teaches during the day and I have only myself and the city to turn to for entertainment.

It has been raining for two days straight here, and yesterday I decided to brave it and explore the city a little. The only raingear I have is a one-use plastic poncho in a stark traffic orange with a picture of a bug on the back. To guard against the elements I also wore black and white cow mittens and a clear plastic visor that I found in Mary's basement. It says "SPORTS" on the front, and the visor height is adjustable.

To my surprise and pleasure, mounted on a bike in poncho and visor, I did not attract the stares of onlookers- for the first time since I've been here. Relatively with-it looking Chinese families will put down their food and watch me, open-mouthed, when I walk into a restaurant. Usually they are waiting to see how I handle my chopsticks, but other times it seems to be for the sheer spectacle of a white guy in their midst. But on the street in day-glo orange and a covered head, I just fit in with the crowd.

Most people ride a bicycle or a motorbike in Dinghai, so when it rains everyone pulls out huge tarp-like ponchos that cover their bikes from handlebars to the rack over the back wheel, rising to a head hole and a hood in the middle. And everyone seems to have their own distinct hue of raingear, so that waiting at a stoplight can feel like stepping into a TV test pattern. Some of the higher end models of poncho have a clear plastic window at chest height, so that the cyclist can see through it to their hands on the handlebars, and so that children who are squirreled away in their parents' laps can see out. I saw one mother bringing home her daughter from school. The mother wore brilliant pink and while she worked away on the bike, her daughter sat on the rack over the back wheel, sideways, in a blue poncho with silver stars.

I rode out of the city, up through the hills to a reservoir surrounded by tumble-down farmhouses. A woman passed me on a motorbike with her poncho sailing out behind her, looking like a fluorescent witch mid-swoop. I was amazed at how quickly the city turned into countryside, with little pathways climbing up off the road to precarious shacks and tiny squares of tilled soil. The whole valley smelled like it was fertilized with human waste, which may not be an exaggeration according Mary's account of the city's public toilets.

The other side of the valley drops down the sea. The coast is choked by industrial behemoths, oil rigs and great cranes and dry docks and naval bases. The seawater is brown and the air is smoky. I was almost run off the road on my way back to Dinghai by a massive front-end loader with tires taller than I was, carrying what looked like two tons of iron filings in its bucket.

It's still raining now, and some of the romance of the rain has waned after I came home from my journey with wet feet and a headache. But I sit at the window and it feels like a revelation after four months in Thailand without a single drop of it. I can hear it on the tin of the porch roof when I'm sleeping and it's a comforting sound.

photos from Songkran

This City Is About To Explode

The Songkran festival is only one day away and the city is arming itself. Everywhere little stands have popped up selling plastic buckets and squirtguns in bright colors. I hear the strains of Thai country music coming from the grounds of the Buddhist temples in my neighborhood. Gangs of kids move together on the streets at dusk and sit on the curb in front of restaurants. My bike was stolen from right in front of my apartment. Families have driven in from the country in the backs of pickup trucks- some have formed makeshift bands and play folk songs as they cruise the streets, others have simply stockpiled four days worth of food and beer along with their bedding and pets. The families show me toothless smiles as I bike by.

Traffic has reached near-parking-lot levels of congestion around the moat, much to the delight of the children who line the streets. This festival is a five day water fight that pits pedestrians against the traffic. Some well-prepared teams have drums of water in the back of their trucks so they can circle the city's moat road for hours. Other groups man the banks in teams, some pulling water from the moat, others loading guns, and a chosen few firing at dry-looking victims as they go by. My favorites are the two person teams that mount motorbikes, driver in a raincoat and rear-gunner in his underwear struggling with some unwieldy oversized super soaker.

Many people choose to simply sit on the banks of the moat and get drunk and go swimming. The motto there seems to be, if you don't have a tattoo of a tiger or a snake don't bother to take your shirt off. Some little kids climb the ruined walls of the ancient city and perform swan dives for the cheering crowds of stopped traffic. I am concerned at the quality of this moat water, which presumably is the same that I looked on when I first arrived here, plus whatever garbage, shit, or pollution has seeped into it. But hundreds of kids don't seem fazed, and it may be that we just celebrate the end of Songkran with the beginning of a time of rampant ear infections.

On the corner of the red light district, the ceremony of washing and purifying the Buddha has aptly become a wet T-shirt contest. Drunk shirtless farangs grope their escorts and brandish giant shoulder-mounted water cannons.

People have told me the two rules of Songkran are: pace yourself because you have five days to do it all, and carry your phone in a plastic bag. If I can hold myself to one out of two I'll be doing all right.