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Here's an e-mail I sent from Kaili, part way through our trip.<br /><br />Kaili, Guizhou Province<br />September 15, 2000

Guizhou Province

John Locke
2006-03-29 10:29:43

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Here's an e-mail I sent from Kaili, part way through our trip.

Kaili, Guizhou Province
September 15, 2000

I should have known when the English speaker pointed to two Chinese words on our train tickets and said "this means you have no seats." I thought that meant we would be more or less sitting on our luggage in a boxcar. If only.

With one foot delicately placed between the guy on the floor with one leg and one arm and a sweating gentleman in a suit, one arm clinging to the luggage rack, and my body hanging between, I lifted my other leg next to someone's face so the 6th beverage cart in 15 minutes could squeeze past. Between carts, Jill and I leaned in the hall next to the unused garbage bin and water spigot with 6 others. We were at the front of the car, but the stairway part had another 10 people. There were seats in the train but they were all occupied beyond capacity, with people sitting on the floor and filling the aisle. We only had 9 hours to go... Jill nudged me and said we're going to ride our bikes the rest of the way, no matter what...

When we arrived in ChongQing, I was getting sick. It was pouring down rain, and hauling our heavy bags up the hill to find a hotel that didn't exist anymore from a map I had only glanced at, Jill found a travel agency that directed us to the Chung King hotel (the older Wade-Giles spelling for the city). After breakfast, I crawled into bed with a fever of 100.6, and stayed there for the next day.

As quickly as my fever started, it ended. We walked for a couple of hours to the train station to pick up our bikes, going through a labyrinth of hillside trails, stairs, and squalid apartments surrounded by rubbish to descend the hill to the station.

Finally, after 3 days and much bureaucratic hell in ChongQing, we pedaled out of town on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. ChongQing has a waterfront viaduct that looks ...