Motorbike trip to Qinhuangdao 秦皇岛with Fin (The crazy motorbike trip)

Date of trip: 16th May 2014

Fin’s bike: Qianjiang QJ150-c
(150cc, 5 gears, top speed just over 100km/h, very revvy at top speed)
My bike: Suzuki EN125
(125cc, 6 gears, top speed 96 km/h, could go slightly faster if going downhill… city cruising around 80 was more or less effortless)

This… is going to be a long article,  but an insane article…trust me.

I will make a cliff notes version a bit later + an audio version of both, because I know not everyone likes reading.

There’s a reason I’ve been putting it off for so long, is that this is a grand story, that I want to be told correctly.

Ok so,

The plan… and I say this in loose terms,…. the plan pitched to me by my friend Fin, was to take a drive to the beach at Qinhuangdao & see where the great wall meets the sea.
“It’ll be an adventure”  he said.

And it certainly was.

For those of you that don’t know my friend Fin, he’s an Irish friend of mine that came to China as a Mathematics teacher….& seriously got into appreciating all the dodginess that is living in China.

Not in a bad way, but it did include learning how to drive a motorbike, having quite a few drinks out and about.  Here’s what Fin has been up to lately
The next chapter of Fin’s life

So, this adventure, he calculated would take about 3 hours drive… not because he looked it up on google maps like website, but because he saw that the distance ‘as the crow flies’ was 300 km, and assuming we’re driving at 100km/h , then it’ll only take 3 hours.

That was literally his reasoning.

Of course you can’t drive… as the crow flies, and you can’t really average 100km/h especially not on Chinese roads.  And as we were doing this crazy trip on motorbikes… and both weren’t completely legal at the time… (You have to have Chinese driver’s license + legally registered bikes).. then we couldn’t take the expressways.

 [Google maps shows it much more clearly than Baidu maps, but their ‘3 hr 46 min, whatever time estimates are based on being able to take the expressways… which were unavailable to us]

To be fair, we both had our home countries car license, and had experience driving on roads for a long time. (with a car…in Australia & Ireland respectively…which only marginally helps when driving in china)

It turns out that you CAN drive on expressways actually, at least in Beijing, but not when you cross into the surrounding Hebei province. Or rather, supposedly you can… but are severely limited, and police don’t know the actual traffic rules, so if they stop you, there’s a good chance they will fine you, take your bikes away or …even deport you if you’re particularly unlucky.

So…the scenic route it was.

I…had done a fair bit of driving in China by that point… and realised that Fin’s calculations were a little too optimistic, and figured it’d take at least 5 hours, an hour for getting a bit lost, and an hour for the fact that clearly we wouldn’t be having an average of 100km/h.

We planned out our route, the expressway was the G1 all the way, but the G102 closely follows that, and then we’d be able to stop in towns quite easily etc.

So that was it.  We originally planned to leave from Fins place at Qingnian lu around 10 in the morning… meaning that we’d have ample time to stop, get some lunch etc.

But before going I had to pick up Fin’s new ‘license, plates & registration’.  It’s in quotation marks there, because I literally just bought it off a Chinese mechanic friend of mine for 250 rmb. It included the license plates (front & back), the blue book –registration documents, + the license booklet that had a Chinese name & you just stuck in your own photo.

Fake obviously.  Because it said nationality: 中国 (China)  And with a white guy in the photo…it was quite obviously not true.

But I had to pick that up, go to Fin’s and get it laminated so it would at least hold up to the 1^st glance test.

Note. Whilst policemen in bigger cities have been cracking down on motorbikes recently, this was mid-2014, and police didn’t care that much…plus once you got outside the 5^th ring road…the level of care went down considerably.

Here’s a picture of my own driver’s license at the time   I…have no idea what I was wearing when that picture was taken. 

We actually left Fin’s place around 2 in the afternoon.

Sun goes down around 7 I think because it was summer in Beijing. (or pretty much)

So…we could technically make it.

We didn’t.   Let’s take a look at why.

The trip out of Beijing is great, like out of Beijing province.  It was sunny, the roads were good, the driving was a little crazy at the start, but got less crazy as there were less cars the further out you went.  It was honestly very pleasant.

Then as the scenery starts getting a little dull. 

Just coal power plants in the shape of nuclear reactors, that’s when we realised that big trucks are not allowed on the expressways…so guess where they all were?

Yep that’s right, on the G102 with us.

Now this was  fine, we weren’t stupid about it… don’t cut in front of a truck..because you know their brakes are shit, etc. But it was more the dust that these trucks kicked up.

Like I’m talking a serious amount of dust.

I had my helmet with my little visor.  (which while was a bit scratched, I could still see where I was going through the dust.  I was also wearing a scarf that I had got used to putting over my mouth for these exact situations…and pollution of course.

Fin?

Fin had an open face helmet and to protect his eyes… sunglasses.

So, during the day time that was fine.

But during the night time.. well you don’t want sunglasses on, obviously.

We quickly realised that past the Beijing province border…the road quickly turns to shit.  And I mean, in some cases… the road just disappears.

There was a time that Fin was driving in front of me, we were both doing 80, and then suddenly a small speed bump thing of dirt is on the road.  He hits it, didn’t have time to slow down and his bike gets air.

I’m watching him and think, ‘wow that was close’….. ‘oh shit, I’ve got to go over that’  Also going 80, and also hit that thing and got air.   Crazy.

And that’s just in the middle of the road sometimes.

So we had to look out for these kind of shitty things, plus all the dust from the trucks.  Fin chose to go without his sunglasses for a while after it started getting dark, until he basically had black sludge streaming from his eyes.  Not a pretty look.

Both of us didn’t have riding gloves…so our hands ended up getting coated in dust, and hit with small pebbles all the time.

There were times where the bitumen just disappeared, and it suddenly felt like you were riding on a cloud, even the road had turned white.

It turned out that they were doing repairs on the road, but as the road still needs to be used, they’d dig up the original bitumen in sections, and then whilst waiting to prep it, they’d lay carpet down on the roads so that you weren’t driving on the rough rocks that is at the bottom layer, and everything would stay in place.

I’m not joking, carpet on the roads

Occasionally we’d drive through an area that had rained, and it was soggy and disgusting, and occasionally the carpet had bunched up so much that it would again creates obstacles / speed bumps on the road.

Of course we couldn’t see much of this because of the growing darkness, the dust, and the fact that the white sand would blend into the white road… and as you were bumping around so much.. you couldn’t get the depth perception right to know which was a bump…or which was just ‘decent’ carpet.

Before you think, we weren’t prepared.. don’t be silly.  We prepared a little.  Although I think something that really makes an adventure is not planning everything down to the last detail….just going with the flow, you know?

So I had asked a friend what he thought we should bring.  I got a snatch strap, rope kind of thing, some gaffer tape (those giant sticky tape things… that can fix anything), plus I had booked the hotel in advance so we didn’t need to worry about that when we were there.

I also had around 1000 on my card and around 1000 cash.  For a 3 day trip where the accommodation was already paid for… this was going to be easy I thought.

Plus, we both had 3 bottles of water, and some snacks.

The journey was just stick on the G102 and you’ll get there eventually.  But as it turned out, because of the road construction, there were often little detours so we went the wrong way a few times.

I remember stopping in 1 ‘town’ [  …when I say town, it was really just some houses that were on either side of the road going through]   we stopped there to ask for directions, because even though we thought we were going the right way… apparently the small right turn that was marked out on baidu maps, was actually a farm road. (seen as a major road on baidu maps)
We got told at that person’s house…for which there was a very strong smell of baijiu, and at least 3 guys were red faced drunk said that we should just stay with them for the rest of the night because our destination was too far.

Nice guys, but we were determined to make it…so we didn’t take their advice.

We ended up driving across a field to get back on the right track…which was a lot of fun.

Then it went proper dark…and that’s a problem because dust and trucks.. & because we’re out in the middle of nowhere, there’s pretty much no ambient light, apart from us.. & the trucks.

And about 30 mins after that… we came to this.

The vehicles that got to this point were either stopping here, or… it seemed were fine to drive across another small farm track…to hopefully get to the expressway.

But we felt that if we tried that…we’d just get lost even more and never make our way there.

After asking the local aunties that were dancing in an open square at a truck rest-stop area, they told us that the road was closed because of construction to the road much further up.

They said they don’t really know another way around, but other cars were taking the farmers’ road.

Eventually I striked up a conversation with the guard that was just sitting at the mouth of the closed road, as he saw our motorbike plates which said 京B (meaning that we were from Beijing)  and asking where we were going.

The conversation basically went like this:

Me: The road is closed, why is this?
Him: yeah, road closed, construction.
Me: Can motorbikes get through?
Him: Maybe, but its closed… and no one is allowed in… you can just take that road. (pointing to the farmers road)
Me: I’m really sorry but we only know to take this road, and we don’t want to take that one for fear of getting really lost.
Him: Where are you going?
Me: Qinhuangdao…
Him: And you’ve come from Beijing??  Wow.
-Your Chinese is really good, where are you from?  Is it America?

Me: Ah, I’m from Australia, and my friend here is from Ireland, but he doesn’t speak much Chinese.

Him: Oh I thought you were from America.. oh I like Australia…kangaroo, kangaroo, kangaroo  ahahha
-Ireland they drink a lot * gives thumbs up.
-Ok yeah sure, I’ll let you in, just be careful
-Ride safe!

So that was it.  Because of this nice security guard, and I think, the fact that we weren’t American… we were allowed to use the closed road.

Nice guy.

Anyway, we rode for another 20 mins… and because this road was really under repair…and there was zero ambient light… we were only going about 50.

I remember we drove through a town.. maybe there were people inside, maybe there weren’t … it was all grey… and it had a really creepy vibe to it.  It really felt like a murder town.  And I have to say, I was really happy when we’d successfully cleared that place.

Then we came to a road block within the road-blocked road. 

[On the right hand side of the picture is Fin holding his bike up, whilst trying to push/ walk around the big grader]

Now this was a huge problem because it was literally a road grader blocking the part of the road that you could have traversed, and a big hole on the right hand side.

In our heads was.. ‘maybe we should just turn around and take that farmers road’  but we decided to give this one a try 1^st.

There was a very small gap, but not big enough to ride slowly through.
So what we ending up doing was walking the bikes through.
Fin and I balanced the bike by standing in the hole and carefully pushing it past the grader.  Once Fin’s was on the other side, we did the same with mine.

The only option was carrying the bikes through the hole…. But that could have gone disastrously because the hole obviously didn’t have steps or anything… and we could have definitely lost a bike down there.

After less than 10 mins more driving we came to another small town, and stopped at the 1^st convenience store…which I think was around 10pm maybe 11 by then. (don’t quote me on the times..because I don’t really know).. but it was late.  We stopped mainly to ask for directions, but decided to get some muffins and some juice to lift our spirits a bit.

Started talking to an old man there…who started laughing when we told him we’d come from Beijing and had been driving in the dark and the dust for a long time. .. He just said, “nah, you’re not going to make it, just stay at a hotel here… and set off early tomorrow morning”

But it was about principle now… and our stupid will that was pushing us on.  We’re not giving up!  We’ve got the great energy of muffins… how can we stop now?  Plus we’ve only got 75 kms to go or something…

He chuckled…looked concerned…told his wife…who also looked concerned, and as we got back on our bikes…he started chuckling again.

And off we went.. back into the darkness, with the trucks and the dust.

And got to say, some sections… the road just dropped away.  That was pretty scary.

The road is built up a bit, so if you come off the road its not like you’re just suddenly on the grass… you are instead falling..into broken rocks and are then onto the grass and sand.

For a truck, pot holes in the road are ok, they just bounce and bump over all of them… plus because they’re always overladen…they’re always making such potholes bigger.

For a motorbike though, different story.
There was one time where we were driving behind a truck and we were thinking about overtaking, and then the road just dropped away on the right hand side… like the road had disintegrated and fallen towards the right… Wtf?

All this time by the way, the general rule of thumb was if someone wants to stop, they 1^st indicate right for 3 blinks, then left for 3, then right again… . and we pull over.

(pretty well thought out right?   ..considering we didn’t have any of this fancy Bluetooth headsets or anything)

But when it started getting dark we were just driving with 1 indicator on the whole time, to make sure we were still visible, with me in front to block Fin from some of the truck’s dust.

This is the actual road… you had to drive really carefully here.

We took a few pictures along the way.. just to show the pure emptiness of it all.. and we stopped in a few towns to take pee stops … and eat muffins.

And eventually we saw the signs to the place we were going.  I had my Xiao mi 2 with the extended battery pack… so the GPS lasted the entire way which was good.

We eventually checked into the hotel around midnight, and we were exhausted.

 

That whole journey took us a little over 8 hours.  4 hours driving in the light, 4 in the dark.

All awesome of course.   Hahaha no, but seriously… we’d already felt as if we’d had a huge adventure.