2002-05-14

Jinan

Rick suffered the honor of having our first flat. It only took him a few minutes to replace the tube with his spare and inflate it with Mike Paull's handy, home-modified electric air pump.

This accident must have happened last night in the rain. Incredible as it seems, there were no signs or barricades on the road to indicate it was under construction. The berm would have been invisible in the dark making an accident inevitable. The glass in front of his seat is shattered and there is a bloody rag on the ground next to the rear tire on the driver's side. I hope he survived the accident. And I hope the highway department will begin marking their construction zones.

The road construction is on our route so we had to take a detour through what was, in the best of conditions, a beat-up dirt road. But today it was a beat-up, muddy, slippery, slimy road of pot-holes filled with polluted black water. The black comes from coal dust and unfiltered exhaust of power plants nearby. You can't avoid the pot-holes as there isn't a single square foot of flat road to be seen. You can't tell how deep they are so you watch the drivers ahead of you and imitate them, or avoid them, as best you can. I thought for sure someone would go down and get a cold mud bath but it never happened. We've got a lot of skilled drivers in our group.

My street tires don't handle mud very well but the KLR is light, the lightest bike in the group, and though it tries to slip around I can keep it upright by shifting my weight.

Miles later, we finally made it to a good road and stopped for directions. I looked back and thought, "I never want to ride through that again." Um, seems we took the wrong road and have to go all the way back!

We stopped for gas and my bike wouldn't restart. A dead battery. Helge is jump-starting it from a car.

We sent our chase car out to buy heavy-duty electrical cable to install as a semi-permanent starter cable. One end is connected to the battery and routed out through a hole in the side panel. The other end wraps around my luggage rack, exposed wire dangling free behind the bike. Jump-starts will be quick but we must pray the wires don't contact anything by accident.

Good thing it's raining today. No battery means no radiator fan. Helge's work-arounds are impressive but we must get to the root of the problem and fix it or it will continue to torture us.

Did I mention that I hate my bike?

We get to the hotel in Jinan tired and covered in mud. David Wilde slipped in the parking lot and goes down. The parking lot has marble tiles in the cement to give it an upscale look but make it dangerous for a motorcycle. David is ok and there is no damage to his KLR.

We got to our room where Rick and I solved the cleaning problem by the simple method of getting into the shower fully clothed.

We went downstairs to meet the group for dinner but couldn't find anyone. Rick and I decided to take a walk around and in a few minutes found a restaurant down a small street. We had no translation book and no way to say what we wanted but that, far from being an obstacle, promised to make dinner a little more interesting. A waitress brought us a menu, in Chinese of course, which I inspected closely, rotated ninety degrees, inspected closely again, rotated, and continued this process until it came full-circle. Our giggling waitress was very confused as to what to do with these strange foreigners. By this time we had attracted some attention from the other diners who volunteered their favorite recommendations. We pointed at the dishes on their tables that looked good and got good reviews. This worked out quite well!

The photo is the owner of the restaurant with Rick. He spoke no English but we managed to communicate reasonably well by miming. We had a terrific evening which more than made up for the discouragement of the day.