Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

addltJon to our group of nine, there were, at times. two other groups of around 10 rIden following our convoy. Those groups included the BMW owners club and also the Honda Gold Wing owners group. Bizarre. From what I could gather from talking to our guide, motorcycles have only been allowed in China for a year or so. and they sIlII aren't allowed in the bigger cities such as Beijing, Jinan, Nanjing and Shanghai. They just haven't figured out how to integrate them into the traffic patterns yet. For instance, most of the highways in China are toll roads, but they make the motorcycles go down a single lane on the side with the bicyclists. Cool, because you don't need to pay the toll fees; insane, because you're sharing the lane with 95year-old great-grandmas on those old-people tricycles. The few motorcyclists who are in nowhere. and Within seconds we would be surrounded by 50 to 100 curious locals. Most had never seen full·sized motorcycles like our BMWs, let alone the GPS units on some of the bikes. At times. it was almost impossible to ride away because everyone wanted to get their photo taken Everywhere we went, crowds would swarm us. China are a little on the sketchy side as far as riding skills go, but I guess they're just learning. Our group of riders partaking in the Edelweiss trip was hand-selected by none other than Edelweiss' owner, Werner Wachter, for their experience and ability to deal with some of the rough edges expected in China No baby-sitting required with this group, which included four Yanks (including myself), a Kiwi, a Dutchman and his Spanish female pillion - in addition to our backup (and at times main) guide Christian Preining. Last but not least, there was our fearless leader (though at times not real helpful) Rick the Chinese guide. Many of the riders in our group have done 10 to 20 Edelweiss tours. Jim Russell, one of guys on the trip, was actually in China a couple of weeks prior to our trip, and then, after ours, was flying to Turkey and riding his personal BMW R 1200 GS back to China over the course of almost 60 days. These guys were experienced, to say the least. Everywhere we stopped, we were mobbed. I could never figure out where all the people came from. We would stop in what was seemingly the middle of with the bikes and our group. Dealing with the urban pedestrian traffic was the single most nerve-wracking experience on a motorcycle I can remember. In my 15 years of riding in the Los Angeles area, I can honestly say that I've had only one or two close calls with pedestrians, and have never actually made contact with one. In my one week in China while riding as cautiously as possible - I must have almost hit 50 pedestrians and brushed quite a few. It really starts to get to you after a while. In some towns, they just assume you're on a slow 50cc twostroke Chinese-made scooter and step right in front of you. Unfortunately, for one of our group members, the inevitable finally happened and he had a nasty incident with a pedestrian. I saw the entire thing unfold and was helpless to do anything other than watch as a pedestrian stepped out from behind a bus on a busy street, looked right at the motorcycle heading toward her and stepped right in front of it. It wasn't pretty. The resulting scene was chaotic to the point that when the police showed up, they asked all of us, other than the guy in the accident and our Chinese gUide Rick, to leave the scene. The accident scene was causing too big a disruption as hundreds and hundreds of locals converged on the area to take a look, completely crippling traffic. We were forced to leave two of our comrades behind, and the guy in the accident was headed off to the local police station where 12 hours and many yuan ($$$) later, he was off the hook. Let's just say that our guide had a connection with the local Mr. Big, and he (and a bribe) convinced the local judge that our man should be free to go. Sounds like Mexico, huh? We all learned a few lessons from this incident. The most important is that for some reason, the Chinese don't react the same way that Westerners do in traffic. Direct eye contact and/or right of way means nothing in China. We finally figured out that when approaching an intersection with pedestrians or cars present, you had better lay into the hom. For some reason, this is a signal that you aren't stopping and that they had better get out of your way. It worked 90 percent of the time, but even this was lost on some of them quite frequently. That was the low of the trip as far as experiences go, but there were so many great experiences that it quickly became an afterthought. One of the most bizarre motorcycling experiences I've ever had took place heading into the town of Jinan, a city that doesn't allow motorcycles within the city limits. After a long day on the road, we stopped in a rural area on the outskirts of town, and without any explanation from our Chinese guide, Rick, we sat and waited, apparently for an escort into town. The scene was odd because we waited on the outside of two giant concrete barricades that had a gap between them, just wide enough for a small farm tractor to pass through. Then there was a single-lane paved road built on top of a man-made ridge between crops disappearing off into the distance. After watching Rick talk on the cell phone for what seemed like an hour, we could hear the faint sound of what appeared to be a police chase. Then, off in the distance, I could see the faint lights of a police car, but CYCLE NEWS • NOVEMBER 9, 2005 21

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