Adventure Cyclist January 2015

It's a sunny January Saturday in Tongling and I'm out for another of my "only a few miles on the odometer but heck I'm a million miles away" rides. I've been watching some guys fish for carp in these ponds. This is after a quick spin through a nearby ramshackle village populated by impossibly spry older people. They're enjoying a gossip with the neighbors as they watch strings of their homemade sausages dry in the sun. There are the cutest semi-feral dogs hanging around and not once do they ever chase me, or the bike. When the village peters out along a weed and rubbish choked stream, there's a chorus of glorious birdsong from the reeds, from the magpies and wrens and tanager-like birds that populate this part of the world.
China is surely the definition of "intense." I'm still learning to adapt to life with a chronic knee pain, and it's been so damned hard to accept that I have to take it a lot easier when I ride these days. No pedal stomping for me today, if I want to be able to walk tomorrow. My normal response is thst of every other cyclist I know: b*gger that. Still, China's helped, in ways I'd never have imagined possible half a year ago. What I've lost in mileage, I've made up (in spades) with experience. China surely delivers in the "what the heck was that?" department. It could be the couple working on the side of a highway, using a diesel powered press to make a comforter, oblivious to the trucks roaring by, only inches away. Or the guy jogging to market with 6 live ducks strung by their bills 3x3 on a bamboo pole. Or the wads of fake banknotes you can buy to burn in the cemetery so your ancestors can go shopping in the afterlife. Or the daily WTF moment when you try to cross a street among all the madness of honking cars, trucks, buses, bikes, mopeds, 3 wheelers, grannies pushing toddlers in wheeled upright chair strollers, and even guys dragging wooden carts laden with recyclables or heat storing bricks that literally come at you from every direction. How does it work? Why does it work? Beats me. It's China.
These 5 months have been a real adventure for this cyclist. In the last week of this month I'll get the chain smoking guys at the bike shop to take off the bikerack, then I'll pack "Tongling the Red" in suitcase for her trip home with me to the United States. She'll be riding along with my grammar textbooks and several bags of Huangshan Mountain tea from here in Anhui Province.
I lost William the Conqueror, my Brompton folding bike, to Parisian thieves just over a year ago and I still miss him. Still, now I'm back with a Dahon bike in China's all time favorite color.
Folding bikes rule! All bikes rule! Travel with bikes really rules!