Biking

I had no idea how all those bikes –one for each kid- had fit into the back of that little truck. But none-the-less, the parking lot back at the hotel was filled with a bunch of relatively new, Trek mountain bikes. Using my colleague Vivian to translate, I asked the first of the two men if it was his business. No, he just worked for the other guy, who owned the company. It appeared to be a good little bike rental business they had going. It’s good to see that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in rural China.

Adilah, our guide from Dragonfly, walked her backpack to the end of the driveway and set it down. She had just set up the world’s simplest obstacle course. “Boys and girls, I am going to test each one of you to make sure you can ride,” she announced. Are you serious, these kids are eleven and twelve years old, Adilah. Of course they can ride a bike.

Well not so fast. The area of the New Territories where we live is fairly bike friendly, but that’s not true of all of Hong Kong. Some of our students simply have not had a lot of opportunities to master the bicycle.

Just in case, the men from the bike rental company had also brought along two tandem bicycles. But happily, we wouldn’t need them today. All of our students passed Adilah’s simple test. A few of them, just barely.

We were off.

We had a great ninety-minute ride through rural China. We rode on paths that cut through farm fields, villages, and even rode through the middle of a rural brick-making facility. We rode single file, and I purposely fell back to the last position so that I could stop, take a picture, and then quickly catch up with the group.
After a month-long dry spell in the Yangshuo area, it finally rained last night. The brickyard we were cutting through had been built where there was a steady supply of thick, heavy . . . mud. And that is exactly what our students found themselves in the middle of. On the outer edges of the brickyard our students got bogged down in a big patch of mud. The more they struggled, the more they churned up the mud. Their bikes got so caked with mud that their wheels wouldn’t turn. The students couldn’t push their bikes forward let alone ride them.

I hung back and let them struggle for ten minutes. I figured it was both a good group problem-solving opportunity and a character-building exercise. Besides, there were pictures of the Chinese brickyard to take because really, when is the next time I am ever going to find myself in a rural Chinese brick-making facility?

Eventually, I had mercy on my students, trudged into the mud, hoisted one bike after another onto my shoulder, and carried them to the other side of the mud bowl.

Finally, I went back and got my bike. I backed up fifty yards, built up some speed, and blew through the mud pit. My bike spewed mud everywhere, but I made it through. I’m sure my students would have been impressed if they hadn’t been too busy cleaning the mud out of their break assemblies with the sticks they had found on the ground.

-Jack