bike traffic and black lungs

Suzhou (pronounced "sue's-oh") is the real deal when it comes to gardens. The garden in Shanghai was okay, but for the legitamite experience, everybody says you have to go to Suzhou. The town was once home to over 200 gardens, is laced with canals, and Marco Polo described it as "heaven on Earth". Today, it's not exactly heaven on Earth, but it is pretty along the canals, and getting into the bike traffic is an intense experience.

When I say bike traffic, I of course mean mostly scooter traffic. Every main street in Suzhou has "bike" lanes that are physically divided from the main flow of traffic, and overflowing with two and three wheeled vehicles. This is intense, serious, move it or lose it traffic, no gentle calm bike rides in this town. At first I was intimidated by all this, but after a preliminary cruise, I was out there muscling and honking (bell-ringing) my way through traffic jams, sketchy left turns, rush hour traffic, the whole deal. Taylor hated the cruising, and on our first afternoon trip, she headed back as we prepared to cross the river. I made a big loop until I ran into a an impossibly busy street that I needed to be on the opposite side of. After I became severely frustrated with the backup trying to get to the next night, I decided to go Chinese style and just force my way through the four lanes of barreling rush hour taxis and buses. That strategy worked surprisingly well, and incidentally, as soon as I landed on the far side, I found myself pedalling perfectly parallel to Taylor. Good thing, because she had no idea where she was or how to get home.

Worse than the traffic is the air. China is of course known for its poor air quality, but you really have to see/breathe it to believe it. The sunsets and sunrises always come severely orange through a thick mist of haze. You can't see any distance from the tops of mountains, and the sky seems to never be truly blue. My lungs basically always ache, and pedalling next to a fleet of diesel spewing buses does not help matters. Even my eyes started to burn at one point on a particularly long ride. Oh well.

To avoid traffic and smoke, I liked to dip off into the narrow side paths and alleys. Though you would inevitably run into torn-up roadway construction, often get lost in apartment complexes, and become embroiled in dozens of near collisions with every imaginable type of wheeled craft, this was the best way to roll. It was back in these little hollows that I felt I could really see, hear, feel, and of course smell China. Well worth the hazards.

The destination in all this cruising was usually a garden. I visited three gardens in Suzho, two were totally bunk, the final one made up for all the shortcomings of the first two. It was called Shizi Li (Tiger Forest Garden), and it was incredibly badass. This puppy has been around since 1352, and its showcase feature is a small pond surrounded by rollicking man-made rock structures that resemble mountains. Curving, tunneling, rolling through these is a series of paths that wind impossibly intricately through, above, around, over, and under. I became lost in this labrynth for about 20 minutes in an area that could not have been more than 30 meters squared. The whole garden was amazingly designed; beautiful, peaceful, inexplicably free from huge tour groups with bullhorn wielding guides. It was fantastic.

Last night we took a sleeper train into central Hunan Province, where we had to kill time all day before catching another sleeper train tonight. I promptly lost Taylor on a mountain, and we did not miraculously meet up until 7 hours later. But that's a whole other story.