My local haunt By Jon Sims-Nngbo
- Details
- Category: Ningbo News
- Published: Monday, 17 December 2012 09:36
Please find another lively story of the long time Ningbo citizen and entrepreneur Mr Jon Sims.
please find more stories on his blog; http://www.simplesite.com/JonSims/132729929
A date etched indelibly in my memory is 18th December 1995. It was the day I stepped off an aeroplane into the world that is China.
It was cold, it was damp, it was grey, it was confusing, it was messy, it was noisy! If I had been able to speak Chinese then I would most probably have bought a ticket at the aiport and gone home, with no regrets.
As it was I couldn't and so I didn't and because of that I am still here. The rest is history as they say. In this case mine!
There were no roads to speak of. Just rutted lanes which may or may not have been sealed at some time in the past or future. Vehicles of all descriptions and sizes appeared out of the misty dampness with nary a though for laws, life or limb. There were accidents everywhere, queues of vehicles caused by people going gung ho for the closest gap to plug and the incessant blare of horns noisy enough to drown out an entire fleet of 747 becoming airborne at the same time.
It took me two weeks before boredom, misery and cold told me I was going stir crazy without the stirring. I needed to get out. I needed to smell the green grass; I needed to see something other than mist, rubble and mayhem.
So I bought a bike. Not any bike though. Two wheels in this country would be insanely suicidal I was merely insane. Suicide, in fact death by any method was not something I was hoping for in the distant future. So I bought a motorcycle and sidecar unit.
At some time during the last century the BMW boxer motorcycle and sidecar had found itself in Russia. Seeing a good thing when they saw it, our muscovite maties copied the thing, slapping on the Cossack and Ural Badges to call it their own.
Later on when camaraderie between Russian and Chinese chappies was at its most potent the BMW made a shortish dash down from Vladivostok in the north and into the hungry hands of the Chinese military machine.
Over the decades pushrods and overhead valves found their way into the engine whilst badly made bits of glass fibre mouldings were bolted onto the body to make the thing "go faster".
It did not go faster. 750ccs, 80Km/h top speed and breaks which, well, in a word, did not. Single leading shoe breaks which were in desperate need of resoling.
This is the mistake Hannibal made. Elephants were too powerful, too reliable and too fast. Had he come over on the Chinese made sidecar units he would have said. "OK, that’s it, we are not going back unless we can find elephants."
In 10 years I rode that machine over most of the roads of Zhejiang Province and most of those roads now, no longer exist. They have real ones now with tar seal, or concrete and are really nice. What surprises me is although people here have to pass driving tests the majority of them have scant regard still for the rules of the roads, leaving it to the police and insurance companies to sort out should anything happen.
In those days there were no digital cameras, no internet (here) and no gps. The maps were scant and sometimes almost accurate. The only way to get around was to follow your nose. Being a "bignose" I had something to follow. The Chinese call us bignoses as we have conks somewhat larger than theirs and I guess if you're going to follow your nose a big one will be easier to follow and prevent you getting lost.
But then, in those days, being lost was simply a point of view. Everyone knew where they were then because nobody traveled. The problem started when the trip did.
One of my first rides was actually a stroke of luck. I had been dragged out to a town called Xikou, the birth place of Jiang Jieshi (Chang kai check) salt seller and last "president" of China before independence was claimed in 1949.. I was taken to a place near the burial place of his mother which was in the mountains. The place was called Miao Gao Tai and the views were the first I had seen of the country from an elevated position. Mr Jiang had built himself a summer house up here in the hills (it turned out most of these chappies had a small house in most of the mountain ranges around China!)
But what caught my eye was the rugged little 3 wheel busses which continued past Miao Gao Tai and into the dusty beyond. If busses were going there, busses were going somewhere. I wanted to go there too.
It was the summer of 1996 before I did my first ride through Siming Shan. The 60 Kilometer ride took me a whole day. It was dusty hot and dry and halfway through the journey I was overjoyed to find an open water race carrying irrigation from a reservoir I had just passed to tea fields "somewhere out there."
Because only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun" I could strip off and plunge myself into the fast flowing water. The milky coolness of the water is one of those almost perfect feelings you get and never forget.
To my knowledge that road was the only road that went right through the mountain range, but without maps and gps and all the things we take for granted nowadays; is really hard to say.
Asking the few people by the roadside was pointless. They probably did not know and I did not speak Chinese then.
It is the roads which have probably saved this and probably most of the remote rural areas of China. The roads are built by the local people for the local people. The roads give the locals easy access to the markets buying their local products. All throughout the mountains are reservoirs. All the way down the watersheds are little independent hydro power stations putting power into the national grid. Thousands upon thousands of little power stations connected to a national grid.
Small power stations all over the country have the advantage of being able to supply power all over the country even if major power lines are broken. Small power stations also minimise the chances of blackouts caused by power surges.
16 years ago I'd go around a corner and there, in the middle of the dusty track was a large dynamo, waiting for the locals to drag it away and connect it up. It is hard to imagine this infrastructure was built "by the people, for the people."
The slogan was "a lightbulbin every house." It also means a TV and a fridge and a washing machine and 1.3 billion people becoming consumers
