Bike lanes, bruises and buses

Getting through Shanghai

Getting in or out of a major city as a group of 40+ bike riders is always slow, sometimes hair raising and often angst provoking. Given the optional nature of traffic light adherence for people in charge of the full range of vehicles in Shanghai, the ride out was slow, but it was neither hair raising nor anxiety inducing. Noisy, though. If a vehicle has a horn or a bell, and it seems they all do, then said horn or bell is sounded almost constantly. This can be very wearing.

We passed industrial parks aplenty, crossed many murky waterways and were privy to redolent smells. Redolent of what you might ask. Ummm, lots of things from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. On the agricultural front we watched three men sitting in what appeared to be elliptical wooden barrels paddle through dense weed - looked like strawberries - but we couldn't work out exactly what they were doing. Harvesting? Fishing? Boating for pleasure? It shall remain a mystery. It was much easier to understand the fenced-in floating duck farm. If not Gerard's morning tea choice...

Floating duck farm

Men in barrels

Gerard tries a chicken's foot for morning tea

Yiwu, a relatively small city of 1.2 million, is an exhibition centre for people wishing to buy Chinese commodities and export them globally. Around the hotel were many 'shops' specialising in colored braids, girdles and threads.

Braids

Since day 2 there have been many textile factories making socks, fabric, carpets and so on. Bicycle and motorised 'rickshaws' are loaded to the gunwales with rolls and rolls of the stuff.

The General sits and watches

The cafe

The ladies

The basket weaver

Looking out over the bamboo-covered hills

The highlight of the trip for me is a small old village, Guodong, clinging to the sides of a gully in a thick bamboo and conifer forest. Old people, teeth askew and amiable, greeted us warmly as we strolled downhill to a busy street cafe, stopping for an hour is so in an old basket-weaver's house watching as he dexterously wove strips of green bamboo into an elegant basket. Others invited us in to observe them packing colored paper clips and push pins into small perspex boxes. One old woman weighed, others filled, someone applied sticky labels and another bar codes. I will never regard a colored paper clip in the same way again. They were seated in a cool stone-floored courtyard around long tables, working slowly and enjoying the hum of each other's conversation.

The Silver Fox takes a bite

However, my ride has come to a sudden and brutal end. I was stationary in the bike lane at traffic lights when an electric motor scooter ran into my back wheel. I picked myself up, thinking this was a minor annoyance, a graze on my left elbow immediately stinging. What I didn't realise however was that my right calf had been sliced into a semi-circle by my chain ring until the scooter driver threw me a roll of toilet paper. I sat in the shade around the corner on the grass, wrapped the paper around my leg and applied pressure as scooter driver hightailed it out of there as fast as possible. A call to the nurse, Claire, who was tending my friend Kendy who'd fallen 10kms back and ripped a fingernail clean off, then sit and wait. No one stopped, offered assistance, brought me a drink. Nothing.

Claire dresses my leg

Claire and Kendy do clinic

The ladies in the village loved our wounds

Finally some fellow riders hove into view and I was able to yell loud enough for them to hear and keep me company until the lunch bus arrived to take me and Kendy to a hospital in Hangzhou.

I'll spare you the grisly details, but suffice to say I was cleaned at stitched at 4.30pm, about 5 hours after the incident, and Kendy arrived back in our room at 1am, also stitched and cleaned after surgery to remove a chip of bone detached from her middle finger. As she arrived in hospital pyjamas - to my eye the same as those worn by concentration camp inmates - I needed to be disabused from a bad dream.

What followed was two days in the lunch and luggage buses, our room looking more like a medical clinic than an overnight home for two bike riders. We kept Claire busy with dressing inspections and changes, more so after my wound became infected and I too had the IV antibiotic drip administered.

In the meantime, Ken from Canada slid under a car coming the wrong way at him in a bike lane, and has stitches in his Achilles, scrapes and grazes and Mick Jagger lips.

Three in three days.

On day 5 I arrived at the Shanghai airport without Silver Fox who is still careering round China in the luggage bus and boarded China Air Flight 177 to take me home. Leg up, lots more antibiotics, rest. Des has been plying me with copious cups of tea. Lovely.

Then I read Svend is also on his way home to Canada after breaking arm bones, and maybe more, on Day 6.

How do I feel? Mournful. I wanted to ride, and I was riding well. Not first, of course, but not last either. It felt good to be strong and on the Silver Fox. I didn't expect Silver Fox to give me such a big bite, though. I wanted the cameraderie of old and new riding buddies. I wanted to see these Asian places from the personal distance of my bike saddle. It is the best way to observe I find. So here I am on Grand Final day sad, miserable and sore. Happy to be with medicine and practitioners I trust as I certainly want to keep riding, and happy to be in the bosom of my 'family' again, but pining for what could have been.

Fremantle kicks a goal, but Hawthorn wins the game

Stats

September 22, Shanghai to Jiaxing: 103km; 19.6 ave; 5'15" TITS

September 23 Jiaxing to almost Hangzhou: 66km; 21.6 ave

September 24 Hangzhou to Yiwu: 103km

September 25: Yiwu to Guodong: 101km

September 26: Gudong to Shanghai Pudong Airport: 2.5 hrs by bus, 3.5 hrs by bullet train, 50mins by taxi, 2.5 hr layover

September 27: ~ 8000km Shanghai to Melbourne, 11 hrs