Shanghai'd

Hengsha Island.

Well, I am flying Solo in Shanghai. Tim is back to the States for 2.5 weeks while I get to explore the city on my own. Its exciting, if a little lonely. :)

Anyway, first weekend back from my trip - and first weekend without Tim - I accepted an invitation (OK, so I invited myself along...) to go to nearby Hengsha Dao. I went with a local biking group called Sisu that our Chinese teacher Kitty is active in. She was the only one I knew, so I was looking forward to meeting some new faces. We met up Saturday morning around 5:30am since we had to make the 7:15 ferry at the north end of Shanghai on the Yangzte River, and since the sun was up anyway... why not! The first, and only, snafu of the trip came at the dock when the ferry guy would not let us on with our bikes. Kitty argued and argued, but it only took a tall blond foreigner to convince him to let us "try" and "see if they fit" before we got on with them. ;-) I find this tactic very effective. It was getting hot by the time we docked around 10 am. 1o am is, for all effects and purposes, high noon. After coming up at 5:10, the sun is directly above, and people are starting to go to lunch. We hadn't eaten yet and had a 11km (~7.5mile) ride to the hotel. The hotel was actually a collection of big villas, fairy tale style looking houses all in a row. There was enough room for our crowd: me, my teacher, one other Chinese guide, an American girl about my age, a mother-father team from Holland and their 2 teenage girls, and a collection of bachelors (all solo like me with their wives and kids home for summer) from England, Scotland, Chech Republic and the US of A. After breakfast the mercury was pushing 40C (104F) so I caught up on some much needed sleep for most of the afternoon. Others hung out at the pool, which was not cooler than the air.


The ride Sunday morning was of note: I went with the bachelors and the Chinese guy out to the retention walls. Hengsha is a island not 2m above sea level. Each year all land in front of the sea wall is eroded by the already very silty Yangzte before hitting the East China Sea in a few miles. Now, Hengsha is reclaiming the land, building retention walls and sucking out water/pumping in mud into the square mile area they've fenced in. We decided to try and ride out around one area that was being corralled. It started out good enough, flat and packed, but as we got further out, we met all stages of the construction: packed dirt with concrete walls, rock wall mortared by hand, talcum powder sand 4" deep, gravel, and finally massive plastic bags of sand. It was flat, and look at the blue sky! but tough going. At the end of the ride I was treated to a sight: A dozen laborers skinny dipping off the wall. No shame here, they all stood up to shout "HELLO!" to the white faces. I tried to divert my eyes :-/ Back at camp, breakfast and lounging by the pool ensued. What a nice weekend. I just wish Tim was there to enjoy it with me!