China Has More Bikes Than Any Other Country In The World

That's because you can ride anywhere....

Today we weren’t quite sure how to tackle the remainder of our China trip, so we went with the next logical big site seeing city of Xi’an – home of the Terra Cotta Warriors and former capital of China. After spending a few hours planning out our transportation and lodging, and generally wasting time while watching the Olympics in the oh so nice AC of our deluxe guest room digs – we finally decided to head outside and explore Pingyao some more.

We rented a couple of bikes from the hotel for the equivalent of 2$ I believe, and headed out to explore the Shuanglin Temple, which lies about 6 or so KM outside of the city. Now China has more bikes than any other country in the world. It has so many bikes that folks set up roadside stands to fix flats, broken chains, etc…so instead of your shoe shine man, you get your bike repair man and your shoe shine man.

We rode out through town, where all traffic laws – or lack thereof – seem to apply.
Can you ride bikes on the sidewalk – yes
Can you ride motorcycles on the sidewalk – yes,
Can you ride motorized mini trucks on the sidewalk – yes
Can your little boy pee in the middle of the sidewalk – yes
Can you set up a food stand on the back of your bike in the middle of the sidewalk – yes
Can you put flowers on the dinner table – nope – not hygienic

Any who, we rode through the throngs of food vendors, shoppers, kids, women, children, tuk tuks, rik shaws, motorcycles, and electric taxis and finally hit the highway – yes you can ride your bike on the highway.

We rode out of town past construction sites, sunflower fields, goats and shepherds, and your occasional fruit vendor till we finally made it to the Shuanglin Temple. The Shuanglin Temple is a Buddhist temple, originally built in the 6th century or so, and rebuilt in the temple a number of times over, the most recent rebuild being from the Ming and Qing Dynasty periods, so sometime in the 1500s or so. Anyway, its main claim to fame being its thousands of decorated clay statues spanning a 700 year period in the history of the temple.

The most visible of these is the many-armed Bodhisattva statue out front of the main temple complex. I am not sure if this is the Kannon – the 1000 armed Bodhisattva (well really 40 armed or 25 armed holding 25 or 40 worlds in each hand respectively) that you often find in Japanese Buddhist temples, but she/he sure does have a whole lot of arms.



We wandered around the temple complex for quite a while, trying to cool down from our dusty humid and bug filled bike ride – and enjoying the coolness of the interior temple complex. One of the most amazing things that I have seen in visiting these temples, are the trees, which often date back to the 900’s or more – and are nearly hollow with old disease, yet still sand in some ancient creepy fashion over temples that have burned and rebuilt many times over.



As you might guess, temples often come with priests and monks, so here Ulises and I ran into a couple of Buddhist monks doing Tai Chi in the middle of the August heat. They stopped to chat with me about the Olympics, America, and how old I was before they went back to doing their slow motion deep knee bends, and we continued to wander around the complex until it was time to ride on back home.

Tomorrow we head out to Xi’an, and another chapter in our Chinese adventure – for the time being, we are tired and ready for dinner.



Zaijian!