Ancient philosopher Confucius says...  "You will receive interesting invitation." 

  
 Modern Chinese girl says..."got rice?"

The CIA's World Factbook page has the official lowdown on everything from the population growth rate to the number of narrow gauge railways. Here's a map of the city of Beijing. 
 

Beijing has an amazingly active expatriate community and a great online resource, the ICIC (International Community In China). This special page by Chinese Business World provides foreign residents and tourists with helpful tips, an events calendar, online travel services, restaurant reviews and a ton of other stuff. 
 
 

 Confucius leads the way.

 
 
 
Now it is 1988, the Year of the Tiger. Are you a tiger? Personally, I'm a dog. Don't laugh... what are you?

In the summer of 1997 I received an email from an American working in Beijing. It arrived like a fortune in my computer.

"There's a bike waiting for you in a garage in China ..." it said. "You could drive it all over the country."

Actually, I was a little used to this kind of inviation. Bikers are a closely-knit group, and after my 1995 American Borders Internet adventure around the United States on a Russian sidecar motorcycles I'd had invitations to motorcycle in Europe and Australia, Russia and Tiera del Fuego, but this invitation to China permiated my daily consciousness. China was suddenly everywhere in the news: the restoration of Hong Kong to the Chinese, the opening of the country to tourism and foreign investment...bold capitalist moves in a tightly controlled society. I had to admit, I was interested. The country was strange... it was on the opposite side of the world, over the international date line. A certain memory of childhood visited often, the one where you're at the beach digging a hole in the sand and somebody comes up and says, "What are you doing, digging all the way to China?" And you, with your child's mind, imagines them upside-down, with upward slanted eyes because they were fighting gravity from the other direction.

Confucius appeared in my email again. "You could ride around the countryside and talk with people about Hong Kong" he told me. "But Hong Kong isn't all that's going on here. It's overshadowed much more dramatic changes, out in the countryside." I love the countryside.

Books jumped from store shelves into my hands. Wall to Wall by Mary Morris, one of my favorite authors. How had I missed that? And The Five Foot Road by Angus McDonald. I bought them. I read them. I replied to Confucius.

"So... you really have a bike waiting for me?" I asked him, cautiously, in our next email exchange.

Yep. 

By October, I was there.

The bike belonged to Jim, the owner of the Subway sandwich franchise in Beijing. It was black, just like my Ural, but witha Subway sticker on the back. I rode it through the streets of Beijing to sights like the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square, to the Dirt Market, the Silk Market and the Russian Market, and right past the Kentucky Fried Chicken to the Subway shop for lunch. The traffic was frightening, everyone had just got cars in Beijing, everyone had just got drivers licenses. It was like driving with thousands of sixteen-year olds.

But one day Confucius took me out to the countryside where the peasants were harvesting golden yellow corn to be dried on the road. It was warm and sunny and the natives smiled and waved as we drove over their crops, threshing their grain. We stopped for noodles and beer at a roadside stand, bought persimmons and walnuts, and other things you do in the countryside, even at home.

The grand finale was a group ride to the Great Wall with the Beijing Chang Jiang gang, an eclectic group of expatriat Americans and Europeans, and one Chinese couple who owns an adventure travel shop in Beijing.

We cruised smooth empty roads rising over the Beijing valley and arrived at sunset in a village far from the Badaling tourist section of the wall. Hiking up took a while, but when we arrived the group kept walking right up through a staircase and we pitched our tents on a watchtower and settled in just in time to witness the full autumn moon rise over Mongolia.

I was hooked.

Next: The ride to the Great Wall.