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Here’s one that’s pretty cool…a 1938 video from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. There are a few things in there that are a little scary, but I’ll let the video show all that. Enjoy, my friends…and kids, don’t try the chalk or cigar stunts at home (or anywhere else).
More gun stuff? Check out our Tales of the Gun page!
My name is Joe and I’m a watchaholic.
It started for me when I was a kid and my parents bought me a Timex, and it’s never subsided. I can’t walk by a watch store or jewelry counter without stopping. Watch technology has jumped through several advances in my lifetime, and I’ve enjoyed them all. I like digital and I like analog watches, and I like that different watches work best for different applications (it gives me an excuse for buying one that, you know, I might need). I like the idea that I can order a watch from overseas that’s not marketed here in the US, and I like a lot of the watches that are marketed here. I travel overseas on a fairly regular basis, so I’m a sucker for a good-looking GMT watch (they’re the ones that allow you to see the time in two or three different places in the world simultaneously). I’ll do another blog about the GMTs at a later date. The focus of today’s blog is ride-specific watches. I tend to think of watches by major motorcycle adventures, and there are three I want to mention today.
The first one I’ll mention is the green-faced, military-styled Seiko I wore on the Western America Adventure Ride. It’s a quartz watch and it’s not a model that was imported by Seiko’s US distributor (which doesn’t mean much these days; I ordered it new from a Hong Kong-based Ebay store and it was here in two days). But I like the fact that I’ve never seen anybody else wearing this model.
I bought the Seiko on an Ebay auction about 15 years ago, and I think I got it for something like $52 brand new. I like the style, I like its relative light weight, and I like the size (it’s the right size, not ridiculously-large like many watches today). The Seiko is impervious to wet weather and it has served me well. Just for grins, I tried to find it again on the Internet, and I only found one that was used in an Ebay auction, and it had already been bid up to over double what I paid for mine new. You might be wondering about the compass directions on the Seiko’s bezel. There’s a method of using those, the watch hands, and the sun to identify which way is north. I don’t need that feature, I don’t use it, and I’d have to read the directions to learn it again, but it’s cool to know it’s there. It’s kind of an Indiana Jones thing, I guess.
Next up is the safety-fluorescent-green Timex Ironman
The last one is a Casio
It rained like hell half the time we rode in Colombia, and the Casio
Watches, saws, generators, and more…it’s all on our ExhaustNotes Reviews page!
Jose Cuervo is no friend of mine. Not after I’ve seen how (and where) the good stuff is made.
This, my friends, is the story of how tequila is manufactured. It occurs in one place and one place only: Tequila, Mexico. And it all begins with the blue agave plant. That’s what you see in the big photo above.
Yes, Tequila actually is a place. It’s about 50 miles northwest of Guadalajara, Mexico.
The origins of this story, for me, go back to the early 1990s, when Baja John and I rode our motorcycles the length of Baja and then took the ferry across the Sea of Cortez to mainland Mexico. John and I stayed in beautiful Guadalajara for a few days on that awesome trip and I fell in love with the place. I was determined to get back there someday, and that someday occurred sooner rather than later. Just prior to a 4-day Memorial Day weekend in 2003, I bought three AeroMexico tickets, and Susie, our daughter Erica, and I explored Guadalajara and the interesting places around it. One of those places was Tequila, with good buddy Carlos as our guide. You’ll see Carlos a photo or two down.
Making tequila starts in the fields with the blue agave harvest. The blue agave is a majestic plant that grows in the red earth of the region, where the soil, water, sunlight, and everything else the tequilameisters worry about is Goldilocks perfect.
The blue agave takes about 8 years to reach maturity, and each one produces about 8 bottles of tequila. As you might imagine, security around these fields is tight.
The guys that harvest the agave plant are the Airborne Rangers of the operation. They chop away the pineapple leaves (the pineapple is the plant’s heart), and they do so with a tool that made me nervous just looking at it. It’s a deal that has a plate-sized blade on the end of a long handle. The operators keep the plates razor sharp (they carry stones and sharpen the blades constantly). The scary part is they hold the pineapple down with one foot and whack at it with that tool, missing their toes by millimeters. The plants are tough, the guys work quickly, and when I asked our guide Carlos about it (that’s Carlos in the photo above), he told me accidents are not unheard of out in these fields. Think about that the next time you sip a good tequila.
Here’s the agave field after it has been harvested.
The pineapples weigh between 80 and 120 pounds, so the guys doing this get a workout all day long. I imagine the truck you see below was resting on its axles after it had been fully loaded. I’ll bet those guys sleep well at night.
The pineapples are then transported to the factory to be turned into tequila. The process goes like this: Bake, squeeze, ferment, distill (a little or a lot), age (a little or a lot), bottle, label, and drink (a little or a lot).
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s throttle back a bit to see what it all looks like.
Caldera is Spanish for boiler, and the heat and steam produced by the boilers is needed for the slow agave pineapple bake. Hang in there; this is about to get very interesting.
The tequila pineapples are delivered to the hornos in the factory. Horno is Spanish for oven. It’s where all that heat and steam from the calderas gets put to good use.
The hornos are room-sized brick ovens that are stacked full of the harvested agave pineapples. Think of them as immense crock pots.
After an all-day bake, the pineapples are soft and mushy. Carlos peeled off a piece for us and we tasted it. The plant had a sweet and faint tequila flavor, but it contained no alcohol yet. It would make for a good candy, but the plants are too valuable for that. There’s more money in turning them into tequila.
The baked blue agave hearts then go through crushers, which separate the juice from the pulp.
The juice goes on to giant vats (we’ll see those in a second) and the pulp is sold separately as an agricultural byproduct. Farms use it for feed (lucky cows, I guess) or compost.
The vats shown below are where the agave juice ferments for 2 to 5 days. That’s where it develops its initial alcohol content. Carlos explained that it is basically a tequila-based beer at this point. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they found the native Mexicans making and drinking this. The Spaniard’s contribution to the development of tequila was the distillation process, and that’s what takes this gift of the gods from agave beer to tequila.
I noticed that some of the vats were bubbling, and I asked Carlos if there were air injectors or heaters in the vats. Nope, that bubbling occurs naturally as a consequence of the fermentation process.
The factory helps the process by planting fruit trees that attract a certain kind of insect around the fermentation building. The bugs are drawn to the scent of the fermenting tequila juice. They fly into the vats and drown, and their decomposition accelerates the fermentation. It’s a good thing I developed a taste for tequila before I knew that.
The photo below shows the distillation line.
Distillation is followed by aging in oak barrels, and how that’s done is a big part of what makes for different grades of tequila.
The pecking order for different tequila grades goes something like this:
After distillation (and after aging, if you’re going for the good stuff), the next step is bottling. Then the bottles are labeled, and then they’re packaged.
Our tour was at the La Cofradia distillery in Tequila, about an hour northwest of downtown Guadalajara. Surprisingly, the La Cofradia distillery had a tasting room (just like you’d see at a vineyard), and we sampled different tequilas after the tour. The bottle that our guide, Carlos, is holding in the photo below is the good stuff with the dark brown color and gold flecks. I tried a sip, and it was very, very smooth indeed. I was tempted, but I wasn’t going to drop $400 (in 2003, or for that matter, at any other time) on a bottle of tequila.
Just for giggles, I Googled “expensive tequilas” and I found that you can pretty much go crazy spending money on tequila, including one that sells for $6700. I’m not into it like that. I’ve found that the best place to buy reasonably-priced 100% blue agave tequila is Costco.
I am glad we visited Guadalajara and Tequila when we did. With the pandemic and the drug cartel situation down there, I don’t know if I would do it again today. I looked up Guadalajara safety and it’s rated as a medium risk city. By today’s standards, that’s probably accurate. Truth be told, I’d much rather visit Guadalajara than, say, Portland, Chicago, or Seattle these days. The pandemic will pass; the drug situation in Mexico will take longer. I hope the Mexican government gets on top of it soon. I’d like to explore mainland Mexico again.
If you’re planning a ride into Mexico, make sure you insure with the best and our favorite: BajaBound!
Want to know more about riding in Baja? Just click here.
If you enjoyed reading about how tequila is produced, you might enjoy our story on Jack Daniel’s, too.
I saw this YouTube video a few days ago on the Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor, and I’ve been meaning to post it here on the ExNotes blog. I think YouTube motorcycle reviews are generally a time suck, but I enjoyed this one. The dude who made it (MotoSlug, a guy I never heard of before) nailed it, I think, with his description of the Enfield, its capabilities, and the riding experience. It’s no BSA, Senator, but it’s still a fun ride. Actually, it’s way better than any BSA I ever rode.
I’m inspired. It’s late afternoon here in So Cal, which is to say it’s hot. When things cool off in a couple of hours, I’m going to fire up my Enfield (that’s it in the photo above) and go for a ride.
Read our story about riding Enfields in Baja here.
Janus Motorcycles has a series of videos on their motorcycles, and this is the latest with Jordan and Josiah. There are few things that sound as good as a single-cylinder motorcycle accelerating, and that comes across loud and clear in the video. Enjoy, my friends.
Watching the Janus video reminded me of the Baja ride I took with Jordan and Devin (you can read about that adventure here). It was cool, riding the jewel-like, CG-engined, Janus motorcycles across northern Baja. We may do that again at some point in the Covid-free future and that would be fun. We sure had a great time on our Janus Baja adventure.
You can read about our other rides here, and more on things to see and do in Baja here.
I visited Chiriaco Summit and the Patton Museum last week (we’ll have a blog on it soon) and it was awesome. But wow, was it ever hot. As in 111 degrees when we left, and that’s not an unusually warm day out there in the Sonoran Desert. The next town over is called Thermal, and a little further north there’s this place called Death Valley. Death Valley recorded a whopping 131 degrees three weeks ago. Sensing a pattern?
Yeah, it gets warm in these parts, and in other parts of the world as well. Hot weather is not ideal riding weather, to say the least, but sometimes we find ourselves riding in shake and bake conditions. I’ve done it. I rode a 150cc scooter all the way down to Cabo and back in Baja’s hottest month of the year (September, when it was well over a hundred degrees every day). It was humid down there, too, once we crossed over to the Sea of Cortez side of the peninsula. We were literally entering the tropics as we crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Whoa, that was rough riding!
When we did the Western America Adventure Ride with CSC and the guys from Zongshen, we rode through the same corridors described earlier above, riding across California and the Mojave Desert, through Joshua Tree, and on into Arizona with temps approaching 110 degrees. That was brutal riding.
The ride across China that Joe Gresh and I did had similar challenges. It started out hot, then it got cold as we rode into the Tibetan Plateau, and then it became brutally hot and humid as we descended into central China and rode east to Qingdao. That was a 38-day ride, and I’d guess it was well over 100 degrees for at least 30 of those 38 days.
The risk, of course, is heat stroke, and it’s often not the kind of thing you can feel coming on. You’ll think you’re okay one minute, and the next you’re waking up in an emergency room wondering what happened. If you start to feel a headache while riding in hot weather, you are already perilously close to heat stroke. You need to stop, drink copious amounts of water, and get some shade. The better approach, though, is to not let yourself get anywhere near that condition, and that’s what this article is all about.
It almost seems like heresy to say it, but my first bit of advice about riding in hot weather is: Don’t. Given the choice, postpone the ride. But let’s assume that this is not an option, as was the case for each of the rides mentioned above. Okay, then…here’s my guidance on the topic.
One: Don’t ride naked. I’m not trying to be funny here, and I’m not implying you might be the kind of person who would go down the road wearing nothing at all (although there is that story about Gresh riding around with only a bathrobe). Nope, what I’m talking about is not shucking your safety gear. You have to wear it. All of it. ATGATT. All the gear, all the time. You can’t peel it off just because it’s hot. It’s saved my life.
Two: Wear a good mesh jacket. These are available from several sources. I have a Viking Cycles jacket I’m wearing these days and it works well. I wore a Joe Rocket mesh jacket on the ride across China and it made a big difference. You can get them from Viking Cycles, CSC Motorcycles, British Motorcycle Gear, and other sources. Trust me on this…you need a ventilated jacket for riding in hot weather. EDIT: We’re getting interesting comments advising not wearing a mesh jacket in hot weather. Make sure you read the comments below, and for those of you who responded, thanks very much!
Three: Use a cooling vest. These things actually work, but they’re not as easy to use as it sounds. They don’t work for long, but they work. The idea is you soak them, and then wear them under a jacket. The airflow causes the water in the vest to evaporate and that cools the vest and you. I’ve found that on really hot days these vests need to be remoistened about every thirty minutes, but you should be stopping that often anyway (more on that later). It’s the remoistening part that I don’t like. It seems like they take forever to soak up water when you remoisten them. I’ve found it easer to just get my clothes wet (see the next point below).
Four: Go soak your head (and everything else). Don’t laugh; I’ve done this. On the Baja ride I mentioned above, it was so unbearably hot that we took to pouring water down the inside of our riding jackets and inside our helmets at every stop. We became rolling evaporative coolers. It helped.
Five: Change your riding hours. On the really hot days, I like to hit the road at 0:Dark:30. Get out and get a hundred or so miles in before it gets unbearably hot. You’d need good lighting on your bike to do this (I generally don’t like to ride at night, but I’ll make an exception when I know it’s going to be hot). This is difficult to do when riding in a group because it’s hard to get everybody moving that early. If it was just me and Gresh or Welker, we’d leave way early and get in a couple of hours of riding (or more) before the sun comes up.
Six: Drink a lot of water. The problem with riding in high temperatures is you don’t realize how much water you lose through perspiration. My advice is to stop every 30 minutes and drink a bottled water. Like I said above, most of us ain’t spring chickens, and you might be wondering if this means you’re going to be stopping a lot to pee. Hey, it’s a common old guy problem, but it won’t be in hot weather. Drink a lot of water; you’ll lose it through perspiration as you ride.
Seven: Avoid alcoholic beverages. Alcohol will cause you to dehydrate more rapidly, and that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do here. You shouldn’t be consuming alcohol on a motorcycle ride anyway. Drinking any kind of alcohol while riding in hot weather is just stupid. Where I found you really have to watch this is when riding in a large group (there will be one or two riders who have to have that beer or two at lunch).
Eight: Stop regularly to cool off. Find a bit of shade or someplace air conditioned, and get off the bike to cool down. When I ride in hot weather, I usually stop to cool off and rehydrate every 30 minutes or so.
Nine: Keep your tires at recommended pressures. Another thing you definitely don’t want on a hot day is underinflated tires. Tires flex with every rotation, and flexing causes the tires to heat. Throw in high road surface temperatures with underinflated tires, and you’re flirting with a blowout. This is especially important to remember if you’re one of those guys or gals who deflate their tires for dirt riding. Don’t forget to pump them back up when you get back on the asphalt.
Ten: Don’t speed. Tar melts on hot days, and melted tar is slick. Factor that into your riding when it gets toasty.
Eleven: Eat light. Don’t over indulge. Heavy meals put a strain on your digestive system and your heart, and that can elevate your body temperature. When I was involved in testing munitions out in the Mojave on hot days (where it was sometimes over 120 degrees), we always brought along melons for lunch and nothing else. We didn’t need to keep them cool. They were a great treat, they seemed to make it a little cooler on those horrifically hot days, and they help to keep you hydrated. Good buddy Sergeant Zuo seemed to know all about that in China, too. We were riding through Ledu in central China one ferociously hot day when our favorite Chinese NCO stopped the group, disappeared, and returned with a couple of watermelons. That was a welcome respite and a marvelous treat. We ate a lot of watermelon in China.
Twelve: Lighten up on the low sodium schtick. A lot of us older guys try to watch our sodium intake. When I was in the Army, they actually gave us salt tabs on really hot days when we were in the field, the theory being that we needed the sodium because we were losing so much through perspiration. I later heard the Army reversed that practice, but the fact is you lose a lot of minerals through perspiration. I don’t worry about my sodium intake when riding on hot days.
So there you have it. You know, most folks who ride motorcycles these days…well, how can I say this delicately? We aren’t spring chickens anymore. Motorcycling tends to be a thing mostly enjoyed by full-figured senior citizens, and we have to take care of ourselves, especially when we venture out on hot days.
If you other ideas about hot weather riding, let us know in the Comments section. We love hearing from you.
I like fancy walnut. I won’t buy a gun unless it has exceptional wood and it’s in chambered in a round I already shoot (I don’t want to buy new dies and components, and with the exception of .22 Long Rifle, I only shoot what I reload). On rare occasions I’ll come across a rifle with wood so exceptional, though, that I’ll set aside my caliber rule. This is a story of one such rifle: A Kimber 84 Classic Select chambered in .257 Roberts.
The Kimber “Select” designation means the rifle has been selected for the figure in its stock, but I’d seen any number of Select Kimbers with mediocre wood. That’s not the case here, though. The two photos directly below were straight from the Gunbroker.com ad, and I’d never seen one as beautiful as the auction photos indicated.
I knew I wanted the rifle, but I was a bit skeptical because I’d talked to a guy at the range with a .257 Roberts Kimber. When I asked him how it shot, he just looked down and shook his head. “With that pencil weight barrel, it’s hard to hold 3 inches,” he said. “Good enough for deer, I guess.”
But still, that wood. When I saw those photos above online, I called the store behind the Gunbroker ad. “Is it really as nice as the pictures?” I asked.
“We were stunned when we opened the box,” the guy at the other end said, “so the answer is yes. We’ve never seen one like it.”
That cut it for me. The rifle had a “buy now” price posted on Gunbroker, and that’s what I did. The time to buy something exceptional is when you see it. I suspect if I had let the auction for the Kimber run its course, the bidding would have taken the price well north of the buy now number.
I was a little leery of the .257 Roberts cartridge having had zero experience with it, but everything I read about it was good. Ned Roberts (a gun writer and wildcat cartridge developer in the 1920s) necked down the 7mm Mauser round to .25 caliber (the actual bullet diameter is 0.257 inch). Remington added legitimacy to the cartridge by offering it in 1934. Folks say it’s perfect for hunting everything from groundhogs to deer. All that sounded great, but I remembered that guy with his .257 Bob at the gun club. I need not have worried, though. You’ll see why in a minute.
So how did the Kimber shoot? In a word, it was fantastic. How about sub-half-minute groups the first time out?
The secret sauce for the Kimber is 36.5 grains of IMR 4320 propellant under the 100-grain Sierra jacketed softpoint bullet (their No. 1620 bullet). My Lyman manual lists a propellant range for that bullet of 36.0 to 40.0 grains. I had three loads prepared that went up to 38.0 grains, but I found the 38.0-grain load too hot (the bolt was difficult to open). You should always start low and work up, and I had just proven that. Every rifle is different (even when they are identical), and 38.0 grains was too hot in my rifle. The 36.5-grain load was the Goldilocks load: It was just right.
More beautiful wood and secret sauce reloading recipes? You can read them right here!
You already read about Joe Gresh’s Viking
The Viking
The inside pocket…suitable for shades, or maybe a cell phone. The zippers all appear to be of good quality, too.
About those belly pockets…they are sized perfectly for holding a lot of different things. Baseball hats, cell phones, Yoo-Hoo boxes, and more.
My jacket came with a spec card, and rather than try to describe the specs myself, I’ll let the card do the talking.
The jacket had a desiccant pouch in one of the pockets. I always wonder what prompts warnings on things. Take a look:
Don’t eat the desiccant. Seriously? You know the good folks who make these things put that warning on the desiccant because somebody did. Even with warnings, though, people still do the things the warnings warn them not to do. You know, folks who urinate on the electric fence because they just have to find out for themselves. Some of those people vote, too. But I digress. Back to the main attraction, and that’s my review of the Viking Cycles jacket. It’s made in Pakistan. That’s okay by me.
Like most motorcycle jackets, the Viking
As Joe Gresh commented in his jacket review, the Viking
Read our Product Reviews here!
My Dad was a world-class trapshooter and he owned more than a few exotic shotguns when I was a kid. I didn’t know much about them but the names and the quality of those trap guns impressed me even as a little guy. Ljutic, Parker, Winchester, Perazzi, L.C. Smith, and others were stacked in every corner of our little place in New Jersey, and the colors, the wood, and the engraving stuck in my mind. Of particular interest to me were the fine walnut and the exotic colors. Dad explained that the swirling grays, browns, and blues on the receiver were done with an exotic color case hardening process that used bone charcoal laid on the parts at high temperature. It’s magical stuff. I didn’t understand all of it then and I don’t pretend to understand all of it now, but I sure like the way those guns looked.
Fast forward 50 years or so, and I learned of a company in New York called Turnbull Manufacturing. Doug Turnbull runs it and the focus originally was on firearms restoration. As part of that, Turnbull researched the history and lost art of color case hardening so he could include it as part of the restoration process. Turnbull’s work was stunning, and it didn’t take long until a few firearms manufacturers and gun distributors realized it would make a highly-marketable feature on limited runs of new guns.
15 years ago Smith and Wesson introduced a reissue of its World War I Model 1917 for a very short time, and as part of that deal, the new Smith included Turnbull color case hardening on the frame. I saw one of the Turnbull 1917 revolvers at a local Bass Pro and it sat in the display case for months. Where I live, the rage is all plastic guns that wannabe gangbangers hold sideways like they see in movies released by folks whose entire knowledge of guns could fit on the head of a pin (with room left over for the Gettysburg Address), so the re-release of the Turnbull 1917 Smith stayed in the Bass Pro display case for a long time. It was a thousand dollar handgun that Bass Pro had marked down to $695, and it still hadn’t moved.
A few weeks later I stopped at Bass Pro and the 1917 was still there. I asked the kid behind the counter what they would take for it; he read the price tag and told me $695. Would you consider less, I asked. I’d have to ask the manager, he said, looking at me and not moving. Why don’t you do that, I answered. He finally realized his job was to sell stuff and I was a real live customer, so he took off in search of whoever the boss was.
“We’ll take 30 off,” Junior said when he returned.
“Is that percent, or dollars?”
He smiled. “Dollars.” It was still a hell of a deal and I pulled the trigger (pardon the pun; some of these almost suggest themselves).
I love my 1917 and I love shooting it. It’s accurate. It looks cool, it hits where I want it to hit, and it’s a .45. It makes me feel like Indiana Jones. And there’s one more cool thing…this gun carries well. Indiana Jones has nothing on me. That Cairo guy cloaked in black twirling the big sword? Bring him on.
Next up? That would be my 1895 Marlin in .45-70. Turnbull did a series of these, too. That Marlin 1895 with Turnbull’s color case hardening hit home for me as soon as I saw photos of it. I had to have one.
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, factory Marlin lever guns were color case hardened. I am a big fan of .45 70 Marlins (as a quick review of Tales of the Gun will show you), and an 1895 with the Turnbull treatment was irresistible.
Turnbull did a magnificent job on these. It’s more than just color case hardening on the receiver. Other bits and pieces received the Turnbull treatment, and Turnbull refinished the stocks with a red stain like Marlins had a hundred years ago. The Turnbull Marlins are very limited production items, and Turnbull had photos of each Marlin they offered with this treatment. The photos you see here are the actual rifle I selected.
I’d like to be able to say a got a hell of deal on this one, and in a sense I did: I paid list price for the Turnbull 1895, and that was still a good deal. To make it even better, shortly after I purchased the rifle Turnbull bumped the price significantly. Got in under the wire on that one, I did.
But wait: There’s more! I’ve been a Ruger fan for years. That particular affliction started with a Super Blackhawk I bought when I was in the Army in the 1970s. I shot it in International Handgun Metallic Silhouette matches back in the day, and I still shoot it. Rugers are great guns and they last forever.
You can guess where this story is going: Turnbull teamed with Talo (a Ruger distributor) a couple of years ago to add Turnbull color case hardening to a limited run of Ruger Super Blackhawks. Wow! .44 Magnum, a Super Blackhawk, and Turnbull color case hardening. It’s like these guys knew me personally. I kept an eye on Gunbroker.com and when one of the gun outfits advertised these guns at something like 30% below list…well, you know how that wave crashed on shore. It’s an awesome handgun and I had it on the range out at the West End Gun Club just last week.
If you want to learn more about Turnbull, their guns, and their services, you might want to poke around a bit on the Turnbull site. The photography and the info there make it worth a visit.
More Tales of the Gun stories? You bet!
The Canton Fair: I’d heard of it many times, and it has been billed as the world’s largest motorcycle trade show. I don’t know if that latter statement is true, but the Canton Fair is certainly China’s largest motorcycle trade show, and China is one of the world’s dominant motorcycle producers. Biggest or not, I had an opportunity to attend the Canton Fair in 2017, and who could say no to something like that?
So, after a midnight departure from Los Angeles International and 15 hours in a center seat on a Boeing 777, I arrived in Guangzhou at around 8:30 p.m. either that day, the next day, or the day before (I can never get the time change thing right). Those 15 hours in the big Boeing flew by (literally and figuratively) quickly, clearing Chinese Customs and Immigration in Guangzhou was efficient, finding a cab was easy, and before I knew it, my Chinese Mario Andretti cab driver was shepherding me through the rain-slicked streets of late night Guangzhou. I’ve spent a lot of time in China and it felt good to be back. A lot of folks hate China these days. I’m not one of them. I’ve had too many good times and I have too many good friends in China.
I stayed at the Paco Hotel, only a couple of miles from the Canton Fair. A hotel right next to the Fair was a cool $1000 a night, so that was a nonstarter. The Paco had what I thought was a good buffet and I ate heartily on all but my last day in Guangzhou. On that last day, a cockroach the size of a small bird ran across a tray of noodles just as I was reaching in, and that killed my appetite for the Paco buffet. I guess I’m lucky it happened on the last day.
The next morning, my first full day in China, it was off to the Canton Fair. I had no idea what was in store for me. Think big, think big crowds, and think “I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going but I’m following the crowd,” and you’ll start to get a feel for what getting into the Canton Fair was like for me that first day. My leg was killing me (an old motorcycle injury), it was hot and humid (hey, it’s China) and it took a good two hours from the time I left the hotel until I was actually inside seeing new motorcycles. There’s the Guangzhou traffic. It’s normally heavy, but as we got closer to the fair (after crossing the Pearl River, which bisects Guangzhou), things really got thick. And there were the crowds.
There was a press of humanity trying to get into the fair once I was off the bus. I walked along with a heavy crowd for a good mile, with my sciatic nerve on fire every inch of the way. Getting into the fair was a process, and it started with guessing which crowd to follow. I got lucky; I guessed right. I had to buy a pass, and I opted to get the 100 RMB buyer’s badge. 100 RMB is about $16, and that allowed me to enter the Canton Fair all week (as opposed to paying 30 RMB for a spectator’s pass every day). But I couldn’t just buy the badge. Lines, lines, and more lines. And for every one of them, I had to guess at which one to follow. I had to go through a metal detector after standing in one long line. Then I had to stand in another long line to fill out an admission application form. Then it was another long line for a photo. Then it was another long line to take the photos to the folks who made the badges. Then it was another long line to pay for the badge. Then it was another long line to get the badge. And while all this was going on, the crowds were deep and pushy. But they were friendly.
Oddly, I didn’t bump into anybody from the United States. I met several interesting people from other countries. One guy pushed up into me and asked where I was from. When I told him, he told me he was from Iran. Wow. Iran. An American, and an Iranian, literally pushed into each other. He asked me what I thought about what Mr. Trump had done in Syria a few days ago (The Donald had lobbed a missile in). Hmmmm. This could get interesting, I thought. “You know, Don doesn’t call me as often as he used to,” I told my new friend, “and even if he had called this weekend, I was on a 15-hour flight to get here, so I would have missed the call.” My new buddy stared at me for a couple of seconds and then he started laughing. I did, too. He took a selfie of the two of us. Me. Working for world peace, one Iranian at a time. My photo is probably in the ayatollah’s database now, but hey, you do what you gotta do.
Things were moving along. I had my photo, I had my badge, and there was one last line: The line to get inside and actually start seeing motorcycles. And then it started raining. On us. Standing in line. Outside. Hey, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
Inside, much to my surprise, I still wasn’t in the motorcycle part of the Canton Fair. The complex is immense, and I had to ask around a bit to find my way to the motorcycle area. I finally made it, though, and the Zongshen booth was the first one I saw. It was one of many and I knew several of the guys from Zongshen, so we visited a bit.
Zongshen, as one of the Big 4 Chinese motorcycle manufacturers, has a lot going on and they have a lot of interesting products. They make motorcycles, they make workhorse trikes, and they make a lot more.
There were a lot of motorcycle manufacturers showing their new products at the Canton Fair. I enjoyed seeing them all.
My buyer’s badge gave me status. There are motorcycle parts suppliers at the Canton Fair, and when they see a buyer’s badge, they’re on it. They all wanted my business card and they all wanted me to have theirs. That’s another bunch of databases I wormed my way into, I guess. I still get four or five emails every day from manufacturers trying to sell me stuff. I could have made a killing on N95 masks. And I can buy digital watches for 88 cents each if I buy a thousand or more. Who knew? And the exhibitors? They all seemed to hire attractive young women who wanted me to buy their motorcycle stuff.
More than a few of the bikes and trikes were interesting. Some had names that were funny as hell. And some were styled to fit regional preferences. Take a look.
The Canton Fair has a restaurant row that must have 100 restaurants, ranging from exotic Middle Eastern foods to all kinds of Chinese food to Papa John’s pizza. I had Chinese food every day (it’s a “when in Rome” kind of thing for me). The beef dumpling soup was a whopping 25 RMB (that’s $3.96 in US dollars), and it was delicious.
There are people here from the Middle East, Australia, South America, Africa, and other places. Yesterday while I was enjoying my now-standard lunch of beef-and-onion dumplings, an older fellow asked if he could sit at my table (the seating is very crowded because there are so many people here). “Sure,” I said. His English was a little rough, but he reached into his bag and pulled out a piece of flatbread. He broke it in two and offered half to me. Not wanting to be rude, I accepted it. I asked my new friend where he was from and his business. He was a construction guy from Lebanon. My guess is that piece of flatbread was from Lebanon. Imagine that…a guy from California at a motorcycle show breaking bread (literally) with a construction guy from Lebanon. A small world indeed, and I was living it, one flatbread bite at a time.
I had another interesting experience one day at lunch when I attempted to pay. I peeled off some the Chinese currency I had and the young lady at the cash register examined it closely. “Not true money,” she exclaimed, in English, and loudly. Other folks around the cash registers looked at me. “Not true money,” she said again, the volume up another notch or two. And then, just in case I was hard of hearing: “NOT TRUE MONEY!!!”
So there I was, attempting to pass counterfeit currency in the Canton Fair, with what seemed like fifty thousand Asian faces taking in the drama unfolding before them: An American (me) trying to pay for his soup with counterfeit money. I had visions of rotting in a Chinese prison. Maybe worse (they have capital punishment over there, you know). I fished out more bills and handed them to Miss NOT TRUE MONEY, and her focus immediately shifted from prosecution to sorting. She studied each bill, giving some back to me and keeping others. The line behind me continued to grow. Weirdly, nobody seemed to mind my attempted criminal behavior or the delay it had induced.
Miss NOT TRUE MONEY was finally satisfied with the cash she selected, and the soup, as always, was delicious. When I left the restaurant area, there was a young guy selling ice cream outside. I found an ice cream bar that looked good and paid him, using some of the bills Miss NOT TRUE MONEY had rejected. He looked at each one suspiciously, but he ultimately accepted them. That ice cream was delicious, too. I admit: It was kind of a rush, committing a felony in a foreign land. I’m only writing about it now because I think the statute of limitations ran out.
When I returned to the hotel, I hit the ATM around the corner to get more (and hopefully, more true) cash. When I reached into the ATM hood, my hand started burning. Something either stung or bit me. I had an immediate and big welt on the back of my hand that hurt like hell, and within an hour, the entire back of my hand turned black. Maybe it was a murder hornet before they gained fame here in the US. My Mom would have told me it was God punishing me for passing that counterfeit money. Whatever it was, it sure hurt. It was gone by the next day, but wow, my experience with all things related to Chinese currency was not pleasant.
I had been sticking to the motorcycle exhibits during my time at the Canton Fair, but I took a different entrance one morning. Silly me: I thought the Canton Fair was only motorcycles. Nope, it’s everything. There are a lot of exhibits marketing to the construction industry. China was still building furiously, and they evidently supply construction materials to a lot of the world. I imagine Lowe’s and Home Depot have been here more than a few times. Here are a few shots as I walked through these areas.
Surprisingly, I didn’t meet a single US person in the motorcycle area during my several days at the Canton Fair. There were lots of folks from Asia, and more than a few from the Middle East, South America, and Europe. But no Americans (other than me). Go figure.
The Canton Fair was canceled this year due to the Covid 19 pandemic, but it’s going to be back. If you ever have a chance to roll through Guangzhou in April, the Canton Fair needs to be on your bucket list. It’s a cool thing to see.
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