China Car Times

The China Northern International Bike Show is a real mouth full to say, it sounds so important and prestigious you just want to go, nay, you cannot help but go.

The show is supposed to encompass the entire Chinese realm of pedal bikes and electric bikes alike, I thought it would be easy to find a Chinese made and designed electric street bike, obviously I was to be totally wrong. Seeing as Tianjin is a massive hub for traditional cycles and now transforming itself into an E-Bike center, I thought it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Tianjin is not that far from Qingdao, where CCT is permanently based, thus the bullet train from Qingdao to Tianjin becomes a viable option, and at 275rmb for a first class ticket its hard to ignore. Tickets were purchased, first class of course. The difference between first and second class is negligible, we couldn’t actually see the difference other than that the 2^nd class seats are three in a row, where as the 1^st class tickets are just two in a row. When traveling on the bullet trains in China, always plump for the 1^st class tickets, its only a few RMB more.

Being British, and traveling 1^st class across China, it was only natural that champagne be brought along for the ride. Being upper class British gents, we had to have a champagne breakfast, needless to say our fellow Chinese travelers thought that our 8am champagne antics were a little too far. Being upper class British gents on a budget, our champagne shopping was limited, gone are the days when we could blow 700rmb on Bollinger, this time we were definitely going down market. Two 1.5l bottles of (allegedly) French champagne were bought for the bargain price of 36rmb each – that’s $5.10 USD per bottle. The champagne was opened, and poured out into paper cups (we are classy) and ultimately consumed. Words to describe the ‘French’ champagne, or at least words that are printable could be ‘battery acid’ ‘horse urine’ ‘brake fluid’ etc etc. We did actually begin to question the champagnes heritage, was it actually French, or was it just the bottle and label that was French? Many beers were consumed after the champagne was finished, just to get rid of the French (allegedly) champagne taste that lingered in our mouths.

Onto the show: The show itself, is nothing. It’s two buildings, there are some mountain bikes, there are some electric bikes. Much of the show appears to be aimed at the domestic market rather than international sales. We saw a lot of poorly designed E-bikes, and but we did spy a few electric cars!

The hotel room that China Car Times stayed in had a few ‘interesting’ stains on the floor by the bed, China Car Times would be wise to note that the stains were actually made by a previous guest.

Tianjin, the home of Tianjin Xia Li, seems to favor locally produced vehicles. At least 90% of the cars on the roads in Tianjin are Xia Li based vehicles. Are they cheaper in Tianjin or something? We didn’t understand exactly why Tianjin people love Xia Li so much, although we can see what Etsong cigarettes were thinking when they decided to produce the rather tired and old fashioned Austin Maestro in Qingdao city, we think the thought process was basically ‘build a car, any old car, call it a car for xxx city’s people, and they will buy it in droves’ this strategy obviously worked very well for Xia Li, but not for Etsong.

The journey back to Qingdao involved more sampling of the Chinese champagne industry. We bought one 2.5l bottle of a rather nice red colored champagne (it looked like red diesel) for 26rmb, and then a smaller 1.5l bottle for 50rmb. Surely, logic dictates that the cheapest stuff would taste awful, and the more expensive bottle would be magic (or as near as you can get to ‘magic’ at 50rmb a bottle). As luck would have it, we drank the cheaper, ultimately nicer, champagne first and left the ‘classier’ 50rmb bottle for afters. The 50rmb bottle was the worst bottle of the trip, you can see it in the photo below, should you wish to avoid that brand.

We arrived back in Qingdao, slightly drunk, very tired, and with a vow never to visit the North China International Bike Show, we suggest you carry on with our vow, oh, and never drink cheap champagne, and avoid the hotel in Tianjin called ‘Single‘, it claims its a business hotel, but we’re not sure what kind of business was happening in our hotel room! Also, we discovered it was very easy to pull the spy glass out of the door from the outside, and peer into other guests rooms, but we never did anything like that.

ChinaMTB has a short and brief write up on the show.