D3: Yi County to Nanhancun Town 易县 → 南韩村镇

August 29, 2018

In addition to bridges, I also really like gas stations.

Last night during the hotel finding saga, I was bitching to Myf on WeChat. Being a Chinese citizen he generally doesn't have the same kind of trouble I have with hotels in China. However, since he's a long-haired ethnic minority with facial hair whose main form of ID is a Chinese passport (rather than the more common Second Generation ID card held by approximately 99.99999% of the population) and whose name features an untypable character, he has personally experienced more than a few problems with hotels.

Myf went diving into the Chinese internet for me and came up with a bunch of resources that generally weren't online the last time I bothered (about five years ago). This included the 中华人民共和国外国人入境出境管理法实施细则 which I'll roughly translate as "Detailed Regulations on the Management, Exit, and Entry of Foreigners in the People's Republic of China". Unfortunately, this document was officially cancelled and replaced by another similar document about four years ago and the current document doesn't mention any of the things we are specifically looking for but, it's a starting point. I'm especially fond of Article 29.

The hotel I grudgingly spent the night at

“外国人在宾馆、饭店、旅店、招待所、学校等企业、事业单位或者机关、团体及其他中国机构内住宿，应出示有效护照或者居留证件，并填写临时住宿登记表。在非开放地区住宿还要出示外国人旅行证。"

"Foreigners who are staying at hotels, restaurants, inns, guesthouses, school dormitories and other such places including institutions and organizations within China should present a valid passport or residence permit and fill out a Temporary Accommodation Registration Form. If the location is within a Closed Area, they must also present their Travel Permit."

Armed with a ton of info (including both an inability to find concrete regulations on the existence of specific foreigner approved hotels at any time after the mid 1990s or any concrete information on such things being cancelled despite what my Foreign Affairs Officer made a point of telling me way back in September 2003) I decided, when checking out, to make a bit of a production out of photographing the licenses on the wall (none of which said "Foreigner Approved Hotel" because, you know, such a thing flat out does not exist and has not existed for over a decade).

This made the Front Desk Manager a bit nervous, especially when I followed up by asking her who told them they were the only hotel in Yi that is foreigner approved. She didn't know. Or at least she said she didn't know. Just that they were the only one and had been the only one for as long as she'd worked there.

I am far more pleased than I ought to be that the person painting anti-government graffiti on random stuff along this road is still doing so, 6 years later. On the one hand, their life still sucks enough from something perceived to be government related or caused that they feel the need to do this. On the other hand, no one is stopping them from this exercise in self-expression.

There are a truly astonishing number of extant pagodas in this area

After checking out of the hotel, I went to the nearby bike shop. They were very helpful in terms of getting my wireless odometer to work (at least for the first 68km at which point it decided, again, to stop noticing the magnet) but less helpful with things like knowing anything about small roads or weird sites of interest. They didn't even know about the Spirit Way near Shiting!

One of the greatest things about the 2008 and 2012 trips was being passed from one bike club to the next and being able to get all kinds of information about the awesome stuff I might encounter along the way. Somewhere around 2014, however, I started noticing that even though there are a lot more bikers, the bike shops and the people hanging out at the bike shops now were either entirely about riding very far very fast or about driving to the nearest place they could do a specific loop ride

Even so, I followed their directions out of town. This put me on a different road than the one I took out of town in 2012. From there, I went south 8 or 9 kilometers until Gaocun Township [高村乡]. On the one hand, according to a map cut into stone on a sign near Yanzi Pagoda [燕子塔], by taking this road across instead of the first one at Xueshan Village [血山村] I missed a pagoda that isn't on Google, AMap, Baidu, or my paper maps. On the other hand, I stumbled across a kick-ass one-room primary school with a straw roof and mud brick walls. It was pretty crumbling and falling down which is really not all that surprising since the lack of any obvious signs that it ever had electricity make it at least 50 years old.

Really beautiful handwriting for the Rules for Primary School Students

Yanzi Pagoda looks about like it looked in 2012. The scaffolded construction site in front of the pagoda that looked like it was probably going to be a temple or something is definitely an "or something". Judging by the three Guanyins in the main hall, I'd say a Temple of Guanyin but it's clear that they must have run out of—or had someone run away with—the money for construction not too long after I was last there. I'm not even sure how to describe it with holes in the unfinished walls, a few carved wooden pieces between unpainted unfinished concrete with rebar sticking out, sunken holes in the brick floor, and statues that have been wrapped in plastic so long that the plastic is covered in dust and bird shit.

For all that, it also appeared to be an active site of worship complete with a solar powered speaker chanting Namo Amituofo on repeat.

Can you see that the closest Guanyin's hand has broken off?

The carved wooden bits were put in place but the rest of the roof and columns never were

On second thought, it may have already been an abandoned construction site in 2012

Back on the road, there was little of interest but at least less traffic than the one which the bike shop had suggested I take to Mancheng [满城区]. For lunch I had donkey meat burgers and a liter bottle of sweetened hawthorn juice. One of the two—or maybe the UHT cream I had in my coffee this morning—gave me a bit of an upset stomach and the next two hours were mostly focused inwards on my feeling like I wanted to vomit but not actually having any ability to do so.

Dawangdian [大王店镇]—where I spent the night in 2012—was only slightly improved by six years of development. It sucked then. It, rather clearly, still sucks now. I thought about 'randomly' stopping by the police station to refill my water bottle and to see if any of them remembered my staying in town but even though I've been getting water from Chinese police stations for the past ten years, even though this is something perfectly normal and acceptable, and even though I'd been given three bottles of water the day before by police officers at one of the ID checkpoints, I still caught myself starting to hyperventilate over the thought of walking into a police station. (It was only post-Incident, when I started to realize all the bad things that could have happened but which didn't, that I started getting all uncomfortably nervous about police and police related things.)

To be totally fair, it clearly sucked a lot more in 2012 than it does now

The signs have been like this for at least six years.

Some murals I liked on the way from Dawangdian to Mancheng

Despite passing through a mining area, most of the ride from Dawangdian to Mancheng [满城] was quite lovely; it was also almost entirely traffic free. Before the traffic came, there was little enough that the trucks were extra careful about doing things like using turn signals and slowing down (as a practical matter, they don't want me to damage their truck, as an ethical matter, they don't want to damage me). After the traffic came, enough of it came all at once that it had to be well behaved traffic. It was basically the most perfect kind of road you can find.

My guess would be mining rocks of some kind

Perhaps, considering this absolutely beautiful slate roof, they are mining slate

I kind of sort of visited the Han Tombs but not really. The woman at the desk at the Tourist Information Center was bend-over-backwards nice about letting me park my bike inside the Tourist Information Center but she told me I had to be back by 6pm. After paying the full price to visit all the tombs, I realized there was no way—even if I took the cable car—for me to make it up the mountain and back down again, so I spent thirty or forty minutes inside a temple of the variety I refer to as "Very Local". Lots of bad art and unique idols who I've not seen elsewhere in China. I really only left because my camera battery was dying.

God of Vehicles (never seen him before but this region also has a God of Roads)

Each deep niche has a shrine with either one or three major figures. These figures sometimes have attendants who are kind of sort of not holy in and of themselves. As with most modern temples, the figures are generally made out of concrete and painted plaster.

One of these days I am going to find out what the deal is with the capes.

Judging by the baby dolls and the murals, I'd say they provide children

With a full hour and change of daylight left to me, I decided to keep biking to Nanhancun [南韩村镇]. This was as much because I had daylight available as it was because smaller towns are, paradoxically, less likely to have NFA issues than large towns or cities. Even so, after I got to Nanhancun, I made a point of eating a small meal (to make sure that I wouldn't be grumpy) and to go find the police station so I could start from "Are you going to cause me trouble?" instead of from them responding in their official capacity to what is perceived as me causing trouble.

After getting myself thoroughly psyched up and having rehearsed lines in my head and having gotten past the hyperventilating, I couldn't find anyone at the police station (which also doubles as the Town Government). Go figure.

Today's ride: 86 km (53 miles)
Total: 292 km (181 miles)

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