D1: Downtown Beijing to Doudian Town 北京市→窦店镇

August 27, 2018

Once upon a lifetime ago, I started my career of being told not to take photos of things by spending ten minutes trying to take a good photo of this gate - with a film camera. (If I recall correctly this is like the main offices of the Security Bureau or something like that.)

Liz and Harrison were very jet lagged and, as a result, fell asleep practically mid-word in talking. One of them (and I'm not sure which one) snores which really annoyed Myf as one of the apparent side effects of my surprise surgery is that I'm no longer snoring. (I say "apparent side effect" because Myf and my boyfriend are two of the only people who have slept in the same general spaces as me often enough to notice if I snore and my boyfriend sleeps much too soundly to have ever noticed.)

Being all excited to get started on my tour, I woke up at a quarter to 8 and spent the next twenty or thirty minutes collecting cruft from around the living room and getting everything packed. Then, since it was obvious that no one else was going to be up for a while, I went back to sleep where, because of some of the smackdowns that were flying back and forth at the hip-hop competition on Saturday night, I had a very strange dream involving the Aflac Duck acting as a male prostitute.

We'd finished the Taiwanese coffee, gotten the bikes from the basement storage room, and gotten everything on my bike by noon. Then we got sharebikes for Harrison and Liz again and headed to some hutong a-yi's not at all legal restaurant for this amazing sesame millet porridge that was even better than the porridge Myf and I had had for breakfast on Sunday.

Harrison's first tattoo, which he got in 2008 in Beijing, may or may not have been based on the cloud designs related to the Beijing Olympics.

This was followed by a zigzag course through the city to the north side of Tian'anmen Square so we could get a look at the newly repainted Mao portrait. It is garishly bright and somehow manages to combine echoes of Andy Warhol with the "Monkey Jesus" version of Elías García Martínez's Ecce Homo.

At Niujie Moslem Street we got some more "must eat" amazing Beijing snacks which I intended to get extras of to have for breakfast but, in the muddle of stopping by the post office to mail my laptop bag and unnecessary jeans home, quite forgot. Around this time, Harrison and Liz left to go to the end of the airport express so they could pick up the person who would be taking my spot on the futon bed, and my rear tube (which was new) decided it needed to loudly self destruct and be replaced with a tested and many times patched tube.

The left hand Mao is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The right hand Mao is the current state of the portrait.

Once again, I cross near the Marco Polo Bridge but not over it as I'm too cheap to spend money just to walk across a bridge (which they probably won't even let me take my bike on)

It wouldn't be until after I was in Fangshan that I would finally come across something I had seen in 2012. Bits and pieces of my ride echoed the trip I took in 2016 with Leslie but, in 2012, I crossed out of Beijing at a more northerly bridge and only ended up in Fangshan by accident.

I intended to visit the Zhengang Pagoda that I stopped at both in 2012 and with Leslie but I accidentally took the wrong road and, having already backtracked multiple times from going down dead-ends, decided against backtracking again.

The Nangangwa Ancient Bridge, my third marked site of interest for the day–and the first one I visited–might have been more interesting if I'd been able to get close to it but it's literally up against the expressway and I would have needed to climb over things and down a weed covered berm to get there. It also ended up taking me to a dead end though, unlike the previous two dead ends (which were caused by my not checking the map), the map claimed that it was a through road.

Leslie and I stopped on this corner and ate watermelon from a farmer's truck

I'd realized from the map that it was "next to the highway". I hadn't realized just how "next to" that meant.

Dinner in Fangshan ate into the last 45 minutes before official sunset and, despite there being plenty enough light to bike for a good 20 or 25 minutes past sunset, I fully intended to stay in Fangshan. However, the very first hotel I stumbled across after dinner was the place that had been a massive pain in the ass about rejecting me halfway through the registration process six years ago and I took this as an omen that I was not meant to stay in a larger city tonight.

Instead, I headed south and west towards the G107–eventually merging onto it–and Doudian Town. This necessitated quite a bit of riding in full dark but the full moon combined with lots of headlights and a good road surface meant that it didn't really matter.

Now that the management of the hotel has been taken over by one of the national run chains, it's guaranteed to be even less likely to let me stay without a hassle

One of those traditional 'burn things to remember dead people' holidays is going on.

The first two hotels I saw required carrying the bike up stairs to the front desk so I didn't even bother checking them out. The third hotel said that the only room they had left was a suite and, even though it was 260 yuan a night, I might have taken it if the room hadn't smelled bad as well; I didn't even get to the point of checking to see if the beds were hard.

By the time I was trying to make the decision to either go into the fourth hotel (which also was a third floor front desk) or see if hotels five and six had ground level entrances, my phone battery gave me a 10% warning and I bit the bullet to go upstairs. Where, of course, I got NFA'd (No Foreigners Allowed). And, of course, I refused to accept being NFA'd.

Partly because there was no way I was going to carry my bike back down the stairs, partly because I'm stubborn, but mostly because of the giant recently installed poster on the wall (which the other hotel had also had) that listed something like 12 possible forms of ID which Chinese citizens could use for checking in and 7 possible forms of ID which foreigners can use to check in.

With the skill of a grifter or a con artist, I cajoled, wheedled, and bullied the woman on duty until I was sitting down at her computer and had registered myself. She still wasn't very sure about letting me stay there (in fact was very sure about not letting me stay there) even after I saved my registration. Ignoring her protests, I scanned the WeChat QR code and paid for my room. I then just kept pushing words at her and being in the way and making it hard for her not to let me stay.

I don't know whether or not she ever got through to the local police to ask them for permission. Assuming that the local police are in disagreement with the giant poster from the Public Security Bureau on the topic of "this is how foreigners can register to stay at this hotel," I imagine that one of the reasons that no one came by to bother me is likely because no one has a clue how to unregister me nor especially wanted to deal with the hassle of getting me out of the room once I was in it.

Point being, even if it's only -5- kinds of valid ID for foreigners (rather than the -7- I remembered), you do not get to have the government put a giant poster like this up in your hallway and then dare to tell me I'm not legally allowed to stay.

Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 110 km (68 miles)

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