D2: Doudian Town to Yi County 窦店镇 → 易县

August 28, 2018

For all that I'm a massive bridge geek, one of the reasons I can't bring myself to pay to cross the Marco Polo Bridge is the number of other old bridges in the area that I can wander across for free

Some people take pictures of doors. Me, I like bridges. This is the Xiahuliang Bridge [下胡良桥]. It was built in 1574, underwent extensive repairs in 1953, and was used as the main crossing on this road until 1987.

Annoyingly loud neighbors in the next room meant that I woke up at an hour which no one who knows me would even believe is possible. Since they didn't show any sign of quieting down and since the sun was already piercingly bright, I decided I may as well get up. The thought that I'd get to eat a northern Chinese breakfast certainly didn't hurt. While there are quite a few southern Chinese dishes that I like, I don't think there's hardly any northern Chinese food that I don't like.

I'm used to 豆腐脑 (literally "tofu brains") being sweet. This was salty. I was not impressed.

Apparently, this area has a lot of Muslims. Or at least some really big mosques.

Last year, when acting as a translator and tour guide for two friends of my parents, I brought the portable coffee kit along with me. Armed with the certainty that the campgas canister would be confiscated the first time my luggage went through a train station x-ray, I organized having canisters sent to every location we were going to (Beijing, Xi'An, Taishan). Of course, this meant that none of the canisters were taken. I gave two of them away and put the third in my luggage certain that it would be confiscated at the airport (it wasn't). As I now have a gizmo for refilling the canister, and an extra small extra portable canister that was a pain in the ass to find, I currently empty the canister before I fly so, before making coffee, I needed to find one of those butane cartridges for refilling cigarette lighters.

I found a place to buy butane shortly before I got to the Western Zhou Yan Capital Site Museum which is a very very good thing. I was up so early that I ended up arriving over an hour before the museum opened. If I hadn't had a way to make coffee and keep myself occupied during that hour, I might have decided to skip the museum and keep riding. Instead, I added three shots of moka pot espresso to the bottle of Coke I'd had with breakfast and found myself unable to stand still long enough to actually read the long and informative and interesting signs at the museum.

A replica of a bronze vessel that is now in the National Museum in Beijing

Original clay items which were unearthed here

Original bronze item that was unearthed here. Part of a horse's bridle.

Like the Terracotta Soldiers Museum, this museum is built on the site of an archaeological dig. Unlike the Terracotta Soldiers, this museum doesn't suck.

(I strongly advise, if you ever plan to go to China for a holiday, make absolutely sure that your itinerary does not, under any circumstances, include the Terracotta Soldiers. You'd think, given the quality of the traveling exhibitions, that it would be something awesome. You'd be wrong.)

The Terracotta Soldiers Museum is lacking in information, badly managed, poorly designed, expensive, and crowded. This museum, on the other hand, was basically empty, completely free, had a number of original artifacts on display, and was full of contextual signage that—assuming you read Chinese—were actually pretty interesting.

After the museum, I spent a while getting lost on dead-end farm roads before finally giving up and backtracking to the G107. I headed south on the G107 until Dongxianpo when I turned west and took all sorts of tiny roads until I got to Shiting.

Although I am "revisiting" many of the places from 2012, I don't want to take exactly the same route. In fact, once I get about halfway across Shaanxi Province, I'll be going north to Inner Mongolia and Ningxia before eventually—some two or three weeks later—merging back on to that trip's route in the middle of Gansu.

When I made the decision to take the G107 south, I did not realize that this section was the bit of National Road that I rode on my last day's ride north to Beijing all the way back in 2008! Pretty much none of it looked the slightest bit familiar to me other than a vague sense that I had once taken a road which, at every bridge, was paralleled by a stone bridge that was anywhere from 300 to 800 years old. I also may have recognized the "You Are Now Entering Beijing" ID Checkpoint.

By the time I would have been passing these bridges back in 2008, my camera had already been broken for a few days

I don't know if the ID checks on the entrance into Beijing Province already existed prior to the 2008 Olympics.

Somehow it pleases me that the person who was painting graffiti advertising anti-stuttering cures 6 years ago is still doing so

After I turned off of the G107 and started towards Shiting, I found myself repeatedly crossing in and out of Beijing. You would think, considering the size of some of the roads that I was on that they wouldn't get an ID checkpoint, but every single one of them had at least one checkpoint manned by volunteers and sometimes a second checkpoint manned by the police. Although I have already been mistaken as an ethnic minority twice this trip (once by people actually from that region!) people on bicycles are apparently not on any watch lists and I was waved through every time without so much as needing to pull out my passport. One of the checkpoints even gave me a couple of bottles of water.

By and large, at least as a foreigner, I've found that most Chinese police really are people who want to do good in the world

At some point, most of the way to Shiting, I stumbled across bits and pieces of the second day's ride with Leslie in 2016. At the time, there had even been the possibility that we would spend the night in Shiting rather than Zhangfang. Considering how completely lost I got this afternoon, and considering how much of a pain in the ass Leslie would turn out to be whenever things weren't going exactly 200% perfect, I'm glad that—on the basis of my knowing that Zhangfang had hotels because I'd stayed in Zhangfang in 2012—we ended up choosing Zhangfang.

For all that I really like China, most of it is not beautiful. Hebei is an especially unbeautiful part of China.

The true sign of being rural in rural China is when the locals get away with using the road to dry crops

On the one hand, I'm really glad to see that this place is no longer being used as a local hospital. On the other hand, considering the relative age of that roof, it saddens me to realize that it only stopped being the local hospital very recently.

Ahead! Chicken Farm! NO HONKING! Drive slowly! Violators will be fined. By order of the Maolinzhuang Village Committee

In 2016, this manky dump in Nanshangle Town tried to charge Leslie and I 100y a night for a fan room with a long drop latrine across the courtyard

From Shiting, I crossed over to the S232 by way of the Spirit Way that leads to the Tomb of Yinxiang, Prince Yi of the First Rank. This was an accidental find on the trip with Leslie and probably one of the only really cool things to come out of cycling with her. Other than acquiring some strategically placed video cameras, it doesn't look like its changed much in the past two years. Hopefully, if and when it gets restored and opened up as a tourist site they won't fuck it up too badly.

The video cameras were not there the last time I was here

A strategically placed Leslie showing off the size of the hole in the bridge

Since I didn't have anyone with me and therefore had the luxury of spending some time wandering around without constantly being asked questions (seriously, she made me seem quiet), I tried to find the actual tomb but, even knowing where it should be from a combination of actually knowing it exists and satellite view, I couldn't find it. I suspect if any of it is left, it's all underground.

The Zhenjiang Pagoda, which was crumbling when I visited it in 2012 and being restored when I visited again in 2016, has—at least for me—lost all of its appeal.

Zhenjiang Pagoda - 2018 on the left, 2012 on the right

I'd planned some various kinds of twisty turny fun and games instead of taking the S232 south to Yi but I didn't feel comfortable with the amount of time I had available before sunset and made the decision to stick to the main road, cut out the side path to Yongyang Town and get rid of the Western Qing Tombs altogether. Although it was generally a pleasant ride with hills that I'd forgotten existed but which I didn't need to walk up, I wish I'd still tried for the Western Qing Tombs as Yi County would end up being a major pain in the ass.

Military Control Area: If you do not have authorization to be in here, don't go in here. If you go in here without authorization and you get hurt, it's your own damn fault.

I did not take any pictures of military training exercises this time as they were sufficiently far enough away that it would have required specifically stopping and changing lens to get sufficient zoom. That seemed an unwise decision.

At the first hotel, I paid for my room, offered to show the girl how to register me on the computer, was told that wasn't necessary, had my passport photographed by her, had unloaded my bicycle, and had already started getting undressed in my room when she suddenly decided I couldn't stay. I was kind of pissed off but fine whatever, I'll deal with it. However, since I've already started to take my manky clothing off, I'm going to take a shower and change before leaving. Her response to that was to turn the water off at the pipe while I was naked and then refuse to turn it back on.

Her older sister the boss also didn't want me to stay but was much more reasonable about it. I still couldn't take a shower since, somewhere in the middle of the saga, the water to the whole building went out, but at least she was trying not to be a bitch. I ended up going to the hotel I stayed at back in 2012 where they also refused to let me stay. Considering that I hadn't eaten and was already in a sour mood regarding the damp half washed gloves and stuff in my jersey pocket and the "gee these shorts are awfully short" shorts that I'd thrown on when getting dressed, I refrained from being a bitch but I also insisted that the hotel owner call the local police and have me show them how to register me.

After all, I'd successfully been registered at this hotel in 2012. And that was before I'd had all the documentation on the topic of there being no such law.

It didn't work. The police insisted I must go to the "foreigner approved hotel". Being as I currently have the money to do so and would rather like to avoid getting arrested a second time this year, I decided—even though they were wrong—not to argue with the police.

The beds at the first place were way more comfortable.

I love his shirt. I want a shirt like his shirt. Being as it is neither black nor a t-shirt, I rate the likelihood of my wearing this shirt as nearly nonexistent but I still want it.

Today's ride: 96 km (60 miles)
Total: 206 km (128 miles)

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