D7: Zhangduangu Town to Zhao County 张段固镇 → 赵县

September 2, 2018

Decorative grindstone that only recently became decorative

The first time I visited either Zhangduangu [张段古镇] or Zhao [赵县] was in late September 2002. I had been in China for slightly over a month. The Foreign Affairs Office for—I think—all of Hebei (but maybe just Shijiazhuang) was holding a big event for the foreigners in honor of the upcoming October Holiday. I was so wet behind the ears new, I didn't even know what the October Holiday was (other than a holiday in October) or even why we were getting a week off for the October Holiday.

We met outside the provincial museum in the morning, were taken to somewhere nearby for a tour of a 'history of leather' museum, a leather factory, and a leather showroom, went to lunch, and then visited Zhaozhou Bridge [赵州桥] and the Cypress Forest Zen Monastery [柏林禅寺] in Zhao County.

There are bits and pieces of that long ago day that still stand out in my memory. Things like teaching someone who had never used a public sit down toilet how you could cover the seat in toilet paper if you were afraid of germs; a stunning leather coat with a pleated skirt which cost a whole month's salary; someone from the Foreign Affairs Office buying me the pair of sheepskin slippers I'd been looking at because, of course, I didn't have yuan and equally, of course, they wouldn't accept travelers checks; the bus turning off the main road and apparently getting lost on rutted and flooded country roads which smelled heavily of rotting pears.

The road in my memory looked something like this - only worse. At one point, I got out of the bus to take a picture of the bus sllllowly making it's way through a giant mud puddle or maybe just because I was motion sick and it was going to take a while to make it through the puddle. Like many Chinese drivers in that day and age, the driver honked at everything that moved - including the chickens.

A somewhat more modern looking abandoned primary school to compare with that dirt walled one from a few days ago. Unfortunately, it seems very likely that the info I had about that one being from the 1980s may have been correct.

Being as I totally inadvertently found myself yesterday in an area with tanneries and leather factories, I know that the first place we visited in 2002 must have been fairly close to where I stayed last night. Not that I have any real interest in visiting it. Also, I've found a Pear Garden tourist attraction on the paper maps and the local specialties for sale are starting to include various things made from pears. So, even if I didn't specifically know for certain that we went to Zhao County, I can now say that I was also really close to the other places we went.

After I checked out in the morning, I went to the same dumpling place for breakfast as where I had dinner last night. Today I made the good coffee. It was a nice meditative sort of thing to do to sip amazing coffee while watching the trucks drive by on the main road knowing the whole time that I was not going to be on the main road with them.

I once read this really good book called "Salt: A World History" by Mark Kurlansky. As a result, one of the many odd things I find interesting is Public Service Announcements regarding things like privately produced salt. 吃私盐有害健康 (Eating privately produced salt is bad for your health) 败私盐违反犯罪 (Selling privately made salt is a criminal act).

The back roads out of Zhangduangu were more complicated than I like but the land here is very flat and it makes navigation by dead reckoning really easy. Combined with my ability to 'cheat' and read the destination signs on the occasional bus, I barely ever had to pull out my phone and check the GPS. This is a good thing because—unless you are actively using the navigation feature—AMap is terrible about updating your location or doing the fine granularity necessary for figuring out where you are on small country roads.

Unless rutted muddy roads currently being reconstructed count as interesting, things only got interesting after I got into Zhao. And then, they were only interesting in the way that adversity is interesting. From a distance. Preferably a comfortable distance such as through a computer screen.

It was much too late for me to visit Cypress Forest and, as that’s one of my few “must visit” detours all trip, I was willing to stay overnight to get the chance to visit in the morning.
And, of course, the hotels didn’t want me.

I don't ever remember seeing this particular slogan before this year and now I'm seeing it everywhere and in clearly 'non new' configurations: "If things are black and corrupt then sweep away the black and corrupt things; if there is nothing that is black and corrupt, then get rid of that which is disgusting and vile"

According to this building "Health is the only path of firm development"

I liked her shirt: Totoro + Totoro + Totoro & Umbrella

Now, I’d already eaten. Already gotten a hair wash at a salon. Had a massage (though it wasn’t an especially great one). Taken a twenty minute nap after the massage. I was chill and relaxed and calm and about as nonconfrontational as you can be and still be the child of my parents.

The first hotel was totally on board about letting me stay. However, the choice of rooms was either an ensuite with air conditioning but a hard bed, a hard bed with a fan, or a soft bed with a fan. The room with the soft bed was very nearly perfect by all the touring cyclist standards for travel in China. No windows would mean no traffic noise and no light from the sun. A bathroom down the hall meant no smell from rural plumbing. But the air conditioner was broken and it was just the tiniest bit too warm and stuffy for me to consider with a table fan.

Apparently abandoned but still in use petrol station

Random local petrol station called 车队 which either means "convoy" or "bike team".

The second and third hotels were nice and friendly and utterly and completely unwilling to even consider attempting to allow me to show them how to register me. They'd been told by the local police (verbally, of course) at a meeting of hotel owners that the small hotels absolutely were not allowed to take foreigners. And that meant a hard NO. That meant not even trying to find out if the computer would accept me. That meant not allowing me to go to the police station on their behalf with the intention of forcing the police to fill out a Temporary Residence Registration Form on their computer because, as the one guy put it, "even if they are wrong and you are right, I'm the one who is going to have to deal with them after you leave".

There are times when I would have fought this. If the suggested Hotel #4 (which was large but not huge and—especially in terms of my income—not actually that different in price from the small hotels) had also turned me away, I probably would have fought it. But, Hotel #4 didn't turn me away and I didn't need to get confrontational about stupid made up rules that don't exist in writing because writing things down means potentially being forced to acknowledge that you are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

I've never really liked being forced to get confrontational over the hotel situation but, once I've been forced, I've always sort of enjoyed making people do things my way. It's especially enjoyable when they are know-nothing bullies in uniform who don't expect me to actually be knowledgeable about their laws. However, right now, and for the foreseeable future, I just don't think I have it in me to tell a police officer he's wrong.

Little temple seen by the side of the road somewhere

The building isn't very old but it is very leaky and the murals weren't very well done

I have a fond spot in my heart for truly terrible hotels and I honestly don't like staying places that are too nice while I'm touring as the contrast between "nicest thing available" in the deep countryside and "actually nice" makes me acutely aware of how uncomfortable the countryside places are. Be that as it may, the 君悦赵州商务宾馆 (Junyue Zhao State Business Hotel) is really nice. Like really really nice.

Instead of a water cooler or a thermos, the room comes with a piped in filtered drinking water supply as well as a boiling pitcher for making tea. The bathroom, which is otherwise a standard Asian-style wet room, has two floor drains and one of them is actually at the lowest point in ever so slightly sloped floor. The sink drain has a u-bend. The included hotel breakfast is not merely edible, it actually tastes pretty good.

Of course, they don't actually register me. They just glance at my passport and check the picture to see if it vaguely looks like me. She doesn't even hold on to my passport long enough to have entered any information off of it into the computer. The receipt the front desk gives me for my key deposit shows that I've been checked in under the name 外国朋友 "Foreign Friend".

Today's ride: 64 km (40 miles)
Total: 498 km (309 miles)

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