Although the former main road had various not yet cleaned up rock slides and patches of dirt on it in 2012, the one in this picture was actually a deliberate blockage to try to keep any larger vehicles from attempting to use the old road as a way to get around traffic jams on the Road. In the 2018 picture on the right, the old road has acquired metal crash barriers and a retaining wall.
Although no single part that is currently a part of my tour bike is more than 10 years old, my tour bike is 12 years old. When I get back from a tour, one of the first things I like to do is replace the bits I wasn't happy with. Or at least, think about replacing the bits I'm not happy with. I've got a mental checklist of all the things I'd like to have on my next tour bike whenever I get around to getting a new bike but despite the random undiagnosable noises and roughnesses I've got (especially that weird *clunk* that keeps happening but only when I'm pedaling slowly after coasting and never when anyone mechanically inclined is around to hear it), I'm mostly happy with it. It's a good bike.
In this tour's episode of "I didn't know you could break that", I damaged one of the washer thingies on my rear quick release skewer.
A surprisingly well thought out and designed sketch map of the One City, Two Temples, Three Mountains, Four Courtyards, and Ten Major Tourist Sites of the Jin Merchants on the basis of the Road
In Old Pantuo Town, an ancient crumbly temple and a late 80s Community Stage seen through a gap in the gate for the government building that isn't open yet this time of day.
The new Road and the old road curving through the same valley separated by a gap of just over a meter. The brown sign reads "bird nesting area, please don't honk".
Technically, I broke it three years ago. It's just that it took me this long to fuck it up badly enough to notice the problem in a repeatedly diagnosable fashion. I just thought the bike shop in Anqing who spent an age tweaking my shifting after I specifically said "no, really, it's not necessary" had, as part of their oh-so-clever perfect tweaks, left my rear wheel a little bit loose when, a few hours later, I stood up on the pedals and popped the wheel out of the drop outs.
I would have liked to have gotten a picture of the mangled up worn out washer thingie but, before I could get a photo, the nice guy at the Merida in Qi County [祁] tossed it in the general direction of the garbage can - never to be seen again.
The Road's loss of truck traffic not only killed the restaurants but the gas stations too.
Yesterday, at the top of the pass in the Taiyue Mountains, I was doing a safety check before heading down a farm road of unknown curviness and unknown steepness and I noticed that when I'd last changed the tube, I hadn't quite set the bead right on the tire. I let the air out in preparation to reseat the tire and reinflate it and the wheel fell out of the dropouts. I'd been noticing that the rear skewer was consistently looser than I liked, that the wheel was a little shaky in the frame, and been thinking that I'd ask Laurence to bring me a new QR skewer with her when she comes from Haikou, but this, this was unexpected and kind of ridiculous. I pulled the skewer out, added a tire patch as an ad hoc soft washer, and, if only because it was so much better than it had been, I called it "good enough".
Laiyuan is trying to rebrand and redevelop itself as a place of interest on the Tea Road (the Chinese part of the Great Siberian Highway.) As a result, the services which Laiyuan has aren't tied to the volume (or current lack thereof) of large trucks on the G208 and it's one of the few places along this stretch of road to still have any services at all. However, despite my dawdling as much as possible to wait for the sun to warm up the air a bit before I started moving, none of those few services were serving breakfast at 7:30am.
A freshly repainted Laiyuan Supply and Marketing Cooperative and Comprehensive Service Center in a building that probably dates to the early 1960s. The slogans read "Develop the Economy", and "Guarantee Supply". I can't decipher the calligraphy. The building has a number of sunflowers on it.
Sunflowers are a common theme in mid-century communist propaganda. Just as Mao was the sun then the people were sunflowers, always turning their heads towards Mao. Symbolically seven sunflowers represented the people, exemplifying the seven hundred million population at that time. If three sunflowers were used these represented the Three Loyalties; loyalty towards Mao, his thought, and the proletarian revolution.
Architectural detail of a sunflower that's been recently repainted yellow.
I'd be almost all the way to the turn-off towards Qi before I'd finally find myself a place that not only was open but which looked like it had been open in the past year or three.
On the road to Qi I failed to find the ratty tatty temple I'd wandered into back in 2012 and which I was sure was just off to the side of the road.
On the other hand, I had a great adventure involving two peculiar Ming Dynasty pagodas in the middle of a corn field. Getting online in the evening, the majority of the limited information available regarding these pagodas is that yes, they are pagodas, and they are in fact in a corn field.
A former restaurant on the Road between Laiyuan Town [来源镇] and Old Pantuo Town [盘陀古真].
Nothing else before the city really quite managed to beat tromping around a corn field trying to see if there was any way to get closer to the pagodas that didn't involve climbing over things (there wasn't), or trying to decipher the accents of the people cutting corn stalks when I asked them. In an area where "Beijing" becomes "Baijin", my listening skills are well and truly strained by trying to understand anything complicated. As it turns out, I didn't miss much by not being able to understand them; if there is any information about the pagodas beyond their apparent age and unusual location, it hasn't percolated down to being posted online anywhere.
In the city, some people outside the Giant bike shop (which seemed to merely be closed for lunch rather than closed for good) rather rudely accused me of lying about being a foreigner, some other people gave me directions to a UCC bike shop, and I stumbled across the Merida. The Merida was able to fix all my minor "yes I know what's wrong, I just don't feel like doing it myself" issues so I trusted him with showing him my rear skewer washer thingy and he went and found me the exact right piece after only a minute or so of rummaging in the Magic Bucket of Spare Whatsits.
On my way to the bike shop, I actually found the place where the only particularly notable thing about my spending the night six years ago was that the nearby blind massage place cost twice as much as my room. I thought about going there but before I got around to it, I found a renovated mansion in the old quarter which had ensuite rooms with sprung mattresses for 169 yuan. After last night's 20 yuan special, I was perfectly willing to spring for something with a bit of a nice flavor to it. The room itself is not fabulous (they ripped out all the remaining kang when they turned it into a hotel 5 years ago) but the rest of the mansion is and even if I only understood four words in five, the owner's storytelling about the Tea Road and the Jin Merchants and Qi was all pretty interesting and he was old enough that I could ask questions like "when was the G208 renovated" or "how old is the collapsed tunnel just north of Fenshi" and get answers.
Of all the Old Towns I've been to in China, I think I like Qi best. It's an absolutely glorious looking place but, for some inexplicable reason, it mostly hasn't been renovated or turned into a ticky-tacky disneyland. Obviously, I would like to see more of the buildings fixed up but if being not fixed up means that the place continues to be more than a tourist site, I'm okay with that. (I suspect that the Tourism Board is not okay with that and that things will change but hopefully they will change in a reasonable way that lets it keep some of its uniqueness.)
Today's ride: 45 km (28 miles) Total: 1,033 km (641 miles)
