I am not, intentionally, trying to lose weight this trip. Weight loss is a pleasant side effect of doing massive amounts of exercise. It is not, and never has been (at least for me), the goal behind doing massive amounts of exercise. I just like doing things like hiking, biking, and weight lifting. Some for the getting out in nature aspect, others for the getting out from behind my computer screen. Also, the endorphin rush.

Don't ask me how or why or what physiological reason is behind it, but the only thing that I've consistently gotten high on enough times to be counted an addict (if it weren't otherwise what counts as 'healthy behavior') is sports. This despite the fact that I'm not actually what you might call "very good" at sports. Stubborn - yes. Persistent - yes. Skilled - yeah, not really. 

I might not be trying to lose weight this trip but the combination of cooler temperatures and odd meal times means that I'm doing a pretty good of it. On a summer tour, the hot part of the day when I want to stop and rest is also lunch time. On a summer tour, there's plenty of opportunities to suss out a meal and then still decide to go one more town over for lodging. Now, however, noon to two is my prime best weather for comfortable cycling and I often have to find a place to stay before I eat, which in turn means guessing at empty restaurants whether or not they'll be any good.

Breakfast is coffee in the room. It's got heavy cream and honey so it's not completely calorie free but it's hardly what you'd call a "real" breakfast. Zhuyuan is sufficiently dead as towns go that I don't see anything which passes as a breakfast stall on my way out.

Lunch is a some packaged sausage and some cashews from a convenience store in the first township I come to. It's possible that there might have been an actual restaurant if I went off the road into the town but it didn't look terribly likely and I went with snack food instead. I spread the snack food and some oranges (which are given to me by someone interested in what I'm taking photos of) out over the course of the day so I'm never actually hungry hungry but it's not, not by any stretch of the imagination, a meal.

Dinner was initially going to be a single dish ordered from the restaurant run by the guesthouse I stay at in Qinglinkou. They take forever making it and while they are taking forever four other cyclists on a five day trip show up. I end up eating with them and even though they are dismissive and unimpressed with most of the food, leaving large amounts of the serving dishes untouched, I eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and never actually feel full.

I didn't know it when I planned this route but for the most of the day I'm on what, for lack of a better term, is a rail trail. Only one that's open to cars. And which is in the process of being upgraded as a road and might soon lose many of the vestigial hints that it was once the railroad.

I had thought given the choice between paralleling the railroad or paralleling the expressway that, even though both of them would use viaducts and tunnels more than a normal road, the chances were the route alongside the railroad would still be relatively more gentle grades. I didn't realize I'd be riding on the original rail bed from the 1954 railway line.

The tunnels give it away. They've got the China Rail symbol carved in the keystone at the top of the arch. Once you notice the tunnels, you start noticing other things like the peculiarly smooth and gentle curves, the long straightaways, the narrowness of the steep cuts through bits that weren't quite tunnel material. Of course, I also cheated and found somebody old enough to know and asked but by the time I did that it was more about confirming what I already knew than it was about finding out information.

It's beautiful country made more beautiful by the fact that the sun is out in the sky and the sky has turned blue after what feels like an eternity of ugly gray days (but is really less than a week). 

Really the only thing I don't like about the ride is the tunnels. Most of them are deep enough that I have no option but to use my phone as a flashlight and just walk one foot in front of the other in front of the other through the Stygian black. Other than the occasional safety niche now on one side now on the other, there's really no way of telling how far I've gone or how long I've been underground.

As a general rule I don't like tunnels. Given my freakishly good low-light vision (I can still identify the colors of objects when many people can't even tell that there are objects) I had long assumed that this was because tunnels are dark and "dark" is not something that I'm especially used to encountering. However, it's just as dark (if not darker) in the former rail tunnels and I don't have that creeping icky feeling in my spine so it's perhaps something else like the echoes in a normal tunnel making it impossible to pinpoint which direction trucks and cars are coming from. 

The longest tunnel is controlled by a traffic light on a 200 second countdown. Even with the lights in the tunnel, it's still nowhere near long enough for me to get through. I stay in the absolute center of the road until I'm sure that the big cement truck sees me and, as I press myself flat against the wall, he slows down enough to inch his way past. Immediately after, I come to another one of the safety niches and suddenly realize that's exactly what those are for! 

Judging by the dump trucks and the construction work, this time next year this tunnel will be replaced by a long deep two lane hill cut.

Qinglinkou is one of those rebuilt ancient towns that used to be all kinds of important but which gradually declined as wheeled traffic became the most common way to move about in China. It's more 'authentic' looking than most as post-Earthquake the goal in restoration work was not only to fix damaged things but also to get rid of earlier less restorative restorations.

Like many ancient towns, however, there's nothing really really old to see in Qinglinkou. Their claim to fame, as it were, is a bunch of stone tablets which were heavily vandalized by the Red Army in the late 1930s with grafittis reading things like "Smash the Japanese Imperialists" and "A Woman Has the Right to Choose Who She Marries" deeply chiseled over top of the original inscriptions.

The best thing I can say about Qinglinkou is that it's sufficiently inconvenient in terms of easy access for tourism that it's not been overrun with gewgaw sellers and tour buses. They've got a few restaurants, a few parking lots, a few guesthouses, but mostly it's just a town that happens to have some old stuff if you feel like visiting.