I am very much in the home stretch before Chengdu. Problem is, I've still got well over a week before I ought to be in Chengdu and, other than editing photos and putting them in my journal, no real idea what I'd do sitting around in the city for a week. As a result, I'm taking the extra super duper scenic route where what ought to be a 28km ride is stretched out into just over 50 because the shortest distance between two points just gets me closer to the city.

I start the morning off wandering around the touristy bits of Dujiangyan that aren't inside the paid area. It's more than a little bit the Disneyfied version of an ancient town but, at least on a cold rainy day in November, it's not unpleasant. I don't say this often, but I could see myself revisiting this place. Especially if I had friends with me who don't have the kind of available travel time I have.

Pretty much everything that's actively in use has a strong "Ye Olde" vibe to it that lets you know it's mostly completely rebuilt. To the west of the actively "in use" area south of the main entrance, there's a half abandoned half deconstructed open mall type structure that looks like a 1980s version of Ye Olde China. It also looks, to my admittedly uneducated eye, like it may have suffered some earthquake damage but it could just be crumbly and unmaintained. 

During my wander on my way out of the tourist area, I do come across a few walled off buildings that, other than being walled off and spray painted "Dangerous Building" look almost entirely normal. Again, possibly damaged by the earthquake ten years ago or possibly just no longer in use structures that haven't been demolished yet.

The park promenade south of the South Bridge definitely used to have more shops and less park.

Since I'm trying not to constantly pull my phone out to stare at the maps and equally trying not to submit to the siren's call of having the GPS tell me where to go, I end up backtracking from quite a few dead ends but they are pretty dead ends and it's not like I'm in any great rush today.

The rain which had me ordering delivery for dinner last night and which is forecast again for today is currently nothing more than a heavy, scenic mist that occasionally turns in to a mizzle but is otherwise perfectly manageable with a silk undershirt, two regular jerseys, a long sleeved thermal jersey, two pairs of sleeves, a windbreaker, a thermal vest, and thermal bib tights.

I remember what it was like to be warm.

Once I get out of the scenic area, I end up on a fairly main road all the way to Zhongxing Town .I stop for lunch in Zhongxing and, after much squinting and zooming, decide that I'm going to go up Qingcheng Mountain on my way to Jiezi.

Prior to this trip, I'd never heard of Qingcheng Mountain. And although my initially planned route went fairly close to Qingcheng, it had looked from the maps to be too likely to be one of those expensive cul-de-sac type tourist destinations. Two months ago, when working on the translation for that massive tourism project whose Chinese source text I kept complaining about, Qingcheng Mountain was one of the destinations that I'd translated. Filtering out the repetitive inanities that every blipping Green Site in China had to use like "natural oxygen bar" and "an oasis of quiet away from the hustle and bustle of downtown", it actually sounded kind of neat.

Which it was. Is.

Could have done with the misty mizzle not deciding, once I was on the chilly downhill side of things to turn into drizzle. But, yeah, really pretty place. And although every single cluster of houses in the inhabited sections of the mountain seems to have been turned into a restaurant, teahouse, holiday retreat, summer escape, or resort, once I got past the big temples near the first entrance, it was basically just me and the trees and the dripping sky.

The number of places I could maybe possibly turn and the generally poor quality of signage had me running the GPS most of the time I was on the mountain. I'm usually pretty proud of my navigational abilities but driveways that look like roads and roads that look like tracks mean that I almost certainly would have gotten pretty lost otherwise.

Got into Jiezi and immediately understood why the cyclists I met in Qinglinkou had said that Qinglinkou, which I thought was quite commercialized, is a rare "basically uncommercialized ancient town". I initially tried to wend my way through the town in an attempt to bring myself up to the my preferred daily minimum of 50km but it was so blah that I ended up just heading for Huaiyuan—the next town south.

I wasn't quite halfway there and had already passed on two just off the road lodgings and was well on my way to passing up on a third when I realized that my hands and fingers weren't just cold, they'd actually progressed to being numb. At that point, I decided that the next hotel would be my hotel for the evening.

The next hotel, 683 meters down the road according to the GPS, was not my hotel for the evening because the first restaurant after the next hotel had a hotel just across the street from them.

I wasn't quite as bad as I'd been in Shilou but I was hardly what you'd call in "great" shape even after warming up some over dinner. In fact, it would take two hours of fitful napping under the comforter with the electric mattress pad and in room heater running before I realized that the window was still open.

The room got much warmer after that.