February 26, 2016
Guilin Airport
in and out of the city
The day’s humble goal is a hotel in downtown Guilin which doubles as a travel agency, one that Robert the ever-helpful manager back in Xing’an has written down on a piece for me: Air Hotel, or as it should have been translated, Aviation Hotel.
Getting to Guilin just means following the main road right in front of the 80rmb hotel, riding through Daxuzhen and then on for another 15 or 20 kilometres: it isn’t going to be a glorious ending to my not-so-Long Ride.
The market area taking up one of Daxuzhen’s side streets offers up the best chance of steamed buns, so I make a right and sure enough the now familiar large circular aluminium containers stacked six high can be seen. The woman running it also sells warm soya milk and I have a couple of cups of that, too, standing just in front of the stall as people walk past with chickens in cages, vegetables for sale or those just passing time, with nothing better to do at around 9:00 AM on a Friday morning in this run of the mill town.
It's a surprise to find a crispy new bicycle path on the outer edge of Daxuzhen. It feels like riding on a red sandpaper carpet, the gritty texture crunching slightly as my wheels roll over its surface. There's only me cycling along and a freshly painted wooden sign has – in English only – Bicycle Road, makes me think it's aimed at foreign tourists heading out to see the scenic spot I just visited, but it isn’t obvious where anyone can rent a bike.
At least a dozen stalls loaded with plastic dishes of strawberries are stacked in round pyramids lining a 100m section of the road. It's hard to resist. After a bit of pantomime, a woman sells me a bag full and I ride a short distance to a spot where it's possible to sit and eat my way through what I can, which turns out to be only around half. The remainder then swing back and forth in the plastic bag that's slung over the end of my handlebar as I pedal on.
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Karst peaks appear again on the edge of Guilin, as do large industrial complexes, which look vacant. A highway junction puts an end to the bike path for a while, but it starts again in the form of a service road a couple of kilometres after and the ride is pretty much OK, albeit one which doesn’t get me very excited. It's basically going past 15km of ribbon development before hitting the city's suburbs.
Finding the Aviation Hotel is pretty easy, thanks to the written text I show people. The agent quotes me 2,300rmb for a one-way flight, but 2,000 for a three-month return. That doesn’t take much pondering.
She's taken aback when I ask how far it was to the airport. She says a bus takes 50 minutes, so I reckon that’d means at least two hours by bike. My flight isn’t until 8:30PM, which gives me around six hours to get there. It's just a matter of tracing the main highway west, and I know there's a service road adjacent to it, making things pretty safe and straightforward.
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By the time I wheel my bike into the terminal, it’s taken me around 2.5 hours. It must have been around 40km. None of it could be described as quality touring, but the idea of getting on a bus with a bunch of anxious tourists with my bike squashed amid a stack of suitcases to then simply twiddle my thumbs in the terminal for a several hours didn’t appeal.
The manager in the KFC inside the departure area gives me a large cardboard box, just the right size to squeeze my two pairs of panniers in, plus my big, red Crocs, the small tripod and tent poles. I then make a bit of a pig's ear wrapping my bike frame with the cling-film bought few days ago and that, basically, is that, apart from forking out for the excess baggage charge for being way over the 23kg allowance. Oh, and the three-month return I'd paid for turns out to be just two weeks when I tryd to change the return date. It kind of goes with the visa misinformation and puts an end to the idea of coming back after a couple of months. Long Ride-wise, it really is game over. At least for a while.
Today's ride: 40 km (25 miles)
Total: 1,332 km (827 miles)
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