D8: 黄宅→横溪

October 13, 2019

Spectacular

This temple is undergoing renovations and the Pusa have been blindfolded so they won't see the mess around them.

No single thing that I saw or did today was spectacular. Few of the things I saw or did even rose to the quality of being wonderful and even less of them managed to hit amazing. And yet, when you take the sum total of all the things that happened, it was in fact quite a spectacular day indeed.

I intended to use my computer last night, to pound out a thousand characters or so on the book project. I've got something like four months left before it's due and only six or seven solid days of work to complete but I really ought to get about to finishing it. Especially as the Corporate Client is making noises about shortly sending me a volume of work that will require me to conscientiously spend an hour or three every night before I sleep doing my actual job.

Instead of using my computer, I collapsed on the bed exhausted and achy and went to sleep before it was even 10pm. This, in turn, led to my waking early enough that I at least pulled my computer out to work on my tour journal but ugh the book. It requires thinking. I'll procrastinate on it later.

Peeking through a locked door at the frames upon which the crêpe paper skins of dragons and lions are built for yearly celebrations.

One of the old buildings in the hidden downtown cluster by the well

A Daoist good luck/fortune charm depicting Taizu.

If you'd like to contribute to my ability to go on tours and write about all the cool stuff I see, products made using the above image happen to be for sale on my RedBubble Shop.

Last night, the hotel owner gave me directions on where to go looking in the morning for a seamstress, and, although it took me a few circuits and u-turns, I found her. The problem with having favorite jerseys and with "randomly" deciding on what to wear for the next three months by picking and choosing among my favorite jerseys meant that the newest shirt is 5 years old, the oldest is 14, and two of the four have broken zips that I discovered only after I left.

Since one of them is my thermal long sleeve that I traded from Polygon Sweet Nice at the 2007 Tour of Hainan, this means I've been wearing and washing the VeloChina jersey every day. Even with laundry soap, however, it's gotten to where I really really want to change my shirt.

I had breakfast and coffee while watching a pair of women haul buckets of water up from a well fronting the main square and literally beat their laundry with sticks. It looked quite labor intensive but, at the same time, was clearly a choice they were making as the likelihood of any of the nearby houses not having plumbed in water was pretty low.

Part of the world's huge economic growth of the 20th and 21st centuries was caused by women's liberation

I mean this not in the sense of the right to vote or the right to divorce (which are also very important)

but in the sense of not taking multiple hours per day to cook or clean.

A laundromat on the other side of the square from the well and the women pictured above. At 5元 for a standard load of laundry, it's actually kind of pricey.

When I finally got around to dawdling my way back to the seamstress, it turned out that not only were the zipper pulls missing but the zips themselves were bad and she was waiting on my approval to completely replace them. At 15元 per jersey, I thought her prices kind of steep but if it meant getting to wear a different shirt tomorrow, it would be money well spent.

My next round of dawdling was spent checking out the old buildings in the cluster around the square. Since I didn't exactly have the highest hopes for my day beyond this particular cluster of old buildings, and since I needed to give the seamstress both enough time to finish my zips and to finish whatever she was doing for the customer before me, I spent a lot of time reading the Rules for preservation of old buildings, on Fire Safety, and about minutae such as the honored members of the village who had served in the armed forces and other such dross on display in the Youxin Hall [又新堂].

It was okay and if today had been like the past few days, it probably would have been the highlight of the day. However, today was not like the past few days, and, as a result, it was merely "okay".

So far as I could tell, there was no correlation between only having a black and white photo from being a teenaged soldier and having actually died while serving.

A few of the old buildings were getting some necessary repairs but, by and large, it was really just a few big compounds that were genuinely old. Everything that was a hodgepodge of the owners replacing parts Ship of Theseus style until you could tell that yes indeed this definitely was an old village without there actually being much of anything old about it.

Having grown up in a historic district where pretty much nothing has any kind of sign on it telling you who once lived here or what important thing once happened here (mostly because nothing all that important ever happened there), I can't fault any historic district in China for not having the history that they don't have many records for on display for the people who aren't coming to visit.

Besides which, the historic districts that do have displays, frequently have such uninformative and badly written displays (in any language) that they may as well have no display at all.

Eventually, I figured enough time had passed so I went back to the seamstress to pick up my jerseys. Since she wasn't quite finished yet, I ended up also noticing and then buying a handful of epically odd patches for me and my friends on the grounds that this was likely to be the best I'd get all day and I should take some color where and when I find it.

I'm gonna sew the Retarded Tiger to one of my panniers

I hadn't been on the Truck Road but a short while when I saw the sign for the Shangshan Relic Site [上山遗址] 1.8km away. The attempt to prettify the intersection with a fake falling apart building made of rammed earth and decorated with potsherds did nothing to convince me to take the detour; the Baidu Baike entry on the other hand.... it had magic words.

Words like "museum", "Neolithic culture site", and "free".

Last tour that left from Shanghai I thoroughly enjoyed the Liangzhu Museum to the north and west of Hangzhou. Same province and same general topic. What were the chances it would also be excellent?

All told, most of what made the museum interesting were the life size dioramas in the (original?) excavation pits of the archaeologists doing archaeologist things. That and the grandpa who somehow figured out how to play solitaire on what was clearly supposed to be an interactive educational kiosk.

I'm not sure which part I like better, the wax statues of Real Archaeologists doing Archaeologist Things or

that, just like statues in a temple, they've had good luck coins thrown at them

Actual bits excavated at this site rather than a reproduction

If nothing else had happened today, the things I learned (and subsequently forgot) about rice cultivation and the age of the Shangshan Culture would have been the highlight.

But the way out from the Neolithic Archaeology Site Museum took me past more old buildings and two notably historic temples of the actually unlocked variety.

The first old building was one of those where I basically wandered into someone's home and started admiring the decorations. Sure the door was wide open and sure the local Tourism Board had gone so far as to put up a welcome sign (in three languages) encouraging random passersby to come on in and take a look, but that didn't make it any less weird.

It was still someone's home. They still lived there. Did their laundry there. Ate their meals there. Slept there.

The first of the two temples was undergoing some active renovation work which meant that there were various locals around for reasons that weren't prayer and I was able to ask about some particular oddities in the art that just didn't make sense to me in the hopes of having my Curiousity Itch scratched.

However, it didn't make sense to them either.

I suppose this is kind of gratifying in that I'm not dumb for not knowing. But at the same time, I still want to know why. And I don't know why.
This bugs me.
Alot.

I very definitely should not be allowed to be wandering around this place with it in this condition but no one is stopping me

I also shouldn't be climbing over things. That's certainly something that should be forbidden.

As a not particularly religious person from a religion that doesn't go in for 'idolatry', I unironically love the way that many people treat the idols as something more than just "things".

Leaving Temple #1 (太祖庙), the GPS wanted to send me straight back to the Truck Road but there was a fairly old sign at the intersection indicating the way to Temple #2 (九皋庵) so I decided to go there instead.

This put me on what are now farm roads and village roads but which, in a bygone day, when people traveled by horse and foot and wheelbarrows, this might very well have been the main thoroughfare. Whatever the case, there were far more not actually open to the public old buildings decorated with all sorts of Cultural Revolution era graffiti to distract me on my way from #1 to #2 than I would have gotten out on the Road.

大办农业 is four characters out of the September 1975 "全党动员，大办农业，为普及大寨县而奋斗" [All Party members should mobilize to do a good job at agricultural production and strive to universalize the techniques of Dazhai County] slogan which was used as the theme of the Conference on How the Agricultural Industry can Learn from Dazhai. I'd previously thought that Dazhai was a Great Leap Forward potemkin village but it seems that studying Dazhai's impossible successes and figuring out how to apply them to your own agricultural work didn't actually begin until 1963.

The newer of the two slogans says 安全用电人人有责 [the safe use of electricity is everyone's responsibility]. I thought maybe if I asked the neighbors who had grown up with this written on the building next they might know the words but they were only able to puzzle out a little more than me. 普及大寨 X X X 在 X X 领导是关键 [In order to universalize the achievements of Dazhai, proper leadership is the key]

No one could even begin to guess at this

As I got closer to Temple #2, all directional signage disappeared on the basis that anyone heading that way would of course be traveling slowly enough to be asking at every alley and lane. However, by this point, my GPS had figured out that I didn't want the Truck Road and was willing to take me to the city via not-the-Truck-Road along a route that happened to include the temple. Which is good, cause I never figured out how to pronounce the name and, had I been forced to ask for directions, wouldn't have been able to.

Two years of trying to take not terrible photos with a terrible camera has led to considerable improvements in my skill as a photographer

Huge modern looking murals to characters from The Water Margin

The particularly notable thing about these carvings is how easily reachable they would have been to Red Guard vandals and yet they remain intact

But why is he chainsawing fire wood at the temple?

Upon leaving the temple and crossing a small bridge next to a smaller and much much older (17th century maybe) bridge, I suddenly found myself in cityland's ugly cousin factory sprawl among the ranks of student drivers taking their final test before licensing.

Took me a very long time to find anywhere to pee or eat and when I did it was a most ordinary and unsatisfactory bit of chain fast food cause I was starting to get grumpy and irrationally picky, had passed multiple food options for no good reason at all, and had realized I was being grumpy and irrational.

Leaving the city, I turned south at the most extraordinary intersection with the coolest traffic lights I've ever seen. Cool enough that I actually sat through a cycle of lights just to admire their design.

And found that my Provincial Road had become a National Road and that I was still going to have trucks and traffic and nastiness to suffer.

Thinking I would take this opportunity to make my mind up about turning off for water or fruit, I stopped at the first intersection past the Intersection and spent a while investigating my route in detail. I was too far to conveniently backtrack and, what's more, the Road up ahead had a tunnel! Not just any tunnel either, it was over a kilometer long and looked to be truck infested.

However, there was an original road up over the ridge so I pressed on.

Got off to walk across the Road to take the old way and stayed off until I hit the top.

You can see here on the first very steep bit where the road used to go before the Road below cut through the hill. I felt no shame in walking as an ebike rider made his passenger dismount and then zigzagged his way up.

A sharp steep curve where a landslide took out part of this road

Looking down at the tunnel Road I'm not on

Zoomed my way down the other side barely stopping for anything as I was kind of tired and more than a little hungry. There was a Memorial Garden for Chairman Mao that teetered on the edge between heartfelt sincerity and schizophrenic obsession, a locked up ancient temple, a stone bridge with some interesting carvings, and the first of the two towns where I could potentially spend the night.

And they were having their yearly Town Fair.

Today's ride: 37 km (23 miles)
Total: 573 km (356 miles)

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