Now that I'm back to having a better camera not on my phone than I've got on my phone, I'm wishing that the kinds of cameras that come with real lenses and all that impressive stuff also had the kind of processing power that phones have to make up for their garbage glass and other lack of range.
The five a.m. wake up call pretending to be from the National Lottery Center really pisses me off. It's not even a live person trying to scam me. I suppose I could have stayed on the line and seen if it went to a live person but I'm too angry. No one should be calling at this hour unless its an emergency and, as I currently have family in the hospital, I thought it might be an actual emergency.
I've recently noticed an uptick in spamscam phone calls to my Chinese number which is not to say that there's recently been an actual increase, just that disconnecting my bluetooth speaker to answer a call trying to sell me something is a lot more noticeable and a lot more annoying than when I'm working. I'm also get spamscam contacts adding me on WeChat for god only knows what purpose.
Between E'hu and Yongping Town there were a truly prodigious number of traditional roadhouses
I'm yet again finding that the provincial road which I've chosen on the basis of it clearly not being a national road on any of my electronic maps nor my paper one has been stealth transformed into a national road. It doesn't appear that too much has been done in the direction of unpleasantness but that it's more of an understanding that this is a high quality road that connects to other high quality roads. I'll get a bit of traffic near the beginning of my day's ride (before I head off onto small roads) but, by the time I make it to Wuyishan Town, everyone who isn't intentionally going up the mountain has been siphoned off onto the expressway.
Silly me, I take the oxbow road around the outside of Yongping Town [永平镇] instead of heading in to the town as I'd meant to do. This turns out to be to my advantage however as, from the National Road's bridge across the Qianshan River I am able to see an old bridge. It's a different, much older old bridge than the old bridge I would have taken if I'd taken the old road through town as I discover when I turn off, go into town, find the old bridge, and find that it is actually an old new bridge and not the old bridge I was looking at from the new bridge.
The little pavilion with benches in it in the middle of the bridge was the first thing I noticed. People around this area seem inordinately fond of traditional buildings with shade and benches.
The old bridge (as in the one that is actually old and not the one that recently was new) was built in 1741 which pleases me thoroughly as my initial guess of 19th century had been revised to 18th century before I found a number (online).
The old new bridge doesn't have an obvious date to be found anywhere which is clearly a ploy by the universe to foil me at my game of guessing the age of bridges.
I take a decent bit of time wandering through the old town which, unlike the old towns in Zhejiang, is kind of crumbling and not at all tourist facing. I find this infinitely preferable but, at the same time, if I were a resident, I can imagine thinking that cleaned up and prettified is better. A decent number of the older buildings are in such a condition that they can't really be modernized.
There just isn't really a whole lot that can be done once a building is in this condition
After a decent bit of a ramble around parts of Yongping that I might not have even noticed the existence of if I had come in on the road I'd intended to come in on and a great big lunch of soup noodles from a stall, I continued on my way on the main road until I got to a turnoff that allowed me to cross to the other side of the Qianshan as I headed south.
Traffic was immediately reduced from nearly nothing to nearly nonexistent and the number of things for me to stop and look at increased dramatically. It was already a good day and it was looking like it was going to shape up to be a very good day.
I'm not sure what things would have been like on the main road side of the river. I still would have had to have gone uphill but perhaps with more switchbacks and less settlements. Certainly, the sheer number of old buildings (not even counting Shitang Town's Old Street) which are scattered about this area seems to indicate that I'm on the original route and that the pre-expressway main road was an attempt to have a fast way for cars to go.
Shitang, which I totally wasn't expecting at all, has an old street which is lined on either side with old buildings including an especially lovely falling down mansion belonging to one of the nine(!) paper companies to have existed there in the 18th century.
Everything is going gradually uphill without much in the way of serious terrain until, as is to be expected, the quality of the road drops from concrete and asphalt to formerly might have been paved interconnected potholes and something that might be gravel. This is also the time that the scenery goes from the merely pretty to the downright amazing so I'm not really complaining, I'm just grousing.
There were a lot of farmhouses like this. I found this set particularly interesting as they had once upon a time had 拆 (to be demolished) spray painted on them and then, later on, someone decided to keep the historic buildings
When I get to Wuyishan Town (which used to be called something else but which they renamed a few years ago, perhaps in the hopes that people would accidentally travel there instead of Wuyishan City) I'm pretty wiped out. I don't realize just how tired I am until I nearly have a one-person crash while making a u-turn to get over to the restaurant where I'll have dinner.
There's a surprisingly large number of hotels for a town as small as this but, prior to the expressway, it would have been quite a decent bit of travel to get from here on south across Wuyishan Mountain and in to Fujian so they may have once had a bit more of a tourist and traveler economy than they do now. The place I pick, for no reason other than they had a ramp and I wouldn't have to carry my bike up the stairs to their front entrance, is mostly full with men doing something related to road construction (to the point that an office with a conference table has been installed on the second floor).
This is what I had to suffer through in the afternoon
I need to convince myself to stop trying to take photos without stopping. This is one of the few that I managed to get where everything that I wanted to be in focus was actually in focus.
I get a huge room for only 80 yuan and they let me use their washing machine too. Registration, which is done on their computer by me, is relatively quick and painless once I convince them to let me do it on the computer by myself.
As with the first place in Jiangxi, there is no way for my to add a picture even though the system demands a picture so I use the real world cheat code of creating a picture called "No Picture" in Windows Paint along with the text in Chinese "could not take a picture" and have the boss photograph the relevant pages of my passport and me holding my passport in case anyone comes along later and wants the picture that isn't there.
Today's ride: 52 km (32 miles) Total: 940 km (584 miles)
