D25: 永泰→梧塘

November 2, 2019

I'm amused to note that the far left picture in this panorama is slightly blurred from a low shutter speed. Since I was standing still taking pictures of buildings, I have no idea how I managed that.

I have a mountain today. A rather big one at that.

Despite the couple days of rest in Fuzhou and the minimalist luggage I'm carrying this trip (save for the extra pounds that reappeared around my waistline between the end of last year's trip and the beginning of this one), I'm not really ready to do mountains. For one thing, Fujian takes a rather Vietnamese approach to going up and over without much in the way of switchbacks. For another, presuming that I could get my damn Alfine-11 to consistently stay in the granny gear, I really don't have a low enough granny.

I am going to do what I can do within reason to try to make the Alfine work but I'm pretty sure, come March 2021 and the start of Amsterdamage—the Great Ride from Amsterdam to Haikou—I will be sporting a Rohloff in the back. With the choices I made in kitting out this bike, my thought was that if I totally hated planetary gears for touring, I could switch back to a derailleur setup and move this stuff to a city bike, and if I liked planetary gears, I could—at some point in the future—switch to a Rohloff and move this stuff to a city bike.

A haphazard little shrine tucked between a hill cut and a new boulevard. It has a notice that's all of about 2 hours old saying that it needs to be removed.

For all that they hurt, mountains sure are pretty

My thinking with regards to "some point in the future" was intended to be farther future than a year and a half from now but I wasn't expecting to simultaneously like planetary gears and also want to tear my hair out in frustration from the annoyances with the Alfine. In addition to my granny automatically shifting itself back into second gear without my input after only a few pedal strokes, the gear that seems to not engage is back. Although my shifting otherwise remains nice and crisp, the lack of problem with the two real problems managed to last for one full day of riding only.

Whatever is going on with the lack of engagement, it keeps changing position. It's mostly around the 4th or 5th position but it's also been 10th gear as well. I want to experiment to see if the pedals suddenly spinning real fast is me actually engaging a much lower gear than what I ought to be engaging based on the order of shifts but at the same time, since it's clearly a symptom of something being wrong, I'm sensibly avoiding it and rapidly changing to something else whenever it happens.

Two shiny modern buildings, one of them finished, one of them quasi abandoned

I strongly consider checking out the temple I can see from my hotel room window but it appears that if I go for a little bit of exploration, I'll have to backtrack to get on to the bridge that crosses the water and there are just so many interesting and historic temples in Fujian (particularly when compared to Zhejiang) that somebody could easily just go to temple after temple after temple documenting the changes in local religion.

So I cross the bridge, get myself some breakfast, and sensible head out of town to the cries of the GPS telling me it's reclaculating and I'm going the wrong way. Having done a bit of Greenway viaduct and switchbacks in the dark last night and having seen the under construction Greenway ramp in Nanping, I want to check out what a finished ramp looks like and I know, from seeing it lit up at night, that there's a switchbacked freestanding ramp up to the pagoda on the hill (which, like every other urban pagoda this trip, I'm not going to).

This leads me to some gnarly little farm roads that even my habit of taking the least convenient road possible would never have led me to if not for the GPS ensuring that I could get through.

I pop out on some big empty modern thing in the middle of the new city and take a few boulevards of similar width and traffic levels until I get to the road that actually takes me out of the city. Somewhere in there, I've gotten all turned about and I actually have to look at the maps to make sure that the GPS is in fact taking me where I want to go because it feels in my head like this is heading east rather than south but the GPS is right and my mental map is wrong.

One of a very small number of houses in the park section of the mountain road

Entrance Gate to a Waterfall Tourism Site

I particularly like the way the ticket booth is carved into a nearby boulder

It's a lovely mountain. Even before I get to the bits that are a nature preserve, it's lovely. Rather uncomfortably steep in places but I never get off and walk and the one time an oversized electric scooter passes me, turns around, and comes back to give me a helping hand, I yell at him to "stop stop stop stop" because no matter how much I'm going to be tired tomorrow (or tonight) I'd rather do it myself.

I stop at a tourist center and scenic overlook at the top of the first climb to get some water; I figure that I've been overlooking the scenery plenty while pedaling and don't actually go over to take a look. Quick whizz down that, even though I never got to the point of properly learning all the complicated rules, I note probably isn't quite long enough to make the two climbs count as separate cols and then I'm back to more up up up. And up. And up. And up.

I'd marked the way to avoid the tunnel but when I get to the turnoff, it's so steep and I'm so wiped that I decide to put my headlight, my confidence, and the general habit of wealthier provinces to light their tunnels to the test and go on through. Turns out that all of the periodic large trucks I've been sharing the road with are all taking the turnoff that avoids the tunnel and that wherever they are ending up is quite close by so I actually end up getting significantly less traffic by choosing the tunnel road. Enough less in fact that I'm able to zig zag my way back and forth from one side of the road to the other and give myself the switchbacks that aren't there.

Things get steeper as I approach the tunnel

Sunsets are so much prettier now that I'm not afraid of riding after dark

Building a wall with stones all higgledy piggledy like this has got to involve a great deal of skill. I'd say about a third of the stone buildings around here have at least some portion of their stonework done this way.

I only have an hour of sunlight left to me by the time I hit the tunnel and am officially heading down the mountain and, while I'm increasingly comfortable with what my headlight can do, I've got at least two and a half hours of riding to the next obvious place with lodging so I don't spend a whole lot of time stopping and checking things out. This is as much because I want to limit the amount of time I spend riding in the dark as it is because the down just keeps on coming and I'm hardly never going slow enough that it seems reasonable to come to a full stop for a picture.

And then it's dark.

Really dark.

Dark enough that I'll be prompted, when I get to tonight's destination, to finally pull out that string of USB powered fairy lights Mango gave me and light up my rack.

What on earth is up with the statues of goats doing goat things in places where there would likely be real goats?

Old buildings in a town on the other side of the mountain

Practice Family Planning; Benefits the Country, Benefits the People.

For some reason almost every bridge on this stretch either recently had one lane's concrete seam jackhammered out to expose the rebar or was in the process of doing so. The concrete didn't look rotten so I'm guessing there was some reason bridge integrity needed to be inspected.

At one point, I pass through a fairly large cluster of buildings with signs about natural hot springs and am sorely tempted to stop and find out if they also have lodging but the one time I see a person sitting outside and I stop to ask him, he turns out to be a little kid and the discovery that I can't ask him uses up all the necessary fucks to give when it comes to asking any kind of questions before eating so I just keep going.

Even after eating I'm still kind of tetchy. Or maybe the person who saw me at the restaurant and tried to get me to come to a specific guesthouse (which he maybe worked at?) was that annoying. In any case, I end up at the closest hotel like building to me paying 80 yuan for a nice soft bed in what's rather clearly a partitioned off former part of an overlarge hallway.

I would love to know what the Chinese do to make eggplant taste so amazing

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,568 km (974 miles)

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