I may or may not have intentionally made a point of routing myself through the town of Wutang so that I could make the pun "Wutang Town ain't nothing to mess with" except that then I realized everyone I know who knows Wutang Clan and would find that funny doesn't actually have enough Chinese to realize that I spent last night in Wutang. I am sad.
Back in the day, when I put my journals on that other site, I seem to have been a fairly popular writer. At the very least, despite hardly anyone commenting in my guestbook, I had a decently high enough hit count that I was actually able to get sponsored gear on two different tours. Also, although it was only five or ten people over the years, I had a number of occasions where I met someone face to face and got told stories out of my own journals because they were so very impressed by what that guy had did. (Apparently, even with the periodic mention of having boobs and periods and stuff like that, my tendency to not have any pictures of me, assuming I even get around to uploading pictures, makes everyone assume I'm male.)
First temple of the day, it's off to the side of the embankment that the road (which is literally a "high" way at this point) is built up on and very obviously locked so I don't go down and check it out
I can't imagine that two stone lions as modern as these are at risk for being stolen and, therefore, must assume that they are in cages because people around here are just that bad at driving.
I should have realized that the Ancestral Home of anyone who died more than 500 years ago wasn't going to be very ancestral or homelike or interesting.
For all the rocky relationships that the Chinese government is having with religion, the fact that this is a ceiling painting in a random village temple tells you everything you need to know about the state of religious rediscovery among the populace
In northern China, the astonishingly bad art by people who clearly have never seen animals is mostly of tigers. In Fujian, it seems to primarily be deer.
The bits of this year's tour that get up close and personal with the coastline are inspired by Peter's journal. Since he made a point of really following the coast in ways that even my allergy to straight lines can't handle, I doubt that I'll actually be coming across any of the exact same places as him, but ... perhaps. In fact, it looks like today will be one of those days.
At least, according to Peter's maps it will be.
But, even though Peter was using my beloved StarMaps (the most accurate paper maps you can get of China) in combination with Baidu Ditu (so no VPN necessary), he wasn't tracking his exact location. He was writing where he thought he was and, as it would turn out, this was not always where he was.
Matsu along with her tamed guardian demons Qianliyan and Shunfeng'er
There's a fair amount of Matsu worship in Hainan which is part of how I know that even though she kind of sort of looks Guanyin-ish, she definitely is NOT the Goddess of Mercy
Despite lots of people telling me I should go down the peninsula to Meizhou Island, I do not go down the peninsula to Meizhou Island because even though I think the Fujian interpretation of temples to the Ocean Goddess Matsu are mind-blowingly cool, I'm pretty sure the actual hometown of Matsu in her human incarnation is going to be over the top to the extreme and probably not all that interesting to me compared to a nice rural thing with some peculiar or badly done folk art. Peter's descriptions of his visit the Meizhou Island (which I don't reread until long after my decision not to go there) probably colored my intentions even if they weren't fresh in my mind.
On Google and AMap, there's a tiny little seawall road stuck out in something that shows as still being water. I'm heading for that. That's today's goal. Even if Peter described it as "dreary light industrial landscape", even if he said that it was "four lane road is on top of an embankment about 6 metres above high tide level", I'm going to be relatively close to someplace that someone else whose journals I've read has been and gosh darn it, I'm going to go to that place!
But first, I have to get there.
Smuggling or illegal immigration will be punished severely. Jointly Build a Peaceful ocean area. Awards given for information.
And getting there, in my usual not very straight line fashion, involves a number of detours. I'm beginning to really like this whole thing where I've got the GPS running all the time. It means that when I turn off the road I 'should' be on because I see an old street that looks like it might have breakfast (it didn't), I don't need to turn around or pull my phone out and check to see if it goes through because, after grumbling recalculating, at me a few times, the GPS already knows that it goes through.
There's a Matsu temple with some gorgeous paper lanterns and a couple of clearly important demonlike figures on standalone shrines off to either side. I don't recognize either of them but will learn later on this evening that they are 千里眼 [1000-Mile-Eyes] and 顺风耳 [Ears-That-Listen-to-Favorable-Winds].
Back on the main road, I'm looking looking looking for breakfast and now my stomach has started making some gurgles that make me think I should look for either a public toilet or a breakfast place that looks likely to have a toilet. As a result, I end up getting a bucket of chicken at a Wallace (of all the ways they could have translated 华莱士, this is only slightly less stupid than their previous name CHLS with the H being some kind of squiggly logo thing that looked like a K).
You ever get the feeling you aren't supposed to be somewhere? Yeah, me neither.
After exiting this bit of construction site to some very appreciative comments by people who didn't realize bikes could be ridden up such steep slopes (they weren't very steep), a security guard turned me back from continuing to ride on the construction causeway and made me take the 'road'
The recent change to have an English name that can be pronounced bolsters my certainty that this chain is going to be one of the first Chinese chains to go international. On the one hand, unlike their previous English name, it's obvious how this one is pronounced. On the other hand, it sounds really dumb saying "I had lunch at a Wallace". On the gripping hand, chances are pretty good that everyone will just call it by something vaguely approximating the pronunciation of the Chinese name.
There's a positively ancient bridge right next to the Wallace and photographing that takes a bit of my time. Then, an old street to take me to what very well may be some of my first visits to actually pre-scheduled detours (out of the 700 and some odd scheduled points for this tour). That gets me to a bridge that looks kind of 1980s but which has four Guardian statues (two at either end of the bridge) who have been ensuring safe passage over this piece of water ever since 1334.
Following this, I wiggly my way through the nearby village across another old bridge (inscribed as having been "rebuilt" in 1968 but no indication of when it was originally built) to the Ancestral Home of some Imperial Concubine that's really got absolutely nothing to do with her other than geographically being the place she may have been born and which is utterly gauche and kitsch and hideous in the way anything Chinese that was developed with an eye towards tourism in the 1990s is.
As a general rule, stone lions and other guardian beasts come in pairs of male and female. You can tell this one is female because she has a cub climbing on her.
Sure, it's currently being used (as are many large village temples) as the neighborhood senior center but money has clearly been poured into prettying this up over a number of decades by rather a lot of people who have absolutely no aesthetic sense whatsoever. (I'd like to point out that although not very many Chinese people have left reviews for it, they generally seem to have the same opinion as me.)
Back to a main road, it's not really a very large road but I seem to have found myself, yet again, on a stealth upgraded National Road. It's running parallel around the outside of some townlet so I end up passing the backside of a temple and noticing a temporary stage for a puppet show and, with permission, I stop and take a look at the puppets while rather pointedly not trying to find out what's going on at the temple because I caught a glimpse of white and I think it might be a funeral rather than a wedding.
I follow the GPS hither and thon, through a large town and out again, on to a big road and off again. Along the little road that probably isn't the one the GPS initially thought I should go on but which is certainly better than anything I "ought" to be on in terms of having things to look at (though maybe not in effectively getting from Point A to Point B) I catch an opera being performed in daylight as well as all kinds of wall paintings from the last 10 to 15 years before eventually hitting Peter's "dreary light industrial landscape" which is indeed quite dreary.
The sallow faced 'man' with his tongue out is some kind of judge who determines your position in the afterlife
Because I'm going downhill quite fast, I miss the turn the GPS says I should take to get to the seawall road and have all kinds of bother getting over to it because, for something that's as big and developed as Peter wrote, it certainly doesn't connect to anything.
Because it's not as big and developed as Peter wrote.
It will become as big and developed as Peter wrote somewhere down the line but not here.
Here, it's basically a dirt track.
Nearing the part where I finally give up and go in search of pavement, I start getting to some inactive but not quite completely abandoned construction for Phase II of Stage C of the North End of the Seawall Road but, by that point, the sun is threatening to set and even though I'm liking my headlight, I'm not liking the idea of needing it while jouncing around on this mess.
The Chinese approach to making sure people realize a bridge has weight limits is to make it really hard for people who weigh too much to get onto the bridge
As I come into town, I pull over at a motorcycle repair place thinking that I'd lost the bolt holding my right front rack on while on the dirt road only to discover that it had merely gotten very very loose. My fear that the lone bolt wasn't going to be enough to keep the rack in place (because the rack is made to be held by at least two and preferably three bolts) means that I've got two heavy duty zip ties as well as the strap that holds my luggage and, very likely, would be able to limp to the next closest repair shop even if I did shake a bolt loose.
Dinner is beef noodles at a place that is trying very hard to look like a standardized fast food chain but which is a little too generic on their menu photos to actually be a chain, and, once I'm all fed and ready to be nice to people lodging is the hotel next door who are "pretty sure" they can't take foreigners, who would really rather I do the sensible thing and go down the street to someplace more expensive that "knows what to do", but who are convinced to try, and who end up being really gosh darn nice folks.
The second and third floors are already occupied so we have to go up to the fourth floor. I'm tired from the day, carrying my panniers, and have permanent lung damage from the accident that broke my leg, but I'm still not breathing half as heavily as the skinny lady hotel owner. Once up there, it's discovered that she forgot to bring the key with her. After the previous episodes of lockable hotel rooms not being unlockable, I do make sure in advance that she hasa key, and that she knows the key works before I lock the door on my way to go across the street and buy some bag snacks.
I like this semi-traditional style of opera advertisement much better than the former Hainan style of scrawled characters on a broadsheet or the current Hainan style of "low budget movie poster".
