D27: 枫亭→东岭

November 4, 2019

Notice from the Food and Drug Administration: The nation is particularly strict with regards to the management of food grade salt. Wholesale sales of food grade salt without a license for the wholesale sale of food grade salt or making a wholesale purchase of non food grade salt and adding it into the food grade salt supply line are both illegal behaviors. For questions or to make a report, please call.

Again, my day starts off with a breakfast from Wallace because fried chicken sandwiches have a sufficiency of protein and carbs and fat, because they come with fizzy caffeine, and because they are still open long after the proper breakfast stalls have closed because this is my vacation and I'm not waking up and getting on the road at 7:30am.

When I show up, although they are open, there are still two e-bikes parked inside. After I get my food, the manager type looking guy moves both e-bikes outside and takes the chargers with him so there's no particular reason for them to be parked inside, just that they were. It's partly on the basis of there currently being vehicles inside the store and partly on the basis of my still being uncomfortable leaving my life out on the sidewalk (where I keep reminding myself no one is going to touch it) that I wheel my bike indoors as I come in. He keeps telling me I need to leave the bike outside but I use my mind control powers mixed with a healthy dose of just plain ignoring what he's saying about my bike while triggering the "customer ordering food" script and somehow it comes to pass that I'm sitting down, with food, and my bike is still inside.

The cleanliness of the streams around here is astonishing

Although this trip has been remarkably free of ordinary rubbish and litter, there have been an incredible number of randomly thrown away couches in places they don't belong. After this one, I've decided I'm going to start documenting them.

After he moves the e-bikes out, he gives me a couple of passive aggressive dirty looks but they have about as much of an effect on me as water does a duck's feathers. It's not like the bike (or me for that matter) are even particularly hobo looking right now. I know, from past experience that when he said "take the bike outside" he meant put it out on the sidewalk in the marked box for bike parking which doesn't work when you don't have a kickstand; if I'm going to get dirty looks, I may as well get dirty looks and have my bike indoors.

I head out of town, following the GPS. Sometimes I miss turns unintentionally. Other times, intentionally. Only rarely do I turn back to go the way it was originally telling me to go. At one point, when trying to make a left hand turn across traffic, some one crossing at the same pedestrian intersection starts talking to me as both of us are in the middle of traffic. And he won't stop. Twenty Questions: Foreigner in China Edition. Eventually, there's a break in traffic and I just get back on my bike and sprint across the road.

I feel like stonework like this has got to be really hard to do

In terms of construction technique (if not material) it could be a modern concrete and cinderblock structure.

Similar construction but modern materials on the closer semi finished and unfinished buildings, great big blocks of granite on the middle building and then a modern structure ON TOP of that

Of course, he's going the same way I am. Fortunately, his vehicle (which may or may not have been powered, I don't remember) is slower than mine and although he calls out for me to slow down and let him catch up, he never catches up.

Now I'm on a nice little concrete road alongside an incredibly clean waterway. I'm not sure when it started happening but China has been tackling its pollution problems in ways that are starting to become visibly noticeable.

As recently as 2013, when trying to find a garbage bin, I was told to just drop it in the gutter. But in 2014, I dropped an ice cream wrapper on the ground and was glared at. In 2015, when riding with Myf, there were the surprise garbage cans in the countryside that caused me to realize that small smoldering piles of rubbish on the outskirts of villages had mostly stopped being a thing. Then, in 2017, I was alongside the Yangtze while it was in flood and the trees along the banks weren't coated in trash (the way the Gwynn's Falls is every time it floods). In 2018, a trip to Vietnam reminded me of how bad things used to be and gave me comparison points when I recrossed the border. This past summer, the tidal swamp near my apartment was reseeded with mangroves.

Image not found :( — Low quality not very old antiques piled high on the road outside a shop that I would have thought a junk dealer except for the high quality antiques inside. I kind of wonder what stuff like this gets used for.

Finally! Peter's road atop the seawall!!

China still has plenty of serious ecological issues; probably more of them than I could easily count. But, when it comes to surface things like starting to require that people sort garbage, quite some impressive changes have been made in ways that are not just top-down edicts but actual changes in people's actual behavior.

The morning start off with a mix of medium sized thoroughfares and giant trafficky boulevards. Since the GPS is telling me where to go, I don't really have to pay attention to where I am beyond surface enjoyment of my environment. Only a few days have gone by and I can't really say exactly where I was just that I was there. I'm pretty sure I don't like that. But I'm equally sure that I really like the not having to constantly stop and check where I am and check where it is in relationship to where I want to be.

The countryside around these parts looks fairly like ordinary Chinese countryside with lots of two and three storey buildings of a style that can, at best, be charitably described as "ugly boxes". What's odd about these ugly boxes though is how many of them are built all or in part with big honking slabs of granite and other local stone. In the case of one partially finished building that I poke my head in, I can see that different grades of stone are used even in places where I would expect poured concrete.

Pushing the water around each individual 'field' to agitate it so that nice fine crystals would be formed

Across a mucking big highway, the old town street that I saw on the map and pointed myself at turns out to be a dud as does the first likely point of interest but the abandoned Farmers, Workers, and Soldiers Cinema across the road from the likely point of interest's marked location more than makes up for my coming this way.

The likely point of interest turns out to be two entries for the same location with one entry shown in the wrong place so, when I get to the second place, I've also gotten to the first place. In form, function, and style, it's not very interesting. Those information placards which I can read (as many of them are intended for possible Taiwanese visitors and are written in Traditional) are, however, fascinating. One thinks of revolution as a young man's business but the guy that brought the Communist Party to this town while fleeing the White Terror was already in his 40s.

He then set up a salt company and salt fields that funneled money to the Communists.

This guy is basically sweeping the crystallized salt into piles

I figure these are food grade salt fields since there's no reason to take such extreme care for industrial salt

I haven't re-read Mark Kurlansky's Salt since I first read it back in 2004 and probably should since it's what sparked my interest in noticing things like warnings about selling illegal salt. (Which, to be fair, given my interest in noticing things like warnings against playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors" or carrying cadaver parts on the bus, I probably would have eventually noticed anyways.)

Just my luck, the next place the GPS sends me is across the salt fields which are still in use today. I take my good sweet time about getting out of the salt fields and on to the road I'm supposed to be on because this is the third time I've been in an active salt field and it's completely unlike the previous two (the first was an industrial field, the second was a heritage field). At what I'm reasonably sure is a food grade pile of salt from the care the workers are taking in producing fine even crystals without sand or other contaminants, I snag myself a double handful of salt to give to a chef friend of mine who has a bit of an obsession with salt pairings.

Now I'm on the wide "seawall that isn't really a seawall" road that Peter wrote about and it's just as fascinating as he said it was (which is to say "not very") but that's okay because I've got a killer tailwind, I'm hitting incredible speeds, and from the side of the road that I'm on, I've got views, views, and still more views of salt fields in all their shades of white and blue.

I'm come round the bend to Wangchuan [辋川] get myself an overpriced bit of lunch from a kuaican cafeteria type place with a steam table and already cooked food and turn directly into the wind so as to follow the Hidden Coast in ways which it turns out are not at all what Peter did five years ago. He went down the main road then turned up the peninsula, checked out the coast, came back, and went to Chongwu [崇武]. I've got more and more better maps than he did so I'm taking a causeway road that links the islands of Liyu [鲤鱼] and Jianyu [尖屿] with seawall at either end.

If I thought the previous causeway/seawall road was bad...

Today's was even worse.

Both Liyu and Jianyu have temples that are ostensibly the points I'm going to visit. However, in both cases, when I get there, the act of getting into the temple looks like too much effort and I give up. And the temple at Liyu really wasn't all that difficult to get into; just missing a bit of road and requiring a scramble up a temporary set of stairs.

If I'd wanted to, once I got out to this gate, I could have turned in to the driveway and gone back to the Jianyu Island temple.

The road from Wangchuan to Liyu is distinguished only in that there is the singularly most ugly ancient bridge I've ever seen spanning the Wangchuan River just downstream from where I start my journey to Liyu. For all intents and purposes, it's a shoddy wooden plank bridge built atop some piles of rock that seem to only have avoided falling down by virtue of them being very large piles of rock. It's also nearly 600 years old. And the wooden planks are actually gargantually large blocks of granite that would be a right bitch to move even with modern equipment.

As the Wangchuan is either not navigable upstream from this bridge or was only ever navigated with small things, the bridge is a squat, flat thing allowing passage of small fishing boats (provided they don't have sails up) and naught more. Also, since the stonework (which barely rises to even being called "masonry") is just great big pieces of stone laid from one bridge 'pylon' to the next, with gaps filled in with fairly modern looking concrete, it's something that must have been hellish to get early modern wheels across.

When I get to the causeway, the seawall rises above me blocking any view of the ocean to my left. I might have enjoyed the scrubby saltmarsh to my right but I was too busy dodging potholes to really notice it much.

And then, the road gets worse.

But surely the signs about temporary construction and reinforcing of the seawall mean that this is just a short stretch? Right?
Wrong.

The road gets worse.

And worse.

And still worse.

I follow the GPS's directions at one point onto a magical piece of asphalt only to be turned back at a gate and told this is a private road related to some kind of plant they're building. Then, back at the sand and rutted dirt 'road', I try to take a ramp up to the seawall to see if maybe there is some road like surface on the other side but some guy on a motorcycle yells at me that this is a work area and I don't belong here. So I'm back on the sand and rutted dirt for a while more.

Though, surprisingly enough, despite what the surface looks like, it was mostly rideable.

Eventually, I come back to pavement at a small harbor where I leave my bike for a bit to climb up the seawall and look down at the water. When I stand up, I'm nearly blown off by a gust of wind so I sit back down again actually grateful that this wall has been protecting me from the wind the whole time I was on the horrid mess.

It's mostly paved(ish) the rest of the way to Jianyu but the paving comes and goes and then, when I'm away from the seawall, heading inland, and a good three meters above semi-enclosed bits of water that look like they may have been (and may still be) aquaculture, the wind picks up so high that I have to get off and walk my bike for fear I'll be blown over the side.

When my bandanna is blown out of my hair, I decide that walking was definitely the right choice. I also decide that no matter where the GPS is trying to take me in terms of country roads that I previously indicated I want to be on, I'm heading for the closest main road per my reading of the map.

It was one thing getting off to push my bike up a dirt slope because the wind was too strong. It's quite another to be walking on PAVEMENT because the wind is too strong.

Mind you, the truck carrying windmill parts also seems to be unwilling to continue onwards from here until the wind dies down a bit.

It's still pretty windy as I get inland but not nearly as bad as it was on the coast. I head towards the closest town, fending off an overly persistent English teacher on a motorcycle who won't stop trying to talk to me while riding dangerously close despite my repeatedly telling him to go away. I find food, find a hotel, and check-in at the hotel with minimal difficulty despite the guy at the front desk looking at me like an alien when I try to give him my passport or offer to show him how to register.

The conversation went something like this (only with more repetition and in Chinese):

"Hey, I know passports are kind of difficult to register, do you need me to help?"
"Yes, you need to register."
"Passports, they are a little bit harder to register than ID cards. Would you like me to help?"
"Can I have your ID card?"
"I'm not Chinese. I register with a passport. It's different. I can show you how."
"I don't know how to register a passport."
"I know. I can show you. Would you like me to show you?"
"Nah, that's okay."

Then, once I was showered and naked and on the phone with my boyfriend, someone else came and banged on my door for a bit and told me that since I hadn't registered and since they weren't allowed to take foreigners, I needed to leave. I yelled through the door that I wasn't going anywhere, and to come get me if and only if the cops showed up.

No one came and got me, so...

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 1,677 km (1,041 miles)

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