D29: 泉州→石井

November 7, 2019

There was a sign suggesting that all bicycle riders should dismount and walk down the hill. Since it came to a t-intersection with traffic, I was apt to agree

Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened today was something that, at first, seemed to be a glitch in my GPS data where I was suddenly recorded as dropping 150m in elevation and then, a kilometer or so later, gaining it all back again. I thought the ability to add edited elevation data according to the map elevation to my tracks was for reference only, not to permanently change the track, so I have no proof that this happened, but you'll have to trust me it happened.

The glitch is interesting because the area where the 'glitch' happened was one where I didn't stop to take a picture of The Most Interesting Garage Ever. I didn't take a picture of the Garage because I was going downhill really really fast. Mind you, since the Garage was directly opposite the entrance to a military facility, was interesting primarily because of the camouflage job, and was almost certainly was directly related to said military facility, had I not been bombing down the hill at full speed but instead going uphill, there's a possibility that discretion would have reared it's ugly head and I still wouldn't have a photo of it.

I do a lot of stupid things. I take perverse pleasure in antagonizing people who aren't used to being antagonized. However, even if they're really cool, taking photos of clearly hidden military facilities is too stupid even for me.

First Detour of the Day: Perhaps the most interesting thing about this temple was the QR code you could scan which brought you to a page with all kinds of historical and cultural information. Unfortunately, it was an auto-play page with a cloyingly sweet woman's voice doing the narration that I could not figure out how to turn off so I could just -read- the information.

As it already is, my then much much less developed habit of taking photos of interesting bridges was one of the things that really really interested the guy going through my photos back in 2008 when I got detained after biking past a Military Area NO ADMITTANCE sign that I honestly didn't see (as opposed to the mumbly-some-odd times I've seen but ignored various types of keep out signs).

Imagine a retaining wall where the hillside has been cut away to allow the road to be widened. It's one of those decorative types of retaining walls that's been done up to look like a fieldstone wall but, in reality, is your bog standard concrete wall that's had pieces of fieldstone attached to it to make it look pretty. However, if you are biking past (even at fast going-downhill speeds) you might notice a straight seam down the middle and the giant hinges. That, along with the really obvious "Entrance to a Military Facility" across the road from the Garage are what clued me in to it not being just a retaining wall.

As it is, if anything really interesting had happened today, or if I hadn't been messing around with my maps data just an hour or two later, I might have forgotten about the Garage. But I was looking at my map data and, because of it the GPS 'glitch', I absolutely had to figure out why I'd suddenly dropped to a 100 meters below sea level.

Three storey granite building complete with granite balconies

More old and new style buildings mixed together. I saw one brick and granite number that could have been a hundred years old with a inscribed construction date of 1974.

The first floor windows of this smart modern building are granite, including the window bars

I followed my day's track from my couchsurfing host's apartment, to an unusually boring temple made mostly notable by all the reviewers asking why this was marked as a tourism site, to the big straight roads out of the city, to the little mountain road that took me to a Greenway and a hill so steep that I followed the directions on the sign and walked my bike down the hill, to the rumbly bumbly road up and over the mountain past a trash sorting facility, to a bunch of astonishingly big graves, to the camouflaged Garage.

Nothing else was wrong with my track, just the elevation data. Three satellites are necessary to get your horizontal position and a fourth to get your elevation, but most of the times you'll be getting a signal from six or seven or eight satellites at once. To screw up the elevation data and not mess with anything else would probably require some form of active blocking; and that turns the camouflaged garage from a passing "wonder what that was" that I'd already mostly forgotten about twenty minutes later and would have completely forgotten about by the end of the day into a mystery that I'll periodically wonder about for a long long time to come.

After all, depending on whether you are measuring to Kinmen County or the Big Island, I'm between 50 and 150 kilometers away from Taiwan and there's a lot of reasons they might have to be hiding large things in creatively camouflaged garages around here.

Perhaps I better forget about the garage entirely?

Saw this half a building from across the street and went to take a closer look

Most of today was spent on large ugly roads. Some of today was spent on small beautiful roads but mostly it was large straight things taking one the fastest way from here to there. Since I'm now running GPS navigation all the time, I was able to periodically decide to just head down random rural alleys after doing something like crossing a street to look at an interesting building.

I had a decent but not great success rate off of the alleys not so much in that they took me into the countryside (though that did happen) but in that they got me away from the big ugly straight roads with trucks. So many trucks. Relatively well behaved trucks but still trucks. Enough trucks having enough of an issue (or vice versa) with people on two wheels that there were warning signs about "cherishing life" and "avoiding blind spots".

I specifically detoured to a well preserved cluster of houses that's only just recently been upgraded from a county level historical and cultural preservation unit to a national level one and a large bridge that I wouldn't have known about except for it showing up on my paper maps (which, being as they are produced by a military publishing house, have a strong tendency towards specifically pointing out sites of interest with military value).

This village has just recently been named a National Historic and Culture Preservation Site

One of the reasons its so unusual to see something truly old in China is how often they simply gut everything and throw it away when fixing things up.

Chairman Mao taking the place of honor behind the family altar

The carved wooden lattices are mostly intact

Same slogan as the poster in the schoolroom of the Old Brick House

Lots of money and energy going in to fixing this place up. I'd like to come back in a year or three and see how it has gone.

This palatial number is just a 19th century village house

(Come to think of it, once I attracted the interest of the spooks, the amount that I travel around China, taking pictures of stuff, and posting it to social media, is probably yet another reason that they keep checking up on me.)

I thought the bridge from a few days ago was the ugliest old bridge imaginable. Clearly, however, my imagination was lacking as this old bridge is even uglier. I described the Wangchuan Bridge as "a squat, flat thing allowing passage of small fishing boats (provided they don't have sails up) and naught more with "stonework (which barely rises to even being called "masonry") [that] is just great big pieces of stone laid from one bridge 'pylon' to the next". In the case of the Anping Bridge, which is 250 years older and 10 times the length, the gaps weren't filled in at all and it wasn't just hellish to imagine getting early modern wheels across, it was sufficiently a pain in the ass to get bike wheels across that I rapidly had to get off and walk for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the number of people walking across the bridge.

The estuary has been silting up for centuries and the bridge (which is just over 2 kilometers long) now connects a series of ponds and wetlands. I made it more than halfway across before I got to a spot that I could leave the bridge and even my fascination with large civil engineering works was not enough to get me to finish it.

From a distance it's not too terrible looking

Extremely uneven stonework with lots of gaps

Pavilion in the middle of the bridge for taking a rest

I may have mentioned a few dozen times before about my incredible fondness for truly hideous art?

Then, I was back on big boring roads again.

I rode down the coastal road to Shijing though, as Peter repeatedly noted in his journal, the Chinese have an amazing talent for putting roads alongside coastlines in ways that completely hide the coastline from view. In my case, since I was making a point of riding on the access road/bike road because it was more "interesting" I had three large well landscaped medians, four traffic lanes, another bike road, and whatever developments or shops or things were on the other side. For all intents and purposes, the water may as well have not been there at all.

When I got to Shijing, I was initially going to check out one of the many hotels shown on the map but I realized when I biked past the passenger port that it was specifically an 'international' port serving Kinmen Island (or, as the PRC call it "Jinmen County") and chances were very high that the cheaper options would be more of a headache than not so I studied the map for a bit and picked a red spot just shy of the Xiamen University Xiang'an Campus. It being the only hotel in that area, I had a better chance of not being told no, but it also being just a few kilometers away from a place likely to have a cluster of hotels (even if they weren't showing up on the map) I would have options available to me if they said "no" and I decided it wasn't worth fighting for.

An idea of what the coastal road looks like. Also, isn't there a better way or time to be doing this?

The bathroom was locked. The puddle not visible in this picture may or may not have been caused by me.

The sun beginning to set is no longer as worrisome as it was before I had a headlight

Getting there from Shijing involved one of those mazes of local streets where the GPS insists that I turn only to immediately start giving me the "recalculating" chant and where I would have probably had a much shorter easier time if I'd just pulled the phone out of my pocket and read the map myself but although none of the places I was being taken were especially special or memorable, they weren't boring either and I didn't exactly mind.

They didn't say "no".

They were a little uncertain about how to go about registering with a passport (Taiwanese people are easy! Their documents are in Chinese!!), were grateful that I knew how, and had an elevator to a perfect soundless windowless room on the third floor.

Also, my habit of going to eat shortly before the hotel (so I won't be grumpy when dealing with hotel issues) got me my first ever bowl of Xiamen Satay Noodles and although none of my subsequent bowls were quite as yummy, that alone was worth it.

Oddly large government office building for a village

Marry Late, Have Children Late, Best to Have Only One

This hotel, which I didn't stay at, is So Hot

Littering or dumping on the National Road will get fines of 1,000-40,000元

Today's ride: 70 km (43 miles)
Total: 1,798 km (1,117 miles)

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