I am strongly tempted to spend another night in Doumen. Strongly strongly strongly tempted. However, although I'm about to break my promise to my Guangzhou friends and not take the train up to visit them, I'm going to abandon the possibility of more socializing with my new Zhuhai friends and hit the road in favor of getting back to my Haikou friends as soon as I can.

Given the hour that I went to sleep, it's kind of surprising that I'm awake as early as I am. In the hopes of more pizza for brunch, I dawdle about in the room for about two hours before I leave but even though it's officially opening time for the cafe, no one is there yet either by the time I get settled in for a bowl of noodles next door or by the time I finish said bowl of noodles.

Last night Peter had mentioned that many of the 'downtown Zhuhai' folk look at Doumen District as being "kind of backwards" and, on my way out of Doumen, I can sort of see why. There's nothing particularly wrong with Doumen. It's a perfectly lovely town. It's just that most of the downtown parts of Doumen seems to have gotten developed twenty or thirty years ago without a whole huge lot of change since then.

To my (clearly non-Chinese) way of thinking, the fact that things were well developed in the mid 90s and are still in use is a good thing—is, in fact, a much better thing than the usual situation where unfinished buildings were left to rot for 10 or 15 years before requiring significant work to be able to be finished. But yeah, it's dated looking. Unfashionable. And because these are good, solid, well built, properly utilized buildings, it will paradoxically make it harder for Doumen to redevelop itself into a modern district of Zhuhai as opposed to being just an outlying county seat.

On the basis of how things have repeatedly been shown to work elsewhere in China, it's most likely that a new downtown Doumen will be built somewhere 5 to 7 kilometers away after which the government and other offices will be moved over (annoying the heck out of everyone who works there and who doesn't have an apartment in the new area) after which the New Area will gradually try (and mostly fail) to become the center because it will have been designed with convenience (i.e. cars) in mind and everyone who lives there will continue to drive to the old area because that's where everything is convenient.

I leave Doumen on a perfectly lovely country road which unfortunately dumps me on a great big motorway after no more than half an hour of biking. Fortunately, although the motorway parallels the expressway and is therefore even straighter and wider and boringer than a normal motorway, its got an isolated greenway running alongside it with enough of a landscaped barrier that I can almost ignore the car road.

At some point the greenway turns away from the road but even though the GPS keeps bleating at me that I'm in the wrong place and I need to turn and I need to turn and I need to turn, I decide to follow the greenway instead. Taking me through what I'm pretty sure are lychee orchards growing over the remains of a graveyard that's had the actual graves moved but not had all the great big concrete "LOOK AT ME, I'M A GRAVE" decorations removed, I decide that I'm fine with wherever the greenway is going as I seem to be coming in from where it abruptly ended and am therefore unlikely to have it abruptly end on me.

Over the hills and into the woods, I'm greeted by an incredible view across a reservoir of a local tourist site temple and, yet again, am blown away not so much by the pretty scenery but by the sheer lack of litter. Sure there's still some but very very little. I've previously commented that if China ever gets to the point where it follows all the laws and regulations that it has on the books, this will be a pretty amazing country. The decision from on high that Thou Shalt Not Litter and that dumping in waterways is a big no-no is a really good example of this.

Litter still exists. Dumping still happens. There've been no few midden pits this trip. There's a beach clean-up group down in Sanya whose escapades I follow regarding their deliberately annoying the companies who illegally use and misuse public beaches, but, the dumping and the litter and the garbage has been the exception to the rule rather than the rule. The "no swimming" signs no longer make me shake my head and go "who on earth would want to go swimming in that?" but instead make me shake my head and go "why didn't I bring a bathing suit with me?"

When the greenways come to an end at a parking lot, I'm greeted with a sign telling me that it's only a few kilometers from here to Doumen Old Street which I look up on my phone and promptly decide to visit. Doumen Old Street is one of those 19th century arcaded shophouse streets that you see all over Malaysia, Singapore and Guangdong which, to western eyes, look particularly Portuguese because the style originally was Portuguese.

(In Hainan, arcaded shophouses come by way of Malaysia. By the time it's filtered in to random places in backwater parts of Guangdong that aren't even on navigable waterways, it's questionable how much direct European influence there still was on the architectural style. That being said, if you compare it to any of the non-European influenced local architecture from the same time periods, it was definitely the faddish modern thing.)

Doumen Village is where the county seat of Doumen used to be before it was moved to Doumen Town (which is actually Jing'an Town [井岸镇]) and before Doumen County became Doumen District. Rather than confuse people by having the capital of County X be in Town Y, China likes to confuse people by wholesale renaming of towns while simultaneously continuing to actively use the old name.

Because I keep turning here and there when I see something interesting (like a fortified watchtower) or because I notice the red pavement of the Greenway and decide to follow that even though it's obvious that the tree branches haven't been trimmed and that riding that way is going to involve some three dimensional dodging, it takes me a while to get to Doumen Old Street. As old streets that have been cleaned up (but not quite made the leap to being ye olde-ified) go, it's perfectly fine. Perhaps if I'd driven here, I might even have found it interesting. I think I spend all of about 10 minutes there before continuing on my way.

I ignore the GPS trying to take me south back to the big main road and instead take little farm roads towards the Hutiaomen Waterway [虎跳门] (Tiger Leaping Gate) with plenty of detours for various marked historic buildings which—as is all too often the norm with the marked and signposted ones—are all shut up tight.

Astonishingly beautiful ride along the banks of the Hutiaomen before I'm eventually forced to rejoin a larger road at Xiaohaoyong [小豪涌] and then the main road just south of Dahaoyong [大豪涌]. More detours though for some old cobblestone streets currently being paved over, a very large temple with vandalized rafter carvings that—having not yet enjoyed the current religious renaissance going on in China—is mostly empty, a tiny little folk temple on the outskirts of some farming village, and another fortified watchtower.

I cross the Hutiaomen heading towards a large fort which I had been quite hopeful about visiting despite the approaching darkness only to be stymied by a ridiculously high entry fee. From then on north, I've got constant construction and roadworks and trucks and nastiness that promises, when it's done, to merely be boring. With sunset approaching and the desire to be nowhere near the icky traffic, I take a side road that—in the darkness—gives me the impression of invisible rural prettiness (including another fortified tower though this one might have been a diaolou building).

Being as I've already been riding in the dark when I get to Gujin (and dinner), my being not so very impressed with the lodging possibilities makes it quite easy to convince myself to keep going on to Sanjiang. This actually was rather frustrating as I could tell that there was all sorts of cool stuff hidden out there in the darkness (like some old temples, old family houses, a rather random stone bridge crossing a missing watercourse) and, most of the time, I could barely see that it existed, let alone stop and admire or enjoy it.

But this is what I get for starting as late as I did today.

I stop at the first cheap place to show up on the map for Sanjiang and find it quite to my liking.