Although I hadn't gotten to sleep until midnight-ish, I was up before 7am ready and raring to go. I had done barely any exercise yesterday and I now had coffee again!

Although we had been expecting that Ivan and Catalina would come by and knock on my door when they were ready to convince me it was time to go already, the situation was quite the opposite when at 7:27, having already resisted getting up and starting the whole getting dressed process for as long as I could stand, I sent Ivan a message "getting coffee ready".

This was followed, just under an hour later, with "do you guys want coffee or shall I wash up and put the kit away?" and then,five minutes after that, with map info regarding our options for where we could go today and the number of hotels each location had. Lianjiang at 70km (more hotels than could be counted), Xin'an [新安] or Guanqiao [官桥] at 50km (two hotels apiece).

When they didn't respond to that, and after a bit of existential crisis that maybe the whole scary dirty first hotel, yelling in the lobby at this hotel, police being called, and over the top friendly drunk guy who bought our dinner last night on top of the city traffic in Maoming, the truck road we'd taken to Gongguan, and my inability to actually find the marked historical site I had as a potential point of interest for Gongguan (it existed on both the electronic maps and the military produced paper maps; it should have been findable) might have maybe been just a wee bit too much for them and that maybe they were ignoring me or had bugged out in the middle of the night away from the crazy lady or something like that.

Nope. When I floated my way down to their room (cause I made two pots of moka for me and one pot for them and when they didn't respond, I drank all three) they were doing yoga, drinking yerba, and having a light breakfast of fruit in their room.

I've not had much luck in the bike touring travel companions department over the years.

In 2008, near the end, I ended up spending a good week and change with a large poorly organized group of 60+ year olds that were on their own trip, had their own ideas, and were willing to let me tag along until their speed (or lack thereof), distance traveled (or lack thereof), ideas about suitable places to camp, and insistence on waking up and getting on the road before the sun was finished rising or the breakfast stalls were open had me too frustrated to continue with them.

In 2014, after all my local friends bailed on me (in fairness, one of them was in the process of having his visa cancelled and being deported), I had maybe four days with a guy I met on the 2012 Tour before his boss insisted that he had to drop everything and come back to work.

In 2015, after everyone who had promised me for months that they were totally coming totally decided not to come, there was the Taiwanese companion from hell who answered my "Companions Welcome" ad on BikeTo and then proceeded to tell me how to run my tour the way he wanted to travel. Myf did join me shortly after this, and we managed to go the next two months without killing each other (we even still talk to each other) so that one wasn't a complete disaster companion-wise.

In 2016, I got the Special Snowflake who somehow missed every single cue that I'm a highly paid professional and whose behavior towards service staff (which, in her mind, clearly included me) was so bad that I actually cut the tour short before I could lose my temper, accidentally block her phone number, and abandon her in the Chinese countryside.

So, even though the 2012, first 2015 tour, 2017 tour, and 2018 tours didn't have any companions at all, I was just a little bit over sensitively tending to spiral into worry over them not responding when it turned out that maybe 3 double shots of espresso after a week of no coffee might have not been the best way to start the day.

Gongguan to Huazhou [化州] continues to be uninspiring. My journal from 2005 indicates rather a lot more strawberry fields than the two we saw (both of which were still in early season "pick your own" mode). There's no sign whatsoever of a toll booth ever having existed though it's questionable if I'm remembering a toll booth from earlier in the 2005 trip or if the road I was taken on by van after the accident in Huazhou was even the same as the one I rode on. In any case, although the traffic conditions are sub-optimal, the road is plenty wide and the marked bike shoulder in good condition.

We have some fancy dimsum for lunch in Huazhou at a restaurant that really would rather we leave our bikes with the security guard instead of parking them in the lobby area against the wall but Huazhou is an actual city and the last time I left my bike with a security guard, I came back to find that he was off getting lunch. That nothing happened to my bike or gear is irrelevant, I'm still not entirely ready to be leaving it where I can't see it.

Past Huazhou, although the road continued to be large and an obvious main route (despite what the map thought), the traffic and scenery situation improved markedly. In fact, the dull ugliness of Maoming to just past Huazhou and the trucks and the traffic rather turned out to be a positive as, even though it wasn't actually all that bad (as these things go), it now meant that Ivan and Catalina had direct experience with what I was intentionally avoiding when taking us on all sorts of farm roads and back roads for most of the time they were with me. 

Since we were making very good time, when we got to Xin'an, I reset the GPS to Lianjiang and found that it was now offering a farm road possibility. I've had much better farm roads before but this one wasn't all that bad. Especially given what we were coming off of and the fact that I had to make sure to stay close enough to them that they could see me when it came time to turn, it was actually pretty good.

It was still light when we got into Lianjiang. If I hadn't been with them, I probably would have considered continuing on to Suixi [遂溪] as I've spent the night there before (2008, 2014) and it's conveniently located near a bit of road I'd like to do again. However, since Lianjiang has (or had) multiple bike shops, it was more important to start by getting them headlights.

Bike shops 1 and 2 were either closed or incorrectly marked on the map. Number 3 had headlights though the owner was one of those people that, had he been a NPC in a quest game, you'd have wondered why the programmers bothered to include him. From answering the question "where do other bike tourers who stop by your shop stay in Lianjiang" with "hotels" to road information along the lines of "yes, there are better routes you can take but I don't know what they are or how to show you on a map" the only useful thing we got done at his shop was buying the headlights.

We followed this up with a side quest called "Finding a Working ATM". From cash only just three years ago, China has basically gone completely cashless. Unfortunately, although WeChat and AliPay theoretically have the ability to sometimes let foreigners who don't live in China use scan to pay, it's not real consistent and Ivan and Catalina are still pulling out cash. Counting the time I used an ATM to confirm that money which I'd been sent had cleared, and the money I got in Hong Kong, this is only the third time this trip that I've used an ATM.

The first one was missing the machines. The second one had no electricity to the machines. The third one wouldn't accept international cards. It wasn't quite as bad a clusterfuck as things had been in actual small towns a decade ago when I oops made the mistake of having an out-of-province card that I wanted to use at a Rural Credit Cooperative but it was definitely a headache.

Fortunately, both dinner and the hotel went nice and smooth.