There's a place on the Leizhou Peninsula that I've been hoping to go back to since I accidentally biked through it in 2014. If I didn't have the Argentinians with me and I'd continued to Suixi [遂溪] the way I'd intended to the day we stayed Lianjiang, it's very likely I would have managed to find my way back there. Not completely certain since I'm not exactly sure where all of my old GPS tracks have gone, but very likely.

On the one hand, the place in question is--without a doubt--the sort of military facility that I probably shouldn't be wandering through. On the other hand, not only does it have apparently public roads going through it, one of the only warmshowers guests that has spent the night in my apartment (a guy about as tall and blondly Nordic as you can get without being in a recruiting poster for the Waffen SS) also found himself on that road without getting harassed so it's probably okay.

The positive (that I'm not getting) to going looking for that road would be  that it would get me in to Zhanjiang City [湛江] where I have an old Ironman China intern and sometimes part time translator, and where there's a super luxury hotel whose English ad copy is written by me and whose management I think I could persuade into giving me a meal or something just for showing up.

The negative (that I'm also not getting) is that the traffic, scenery, pollution combo on the outskirts of Zhanjiang City was remarkably hellish in both 2008 and 2014.

Instead, we've now swung far to the west side of the peninsula. I went down the west side of the peninsula in April 2018 and, while it was alright, it was remarkably boring. Lots and lots and lots of uninteresting managed forest with no horizons or variation in crops. Also, the few parts where it actually got interesting or beautiful generally involved me going down a dead end that I had to eventually come back on. Or, in the case of the roads immediately before and after the little ferry, force you to go through a trucking area to get there.

So, even though at their daily capability, it'll almost certainly add one more day to before I can get home, we're going to swing wide back to the east side of the peninsula. It could be that the east side is also boring (this is, after all, quite the cultural and economic backwater) but I haven't been there in five years and I'd rather the area that might be boring versus the area that definitely is boring.

Once again, I'm up and caffeinated and ready to go well before Ivan and Catalina are. Even if I'm likely staying up later than they are, after 10 weeks on the road, flat roads with them at their speeds are basically nothing to me, and I've gotten to the point in minimalist packing that repacking is pretty quick.

We've got maybe 3 or 4 kilometers on the west line before we turn off onto side roads and basically spend the rest of the day in the countryside. They're the sort of kilometers where, even though the road is barely a lane in each direction, the road management rules are being strictly enforced and the buildings don't start until 30 meters away from the center line. This unpaved space has then been filled in with various cruft, truck parking, and just general mess.

Just as we are coming up on where we are supposed to turn, a big rig is blocking the entire road to make what looks like it might be a u-turn but just as easily could be the driver backing in to something or trying to make his way out while avoiding the various obstacles and trying not to get mired in the soft dirt. One obstacle, however, is a mobile one and not a very attentive mobile obstacle at that. The three of us watch in horror as an ebike darts in to the gap between the turning truck and a parked truck just as the driver of the turning truck starts to pull forward again.

When the crunch happens, we're sure we're about to watch somebody being killed but, much to everyone's surprise, once the rider has been stood up and dusted off and the ebike is removed from beneath the wheels of the truck, it looks like nothing other than the fairing is damaged. For someone who very nearly got himself killed for being an idiot, the rider of the ebike looks incredibly pissed off at the truckers and completely unaware that he wouldn't have fallen over (been knocked over) at all if he'd, I dunno, done like everyone else and waited for the truck driver to finish turning around before darting into the only blind spot the driver has.

I don't know how much it'll help, but after this I doubly make sure to take a couple of opportunities to separately point out to both Ivan and Catalina the importance of being noticed. Wave at the trucks. Tell them it's okay to pass you. Ride a little farther in to the car lanes and pull over to the shoulder as people come up behind you. Be seen!

I'm not sure but I think this might be the first time I've ridden with people who'd never toured before.

The old temples I'd found on the map mostly weren't all the old though there's indicators that they are completely modern rebuilds of old stuff that was, to the people whose temples these are, looking a bit too shabby to be worth keeping around. There's a sad ancestor temple of the "plaques with names" variety has 18 tiers for plaques but only 23 plaques on the top 6 tiers. While I suppose it's possible that they only decided the guy a couple generations back is the point from which they would start worshiping their venerable ancestors for creating their clan, it's more likely that this is a case of history abrogated, and the previous generations' plaques have just been lost or destroyed.

Because I keep taking pictures of stuff with my phone to quickly share to my WeChat Moments, I keep crashing the GPS and I keep having to re-route us which gets us on all sorts of directions that definitely weren't the original route. Not that it matters so long as we stay in the countryside where the trucks are far away, the roads are small, and the art is--if not always good--interesting.

Lunch in Kelu [客路] just off the National Road (which we have to cross to keep going) and, yuck, I just don't know how anyone can intentionally travel on these roads for any length of time. After Kelu it's back to the little roads again and some amazing new additions to my propaganda collection.

Rules for the collection of propaganda are that it must be one of the following:
1) Old
2) Artistically interesting 
3) Bizarre

Since the family planning policy has been relaxed from one child to two children, pretty much everything related to that now gets photographed. Big Character Slogans from the 70s and earlier get photographed. Anything with Chairman Mao gets photographed. "The Chinese Dream", on the other hand, that's too recent and too ongoing of a campaign to get photographed unless it's a local variant hand painted work of what can only be described as "enthusiasm".

I'm not sure what I like better, the anthropomorphic condom with a pikestaff guarding against sexual diseases, or the long form textual explanation a few panels over that it's a bad idea to get pregnant in the first few months of marriage because you have so much sex at this period in your relationship that the quality of sperm and ova are negatively affected and therefore won't make healthy babies.

We have some not very nice big road to deal with coming in to Leizhou as the small roads that the GPS wants to send us on through the under construction woodlands park seem to not actually exist. Then, all the sudden, we're in a city. An old one. With narrow roads, narrow sidewalks, and really crowded bike lanes.

We have a very nice time at a Zen Buddhist temple that was not one of my marked points for things that might be interesting but which was on the way to the point and already looked interesting which made it a much better destination than something that might be (but, which was closed for construction, and therefore wasn't).

After the temple, we had dinner nearby before going in search of a hotel. First place that popped up as recommended in our price range was a second floor place. Then, on the way to what would end up being the third and final place, I saw a reasonably priced looking second place.

After lots of yelling and no real conclusion or way to truly escalate because their front desk was behind a glass counter like a bank (something I've honestly never seen before), we stalked out with me still pissed off that they had the audacity to tell us a price for two rooms, call their boss, and now tell us that all the empty rooms were already reserved tonight.

That third place, however, it was the same total price for both rooms; actually 5 yuan more for the Argentinians' 'larger' room and 5 yuan less for my 'smaller' room (both rooms were pretty huge). Also, their approach to having foreigners with documentation and a willingness and knowledge of how to be properly registered on the computer that they had at their front desk was to have a discussion with the random customers who happened to be hanging out in the lobby and mutually decide that photos of the passports were good enough.