Leizhou is one of the few places on the appropriately named Leizhou Peninsula that's actually got all sorts of old and interesting things. Therefore, we go to see none of them. I've been on the road too many days, I'm too close to home and too able to come back and visit here again to push for detours and they don't know about anything nearby unless I tell them.

So we skip the street with the cleaned up arcaded shophouses, skip the temples, skip the less cleaned up (and therefore more interesting) bits of historic downtown near the cleaned up street, and head straight out of town. That it's straight out of town in the slightly wrong direction is irrelevant as there are lots of farm roads around here and, as the arbiter of navigation, they don't know that I ignored the GPS's instructions a few times too many and probably added a good 4 or 5 kilometers of distance just to the morning.

We're on that road that I was on before in 2008 and 2014 when I see some nice indeterminately old graffiti of the Big Character Slogan variety and call for a stop. To swing back to the abandoned mansion that has half of a phrase which dates to before the founding of the People's Republic but which was rather popular as a school entrance thing well into the 70s, we come across an incredible historic temple that I'm flabbergasted I somehow missed seeing both of the times I took this road going north.

Looking over my pictures from 2014, however, it turns out that I didn't actually miss it; I merely didn't know what I was looking at. It seems as I was there, poked my head in, took a single picture of the weird blue demon guy on one of the secondary shrines, and left again. Had I taken a moment on that trip to read the signboards or puzzle out their donation years (which are almost always given in terms of the Nth year of the Y Emperor), I'd've realized the temple was at least 400 years old, would have perhaps taken the time to look more closely at various parts of it or the surroundings, and would have therefore remembered that the temple so much as existed.

It's true that the GPS is putting me in places which are allowing me to see a whole lot more than I've seen on practically any previous trip. It's also true that recent top down policies regarding historic buildings are making them stand out more. However, as can be seen by my seeing things I didn't see before when I was in the same place, the biggest difference is the knowledge of what to look for.

From the temple, we end up on a seawall road that's by and large not particularly exciting or interesting except for knowing (thanks to a sign at one of the sluice gates which is more concerned with bragging about the capacity of the sluice gate in question) that the earliest construction on this seawall began in the 12th century. This leads to taking a bit more time to look at all the little temples left and right of the Wall that dot the landscape rather like the temples along the river dykes I biked atop in Vietnam in 2018. I skipped those temples because my lack of Vietnamese and lack of context made them uninteresting; I skipped these temples because the fish ponds and weirs inside the Wall were currently being drained for maintenance and we had no desire to spend a moment more than necessary in the miasma of rotting sealife.

I had a few potential detours marked that I decided not to mention to the Argentinians because I knew we'd be hitting some wind and some hills before our likely end point in Qujie and I was kind of sort of hoping that if they weren't too tired when we got in to Qujie that we could continue straight on to the ferry. As a result, after lunch in Leigao, we stuck to the main road nearly the whole day with our only departure being almost all the way in to Qujie because the spot where I'd stopped to wait for them to catch up to me and to take photos of them underneath the giant windmills was a farm road I recognized.

They were utterly wasted when we got in to Qujie. I was still pretty fresh and could have kept going if the temperature hadn't dropped a good 8 or 10 degrees Celsius with the sun going down. So I didn't mention that I'd even considered pushing on to the possibility of being closer to the ferry, to the potentiality of taking the ferry tonight and aimed us at the closest hotel to show up on the map.