May 21, 2021
D36: 白泥井 → 定边
In my journal from 2018 I failed to record whether or not I was registered in Dingbian. As that was the year of the Incident and I was still being rather over the top about making sure that available records existed (should the detectives want to look) to show me as being a scrupulously law abiding non-citizen resident, I tend to think that I must have been registered. However, I didn't write it down, and I didn't take photos of the computer so I don't really know for sure.
What I do know is that the hotel didn't particularly impress me. Since Dingbian is a county seat, since problems—if any—mostly occur in county seats, and since CTrip's foreigner facing platform Trip is a lot more robust than it was three years ago, once the bike shop convinced me that I didn't want to try making it to Hongliugou tonight, I booked a $13 room at a business hotel on Trip.
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In retrospect, I probably should have gone on to Hongliugou. Hard to say though, my not going on certainly ended up with my getting quite a Story out of the evening, but at least the first part of it is a Story I'd rather have avoided.
However, I'm getting ahead of myself in writing about something that gets its own entry when this entry should be all about today's ride and what I did before the episode that will involve politely worded nasty letters on various kinds of official letterhead.
Since my adoption in 2019 of active GPS navigation constantly running, I've been intentionally getting onto more smaller roads and complicated twisty turn roads than before. I still kind of miss the Knowledge of remembering every turn I made, every intersection I questioned, but even with instructions to take a "slight left" often meaning "make a hard turn to the right", it's incredibly nice not having to think about directions.
Although it presumably meets up with the road into Dingbian from last time (again, although I could check the GPS track, I have not) since I'm almost certain I crossed through Bainijing last time, my route is far smaller roads of the much much more scenic variety with nary a truck and barely a four wheeled passenger vehicle to be seen.
The village of 先进 (Scientific Forward Progress) must have been something special in the 1950s when the road from Bainijing to the intersection near was named in two parts as the Bai-Xian Road and the Xian-SomethingElse Road.
If it was special back then, it's not special anymore. Could be the encroaching desert, could just be China's rapid urbanization stealing most of the population. Whatever the case may be and although many of the abandoned farmhouses are obviously next door to the new place the family lives now, it's a mostly dead place.
I spend a lovely thirty or forty minutes inside the old schoolhouse which—with the exception of people taking presumably winter craps in the first two rooms—seems to have been unused in the past 20 years on the basis of there still being a picture of Jiang Zemin on the wall, also still has the last lessons up on the blackboards.
It's an eerie place.
My initial pin for the day is a Desert Museum but, when I get near enough to see the entrance at the wrong time of day to be going into a museum in China, it looks like something patriotic instead so I don't even bother checking to see if it's open and—instead—go for what turns out to be a pretty boring lunch.
Back on the road for mere minutes, I'm flagged down by a car with Ningxia plates offering me some bottles of water and to ask where I'm going. There's a bit of confusion over the difference between "a theme of city walls" and "a theme of the Great Wall" since I've once again gotten close to the Wall and, as it turns out, they're from the county Museum on a surveying trip of parts of the Wall in this area to determine what sort of preservation work can or should be done.
After a bit of chatting with them and the rare agreement to provide my WeChat instead of just suggesting that they follow me on Douyin (as the chances of them being people I want to talk to are much higher than usual road randoms) they head off and I head into the city to pick up my package.
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It had actually been sent to Hongliugou rather than Dingbian but, before transferring it to the Hongliugou truck, someone from the courier company's Dingbian offices called me to make sure I—a person they didn't personally know—actually wanted a package sent to Hongliugou and, as a result, my package stopped in Dingbian and I got my stuff a day earlier.
The ice packs were melted and the cookies had started to go a bit extra crunchy but the cheese was still cool to the touch.
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Final stop before the hotel and the evening's Saga was the local bike shop for tune-up. Like the fellows from the museum, they also wanted to invite me out to dinner but, unlike the fellows from the museum, I was having serious problems understanding what they were saying whenever a sentence was something other than something I could guess by context.
Armed with the knowledge that I'd stayed in Dingbian before, that no one from Trip Customer Service had called to attempt to cancel my room, and that the locals at the bike shop thought it "absolutely preposterous" that a hotel could possibly have problems registering foreigners¹, I texted the museum guy the location of my reservation and to come pick me up in an hour.
However, when all was said and done it would be much, much, much longer than an hour.
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¹ I recently picked up the term "hansplaining" for when a Han Chinese person confidently informs you of how something is in China even when said thing is in direct contradiction to your personal experiences as a foreigner
Today's ride: 45 km (28 miles)
Total: 1,250 km (776 miles)
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