D40: 大水坑 → 甜水堡

May 25, 2021

You get pictures uploaded something resembling promptly or you get pictures that have been reasonably edited. You don't get both

Foreigner registration for Ningxia is still broken. It took me a good thirty minutes and change of explaining why (and to multiple people) I wanted to look at their computer but I eventually managed to not only get a look at the computer, I also got to hear the story of how they used to sometimes have foreigners try to check in because of stuff related to the oil fields and how those foreigners always ended up being made to go to Yanchi.

Being as I've encountered a software based lock on a near identical version of this particular flavor of registration software in a town near Hangzhou in 2017, I'm vaguely tempted to almost believe the inability to register foreigners is intentional.

If you look closely, you'll notice that a number of the important fields are grayed out and can't be typed in

However, on one of the two times on my last pass through Ningxia where the police had a specific 'Foreigner Hotel' in mind to send me to, they still ended up downloading and printing off a paper registration form because the registration system was broken in the exact same way it was broken at the not 'Foreigner Hotels'. There was also one episode of "absolutely no way can you possibly stay in this town at all" where the software worked correctly.

This says to me that it is not an intentionally applied block.

First watchtower of the trip (3 days and 20+ towers later I'm no longer bothering to photograph most of them)

It amused me that the only vaguely realistic looking thing in this temple mural from 2004 was the horse Archer. Where did rural Chinese people in 2004 even have the chance to see horse archers?

Grafitti carved into a temple wall reads "the Shining Path of the Falun Gong is good, Fuck the CCP". I am not a fan.

I drink my morning coffee, watch my pulse-ox levels go from "not actually dangerous" to very nearly healthy, get breakfast, go shopping for pannier snacks, and hit the road.

I am so so so glad I got those pannier snacks as I never did find a place to have lunch until it was less of a late lunch and more of an early dinner. I mean technically the extra large apple I ate along with a hard boiled eggs and some beef jerky while I was sitting on the floor of a temple working could be considered lunch but it wasn't, not really.

Same content, same rough age, completely different style

Lots and lots of temples today. Little temples, big temples, new temples, and old ones.

The oldest was probably the big one by the side of the G211 National Road though you wouldn't know it to look at it. Honestly, the only reason I could even guess that it was old was because one of the two upper staircases still had traces of the original finished stone instead of the nice new concrete all the other stairs had been replaced with.

Ugly boring statues too.

Sign within an otherwise dull temple that it's been around for a long long time

Other than the Boring Temple, the standard around here seemed to be for the idols to be painted on the rear wall

Relatively recent temple that used a bad batch of plaster

Which is not to say that the other temples necessarily had attractive statuary. Cause, well, they didn't. Both from the point of view of not trying to look "beautiful" and from the point of view of not especially skilled creators. But, they were interesting. They had character.

These were both low quality and mass produced.

All told the day had two beacon towers, a small fort, a medium fort, and five temples. Which, even if I didn't climb up the hill to go to either the near or the far beacon towers, and even if the small fort appeared to be completely inaccessible, that's still a lot of places to see in a single day.

Beacon tower on my right, barely visible fort on the distant left

The landscape was a mix of definitely desert, dry grasslands, and cropland with literally hundreds of windmills surrounding me. At one point I actually counted the number of windmills I could see on the horizons all around me and I actually got up to over 90 before I wasn't sure if I was double counting some of the more distant ones.

I could have done without the last part of my day being the truck route and while it probably means that finding places to eat or buy drinks will become even more difficult than it already is, I'm hoping by the next time I come this way that the expressway is both finished and the choice of road for the big rig drivers cause even if they are far more respectful than your average SUV driver, they're still a lot scarier.

After dinner in Mengcheng Village on the Ningxia/Gansu border, I thought about stopping there for the night but the town of 甜水堡 (Sweetwater Fort) on the south side of the line had a police station and I figured if I was expecting likely hassle, the 5 extra kilometers to put me in a town where I could get a hotel near the police was worth it.

The fort which gave Mengcheng it's name was sufficiently difficult to find that I'm not entirely sure that I didn't just happen to decide a random rammed earth wall was The Fort.

The hotel I picked more or less at random had a computer that wouldn't let me register (but in different ways from how Ningxia wouldn't let me register) but an owner who was enthusiastically certain the police would have no problem. Whether they had a problem or not, my prepping the situation with a friendly "these are all the things you need and here they are" definitely smoothed things along cause they really had no clue.

Going out for fruit cause I know the police are coming by my room and I can't get undressed and showered until they've left

Today's ride: 59 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,383 km (859 miles)

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