D80: 茶店 → 西安

July 30, 2021

Had my Mom known that inflatable statuary or marching bands were something you could have for a funeral, she'd have been very disappointed at my Dad's failure to arrange either.

Breakfast at the same place as last night's dinner either confirms that last night's noodles weren't very good or that I just prefer to have things that have been fried.

There isn't much of interest to today's ride and that's not because I'm finally writing about it over a week after it happened. It honestly wasn't interesting. No conflict. No stress. No mind blowing beauty. No sites of interest.

I have one hill that I walk not because it's particularly steep but because the heat is getting to me and I don't have enough water.

With the exception of the two clearly renovated and lived in apartments, this otherwise appears to be the abandoned housing block of a wildcat coal mine

Get vaguely lost-ish in the tangle of streets heading into town because I follow a marked Detour that the GPS disagrees with being a closed road. I say lost-ish though rather than lost because I continue heading in the correct direction as I periodically ignore my GPS's plaintive cries that I really ought to be turning here or turning there and recalculating recalculating recalculating.

Find the bike shop, ask if they'll store my bike, get an affirmative, and within 15 minutes everything I want to take with me back to Haikou has been unloaded and I'm in a taxi on my way to the coach station for a transfer to Hanzhong followed by a most uncomfortable trek-with-pannier through the train station and a bullet train to Xi'an.

I wasn't sure if people would like my pairing this particular image and slogan with the Happy Birthday song for the centennial of the CCP but, much to my surprise, the only negative comment I got was from someone I already know to be a dipshit

The train station in Xi'an is a nightmare of long walks without benches culminating in a "we don't care that you've already filled out the same health check declaration as everyone else" episode of being singled out on account of my being a foreign passport holder and therefore—of everyone in the fairly well heeled crowd—the least likely to have recently been overseas or been in contact with anyone recently overseas¹. They then want to send me back to recomplete the health check declaration that I've already done but I effectively tell them to go fuck themselves.

That they don't stop me from continuing onwards at this point indicates to some degree the amount which health checks have become, like TSA in the States, security theater. That and I'm also doing my usual thing of very carefully choosing my words when being a rude and uncooperative twat².

It's been a week plus and I'm still seething furious at my taxi driver. I'd just gotten up to the front of the queue at the Taxi Stand when two guys in a frightful hurry to catch a flight asked if they could skip the line....well, I'm going to an airport hotel so feel free to share with me.

It's not that the driver was even that ridiculously out of line in attempting to convince us that we were two separate fares and he ought to get paid double for our existing. It's that he kept up this argument for 45 minutes of driving us.

Booked my hotel on Trip and, when I got a call from them about halfway into the drive, was expecting an attempted cancellation³ but they just wanted to confirm that a) I speak Chinese and could check in without problems, b) that I'd definitely been in the country for more than three weeks⁴, and c) that I wanted airport drop off service in the morning.

Got to the room, got checked in, and got grinding on the newest UNESCO document.

¹ Although they still have Quarantine requirements, the borders were never closed for citizens. In fact, the cyclists I ran into the day before actually included a Chinese person who was about a week out from heading back to the States to continue his undergraduate.

² I'm happy to be cooperative up to a point. That point is the point where the people around me are also suffering fools gladly. However, when you are singling me out to inconvenience me in excess of what you are doing to everyone else, you better be very certain of your ability to logically defend yourself and most "I don't want to be here either" folk aren't up for that kind of a challenge.

³ Ever since people on the Travel in China during Covid groups have been using my advice as ways to get upgrades at Trip's expense, I've been eagerly waiting for them to try to cancel me at a time when it was convenient for me.

⁴ Many localities are imposing extra quarantine restrictions on people who have been released from centralized quarantine and still expecting them to stay in hotels but they aren't being very clear in their expression of these rules that most of those people are still in monitored facilities rather than just released into the public.

Today's ride: 30 km (19 miles)
Total: 2,876 km (1,786 miles)

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