D81: 勉县 → 汉中

July 11, 2021

In a region where locked temples are rare, this locked temple had some truly amazing historical statuary that I could just glimpse through the gate

I have a delightfully relaxed morning involving three hits of the new coffee strong enough that I need to water it down into an Americano but so high quality that no sweetener of any kind is required¹. This is accompanied by oddly savory oatmeal that I'd forgotten had the last of the "bone tea" I'd bought in Pingliang mixed in cause I was low on food safe ziploc bags at the time.

More repacking and restructuring of things and where they go, I decide to ditch the bulk of my sleeping bag when mailing the laptop bag back to Haikou. Once (or if) I decide which pair of shoes I don't want to keep with me, I'll have room for something that fluffy inside my panniers² but it's very likely that—should I camp—it will be warm enough that a sleeping bag won't be necessary. I also plan to check taobao for silk sleeping bag liners as I've got room for one of those.

I counted *six* fuel cans in the one guy's tote. Cause apparently there is nowhere between their departure point and Lhasa that sells fuel and no place to arrange the pickup of mail

Once upon a time countryside convenience store

Happy happy go to work; safely safely return home

I'm displeased that my best method of getting things evenly distributed results in my still needing 3 bags of a night when I'm not taking the bike into my hotel room but I can't come up with anything better.

The Post Office was a delightful comedy of errors mostly perpetrated on me by a very pleasant employee who kind of spoke English and her coworkers' insistence—despite having already spoken to me in Chinese—to run everything through her as a translator.

Her English was on a par with the person who translated these signs. It was understandable and I had to be nice and accept the effort being made for me but Chinese would have been so much easier

I specifically chose the Post Office rather than one of the courier companies because I can never remember which companies accept the existence of a person without an ID card as a valid sender and which ones don't. Even though this Post Office had no problem after a team huddle and consulting a manager on the phone with using one of their ID cards to send my mail, I wasn't willing to completely let "but our system can't handle passports" pass without comment. "Thank you for finding a solution that I'm sure is easier than figuring out how to do something you won't be doing again".

It will be a few days before my camera catches up with me and even though my phone gets used for a lot of photography, it basically never gets used for landscape stuff or casual snaps as those can happen with the camera without my needing to stop biking. I am at times frustrated and at other times (like every time I get up from somewhere) panicked by the lack of a familiar weight on my shoulder.

A mural showing Guanyin stretching out her hand to catch someone who has been thrown off a cliff

First temple of the day is a Daoist place whose grounds look distinctly like a repurposed cottage manufactory from the 70s or 80s. The old woman caretaker actively does not like my being there and alternates between dark mutterings and shouting at me. While friendly interactions are obvious much more to my liking, I take a rather perverse liking to annoying rude people and make a point of spending extra time looking at things. However, it's neither a very large temple nor a very interesting one so the "extra time" is more like stretching my visit from five or six minutes to seven or eight.

Children and teenagers are prohibited from entering sites of worship to participate in religious activities

The next temple is a glorious place that I hesitate to call "under construction" since the construction work has clearly stopped for a long enough period of time that there aren't even visible footprints in the rat shit all over the floor of the main sanctuary. I also can't decide if the three Buddha statues have been left with only a layer of primer on them or if they were originally a gaudy brass that was deemed unacceptable and covered up as some bright spots which I think see beneath the cracks might indicate.

Halfway between primer that hasn't been covered and spray paint covering something

The secondary sanctuary looked much more in use

As you can see from these statues, the ones above shouldn't be a solid color

Temple number three is locked but that's fine as the day is starting to get hot and I'm really getting to need to find a place to sit and eat and hydrate.

I wiggle my way south from what would have been a lackluster chicken sandwich lunch except that I've got a soda bottle full of surprisingly not completely liquefied blue cheese. The site of interest where I've pointed myself turns out to be a modern within the last 20 years wooden pavilion over a two or three hundred year old marker stone commemorating This Spot Right Here as totally being the place where Zhuge Liang invented the wheelbarrow 2500 years ago.

Something Important (Probably) Happened Here

I cross a bridge. I miss a turn. This means both that I get some great humanistic scenery in the form of tile mosaics, twenty year old payphones, and an incredible Roman columned concrete and brick office building that must have been the grandest thing in town at a time when this town still had an industry; it also means I've got to deal with a very torn up road cause why bother fixing the asphalt in places no one really goes?

Skip the next temple for looking too under construction and too up a hill, sweat my way into the city of Hanzhong (with a stop to stuff myself with watermelon), and rock on up at the bike shop which isn't the one that commented on a recent video inviting me to drop by, but I can't find that one.

While sitting outside the Merida not quite getting the impetus to move, a group of four tourers arrive to have some work done on their group leader's brakes. They're mostly camping and I kind of want to try my gear out (especially the tent fan) but they aren't much up for the act of social interaction (even with probing attempts to get them to talk about gear or distance traveled) and when I go for dinner in the same restaurant as two of them, they are sat eating their individual meals and staring at their phones.

Plastic carry totes on top of rack packs on top of canvas panniers

The greatest part of touring with others in China is the ability to not be forced to eat single dishes in a culture that just doesn't get non-wasteful non-communal eating.

And with that, I know I won't be camping.

I can't say as I was hugely surprised that the cheap hotel I poked my nose in at gave me the no foreigners treatment. I'd already tried booking online at a few places and had them all refuse my non Chinese name. However, as the statistics I've recently been putting together as part of a research paper on tourism in China show, unless it's a total frightfest, I don't really do the "going to another hotel" thing anymore.

Wish more of today's roads had been tree lined but I'm pleased that I managed nearly the whole day traffic free

Stopped here to liberally soak my bandana and sponge bathe myself

Nowadays, I walk in, things happen, and I go to my room.

In this case the things were a phone call (to the husband not the police), an attempt to tell me "no", instructions from me to call the police, the woman unwisely standing up and leaving of the Front Desk while calling the police, and the discovery that not only am I getting pretty good at even the most poorly programmed of Registration Systems, I'm also getting pretty good at the software for assigning keycards.

Police took a frightfully long time to show up all things considered so I'm glad I decided to go to my room to wait for them.

Per the epaulet chart I was recently sent, the bodycam-less officer was about the most senior you'll ever see out on the street so that may have been part of what took them so long to show up. That, or they wanted to be very certain that they knew exactly what to say and do and how as my reported³ behavior had already put them in the awkward position of knowing that I very likely knew things and very likely wasn't going to put up with any bullshit.

¹ Given that the last of my road bought honey was gifted to a friend in Haikou, it's important that my coffee be good enough to not need sweetening.

² I hate the messy look of stuff strapped higgledy-piggledy to the outside of panniers.

³ If anyone knew how to navigate their end of the Registration System, they also would have had access to my personal details and, presumably, the mysterious bit of Information that makes people suddenly become very nice to me. However, since they needed to supplement what I had already done on the computer with photocopies, I don't think they necessarily knew how to force navigate their way through that mess.

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 2,932 km (1,821 miles)

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