Other than the perennial "because it was there" and to, of course, get off of the National Road, the reason I had picked this particular round about excursion through the mountains was to visit a particular Grotto located about 5km off the road I was now on.

Mentioned on my paper maps and on AMap (and possibly even on Google), it had looked at the time of planning to be a most excellent detour.

Faced with having to take a one way trip 5km uphill to something that, although it had managed to garner three reviews by past visitors, only had people complaining about how difficult it was to find and how worthwhile a visit it wasn't had me somewhat questioning of whether or not I really actually wanted to visit it.

My managing, by the time I got to the intersection, to have completely failed to get any kind of lunch or afternoon snack or roadside ice cream was the final nail in the coffin and I didn't go. 

This is a perfectly lovely area that's been on the receiving end of decades of policies to convince people to move out of isolated mountain homesteads and into safe housing where the cost to set up and maintain basic infrastructure like power lines isn't orders of magnitude greater than what society is getting in return.

Ignoring for the moment the generalized trend of urbanization which the country has been undergoing (and therefore a lot of empty houses in all villages and market towns), this has resulted in entire communities of isolated homesteaders living together in the same place. Population density has occurred but, perhaps because the sort of people who are attracted by an urban lifestyle haven't stuck about, the cultural changes which one might expect haven't occurred. They're still isolated homesteaders. They just happen to be isolated together.

There are no noodle shops or restaurants or people sitting around the General Store playing mahjongg. Forget about publicly accessible refrigerators with ice pops on one side and dumplings on the other, there aren't even any of the random store fronts or remnants thereof to show that commerce once happened here¹. 

Instead, it's nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, three five storey apartment blocks, nothing, nothing, and more nothing with occasional intervals of a row of eight or ten two storey houses that experience tells me ought to have a seed co-op, and a motorcycle repair place, and someone selling children's clothing, one pretentious restaurant that's overpriced for the quality and one grubby hole in the wall that probably won't give me food poisoning but which, for some reason, don't.

Even the road paralleling the expressway through the valley was more commercial than this². 

I have a tolerable (if very very late) lunch of noodles in what looks for all the world like someone's living room in the town of Lengshui but which all the signs both inside (from the Health Department) and outside (Food! Lodging!) surely indicate is a place of business before a terrifying descent down to the main road that not only has me getting off to walk my bike down the last little bit, but also leads to me bruising my thigh from the way I balance the bike against my hip as I creep down one step at a time.

The main road isn't much better for having commercial services but at least in this case it's the familiar look of Restaurants Were Once Here that you come to expect of any route between City A and City B where the two cities now have an expressway connecting them.

I grabbed a few snaps of some pretty calligraphy whose thoroughly Maoist content belied the mental turmoil it's author had to be going through for this to be turning up on such a modern railway trestle only to discover five or six kilometres later that at least some of this line was laid in 1969. I suppose that most of the concrete I'm used to guesstimating the age of is much lower grades than what was used in building rail but, if not for the date, I seriously wouldn't have thought this any older than the late 90s.

Crossed the Han River for the last time this trip and made my way into the town of Jiahe where nothing that was on the map seemed to exist in reality, the restaurant situation was limited to a single fried chicken and hamburgers shop, and my hotel (which was the only hotel) had expanded beyond their original location to one or more apartments which had been rather poorly converted into hotel rooms.

¹ Sometimes I'll be on a tiny little farm road in the middle of nowhere and I'll see a half height boarded window and counter that tells me, once upon a time, this was a store. And I always find myself wondering who came to these crossroads at the end of nowhere and what did they buy here? Also,  why here and not in the town?

² Which is not to say that it was particularly commercial, but I was able to stop and buy iced drinks on two separate occasions without having to previously wait until I was desperately dry and in need of anything at all.