Visiting then in the morning, those potentially interesting historic sites in Manchuanguan turned out not to be very interesting at all. In terms of time that could have been spent moving forward, they were probably one of the biggest dings to my day's ability to get anywhere but I would have camped no matter what.

I have now confirmed that my new tent fan is lovely. Batteryless, it plugs into a power bank, and it works a shit ton better than the combo power bank tent fan I tried last year.

Separate from that good news, I have also managed to puncture both bladders of my new self inflating mattress (though it still worked to keep mosquitoes from biting me through the hammock), and crack the screen of my phone again.

I believe the hammock-tent experiment is over for me. As a thing to camp in on the beach in Hainan where decently spaced palm trees are a thing and we came by car, yes. For biking though, no. You can't bring any valuables (camera, laptop) inside the "tent" with you. You need trees with the right spacing and neither a swamp, a shrub, or crops beneath them. And there's a whole host of minor niggling problems that I'm not even mentioning.... but a backpacker's tent is definitely more my style.

I've not written anything about the biking. That's because it was pretty uneventful compared to the camping. I mostly managed not to need to walk. I mostly managed to have food and water and to find resupplies at reasonable intervals that meant not raiding my supplies. Mostly.

The campsite, in the front yard of an old slate roofed farmhouse, was a spot I saw and then turned around and came back to an hour and change later. I'd been walking by this point so we're talking less than 3km total distance but boy did it bug me the whole next day when I discovered a viable campsite less than a kilometer after the place where I gave up.

Asking the owners if I could use their space to set up my tent I thought from the slightly hostile body language¹ I was going to be told "no", but then he realized I wasn't a danger to him or his wife and although things didn't quite progress to being invited indoors to chat, he did come out and kibbitz my hammock setting up skills.

China is mostly a very safe place. This is not so much a case of massaged statistics as it is population density. Muggings and things like that have to happen in a place where there is no one to intervene.

You get a lot of pickpockets. You get bikes and ebikes stolen from unguarded parking areas. You have sneak thieves figure out which apartment complex doesn't actually have security cameras (or guards that pay attention). But you don't have violent crime.

Unless, maybe, your house is the only one uphill or downhill for quite a number of miles and you've got the physique of someone who grew up during the hungry years. Maybe then, even though you don't really have very much to steal, some people might think it worth it to try.

¹ Who me? Hostile? No. Just picked up this wickedly sharp farming implement and am holding it between us for no reason at all.