T-7: 三亚 → 陇西

September 9, 2024

I don't think I'm going to give you a blow by blow recounting of how things go while I'm on the media trip. For one thing, it's got nothing to do with biking. For another, I've got no control over the itinerary and I'm not going the kind of places that are "bike trip relevant."

I will note that our first hotel (at about twice the cost of my usual bike trip locations) photocopied everyone's passports as the Gansu Registration System's foreigner component appears to still be broken. I say "appears" because, although talking my way behind the front desk is a plan for before the end of the junket, I just haven't done it yet.

Only one of the seven hotels I've stayed at since I started documenting the systemic changes since the May 24 Announcement correctly and quickly registered me¹ so it's a bit difficult to make a video which accurately reflects what has happened and what people ought to know while simultaneously not pissing off the state-owned media that are the reason for my getting paid for vacations.

The first of many Large Group Photos in front of things

With our first meal being Beef Noodles near the airport and our first stop being a TCM hospital, I was a little worried that this trip was going to turn out bad

Got into Sanya fairly late last night. Completely knackered from the walking with the suitcases that are 90% Tour gear², and the hours spent sitting on the train station floor waiting for my train. Reading through the messages of people I know looking for a place to charge their phone or to get a shower, I felt more than a little bit guilty relaxing in the giant bathtub that my hotel room had but I told myself that even if I hadn't thought I was leaving for four or five days, I wasn't the one who scheduled my leaving now and I wasn't exactly pulling a "Ted Cruz running to Cancun."

Up at 4am to get the shuttle³ to the airport and my flight to Lanzhou. Paid for 6kg of overweight luggage that should have been within the allotment I was told was included in my ticket but which I wasn't exactly going to try arguing about or rejiggering into carry-on at that non-level of alert.

Even knowing how much pain I'm in when I don't use Airport Wheelchair Service, I still feel like an imposter using it

Didn't really sleep on the plane beyond interrupted catnaps. Also didn't get much sleep on the coach after landing. Luckily though, the only place we visited today was a TCM Hospital so I not only didn't miss out on anything interesting, I was also too wiped to be snarky⁴.

¹ Beihai registered me on the computer; Shanghai, Haikou, and Sanya took pictures of my passport; Zhouning took our passports while we were at dinner and may have registered us; one hotel in Chengdu let me stay but flat out refused to register me while the other triggered a complaint about the local police during the process of them making registration as difficult as possible

First sight of the Yellow River in over a year

² I can shoehorn relevance in

³ I'm not sure they actually have a shuttle. They said it was just a case of not enough people and hailed me a car on their phone app.

⁴ I have very little faith in placebo

Photographing the Front Desk's phone in order to prove to the driver that I'm supposed to be getting in his car

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