D2: 固安 → 定兴

September 19, 2024

O & A do this thing with their munchkins called "High, Low, Gruffalo" where they have to tell Mom and Dad what one thing happened today that was awesome, what one thing happened that was not awesome, and what one thing happened that was weird.

Today's high had to be the discovery of a new function on AMap where, if a driver coming up behind me is currently using AMap to navigate, and he is either going substantially faster than the road's average speed or the road is narrow, my GPS interrupts my music to warn me.

Today's low was definitely the chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberries. I'm not sure how it's possible to include actual freeze dried strawberries in something marketed as "chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberries" and get it that badly wrong, but even if I wasn't expecting the so-called dark chocolate to be high quality, I wasn't expecting anything this bad.

Spot the problems with this "seatbelts and helmets" poster by the local Traffic Police

Today's weird was coming to a small intersection on a rural trunk route where a solar-powered-traffic light on wheels had been installed, the intersecting road had zero traffic, there were no obvious traffic cameras anywhere, and everyone including the ebike¹ in front of me stopped at the red light and waited for it to turn green.

Although it's definitely not as bad as it once was, once I passed out of the Gaobeidian² area, traffic started to become the kind of crazy that is more in line with my memories of what Chinese traffic used to be like back when I was a fresh off the boat too afraid to cross the street if other people weren't crossing at the same time.

The morning started early enough that—had I not exploded my luggage all over the room the night before as part of trying to figure out where everything was and where everything actually belonged—I could have been on the road by 9am. The aftermath of the luggage explosion, plus the waiting for the courier to come pick up the newest round of stuff being mailed to Hainan³, plus breakfast and coffee, plus some work for the media center, and a little light video editing, means that I wasn't on the road until after 11am.

They just stopped and waited for the light to change

Gaobeidian preparing for an international event

What rural Chinese traffic is supposed to be like

I'm in a not terribly exciting part of Hebei. Luckily, since it's only the second real day of the Tour, I'm sufficiently happy to be on the road that I don't care about the lack of anything interesting⁴.

Hungry for lunch by the time both 10km and noon rolled around, I pick a restaurant as much on the basis of it being the first place I've seen open as I do because it has a lot full of vehicles. In terms of flavor, this was a Big Win. In terms of getting served by staff who were mentally unprepared for the possibility that they could understand me, and who have lots and lots and lots of other customers who wanted to spend a lot more money than me... not nearly as winning.

After lunch, I moved from the big provincial road to a much smaller county one. On the one hand, it was nominally more interesting (which still wasn't very interesting). On the other hand, it meant that the shoulder was narrower and the trucks a lot closer to me.

I suspect that, if the not-very-international event hadn't been going on, the ride into Gaobeidian City would have been horrible. As it was, however, the traffic cops were out in force, and were both preventing trucks or other large vehicles from using more than a couple of the roads I traversed and were organizing tow trucks to remove parked vehicles from the shoulders.

Breakfast oatmeal and the last of the free pour overs

High protein milk from the convenience store where I got dinner⁵ last night

First donkeyburger of 2024, it was a bit dry but comments on the video are going to send me to check out someplace that's supposed to be better.

The not-very-international event was one of the reasons I decided to continue from Gaobeidian on to Dingxing. This particular area of Hebei is one where I, and lots of other people I know, have lots of experience getting into heated conversations with people in uniforms on the topic of... you gussed it... foreigners staying in hotels. And, as none of the places in my price range were coming up listed 'foreigner friendly,' I thought the same period of time as an event that has them deploying the police to keep trucks out of the city is a bad time to be Different or Demanding, even if what I'm demanding is that the people whose job it is to make sure that the law be followed, know the law⁶ and fucking follow it.

Dingxing had other advantages as well. Such as the first place that I randomly picked that looked okay from the pictures being one named Marriott.

(Obviously, I don't actually mean that it was a Marriott. I simply mean that it was named Marriott.)

Especially since I almost always book online these days, it's been literal ages since I've had a hotel try to tell me that they had no vacancies. Needless to say, this worked as well as any other tactic which gets tried on me (i.e., not very well). I could have called the OTA on account of it being a "refused booking" and could have done the whole "forced upgrade thing" but, even if my specific terms and vocabulary have changed dramatically since the May and July Announcements, I've got lots more experience at calling the police.

Copy of the famous rainbow in (I want to say) Chaoyang (but I might have the district wrong) outside the Gaobeidian Waterproof Materials Building

International Door & Window Technology Building and Scientific Cooperation Base

I can't decide if the translator who came up with this name deserves an award or a punch in the nose

I'm pretty pleased with how that phone call went as—unlike either Chengdu or Beijing Daxing—the people on the other end were clearly aware that Announcements Have Been Made and they are supposed to be followed. In theory, someone from the local police station was going to come to the hotel and show the front desk lady how to register me but, by the time she left the front desk to go to the bathroom, he hadn't arrived yet, and I had finished all the work that could be done on my phone, and... well... leaving me alone or unsupervised when I'm bored is never a good idea, and then she called them and they were all "mmmhmm, fuck off⁷."

I didn't see anyone until after I came back from dinner. Dressed in plainclothes and smoking a cigarette outside the entrance, he didn't identify himself as police, but he was pretty clearly waiting for me, and he definitely knew more than your average Chinese person about topics like visas and how employment status can be tied to one's ability to stay in the country.

So, I casually name-dropped the hell out of that conversation. Never in the "I'm important" bragging sort of way that makes people rightfully want to kick you down a notch. But, instead the bitching about my job (which I love) and how much it sucks, and why I'm glad to be on vacation kind of way that doesn't give them an opening.

Finally! The road to a moderately prosperous society in all respects... (小康路)

First advertisement on curing bed wetting⁸ of the Tour

And if I happened to mention the Ministry of Tourism or China Daily... well, that was just commiserating with someone who clearly has government experience and also obviously understands why someone would dislike the mountains of red tape involved in getting money out of places like that.

Just before I bowed out to go up to the room and put my phone on charge, we ended the conversation with his trying to let me know that the hotel just wasn't aware of current policy, and my responding "I know. I hate it when local relevant departments fail to fulfill their responsibilities at disseminating information."

¹ I'm in a part of China where ebikes don't have license plates.

² Where, admittedly, they are having some sort of 'not especially international' big international event that had the traffic police out in force.

First person using the road to dry crops

Nowadays, pretty much every home in this area has its own bathroom. This is a change from within the past decade. As a result, many small rural hotels still feel the need to actively advertise that they have bathing facilities, and, in some cases, that their primary winter business is owning a large hot water heater.

When the village chief started singing⁹, I realized that "I can't carry a tune in a bucket" wasn't really an excuse for why I wasn't letting them drag me up on stage

³ Mostly books this time, but also some tea, and the t-shirt that I forgot to wash last night, because ... seriously ... there is no need for bike clothing + four t-shirts†.

† There's this otherwise quite interesting returned urban student in Hainan who has set up a cool rural revitalization project which I've long wanted to visit except that he absolutely reeks of BO and bad breath. I wasn't at all surprised when he commented on the picture on my Moments of me with all my luggage that "you really don't need more than three shirts when you go on a business trip."

⁴ And given how eclectic my definition of interesting is, if I say an area has "nothing interesting," it really doesn't have much of anything at all.

⁵ A bag of Doritos, and a milk that I mixed with the purple taro protein powder that I'm trying to finish off.

Whether it's real or a scam, this seemed a very weird place to post lonely hearts looking for love.

⁶ I was messaged out of the blue today by someone who has been a WeChat friend of mine since the days that WeChat scraped your phone contacts to suggest people that you might want to add. He had seen my "I'm in Hebei" post on Moments and, if I was going to in Shijiazhuang, wanted to invite me out to dinner. We both remember our first and last meeting (in 2012) quite well, though for different reasons. Him, because his police station didn't know that foreigners could stay, and me because it was the first time I flipped my shit at the police. And now, I'm really wondering if the totally pain-free check-in I had in that county in 2022 was at all related to the impression I made on him and his colleagues.

⁷ Their specific vocabulary, which I could hear over the speaker phone, wasn't that rude.

⁸ This ad is centered on Hebei and is rarely seen outside rural Hebei. There's also a very common ad to cure stuttering which has spread throughout the rural parts of northern China. To add to the weirdness, they are all local places, not a chain.

⁹ I was enticed over by the sound of drums and dancers

Having mud spatters or a weird load obscure your license plate number is not an allowable thing in China

Today's ride: 64 km (40 miles)
Total: 190 km (118 miles)

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