D8: 王庄堡 →砂河

September 26, 2024

It's a really good thing that I didn't try to make it to Pingxiangguan yesterday. Even if I hadn't gotten the flat tires, the amount of time it took me to get started means that it would have been a dodgy proposition. Today was a lot colder and grayer than yesterday, so the descent from the Pingxing Pass Great Wall wouldn't have been quite so miserable. But, even bearing in mind that I didn't go in to the still walled town of Pingxingguan, it very much did not look like the sort of place that was apt to have open hotels of any stripe.

It will come as a great surprise to people that know me in my normal life, but when I'm biking, unless I'm doing the Vulcan Healing Trance thing where I sleep 14 hours in a row, I'm often up at 6am. On my previous fall excursions, this was particularly frustrating as there was no way in hell I was leaving bedlandia until the sun had warmed the world somewhat. Nowadays, I've at least got video editing or Dr. M's book to work on. On this day, I was fed, dressed, and out the door by 7:30 with the thought that, having had oatmeal with sweet milk powder for dinner the night before, I'd have a proper breakfast somewhere on the road.

No proper breakfast was found. The trucker restaurants I'd passed on the way up to Wangzhuangpu were all lunch and dinner places, and what little I saw of the town was no more lively than it had been the night before.

Then, once I was on the Rainbow Road¹, although I would pass through numerous small villages and townlets that obviously had people (as evidenced by chimney smoke or old folks getting their morning sun), they weren't the kind of villages were people pay for food cooked by other people. The first time I came to something obviously restaurant-y was a former small town turned giant holiday complex² just downhill from the first of many sites related to the Battle of Pingxing Pass³. Nothing looked open and nothing looked like it would have the ability to cook food for one person when it was open. The next time was a handful of stalls outside a tourist temple and, although they all clearly had food, they also didn't have walls and I thought (incorrectly) that if I kept going I would find someplace with both food and walls.

Not too long after that, I got to what AMap helpfully told me was a dirt road that I shouldn't be on. Perfectly paved and with no problems at all, there was a "Road Closed Ahead" checkpoint of some sort maybe a kilometer or two after the nonexistent transition to dirt but all they did when they saw me coming was move the cones out of my way and wave me through, so I kept going.

I guess the climb was about 5km. It wouldn't be too hard for me to figure out. That's what GPS data is for. I'm pleased to say that, although I stopped frequently, for everything from checking phone messages and taking photos to correcting headlines, the only time prior to the dirt road finally showing up that I got off and walked the bike was when I was combining walking with typing.

They are building a tunnel. I don't know if it doesn't go through yet, or if the viaduct after the tunnel isn't surfaced yet, or if they just prefer to try to keep people out of their construction site⁴. In any case, that plus the beautiful new asphalt after the Pingxing Pass Great Wall told me why someone had marked the road closed on the GPS.

If you've seen one Ming Dynasty Great Wall Pass on a cold gray day where you haven't eaten anything but pannier snacks, you've seen them all. Or at least that's what I told myself when I decided not to go climbing on things in search of mountain vistas obscured by low hanging clouds.

So. Cold. Going. Downhill.

And then going downhill.

And then still going downhill.

The aforementioned still-walled fort town that would have been my attempted destination for yesterday barely even had any chimney smoke rising up from inside, so it was stop for a quick photo of a beacon tower and to put on an extra jersey and keep going.

Widened within the past decade to accommodate the death machines moving as fast as they possibly could on a road that still has level crossings, I wouldn't find a restaurant that looked like it had been open any time after the Hu Jintao years until after I'd been on the truck route for 8 or 10 kilometers.

I'm not sure if it actually got colder while I was sat inside or if it just felt colder going from the inside to the outside but during my making of a video on trying out weird local drinks⁵, I also put on two more jerseys, a windbreaker, and my only pair of tights.

Booked a hotel another 15km down the very straight road with very wide shoulders and very respectful⁶ death machines who started announcing their presence from the moment they saw me and who both slowed down and pulled far to the left to pass as I pulled far to the right to let them.

A national chain that is internationally owned, because CTrip doesn't feel like following the announcement from the Ministry of Commerce, it was still marked as "not taking foreigners" despite the front desk telling me I was at least the tenth foreigner she had checked in since she started working there two years ago. I got into the room, turned the heat all the way up, made myself a bowl of oatmeal, and fully intended to spend the rest of the evening getting warm when the police called.

¹ I think Rainbow Roads started somewhere in Zhejiang. In addition to the yellow line down the center of the road a red and a blue line are added to mark it as a scenic byway that usually isn't allowed to have through trucks. As the road I entered Shanxi on (which was once a truck route and which now has a traffic police post where trucks must stop and prove that they have legitimate business inside) was designated an official scenic byway by the traffic police and did not have the rainbow stripe†, I suspect that the stripes come from the local tourism board and don't have the same force of law.

† It also hadn't been renumbered as a 5xx road which used to be my standard way of determining that something was a Scenic Byway.

² Taking villages where greater than half of the population has moved to the city and turning them into holiday retreats managed by a single large company is a recent rural revitalization thing that I can't decide whether or not I dislike. In many cases, it's done quite well; the people still living there get improved services; the people who aren't living there get a reasonable income off of their otherwise disused property. But, in many other cases, it's basically a land grab that disenfranchises residents and ensures that tourism money doesn't spend any time in the local economy.

³ Never got around to figuring out if that was Chinese Civil War or War Against Japanese Aggression

⁴ I'm sure if they really wanted to keep people off of their under construction roads, they could. However, the necessary effort to do so would make things difficult for both the construction vehicles that need to use these roads and the locals who have no other choice.

⁵ Most weird local drinks (like 非常可乐 “Very Cola”) have either been bought out by the national conglomerates (Wahaha in the aforementioned case) or have become national drinks in their own right (大窑 Dayao). Few of them taste good. All of them are worth paying a small sum for to try on or off camera. In this case, the fizzy orange was mostly notable for a strong chemical flavor, and the fizzy snow pear for tasting like pears. I don't know if it was the glass bottles or what, but both of them were among the fizziest fizz-pops I've ever drunk.

⁶ Just to remind me how nice most of the drivers were, the occasional truck driver kept to his lane without slowing or giving me space and let me feel the power of his motion.

Today's ride: 63 km (39 miles)
Total: 511 km (317 miles)

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