D12: 阳防口 → 五寨

October 2, 2024

With tonight being the third of three nights where checking in as a foreigner goes back to not being the insanely smooth experience it had been every night in Shanxi prior to Dr. M's arrival, I'm unimaginably glad that she's just as firmly stubborn as I am on the topic of "fuck you and your unwritten rules."

As so many cool things happened before we got into our showdown with Wuzhai Public Security, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself but suffice it to say, our eventful day had an even more eventful ending.

After trying some inedible fake Oreos which we expected were going to be inedible and which we purchased solely for the purpose of determining their degree of inedibility, we began by trying to find Yangfangkou's lone online bookable hotel. Given the price, expectations were insanely low and—from what we saw of the sister restaurant—those expectations were met.

Before that happened, however, there was easily an hour spent at the folk temple across the street from the hotel climbing up and down the mountain, poking our noses into shrines, trying the spring water, pondering the meaning of the concrete statue of mushrooms, reading inscriptions, and trying to find ways up to the nearby Ming Dynasty fort.

By the time we were done we had probably come up with as many unanswered questions as questions which we had found the answer to, and we were really hopeful that the Hotel We Didn't Stay In would be able to answer them.

However, despite being named Mystic Spring Hotel, their proximity to the Spring Temple, and architecture that clearly made them at least a decade older than anything we had seen at the Temple, the one staff member we found didn't know much.

Furthermore, her thick local accent is a different thick local accent than the ones which Dr. M usually encounters during fieldwork and we were faced with the common problem of "they understand me" but "I don't understand them."

We didn't have much farther to go from here to the turn off we'd picked that went most of the way over the mountain with almost no distance at all on the truck road over the pass. Found and confirmed with a combination of AMap and Open Topo (my phone) and BaiduMaps and Tubulu (her phone), none of our resources¹ bothered to inform us of the I want to say 17th century pagoda that we'd have spotted even if the guy on the motorcycle hadn't told us about it.

Perfect blue skies of the kind that threaten that the night will be cold, bushes full of ripe seabuckthorn to try to snag without cutting our fingers open on the spikes, an overgrown brush layer with a lot of wild chamomile, and locals who had come up to granny's village to dig potatoes and roast them by the side of the path, the pagoda and crumbling² original temple take another ninety minutes, and then we had to have freshly roasted taters straight from the fire pit.

Which is probably a good thing, cause there wasn't any food between the pagoda and Shenchi County and, if we hadn't had the potatoes, we'd have been hungry and grumpy as well as spooked and discombobulated by the fast moving trucks along a road where—drivers' good behavior notwithstanding—I was seriously considering riding in the drainage ditch and Dr. M was thinking of going off road.

Making the executive decision to continue on to Wuzhai in order to grind out the kilometers as fast as possible on a road that wasn't as truck-y and which was taking is away from the arterial road, with the exception of a downhill that existed only on the topo map, who knows what would have happened if we'd stayed in Shenchi.

It may have already been dark by the time we crossed into Wuzhai. I don't think it was. Heading towards dark, for sure. But not actually dark. And, at least until I make a complaint to the national government and get a response, I'm still not entirely sure that the County is closed.

I've been in a Closed Area before. Been kicked out of a Closed Area before. Had friends and acquaintances who were kicked out of Closed Areas.

Closed Areas have specific, expected behaviors that follow specific, expected patterns and these patterns are consistent across a multi-decade time period that easily includes over a hundred incidents in over a dozen provinces.

Not one of the procedures for dealing with foreigners accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves: "we have rules but we aren't allowed to show them to you."

Not one of the procedures for dealing with foreigners accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves a hotel guest registration system that allows foreigners to be registered.

Not one of the procedures for dealing with foreigners accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves the police only knowing that the foreigners exist because an officer driving by saw one of us talking to someone³ on a street corner 20km inside what they are claiming is the Closed Area.

And, glossing entirely over the part where they had no tools available to deal with both of us yelling at an ever growing number of them, not one of the procedures for dealing with foreigners accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves them giving up and letting us stay the night.

¹ Neither of us checked the Antiquities Atlas

² We both pretty much ignored the new temple encroaching on and directly next to the sign delineating the Core Conservation Area

³ A guy that saw us riding "invited" us to dinner only for us to get to his location pin and find that he had invited us to drink tea and talk about where we might want to go to dinner.

Today's ride: 59 km (37 miles)
Total: 759 km (471 miles)

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