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 various iterations of Public Security, my even mentioning that a showdown happened is a case of my getting a bit ahead of myself, but, suffice it to say, our eventful day had an even more eventful ending.

Since our rooms came with free breakfast, we dutifully made the effort to go downstairs and eat. It being a small hotel that was putting out approximately the amount of food as the number of guests made the breakfast more edible than is usually the case for hotel breakfasts; however, it still wasn't half as delicious as a street corner packed with locals would have been. Given the general furniture situation with Chinese hotel rooms¹, it did, at least, mean that we had someplace better to sit and caffeinate.

"Hotels Even Marian Won't Stay In" Series, "Food, Lodging" and instead of mentioning that they have high speed internet or parking, they want to make sure you know "if you stay here, you can shower!"

"Hotels Even Marian Won't Stay In" Series: Top "Smokes, Booze, Lodging", Bottom "Medicinal Ingredients Hotel"

Roll up your sleeves and get things done

Proud to take part in the redevelopment of my neighborhood

Dr. M found us some incredible fake Oreos while we were looking for a shop that had big bottles of water. Since they were cheap, these—of course—needed to be bought, and tasted, and reviewed for the camera. Just as inedible and gross as expected, we threw them out after one bite each², then proceeded with attempting to see if we could find Yangfangkou's lone online-bookable hotel.

Small as Yangfangkou is, and near as it was, we still managed to get distracted on our way there; but we did eventually find something in the right general location that had probably been part of the same property when they first opened and now seemed to be a closed banquet hall combined with a storage area for electric cable and other construction materials. By this point we were just over there to use their (horrific) toilets and to ask questions about the folk temple on the other side of the street, and we weren't actually looking to rent 38y a night rooms, so we never got around to asking where the rooms were.

In terms of location and architecture, Mystic Spring Hotel³—the banquet hall / construction materials yard—certainly seemed to have some sort of relationship to Holy Spring Temple. But, even with everything pointing to this building being at least a decade older than anything we had seen at the Temple, the one and only staff member we eventually managed to find by wandering around shouting "hallooo" didn't know much of anything

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 all too common problem of "they understand me" but "I don't understand them."

When I say "thick local accent" I need you to realize that we're talking a level of accent where—comparing notes after we left—I thought Holy Spring Temple had been built by a local deaf man (long ren) and Dr. M thought it was built by a monk from Longmen.

The dipper at the spring is made from a hardhat

Religious art doesn't require a lot of skill

Before our little Q & no A Session at Mystic Spring, we easily spent an hour climbing up and down the mountainside, poking our noses into all the shrines, trying the spring water, pondering the meaning behind the decorative(?) concrete statue of mushrooms, reading all the inscriptions, and failing to find ways up to the nearby Ming Dynasty fort⁴.

Showcasing why field research into folk religion is a bitch, we left the Temple with more unanswered questions than answered ones.

From here, we didn't have much farther to go to the turn off we'd picked that went most of the way over the mountain to Shenchi (with practically no distance at all on the truck road) Pass. Found and confirmed over morning coffee, our route was worked out with a combination of AMap and Open Topo (my phone) and BaiduMaps and Tubulu (her phone) and—even though none of our resources⁵ 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 when he saw us pushing our bikes up the hill—was most likely the original Shenchi Pass Road.

Beacon Tower and Heritage Site Boundary Marker

I don't know if this Great Wall marker is from 2018 or if it's the 2,018th maker. Both are equally likely.

It was a good morning and a good road. Perfect blue skies with the barest hint of fluffy white clouds to threaten that the night will be cold, bushes full of ripe orange seabuckthorn for us to try to snag without cutting our fingers open on the spikes, an overgrown brush layer with a lot of wild chamomile that somehow made the world smell purple, and a great big group of locals who had come up to granny's village to dig potatoes and roast them by the side of the path, the pagoda and crumbling⁶ original temple take another ninety minutes out of our available daylight, and then we had to have freshly roasted taters straight from the fire pit.

It's probably a really good thing they insisted on feeding us, 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.

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew, and always make sure the fire is completely out before you leave even if the people whose fire it was didn't

I'll show off my ability to balance for as long as possible but will eventually join her walking

Making the executive decision at Shenchi 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 us away from the arterial road, we should have stayed in Shenchi, should have gone to visit the Mao Was Here Site, and should have found out why Shenchi has approximately 73 million shops selling mooncakes.

With the exception of exhaustion caused by an imaginary downhill (it existed only on the topo map), and being really cold cause both of us were too stubborn/dumb to stop and pull out additional layers beyond gloves, the riding was fine.

There's no shame in short days. But it feels wrong when your Touring Days get less kilometers than your Commuting Days and the insistence that we keep going combined with a road that, even when it was officially a town or a township, didn't seem to have much of anything at all between county seats, meant that—no matter what—our arrival in Wuzhai would have been a hungry, hangry, unpleasant end to a wonderful morning.

The only power pole on this stretch to have an advertisement⁷ is right next to the pagoda

Dr. M tells me that leaving an "I was here" is pretty normal behavior in this part of China. This brick was defaced by someone from the People's Liberation Army.

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. Not that darkness or lack of darkness should be an issue but, if it was dark and Wuzhai is a Closed County, then they might have an excuse for failing to see us enter the County.

Of course, 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 Closed Areas before. Both with and without permission. Obviously the times that were without permission weren't intentional ... but shit happens, the GPS sends you the wrong way, you get lost mountain biking, you're on a road that wasn't signposted "no admittance," you don't notice a "military area" sign⁸ until it's too late, or the road you are taking was built on land that's officially owned by the military and no one cares⁹.

Not my first¹⁰ yurt of the year, but my first easily photographable one

My fingers think it's a good time to put on the other gloves

In the emptiness between Death Machines, the road doesn't look so bad

In addition to discovering that I've spent the last however long inside a Closed Area only as I'm on my way out¹¹, I've also had a couple experiences getting kicked out of Closed Areas.

The first time accidentally discovering that you've wandered into a Secure Area and—instead of them being the kind of shouty asshole security guards who are Keeping Bicycles Out of a mall parking lot—they surprise you by doing something like feeding you watermelon while they organize a vehicle to take you to the other side is kind of an inevitable rite of passage among people (including Chinese citizens) who like to travel off the beaten path.

The more serious the intentional or unintentional transgression is, the better trained the authorities are in handling it without emotion.

Or, to put it in simpler terms, the lower the actual stakes are, the more likely it is that any demands you are getting to "respect my authority" are coming from someone who is making shit up.

The drainage ditch I was considering riding in

It is honorable to protect the Great Wall and shameful to damage it.

Closed Areas have specific, expected behaviors that follow specific, expected patterns; furthermore, these patterns are consistent across a multi-decade time period that—limiting myself only to friends and acquaintances who are foreign nationals—easily includes over a hundred incidents in over a dozen provinces.

Not one of the procedures I've either experienced or heard about for dealing with foreigners who are accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves: "we're like really really certain that we have rules, but we aren't allowed to show them to you because they're secret rules."

Not one of the procedures I've either experienced or heard about for dealing with foreigners who are accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves the police only knowing that the foreigners exist because a municipal code enforcement officer driving by happened to see us talking to someone¹³ on a street corner 20km inside what they are claiming is the Closed Area.

Temple building inside the core conservation area

Yaodong inside the core conservation area

The inside of this half collapsed abandoned cave house is totally a safe place to explore

And, glossing entirely over the part where they quite simply had no tools available to deal with not one but two Chinese-speaking foreigners yelling back at an ever growing number of them, "no, you," not one of the procedures I've previously experienced or heard about for dealing with foreigners who are accidentally or intentionally inside a Closed District without permission involves the officials who are claiming National Security as a reason for why "[we] aren't allowed to be here" eventually deciding that arguing with us is harder than just giving up and letting us stay the night.

¹ Even as an increasing number of business trips means an increasing number of expensive hotel rooms, I'm consistently disappointed—even in rooms that have two beds—by the lack of chairs and tables suitable for use by more than one person at a time.

² Unlike Dr. M, I managed to at least swallow the bite I tried.

Reading the ceilings of old buildings you wander into is Perfectly Normal Behavior.

Whilst using her shoe to try to clean surface dirt off of a stele that's embedded in the ground near an old well shaft, Dr. M regrets that she didn't pack a brush with her

We knew well enough not to stand on the wood bits

³ Unlike 宾馆 which clearly only means place to stay, 酒店 can mean either a place where you eat or a place where you sleep.

⁴ The entrance of which was immediately discovered thirty seconds after we left the hotel, and which required sufficient climbing on dodgy vertical paths that I rode on ahead confident in the knowledge that the stronger rider would catch up to me with photos of what she found.

⁵ Neither of us thought to check the Antiquities Atlas

⁶ We both pretty much ignored the new temple encroaching on and directly next to the sign delineating the Core Conservation Area

⁷ And, possibly because pagodas have a lot of ... ahem ... male energy ... it's for adult circumcision.

Painted rafters on a temple building inside the core conservation area

More partially buried stelae that were toppled over by people rude enough to leave them date side down

⁸ All the way back in October 2008, near the old Dayingshan Airport in Haikou, my first ever time being interrogated, I'm still impressed with the way in which they went about determining that I could speak and read Chinese† before letting me know where I was and just how much trouble I was in for being there.

† He chatted with me and gave me directions to the road I missed!

⁹ The main road which all the tourists use going to Shuiman from Wuzhishan, for example.

¹⁰ First yurt of the year was on the second biking day in Shanxi when heading south to the turn off I'd skipped the day before

¹¹ Every time this has happened, with the exception of an extremely reasonable desire to know how a civilian (let alone a foreign one!) got to where I was without anyone thinking to stop me, the authorities have been great ... to me ...

¹² There was this one time in Zhejiang in either 2017 or 2019 where the hotels were running a fork of the Blue Variant of the Hotel Guest Registration System where the police had remotely disabled the foreigner component† and were requiring foreigners to go to the police station to register.

† Because the Blue Variant and its forks are the most common flavor of Public Security's Online Hotel Guest Registration System and because I was behind the counter attempting to register myself, I am very certain that it was not "operator error."

¹³ A guy that saw us riding "invited" us to dinner only for us to skip multiple food options on our way 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, as opposed to his actually having food...

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

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