D33: 熊背 → 石桥

July 8, 2022

With regards to tonight's TVDQ (television dustiness quotient), it's bad enough that I'm able to write Sarah's name in the dust

If you are paying very careful attention to the Chinese characters, it will seem that I've returned to the place I was at two nights previous. This is not actually the case. Instead, I've gone to a place with the same name¹.

This day is a mixed bag of experiences. I get friendliness in the form of the hotel owner's wife urging food² on me but I also get outright hostility from the first place I tried to eat a real meal with them being "sold out" of everything and them really not liking me "scaring other customers off" when, having not left yet (I was looking at my phone) I let new arrivals know that "they don't have any food left" cause, of course, they had food, they just didn't have food for me.

All things being equal, the air conditioned place 10km down the road was a far more suitable place to sit out the heat of the day.

Wall painted slogans are presumed more durable than advertising banners. This is one of my first for Covid.

I would not have otherwise thought this railway to be pre-1976 but Maoist slogans stopped being a thing when Mao died

This is one of the rarest slogans in my collection

The road I'm on hasn't been a main road of any stripe in a long long time but, once upon a time, it must have been more important than it currently is. Now a provincial S route, I do believe the coolest thing I come across all day is a warning from the Traffic Police that they will "resolutely strike at and destroy highway banditry³" that, given the building it's on, and the location where I find it⁴, very likely actually refers to actual highwaymen.

I'll also have some "hospital births are safest for mother and child" and some Cultural Revolution era slogans but I knew those were coming as I photographed them a little less than a year ago when taking this same road north the day that I abandoned my last Tour.

The evolution of the handwriting of the slogan writers also tells a story

Windmills really are enormous pieces of machinery

First time I've been at a county border with a semipermanent Covid checkpoint and had the checkpoint completely closed

Photographed just in case someone asks why I haven't been recently tested (won't actually work when I get asked)

Unlike the past three nights, tonight's hotel has the computer registration system but they are a bit leery of my general foreignness and decide that this calls for us going to the police station to ask them about the process of registering me. Which means getting on a motorcycle to stand in the parking lot outside the closed police station and call them on the phone via which method the police determine I have a health code, a travel code, a passport, and I speak Chinese. This is good enough to 'consider me registered' cause, "ugh, there's no way she can be directly registered on your hotel's computer and you don't actually expect me to go and find out how to get a Foreigner Registration Form for her at this hour?"

Old farmhouse by the side of the main road

Tree growing inside what used to be a farmhouse

Then we go back to the hotel and I teach the owner's son how to directly register me on their computer.

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¹ Meaning "stone bridge", it's actually a fairly common name.

² As roast corn goes, it was exceedingly lackluster when I shoved it in my jersey pocket and amazingly good two hours later when I really needed food

No particular info about this historic site of interest other than "it's here and you better not mess with it". If I recall correctly, it should be about 1,500 years old.

Accidental bit of gravel riding while trying real hard to stay off the main road

³ I suppose something like this would get handed over to the criminal police but the traffic police definitely do more than just breathalyzing and speeding tickets.

⁴ Almost 2 meters below the current road surface

Foreigner registration, while a pain compared to domestic registration, really isn't that hard. The problem is as much a lack of training as it is anything else

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Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 1,969 km (1,223 miles)

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