Although none of it will actually be open for visiting and little of it will be anything I'd ever have had an interest in visiting on my own, last night's stop in Hengkou fortuitously causes the GPS to notice that—if I want to take something other than the National Road—I've got a lovely little road that snakes from recently developed tourism site to under development tourism site to farm and country tourism site to locally historic person of interest tourism site. 

Without too much trouble, I find the Giant bikes in the same place it was 7 years ago. About half of the display floor has been given over to Vespa style e-bikes and the accessories collection for bike related gear has been pared down to a mix of "I wouldn't buy that" and "I wouldn't buy that at this price". Separate from my needing a bidon now for something like 6 weeks, one of my sun sleeves is badly torn. Cruft like this is my usual "thanks for using tools I don't have to tweak my bike for me" but even the better class of shops all seem to have given up on selling it. 

When I arrive, the mechanic and apparent owner is taking a nap on the floor. Although he does an excellent job on the front brake adjustment¹, he joins the list of shops who tell me that new brake pads won't be necessary on the rear until after I'm back in Haikou. 

Given the situation a week later where I find myself not so much with "bare metal peeking through the brake compound" as "no brake compound left" at yet another shop that promises me my brakes are fine, I shall take the inane questions I am asked by him ("does your home country have mountains" being my favorite), combine them with the state of the shop and his frustrating insistence on 'helping' me do stuff like find the foot massage five doors down (that I was headed to on the basis of explicitly saying I had seen it and thought it a good place to sit out the noon heat), and proclaim that Buddy might not be the sharpest spoon in the knife drawer.

I'll grant you that I'm stupid enough to let my brakes get into this condition but I've got the excuse that you really can't see the state of the pads without a stand and I've been stopping at places with stands and theoretically Trained Professionals™.

Leaving Xiushui, I stop for an excessively large meal of fried chicken at a Wallace² where there are theoretically special offers I can get buy one get one free on except that none of them actually show up on the ordering platform.

The attempts at stopping to find locations where I took photos when I passed this way with Myf manage to be surprisingly successful for a road that's undergone this much regrading and adjustment but, other than finding a hill here or a building there to match photos I've just spent my lunch period staring at, I may as well be somewhere I've never been.

I'm going to have to go back and look at the 2015 journal as I can't figure why it took the two of us as long as it did to get from Xiushui to Shankou or why the next two days were also that short. Did we get flat tires that I don't remember? Was one of us sick?

The pagoda is a tricky find that was kismet 7 years ago and which I definitely wouldn't have known to go looking for if not for already knowing it existed. I remember being slightly more impressed last time but I suppose I've seen a lot more late Qing pagodas between now and then and it's not actually all that impressive a structure.

From the pagoda, I take back roads in to town to the accompaniment of a truly glorious sunset that lights up the sky and rice paddies in brilliant streaks of pink and purple. There's no chance of finding the specific place we stayed so, after buying fruit from a guy who clearly overcharged me on the price per half kilo and then felt bad enough about it to round the price down and throw in some random handfuls of extra stuff (like a bottle of water from the fridge) I end up at a random hotel of the Newly Prosperous Sort.

This means a prominent washing machine in the lobby, being asked multiple times am I sure I don't have laundry I want to do, a drying rack cleverly installed beneath the air conditioner, a single use plastic cover on the seat of the western toilet, and an honest to goodness shower curtain. However, other than the sparkle grout, it's actually a fairly utilitarian place aimed at people who need somewhere to sleep and nothing more.

¹ I've tried and tried and tried and, even though other people somehow seem to manage it without a third hand, I just can't manage to pull the cable tight enough and retighten the bolt at the same time.

² Formerly a KFC clone, 华莱士 (formerly called Chls, now called Wallace) has made the leap to being a brand in it's own right. It's cheap, air conditioned protein and fat of a known cleanliness standard.