There's more work in the morning.

Four mattresses felt pretty comfortable when I piled them up on top of each other. A few hours worth of compression under my body weight and I didn't even need to be repeatedly woken up by a gurgly stomach to have slept poorly.

One of the times I wake up, there's a bunch of files from my liaison in the Foreign Affairs Office so, with the most minimal of grousing at him over my absolutely holding him responsible for my poor night's sleep and how he needs to appreciate my doing this before coffee¹, I pull out my laptop and get to it.

Not thirty minutes later, at what is definitely still a 'very early hour', ayi comes knocking on the door to the room. She doesn't say she wants one of the two fans² I've got. No. That would be silly. She just wanted to check, on the basis of - I don't know - the lights being on in my windowless room and my bike still being downstairs, if I'd left yet.

Once I'm done with these files, I'll force myself into a 45 minute nap because "groggy" doesn't mix too well with "traffic". No kettle in the room and the idea of black coffee on an empty stomach after the previous night's disturbance makes me think "certain heartburn" so I skip caffeinating myself only to find, once I'm downstairs, that this part of China not only doesn't believe in Coke Zero, they also don't believe in Coke, or, apparently, refrigerated drinks.

Warm Pepsi of a morning is not going to do it for me.

By the time I get to the county seat and stop for lunch, I'm doing that thing where I get flaky and indecisive about what to eat or where to stop because I really should have stopped for food and sugar an age back. It's the third almost collision with a motorbike that breaks through the fog and convinces me to stop at the next whatever whether or not I think I'll like it.

That, and the two one liter bottles I drink of Pepsi Zero (or whatever Pepsi calls it's artificial sweetener version that isn't named "Diet" because it's sucralose instead of aspartame), helps considerably.

I don't have any paying work immediately being dumped in my lap but I take the opportunity to sit out the hot part of the day answering questions in the WeChat group HainanFit's Liza and I set up for stranded tourists³ and, since it has hit the 200 maximum for 'join by QR code', setting up a second Group.

Then, back on the road, where—thank heaven—I'm off on the wibbly wobbly farm roads for a bit and have more to look at than Shops For Drivers⁴.

Conversation in the groups is heating up. Every time I pull my phone out for a picture, there's another person that needs to be told to cut it out with rumors, stupid memes, criticism of the idiots in the government for worrying about a cold, and—bless her heart—someone has invited Lilian⁵ to the group and why is it that the person on Hainan who most desperately wants to learn English and eagerly wants to help all the foreigners with everything they could possibly need help with someone so uniquely incapable of ever being helpful?

Merging back onto the truck route, my rural interlude has given me new eyes to appreciate the waves of development that have swept along this road leaving behind closed, abandoned, and repurposed buildings from a wide variety of eras. 

I also note, when passing a place specifically selling paired lion statues, that my newest microculture is statuary appointed with "ginormous fake penises". I mean we're not even talking anatomically incorrect in being too large for felines, we're talking generously endowed for humans and attached at angles that don't account for where the lions' legs are.

My destination for tonight is a guesthouse type place on the outer edge of a hot springs resort village at the far edge of someplace that's actually a city rather than just a county seat. I'll turn up the street, pass the place my GPS is sending me to because it looks abandoned, pass the one after that because there isn't a good spot to turnaround, and come to a stop at the third of three places to rent cheap apartments and rooms to people who want to be in this tourist townlet but don't want to be in the resorts.

I'm in the downstairs convenience store helping the boss fill in my info in his paper logbook when the two African women staying on the second floor⁶ come back from their evening walk and invite me to come over for lunch the next day.

--

¹ As you may have guessed, we have a fairly friendly relationship.

² One she specifically retrieved from a bedroom in the apartment on the second floor for me to use, one that I took from the lobby.

³ Of the more than 140,000 people who can't leave Hainan owing to the airports and ports closing, 80,000 are in Sanya, and 1,700 of those are foreign passport holders 

⁴ The usual sort (car washes and water tank fillers, fuel additive sellers, tires) and the unusual sort (kitchen knives)

⁵ A congenitally disabled kindergarten nanny presumed to be from a wealthy family on account of things like having traveled internationally before the pandemic, she's the sweetest, kindest, dearest pain in the ass and if I so much as hear one word about someone bullying her, they are forever banned from any of the things I organize.

⁶ The woman who just finished her Master's degree is helping nanny for her friend whose husband has been out of the country long enough that he's never even met his daughter face to face. They're here on account of the son needing long term medical therapy at the nearby hospital.