This morning's emergency work break took place outside a convenience store which had sugar free caffeine, use a spoon to eat it yoghurt, and M&Ms.

On account is this, my liaison in the Haikou Foreign Affairs Office has been informed that he is officially forgiven for the other night's hotel.

Since this convenience store is also just across the street from an expressway exit with a Covid testing site, I figure it will probably be in my best interests to get tested before I leave Hunan. Not that Guangdong will be checking when I enter nor will the results of this test ever show up anywhere that I can find them, but it's the first staffed Convenient Point I've seen since a few days before leaving Hubei; and, as everybody keeps pointing out, the current epidemic situation in China has gotten unpleasant¹ again.

I had planned on turning down off the main road and heading to a town west by southwest of me on the Hunan/Guangdong border. However, the roar of trucks and the speed of my descent on a very nicely paved hill mean that I miss my turn-off. I'm not going back uphill for that and proceed southwards along the National Road where I'm treated to one of those mid-90s petrol stations with the giant pyramid roof on top of it and a cluster of 18th and 19th century buildings that still have People's Commune related slogans all over them.

Then, after passing a truly massive checkpoint doing everything from checking ID to cargo manifests² on the other side of the road, I'm in Guangdong on a mucking dreadful stretch of Class Two Highway with chubby³ shoulders and no facilities.

This keeps up long enough for a sneaky side of the road pee, a stop to check out some tile mosaic birth control policy murals and to make the first video of this trip to be harmonized. Then, surprise surprise, I'm passing through a Covid checkpoint where they really actively don't give a fuck that the person on the bicycle is trying to show them that she's followed instructions with code scanning, and I'm back in Hunan.

Same route number of national road but much nicer to ride on, even though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted to do another 10km at this hour, I kind of wish I'd known that another 10km down the road, instead of being a resort, the hot springs town was chock full of 80s and 90s era hotels that must have bathtubs or something because I surely didn't see any swimming pools.

Unfortunately, I did not know and the 10km the next day it takes me to find this out is far far far too little to dream of stopping.

Recommended to me by the place I ate dinner, the place I stayed is nice enough though for being a small town hotel on the truck route but without any facilities for drivers of any size vehicle. Predictably by now nervous not about me being a foreigner but me coming from Hainan, the bed is harder than I like but the people are friendly.

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¹ We're talking the kind of unpleasantness where I've been contacted by Al-Jazeera English and been put in contact with Bloomberg. 

² If I were the government of Hunan, I would be miffed that Guangdong didn't think them important enough to put up even the most nominal of checkpoints for vehicles entering their province from Hunan.

³ You can ride on hard shoulders that have been swept clean of road debris. Soft shoulders are sufficiently unrideable that drivers mostly seem to understand if you take the lane. Chubby shoulders are my term for soft shoulders that look like hard shoulders.