On account of my missing the last ferry across the Zhenhai Bay last night, I not only added an extra 21km on to yesterday's ride, after 65km today, I was only 40km away from where I should have spent last night.

Under the normal rules of me on Tour, excessive detours don't matter all that much. However, I am less than a week from home by the shortest route and the announcement that I plan to see people for a hotpot dinner Saturday night has had a mate quietly message me to ask if I can make it Saturday afternoon and make it in time for the soft opening of his new café and bar.

Of course, it all depends on Covid. Crossing the Qiongzhou Straits is usually an hour on water plus an hour of loading and unloading at either end and maybe an hour of paperwork, ticket buying, and waiting for the boat you've been assigned to. With fewer boats running and the absolutely mental amount of stuff that people leaving the island must do¹, I can't imagine it's going to be quicker.

As well, although yesterday saw the Municipal Headquarters for the Prevention and Control of Covid-19² gleefully announcing that—in accordance with the relevant requirements of the State Council's Covid Prevention and Control Guidelines (9th Edition)³—their experts had determined that the city's last medium-risk area could be downgraded to normal, today saw the announcement of one high-risk area, two medium-risk areas, a 13 hour lockdown and the 12th round of citywide mass NAT sampling and testing since this outbreak began.

So, even though I woke up plenty early for a full day of riding, by the time the news was digested and the morning Announcements sent back to the Foreign Affairs Office, it was 11am. Then, despite my having had quite a decent sized bowl of oatmeal, I decided that the route ahead wasn't looking promising for food and that last night's dinner had been both delicious and reasonably priced.

Ultimately, this was not a bad decision on my part.

There were a few towns where, wrong hour of the day notwithstanding, the population was big enough that I probably could have scrounged up something to eat but starting with a bellyful of delicious food from someplace I'd already approved of was definitely the right way of going about things.

The farm roads route from Hengpi to Nalong was an astonishing tangle of itty-bitty things that constantly called for the GPS to be telling me to turn only to tell me that it didn't actually mean for me to turn, it had just randomly decided to announce 'go left' when I needed to be going straight.

As a result, when I got to the nasty dull divided highway with the relatively large volume of trucks and nothing more interesting to see than the county jail, I was glad to finally be on something comparatively stress free.

Even though the person who promised to put me up isn't there and the situation of my thinking I might need a place has improved, I'd still been thinking I was going to try to make it to Yangjiang tonight. However, there's another person—one who knows me from the WeChat Official Account rather than Douyin—who mentioned something a few weeks back about treating me to a meal if I passed through his city and pushing on to Yangjiang would have me arriving far far too late for that to happen.

As well, even if last night's lodging (with the exception of the part where their fancy scan a QR code to self register system insisted that the information I had entered didn't match my information) had gone smoothly, and the night before had gone not too un-smoothly, and the time in Yangjiang in 2019 was fine, I also didn't want to be dealing with an urban hotel while exhausted.

And so I came to Heshan.

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¹ So far as I know, the Omicron variant that has caused 20,000 infections on the island over the past month has not yet been found anywhere else in China and they are working very hard to keep it that way. Predeparture quarantine for people leaving via the ports, or—if flying— a bajillion tests followed by up to 7 days combined quarantine and home isolation at the other end.

² I really hate that this is one of my phone's predictive text phrases

³ Because not everything in the daily emergency workload ends up with me pulling out my laptop, this is also a predictive text phrase