Starting sometime last night, the weirdest GPS error happened with the tracker on my phone. Showing me as moving as much as 14km in a single hop between points (set to record once every 8 seconds), a perfect circle of hundreds of points was created in some village about 14km down the coast from here. I've never had anything like this happen before.

Despite, my phone claiming that I did over 700km today, I didn't even manage my preferred minimum of 50. Even back in 2012, when I was still doing relatively longer daily distances (and subsequently taking more rest days to deal with exhaustion), I thought 50km was the perfect average of all touring days (both riding and non). Since the triple whammy of working from the road, making videos, and dealing with Covid bullshit has become my reality, I generally don't take any days off¹. 

Knowing the morning's work would come, I didn't feel like leaving until it was handled. It didn't come until a quarter past 10 which meant I didn't even leave the room until 11:30 and then I had a very long and quite in-depth conversation with the hotel owner that started from my trying to explain that I was here in this beachy town because his bookable online hotel was 50y less than the bookable online hotel on the truck route and, even if the ferry didn't run anymore, I could pay a random person with a boat up to 50y and still break even from where I'd have been if I'd gone where I didn't want to be.

"You shouldn't book online," he told me, "you'll get better prices if you just show up to the places like mine, one street off the main drag, and you bargain."

Notwithstanding this very nearly never being the case for me (as I apparently suck at bargaining over sums too small to care about), I tried to explain that even if booking online means the hotel has to give some of my room fee to the OTA, it gives me an added layer of legal protection in case I need to get into a fight.

Somehow this led to a conversation which touched on everything from the Rule of Law to using a VPN to access Facebook. Eventually, however, his wife had not only finished cooking lunch but given up hinting at him that it was time to wind things up and let the guest go.

I'm glad for the potato chips and Coke Zeroes I bought before I got to the docks where he said I could find a ferry as the opposite shore was distinctly lacking in any food or drink for quite a number of kilometers and the banana oatmeal I'd made in the room really wasn't feeling like it had been enough.

The first restaurant really didn't want to serve me. Lots of face saving excuses on being out of what I was trying to order before finally saying they had something but golly, gosh, and gee, the lone table currently eating had a lot of dishes coming and I'd have to wait a long time to get fed. 

This was a bit of a aha moment in my head as I suddenly realized every single fucking time someone "saves face" by blaming the government's "new rules" or the "lack of a license to take foreigners", they 110% know they shouldn't be saying that. It isn't ever (or at least hardly ever) about actually thinking they aren't allowed to but is really all about sparing themselves the embarrassment of admitting to their own poor manners in telling me to go away.

Second restaurant didn't want me either. Told me they didn't have set meals, or noodles, or rice, but backed themselves into a corner over that cause I generally prefer not to eat carbs unless they taste good² and once I'd ordered what's basically a Chinese scallop frittata, they decided to just let me be a customer.

As I ate, I charged my phone up and edited the video of my so-called ferry crossing. The first boat, the one that some guys apparently buying wholesale seafood helped me talk to, he looked far more ferry like (which is not to say that he actually looked like a ferry) than the one I took, but he also pulled out before I had any chance of coming aboard. I don't know for sure that my boatman was Tanka but it's a good guess for the port in question, so I also spent way too much time finding a clean audio copy of one of the Tanka Saltwater Songs³ to add as background music.

Farm roads through countryside that looked exactly like Hainan led me to bigger roads and smaller roads, past an under construction chemical plant of some kind, and row upon row of the caltrop shaped concrete blocks used to build breakwaters. 

Diancheng Town—which surely must have been the county seat at some historical point in time, perhaps before Dianbai-the-city became Dianbai-the-district—had been chosen as a midpoint on account of a bell tower found on Maps and starred as a potential point of interest when I came nearly past here in 2019. Located atop one of those fragments of City Walls that's nothing more than a gate which makes a narrow alley even narrower, it turned out to be completely uninteresting.

The Matsu Temple a few kilometers down the road, however; that was gorgeous. I particularly liked the way in which stone columns that had clearly supported the roof of some previous outbuilding had been repurposed as benches.

I was particularly wibbly wobbly wandery by this point as initial attempts at calling ahead to hotels in the town where I wanted to end had all failed on account of my Hainan phone number. It wasn't until I had called the place only 8km away from where I now was that they actually said "are you coming from Hainan" and agreed that, so long as I definitely was heading to the island rather than from it, a 72 hour validity NAT was fine.

Up, up, up and over a huge bridge that, despite being arched, seemed oddly frail for its lack of suspension towers or cables. Then down into the town under the bridge where, of course, the front desk had to call her boss, had to ask "can we take foreigners", had to tell me "no". I don't know if it was the long noon conversation or how thoroughly bitchy I'd been two nights ago but I looked at her and quite calmly said: "so, will you be calling the police or shall I?"

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¹ 13 non-riding days this year, of which only 6 were primarily because I didn't feel good

² Banana oatmeal and potato chips being two examples of carbs that are far more acceptable than rice

³ Which I know to be a national level intangible cultural heritage item, and which may also be UNESCO recognized