I am about as extroverted as they come. The buzz that I get off of conversations and interactions with people is sufficient that, even as I've been on vacation these past three months, I've still been fairly active in a number of large group chats that aren't the ones I moderate. I like, as my best friend Sarah puts it, "peopling". 

In fact, I like peopling so much that the experiences of Vietnam in 2018 plus the doldrums of the past few weeks have pretty much convinced me that Europe to Asia or any future long tours in countries where I don't speak the language are probably off the table.

Imagine then how damn suprised I was that a single person managed to use up most of my day's allotment of peopling.

When I left the hotel in the morning, my rear tire was going squishy with a slow leak of the "I don't want to deal with this" variety which, as I would later find out, was also the "I can't deal with this" variety because the China Rail Badge on my right front pannier had punctured my glue and I had a blobby piece of impressionist art rather than a useful way to repair tubes. I also really don't want to take the rear wheel off unless as I have to as the last time I did that (in Hebei), I ended up with the Rohloff only shifting into 12 out of 14 gears. 

A local character who seems to actually be a Stuff Repair Dude was walking by as I was asking directions from the e-bike shop that was telling me "no, we can't fix that for you" and proceeded to inform them that he had no problem and I didn't even need to go to his place, he'd do it here, mostly with their tools but occasionally leaving and going back to his spot to get stuff.

You would think, when someone speaks with a thick enough accent in a unusual enough topolect that they carry their own felt tipped marker for writing on the sidewalk that they would grasp the concept of "sometimes people don't understand you and don't want to put in the mental effort to keep trying". Throughout the conversation, which I eventually checked out of in various ways (including messing about on my phone, leaving and buying him some cigarettes, and finding other people with whom I could speak Mandarin), he was determined, with the fierceness of a thousand suns, to teach me how to say really important words that I needed to learn in his local language.
Words like "fire extinguisher". 

By the time my tire was patched and I was on the road, I was completely worn out. Spent a bit of time on the X road paralleling the multi-lane divided tourism road along the coast, a bit of time on farm roads heading down to the tourism road and back up again, and then realized that if I didn't get a Covid test this afternoon, come evening I was going to be outside of the 72 hours even the least strict place was going to require for me to check in.

Out to the National Road, I'm reminded yet again why I don't ever intentionally spend more than the minimum amount of time on roads like this. The shoulders are wide. The traffic is polite. I move fast. And, at least until I cross into the conurbation of Dianbai, and get mud puddles and traffic jams, that's about all I can say for it.

I'm glad for the cyclist I met on my way into Dianbai as the place I went for a Covid test, although it used the same scan-in app as the rest of Guangdong's test sites, required payment through the hospital's own app, and it didn't support people who don't have a Chinese ID card. I honestly have to say, even with all the various problems I encounter on the road (primarily from people who are theoretically being paid by me to solve problems), I am constantly warmed by the number of people who take the time out of their day to go to the extra mile and help out. This guy was on his way from somewhere to somewhere else and he didn't just check to see I knew how to find a test site on Maps, didn't just send me in the right direction, didn't even just drop me off at the closest test site, he stayed with me past paying the nominal price of a test to making sure that the problems they had accepting money from me were the only problems they were going to have.

Another couple hours of dull main road riding from Dianbai to Wuchuan followed by an uninspiring dinner eaten in the hopes of delaying my check-in to the point where my test results would show in the app. When they still weren't, I rehearsed the app prompts that showed "test results waiting", rehearsed what I would say to the Front Desk of the hotel I'd chosen¹, and—as in Zhaoqing when I was so very very sure that there would be problems—had absolutely no problem at all.

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¹ A national chain of low priced hotels found only in county-level cities, I last stayed at one of their properties my first night in Beijing. 

While they had listed themselves on the OTA as 'foreigner friendly', it was one of the only hotels in town (at any price point) to list themselves as such and, as plenty of my stories have shown, merely having chosen at some point in the past to list yourself as 'takes foreigners' or 'doesn't take foreigners' has no relationship to whether or not the Front Desk feels like taking foreigners.