As of right now, all indicators are go for me giving up tomorrow. Qiongshan District, where I don't live and rarely go, is the only part of Haikou to still have restrictions on indoor dining and Zhanjiang, as the only Real City on the Leizhou Peninsula, has a plentitude of scheduled coaches and trains running down to the port 150km away.

I've biked back to Haikou from somewhere on the Mainland six times now (2005 from Guangzhou, 2012 from Beijing, 2013 from Guangzhou, 2018 from Vietnam, 2019 from Shanghai, and 2022 from Hebei). I'm not ashamed to say that, out of these six trips, I've only actually made it to the port twice. 

The first time I had the excuse of a having been hit by a motorcycle and having an out-of-true wheel, but, at the time that this happened, I had already taken three buses on a trip that was supposed to be a less than 700km ride.

The second time, I'd been on the road for three months, got a flat tire in the rain and decided that being maybe 4 hours from home by motor vehicle was an excellent reason to just not fix the flat until I got home.

The third time, it was a work related thing. And, to be fair, one of the reasons I was on that bike trip was specifically because I was trying to train the client in question into scheduling things more than a few hours in advance.

Then two in a row where I actually made it, and now this time. I am, frankly, over and done with this whole "being on vacation" thing. I am sick and tired of the daily hassle with hotels and Covid tests. I want to eat familiar food from familiar places. I want to see my friends.

In some ways, I think it is because I know the trip is over that today is as good as it is. I'm still lacking energy that I feel like I ought to have for doing things like exploring cool temples or wandering down random paths in search of detours but some of the spark that's been missing for so long feels like its back. That, or I'm just cheered up by the giggling reaction my friends' group is having to the posted photos of my discovering that this region is really into not only having Obviously Male Statuary but also Obviously Female Statuary¹. 

I have two ferries to pick from for crossing into Zhanjiang. The closer of the two leaves me with an extra 5km to go after I'm in the city. I pick this as it is also relatively near a bridge (that I surely won't want to go on) but, if its closed down or too late I'll have that as an option. Whereas, if I take the farther of the two ferries and screw up scheduling, it's going to be almost 20km of backtracking to get to that bridge that I surely won't want to go on.

Perfect timing on the last ferry of the day, a rainy ride through the city, and I'm at a small, grungy, old hotel near the train station picked on the basis of it being one of the few places under 200y a night that lists itself as willing to take foreigners. On account of the front desk initially being unable to find my reservation, I'm waiting for the shit to hit the fan when it doesn't. He doesn't actually take enough information from me for him to possibly have actually registered me on the computer but he gives me a key.

It's a cheap cheap hotel and I make up for what I'm saving by spending it on a taxi to and from the part of the city where a former intern who I haven't seen since the 2009 Ironman China now owns a craft beer bar. I'll drink too much of an excellent (if slightly too sweet) cider, get treated by a table of regulars to more of the other drinks (none of which I like as much as the cider) and eventually have to pull a sudden "bye now" because its stressing me out too much to explain yet afuckinggain to the crowd who have invited me to their table that its not unreasonable of me to expect police officers who are encountering something unfamiliar in terms of civil enforcement to spend 5 minutes prior to arriving looking up the relevant regulations online before declaring "you aren't allowed to do this" and that every single police officer who has been on the receiving end of a yelling Marian ought to be grateful that all he got was my raised voice and not my raised voice plus a formal complaint letter.

"You know, if you run into problems like this in Guangdong in the future, you can call me" says one of the guys who has given me his WeChat, "I know all the right people and can have things solved in a snap".

Separate from the fact that things shouldn't need solving in the first place, I'm already solving them without calling people who know people. As well, my least favorite wins are the times when the other side recognizes me from TikTok, when they suddenly realize they are dealing with That Biking Foreigner Who Yells at Cops, or when they get all quiet after looking me up in their internal databases and finding the mysterious whatever the hell it is that scares them.

So, realizing that this is not a debate to be having when I've been drinking or with strangers, I bid adieu to my former intern and go back to a hotel room where I very carefully pretend that the movement glimpsed out of the corner of my eyes is actually small geckos and not large cockroachs.

---

¹ With regards to the Qilin that I felt obliged to record myself molesting, from the quantity of soot on my finger, it appears that people have been shoving lit firecrackers or incense all up in there.