May 22, 2022
Route
As per the usual, my Detailed Map of All the Things is on Google Maps and if you check it out in 2022, will probably still have the Planned Route marked in blue.
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Playing with the layers, Square POI are places I've slept on Tour color coded by year, and map pins are either places I've visited or places I want to visit. I've also been playing around with adding everywhere I've slept while not on Tour (a substantially smaller dataset than while on Tour).
Because it's where the bike shop my local shop shipped my gear to is located, instead of a planned start from Qinhuangdao 秦皇岛 where the Great Wall meets the sea, I will start in Tangshan 唐山¹ which is mostly known for the 1976 Great Tangshan Earthquake and the 2010 movie Aftershock.
I will then skirt the northern edges of rural Beijing 北京, hopefully visiting bits of Great Wall and the Eastern Qing Tombs² followed by Hebei 河北, the Western Qing Tombs, the grave of the last Emperor, some interesting pagodas, the Han Tombs, some more pagodas, and so on and so forth until—just past Zuoquan 左权—I get to places I've never been before.
Meeting up with the planned track of the latter part of last year's Tour, my only goal in Henan 河南 is to see if I can track down someone who will let me buy a certain mid 90s tile mosaic Rural Safe Electricity Poster off their wall though I don't plan to physically stick around long enough for the bits with sledgehammers and transportation. In Hubei 湖北, I had planned to go through Wuhan 武汉 but my first ever Proper Academic Translation for a journal (done last month) was an analysis of the poetry found on objects unearthed from the Tang Dynasty Changsha 长沙 Kiln Site and now I kind of find myself wanting to visit there instead.
Hunan 湖南 will see a revisit of some places I last saw on the 2008 Tour and then finally Guangdong 广东 and that last push where I'm really sure I'm ready to throw in the towel and equally certain that I've made it this far already so I can totally make it home without giving up.
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¹ No promises, but I'm going to attempt to have the first usage per page of any location in characters.
² The way sites of interest were closed down last summer during the Delta outbreak, I'm a little bit apprehensive of my actual ability to visit places.
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I'm kind of jealous, I would love to explore China but doesn't seem like it's going to be possible for most people for a while yet. I spent a couple of months backpacking there in 2014(?) and had a great time - highlights being Yading national park and tiger leaping gorge!
2 years ago
2 years ago