January 28, 2024
D3: 临高 → 东城
Once again, I woke up relatively early. Not even 7:30. However, although I refrained from turning the electric mattress pad back on and making the bed all extra toasty again, I managed to convince myself that I didn't want to wake up just yet. The watch shows that I was awake for 39 minutes (felt more like 10) before sleeping another hour and 54 minutes and jumping out of bed in a panic that I was going to be late to the event at the Dongcheng Town Houchen Coffee Farm.
With regards to Houchen, if I say that they are one of Hainan's best domestic coffee brands, it's because I'm intentionally damning with faint praise. Once you get beyond the cottage roasters making unbranded stuff for the laobacha that give you a liter of coffee-sock brewed coffee for 10 yuan, the large brands are charging specialty roaster prices¹ for decidedly not specialty roaster quality.
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So long as I think of Houchen as a lifestyle brand selling the concept of rural tourism without any of that having to deal with rural people instead of as a coffee brand, I'm okay with them and the somewhat fusty and dated³ environment of their coffee gardens. However, if I start looking at them through the lens of my being a coffee addict⁴ and long term specialty coffee snob, I'm decidedly less okay with them.
I would never intentionally make one of Houchen's coffee gardens an intentional destination while traveling. But, the New Media Association has invited people to come out to the Dongcheng Garden for coffee and dinner and, based on past experiences, is probably paying us for the visit. And, even if they aren't, there's a fair amount of knock on benefits for me in going to things like this and meeting the other association members.
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Instead of the lazy 10-12 kilometers per hour (inclusive of photo and video taking) I'd expected, I'm off on a race against the clock , where I'm not only riding as fast as my legs and the road conditions will allow for, I'm also making no detours, and no stops for looking at shinies.
Okay, there was one stop. A place I found on Maps when I was route-planning. No explanation, no time to find people for an explanation, just a quick "what the hecking heck?" video about a village named America that's already well on track to be my first 100,000 view⁵ video of the year.
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The little blip of getting turned around at the boulder carved with the characters 美国村 had the GPS recalculate me from Provincial "S Route" followed by a Y Road to a County "X Route" followed by a different Y then an S then another Y. It's a whole 2km shorter than the original routing and distinctly lacking in anything unpaved, and I neither have any idea why it wasn't my original routing nor what I might have gotten if I'd stayed on the original route.
In any case, I got what I got. Pretty terrible concrete pavement that would have felt awful on high-pressure skinny tires if I weren't trying to go fast, but I liked what I saw of the scenery, and I especially liked that I ran into a group of college-aged bike tourists mostly on 517's rental bikes⁶ with 517's rental panniers cause you hardly never see the Tourists actually making any attempt at exploring beyond the Acknowledged Cycling Routes⁷.
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Started descending just after passing the group of Tourists. Mostly it wasn't too steep but there was one 700m long stretch with a 50m drop that got me all nervous to the point that I may have to consider using the intraprovincial bus network method of shipping luggage on ahead of me rather than carrying it when I leave Baisha in a few days.
Finished descending and, even with rough riding a 2.5km long section in the process of being resurfaced (it was that or sharing the road with cars that had gone from having two and a half lanes in each direction to one), I still made it to the Coffee Garden ahead of the group that had left Haikou by chartered coach.
Then—prior to a really miserable after dark ride back to Dongcheng and the night's hotel—it was time to drink coffee, eat bougie certified free-range duck with officially organic vegetables, and take pictures and video of trying not to look miserably cold at an outdoor venue that isn't really intended for misty, rainy winter days.
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¹ They wanted 118 yuan for a 500 gram bag of nothing special beans! This is, coincidentally, the same price that I'm paying (with shipping!!) to have my preferred roaster in Haikou send me a bag of "moka pot appropriate roast" of, based on what he knows about me, something that's probably going to turn out to be either Ethiopian or Columbian.
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² Today's oatmeal is sweet peanuts, coconut protein powder, assorted raisins, sweetened condensed milk, a touch of sesame oil, and a salty egg.
³ Although it's only 12 years old, the one this event was held at was deliberately built to look the same as the mid-90's coffee garden in Fushan.
⁴ Nothing too serious, a single cup a day will do me, but I will get (possibly psychosomatic) withdrawal headaches if I don't have my coffee
⁵ Achieved six and a half hours after the video was posted.
⁶ If you try to ignore the rules of Chinese pronunciation, "517" almost (but not really) sounds like "我 要 骑" or "I want to ride."
⁷ During the little bit of on island riding I did with Myf at the end of 2015, we saw no other cyclists on X roads, a few local cyclists on S roads, and roughly 20 Tourists per day on the G roads.
⁸ A direct translation of the Chinese word for foreigner.
Today's ride: 45 km (28 miles)
Total: 163 km (101 miles)
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