D9: 昌城 → 海口

February 5, 2024

The jar labeled "honey" is actually sweetened condensed milk

After a morning oatmeal featuring the last of my bananas, crushed peanut brittle, sweetened condensed milk, assorted mixed raisins, a salty egg, and lard, and a full run of the mini moka and both mokina¹, I'm ready to head out for today's Adventure.

I'm not sure exactly when I met Mr. Lin. I remember, at the time, his corporate overlords' offices in Haikou were near to the Provincial Government Service Center², but, a very minimal amount of my company registration was done in that building. In any case, his company is one of those ones where, graciously assuming that things they ought to have the minimum necessary knowledge to translate in-house³ are correctly translated, I stamp and certify already completed⁴ translations in return for bartered goods and services⁵.

As the slogan references not the "Cultural Revolution" but the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," this building was last painted in 1967

Whenever I met him, I've known him for a good long time, long enough that our intermittent and infrequent WeChat chat history shows that we haven't seen each other in nearly 8 years.

Now in charge of the development of a new 200 hectare facility, he's the Interesting Person I'm going to visit at the Cool Location.

First sign of what I thought were tobacco plants

Smoking is one of those things that the Algorithm penalizes showing on Chinese social media. Besides which, the probably a panatela-sized cigar I smoke is consumed inside an office which doesn't look to me like it has anything obviously sensitive sitting out, but which also isn't the kind of place his corporate overlords would likely be happy about seeing on social media.

On the other hand, the drying sheds—with their understandably state-of-the-art security system—are perfectly fine.

I am absolutely IN LOVE with the choice in cartoons that they've decorated their quonset with

Absolutely NO SMOKING in the tobacco storage and processing facilities!!!⁶

If I'd had the right equipment or wanted to take video of the fields and their row-by-row individual Smart Irrigation and Fertilizer systems that not only allow the tobacco to mature faster but also have the ability to flexibly moderate conditions on the basis of how the plants are doing, that also would have been okay.

To be perfectly honest though, the thing I found the most interesting about the plantation was actually the baled up pile of spoiled tobacco⁷ that, on account of being tobacco (and what ought to have been quite valuable tobacco at that) was sitting around waiting to be specifically Witnessed by a particular Regulatory Authority before it could be destroyed. But, I'm weird like that.

Part of one of seven drying sheds that I saw

Posing with relatively recently harvested leaf (it gets moved to higher racks as it dries)

Lunch eaten, (his) cigars and (my) coffee shared, and plantation toured, my bike is loaded into the back of a truck and I'm driven to the very nearby train station with the intent of getting the bus from there to Changjiang. Bus driver is very dismissive of my bike fitting in his undercarriage luggage compartment while the taxi drivers are all willing to use the meter to take me. Sure, I could have pushed, but I ultimately didn't care and the taxi was going to be more comfortable.

Once in his car, the driver gets on the horn with the west island intercounty black taxis and finds me a ride to Haikou in a car already going that way. Overcharges me (by a lot) and underpays the other driver (also by a lot) but—other than the real bad motion sickness I'm getting by the time I've been in a car for four hours—it's mostly one of those non-issues where the learned lesson⁸ is substantially more valuable than the extra money I shouldn't ought to have had to pay.

I felt like I absolutely pigged out on the "yay, I've got variety" in dishes and the sweet potatoes that they grow as part crop rotation and part government-mandated food crops, but I was starving come dinner time

Other than the amount by which he overcharged me to organize my ride from the expressway entrance to Haikou, this driver was way better than the other one⁹

¹ Which, by the way, are closer to 65% or even 70% the capacity of a mini rather than half

² Close enough that, in those days of still requiring color photocopies (but not having available color photocopiers you could use), one of my early assistants once ended up at their offices borrowing the use of a photocopier

³ We're talking really, really basic things like passport info pages.

⁴ I don't do it very often, but sometimes I'll put my stamps on something done by someone who is totally qualified to be a translator but—having instead a job title like CFO or senior counsel—doesn't have the relevant stamps required to certify their own work.

You can't see them too well in this picture, but there's a double line of kapok trees paralleling a farm road that I've previously ridden

Photo attached to the "I've followed the GPS and I think I'm here" message

⁵ See, I don't like (and by "don't like," I mean "loathe") certified translation. It's a formatting nightmare where not only does every office have a different set of requirements on how things should be formatted, it's often the case that different officials in the same office have different requirements. As a result, I'll only do certified translations for people I really like, and I almost always charge in baked goods†.

† I'm not joking. A driver's license will cost you USD 100 or one Tupperware container of oatmeal raisin cookies.

⁶ Three exclamation points to let you know how serious they are.

⁷ Roughly 1 or 1.5 cubic meters worth of burlap sacks full of leaf that went moldy after it got too damp during the fermentation stage, napkin math puts that pile of bales at at least $7,000 in damaged product.

(Using a Reddit thread on theydidthemath, it would seem that there are around 448 cigarette cartons per cubic meter, so, if this had been cigarette tobacco, and if specialty cigar tobacco is assigned a value of ⅓ the retail price of the most no-name cigarette brand I can find online, I get 448×1.5×10=6,720.)

⁸ Said lesson being: when I decide to stop on Part II of this Tour, I'm shipping my bike back and taking the train.

⁹ I'm reasonably sure that nothing I said or did once the other passengers had been dropped off indicated any interest in either talking about my relationship status or being asked out on a date. If I hadn't not wanted to reassemble my bicycle or find some way to tie the handlebar bag back on to the rear rack, I was honestly thinking of just asking to be let out to ride home.

Newly opened western restaurant very near my apartment. The food was much prettier than it tasted.

Today's ride: 17 km (11 miles)
Total: 456 km (283 miles)

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