D10: 海口 → 云龙

February 17, 2024

Stopping for a fruit break, I saw a couple on what looked like a nice tandem riding by at a decent clip

As with the time in 2019 where I specifically made a point of scheduling a break in order to coincide with my period, my body also decided that this was a month where I wanted a longer than usual cycle. I've never been one of those women who is so regular that she could set a clock by what her body is doing, but I'm not that irregular either.

Unless, it seems, I've made plans.

With one of my oldest, rattiest, ready to be thrown out pair of shorts on underneath a nicer (but not actually nice) pair and all the necessary girl supplies up in my handlebar bag where I can conveniently get them, I'm still starting again today. Cause otherwise I'll have spent more time on my break than I did on the first part of riding and that's just not acceptable to me.

I just can't resist doing this instead of the main road

Almost all of the day's small roads were paved though

And, in fact, better paved than all but the big big roads

Back in the distant mists of time when I used to regularly go on three-day trips to Wenchang, I always left the city heading east. Therefore, I've decided to go southeast and try something new.

As I actually made this plan last night and had not yet discovered The Horrible Sound, my ability to pass one of the four bike shops owned by the same guy as the shop where my Tour Bike has spent the past couple of months actually wasn't a consideration at all.

Basically only happening when I first started pedaling from a full stop, and thus in no position to be looking down or backwards to figure this out, it felt like something was going on with the chain. Something that hadn't been going on yesterday when I rode the bike home without a load.

My first hill (which isn't actually much of a hill) came right before the bike shop as I was passing the neighborhood of "facing the hills" (面前坡), and, shifting from the big ring to the middle, the entire drivetrain ground to a halt with a jammed chain that, even after I unjammed it, continued to make some pretty dreadful noises the rest of the way there.

Motor vehicles, please be aware that this road has lots of tractors, motorcycles, and bikes, and drive accordingly

WARNING! Absolutely forbidden to dump dead pigs here!!

After a lot of riding my bike in circles with and without my luggage on it and a phone call to the shop that put together my interesting new brifter set up¹, some fidgeting was done to the front derailleur adjustments, then undone when it made this worse, then done differently, and it looks like the problem has been diagnosed.

Ish.

The chain is new. The crankset rings are not. I used to use the middle the most, followed by the small ring in high stress situations like steep hills. Owing to a combination of factors including not wanting to go fast, carrying too much to go fast, and my handlebar bag placement interfering with the brifter, I almost never used the big ring.

That's some of my jockey-wheel scraped off onto my chain

Volleyball is really popular in Hainan, and has been for the past hundred years and change

No idea where this procession with drums, gongs, cymbals, and gods in sedan chairs was going but it wasn't the temple I was sitting outside

The shop I was in is the least and lowest of Feng Quan's shops. They don't have chainrings. My choices are to ride 8km north and west to the shop that does have chainrings or to grit my teeth and try ignoring the Noise until I get to Wenchang, by which point the chain will either be approaching a wear pattern that matches the rings and doesn't make noise under load, or I can get chainrings at the shop there².

Leaving the bike shop, my GPS is set to take me to a defensive tower that, on account of my unexpectedly finding myself on what must have been the main road south for five or eight hundred years, I'll end up deciding not to actually go to as the daylight starts creeping away from too many stops to look at things like illegible stelae, brightly painted lions, and old houses.

The only legible date was Guangxu 2 (1877)

The tall one in the back is from the 90s

This is also a region with an unusually large degree of variation in grave styles, however as I have a rule about not taking photos of graves that are occupied by people who are still remembered by the living, looking at them mostly doesn't lead to delays.

Dreadful bad laobacha in Longqiao followed by the discovery that the old bridge over the dam is completely gone beneath a project upgrading the Nandu River Water Conservancy District. There's a new car bridge not that far north of me that opened maybe a year and a half ago, so I take that across, stopping to watch the sunset and a fisherman down below doing some very traditional net throwing techniques that you usually don't see.

Worse than Lipton. But, thankfully, there was lots of sugar and sweetened condensed in the cup

Then, an actual main road the rest of the way to Yunlong, dinner, and my hotel, where I'm pleased to say that—as is generally expected with small family owned places (and not major chains)—it is easy to talk my way behind the front desk and register myself on the computer.

¹ Secondhand Sora brifters, and they've somehow gotten the right brifter that usually handles a rear cluster to correctly map onto a mountainbike triple.

² At the very least, if things still aren't good by Wenchang, and the shop in Wenchang doesn't have the right parts, they can then send replacement chainrings to the shop in Qionghai.

Today's ride: 47 km (29 miles)
Total: 610 km (379 miles)

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