D14: 黄竹 → 屯昌

February 21, 2024

Technically, my room has a window. That window is in the bathroom and blocked by the hotel's sign, but, technically, my room does have a window. The location of the blocked up window means that, at 6:30am, when the sun comes up and the world starts growing bright, I ought to be able to sleep through it.

However, there's something going on outside involving a truck engine and raised voices, and although I'll manage to get back to sleep again, it takes me half an hour and I'm still logy and wanting to sleep more when I wake up for good at 8:40. Which is probably why the coffee¹ had the effect that African coffees often have of making me very alertly not really want to do anything.

It looks even less like a hotel entrance in the daylight

August 2022 requirement to have a 72 hour validity NAT in order to eat at this restaurant

Today's breakfast oatmeal is just raisins and sweetened condensed milk. I'm craving the saltiness of one of the preserved hard boiled eggs, but I ate the last one during yesterday's lunch break and I'm not going shopping until after I pick up my packages and know how much space I've got.

Deciding that my route has very little in apparent places to eat, and figuring that any morning where the dawdle² takes me until noon to leave is a morning where I'm allowed to eat lunch before setting out, I'll end up filling my saltiness and protein needs and wants with two steamer baskets of dumplings from the Shaxian Snacks just around the corner from my hotel.

I'm continuing inland to Tunchang County on the old central highway³, after which I'll return to the coast at Qionghai, putter down to Wanning on the Tourism Road, then go back to Qiongzhong with the intent of visiting the Shanlan Distillery and hopefully finding some wild hot springs I missed on a previous trip. I'm not exactly sure what I'll do after that as I don't especially like the Lingshui coast but I'll think of something.

The pink line is more or less my rough plan

I've worked out a plan for today that takes me on as many small roads as possible only, once I start out, to find that the provincial route I'm on has been designated a "scenic highway" by some organization I've never heard of and, now that Chinese New Year is over, is effectively car free. On top of that, I suddenly realize that this is near some historic statues I was supposed to go looking for with Golf Guy⁴ but didn't because planning road trips is not at all the same as doing road trips.

As I've since purged the photos and videos from my chat history with Golf Guy (not because there was anything racy in them, but because he also likes old buildings and at least 20gb of my phone memory was taken up by photos I'd sent him of things and places I'd been that I thought he'd like⁵), this was harder than I thought it would be, but I eventually tracked down who had sent me the statuary photos in the first place.

Loving the amount of thought that's gone into making this road safe

Rerouted to go to the statues, I'm finding that even if this road isn't terribly exciting in terms of "things to look at along the way," there's a very definite reason it's been named a scenic highway and it's awfully pleasant riding.

I find the correct milemarker⁶, find the turn-off that isn't on Maps, go 300m down that road, and ... I might be lost.

"Excuse me convenient man with herd of goats, do you know where the ancient grave is?"

"Ancient grave? There aren't any ancient graves around here."

"Oh, my friend told me there was, with some statues..."

"Do you mean the stone horse?"

Please tell me how I was supposed to know to turn here?

**Nods** "I guess so"

**Points with machete** "Go that way through the field over there"

Now, he's pointing at like 15° of area so I'm not real confident that this is going to work but I go over that way and I follow a dirt road that takes me to a dead end with a dog that very angrily lets me know THESE ARE HIS Betel Trees and I do not belong here.

I've turned back, thinking to walk my bike and carefully look at both sides of the dirt road, when machete man (now goatless) comes running up to me with a "you missed your turn" and then sprints off down a track that is identical to every other farm track that I wouldn't have thought I should be taking cause people don't like you stomping on their crops.

Maybe a bit more obvious from this angle

Heading alone into the forest with machete man⁷ he suddenly goes "ahh, here it is" and hacks at some undergrowth with his knife, revealing the turtle that once held a stele announcing whose tomb this was and when he died and what he did. Then we tromp back and forth for a while, him kicking at various large rocks and sometimes whacking at stuff until we've found both the horse and the fallen man, at which point he says "I got to get back to my goats now" and takes off at a pace I wouldn't have tried on terrain that lumpy or concealed but obviously he has more experience than I do at not breaking his ankles.

Could anything else I do today live up to this experience?

I mean, sure, it's possible. I've had some days where cool things just happen one after another after another.

Those days usually aren't in Hainan though.

I'll stick to the Scenic Road for another 10 or 15 kilometers before turning off on to farm roads where there's nothing especially special beyond a larger than usual number of stacked rock fences acting as field boundaries that must have been around for centuries.

These roads get me the greatest Rural Safe Electricity Usage Poster I've ever seen (unique to Hainan as well) and a 2011 bridge that I guessed at 2014 because I've now gotten to the point where I've been playing the Bridge Guessing Game for so many years that I practically have to seek out the date on every major bridge I cross, and the more times I do this, the more info I have for the next time I guess.

But, generally, there's not a whole lot beyond it being awfully pretty, and then I'm in Tunchang where I've apparently not booked the same cheap hotel I stayed at in 2022 (that one had an elevator) but she'd paid attention when confirming my booking, knew I was a foreigner, and had no issue with it⁸, so—other than my having to carry my bags up to the third floor—this place is a-ok in my books.

¹ which is still the Western Ugandan that was sent to me on day 5 or 6

² Part of the dawdle was video editing. Another part of it was a job for Media Client. A third part was chatting with the hotel owner and trying to convince her that just because most of the bike tourists she sees are pushing themselves to their physical limits that doesn't mean it's a required part of bike touring, and if she wants to, there's no such thing as not having the strength.

I'm really getting way too good at the Bridge Game

³ Highway in the non-expressway sense of the word. National Road 223.

⁴ The gold standard by which I measure flaky communication habits, this is the guy I briefly dated about two years before meeting Chinese Boyfriend.

⁵ The problem with staying friends with him after he initiated breaking up is that he only wanted to be friends when I was very definitely not in the same city as him. As soon as there was any possibility that I might actually want to do anything other than share pictures of 19th century architecture, he'd go back to being extra flaky.

⁶ kilometermarker?

⁷ I'm a very trusting individual

⁸ For very complicated reasons that I'm not going to go into here, cheap places that are explicitly listed as "we take foreigners" are often the most hostile to foreigners

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 830 km (515 miles)

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