D24: 琼中 → 新兴

March 6, 2024

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED, first camel statue of the Tour

I'll see one fully loaded bike tourer in Qiongzhong as (having not bothered to take the food bag up to the room) I'm getting lunch at a Wallace Fried Chicken before hitting the road. He's just far enough away that calling to him doesn't get so much as an ear twitch of indication that he's noticed me, which is a shame cause—of all the people on bikes I've seen so far this Round the Island—he is the first person since that group of college students on a country road near Fushan to look like "my people."

I'm absolutely not going out of my way to throw shade at the bike tourists on their Big Ride. Yes, we have next to nothing in common. However, everyone has to start somewhere, and I was once like those fit young men on the way to Wenchang who didn't know about changing gears.

A fibreglass horse that's, uh, hung like a horse

But, even when I didn't know what I was doing, I embraced stepping outside my comfort zone to the point that I got very, very lost and needed help getting home; and the people who absolutely must stick to the tried and true routes that everyone used when GPS and online hotel booking weren't around, who are still firmly enough in the mindset of having to make it a certain distance every day that they'll book a week in advance or call a taxi to make up the difference, they aren't "my people."

This guy—on the other hand—had panniers that weren't eyecatchingly the cheapest or the most expensive Taobao has to offer¹, he had luggage that was distributed around his bike like someone who knew the value of a balanced load², and his lycra fit³.

Later on in the day, I'll see two more riders on road bikes with no luggage at all and I'll wonder if it's already the wrong time of year to be seeing the Tourists, or if the existence of the mostly flat Coastal Tourism Highway has siphoned them all away.

I'll have a little bit of up and down before the proper down starts and then it's like wham, no more mountains. Not even foothills. It's not quite flat plains either but it's so much flatter than where I've just been, and along with a resumption in scattered architectural layers of microhistory, I feel like I've done more than just cross a modern political boundary from the Qiongzhong Li Autonomous⁴ County⁵ to Tunchang County.

Seriously, what is up with all the horse statues on this road?

This region isn't especially known for anything horse related

It's only 50km from the county seat at Yinggen to the county seat at Tuncheng and (with the exception of an abandoned crystal mine that I understand has become a visitable site) there really isn't anything to do there⁶ so I make the choice to keep going even though I know it will mean riding in the dark.

First town to the north only has one hotel, not on Maps, and more than I want to spend. Next one has far more than the one, though the thumpa-thumpa music of the first (sharing with a KTV) followed by the frustration of talking on the phone with a person who flat out refuses to tell me a price unless I get off my bike and go up the stairs and look at what he has almost ends up with me being so angry I don't call the third.

This is one of those places where I really don't understand why they made the hill cut

When they widened the road, they also gentled the curves and flattened everything (the original road is about twice as wide as what you can see through the plants)

However, I'm getting a sore chafed spot on the one ass cheek and the next option is twenty more kilometers in the dark, so I force myself to do calming breaths, and get an absolutely lovely woman who not only lets me behind the counter to properly register myself, she even offers to help carry my things up the stairs if I so want.

¹ I am mightily proud of my current rig having six bags from five manufacturers.

² Although I know the island has both long term residents and short term visitors who do the ultralight thing†, I didn't see a single bikepacker this Tour.

Buying me this earned him so many Boyfriend Points

† Case in point: Chinese Boyfriend's description of his ride around Taiwan effectively guaranteed that, short of my having a pedal assist motor, the two of us won't be riding together.

³ You wouldn't think this to be a metric, but an astonishing number of people who are "trying the cycling thing" (whether wearing expensive or cheap) have completely embraced the full spandex warrior aesthetic without, apparently, trying their clothing on before going riding.

For some reason, this bridge over the expressway is a suspension bridge

Lot of parked cars and buses and trucks and scooters immediately after this sign saying that no cars, buses, trucks, scooters, or tractors can park here

⁴ Other than places which are "autonomous" usually also being places with high populations of minority ethnic groups (to the point of having the ethnic groups' name in their name), I'm still not sure if there even is a difference between them and places that aren't "autonomous."

⁵ Wuzhishan, which is a 市†, has just as much of a minority population as Qiongzhong, but doesn't get "autonomous" in the name.

The shape of this plantation gate is a kind of skeuomorph on account of the fact that this was never a defensive gate and probably never had giant doors in the middle

† My least favorite word. In Chinese geopolitical divisions, this usually means "city," sometimes means "prefecture-level city," and occasionally means "municipality." I particularly loathe this word on account of—in Media Client's work—it forcing me to come up with ways of explaining that, despite being inside 市, neither the national rainforest park nor the island's best surfing beaches are inside cities.

⁶ Piggy Haha's Farm, Flower Dreamland, and Oil Painting Street do not, in my opinion, count as "things to do."

Now that helmet campaigns (that give fines) have most people wearing something on their head when driving a motorized two wheeler, they are working on the concept that hardhats ≠ helmets and that people should specifically wear rated helmets⁷. I mention this because this older PSA uses the vocabulary word for hardhat.

⁷ Many years ago, one of the photographers at the Tour of Hainan died because he was wearing a random 'helmet' bought from a scooter shop in Sanya. The appropriately armored driver of his bike didn't even need hospitalization.

Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 1,474 km (915 miles)

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