D3: 临高 → 光村

January 8, 2025

The absolute best part was the car driver coming to a complete stop and FLASHING HIS HEADLIGHTS ¹ at the ducks. The motorcycle and trike both knew that honking and driving slowly would get them to move out of the way.

The leg cramps that came around 10pm the night before tell me that—even if there wasn't a sweet spot in terms of online bookable lodging at just under the 50km point—that this place would still be the best place for me to set as my destination².

What with making coffee and eating breakfast and updating social media and doing paying work, I don't leave my windowless room with it's perfect lack of intrusion from the outside world until just shy of noon. The world outside is grayer and less sunny than the previous day, as well as being colder and windier so it's no great loss to have been cooped up inside.

Achievement Unlocked: First "massage services" cards of the Tour

Painted electric box outside my hotel, can't tell if that's an airplane or a bird

First time ever seeing a neighborhood Praise and Criticism bulletin board, let alone with pictures, and I can't figure out what's wrong with the house whose owners are being chastised

Not that I expect I'll be back in Lin'gao until this time next year but, if I recall correctly, although the hotel I had been planning on staying at doesn't have an elevator³, it is otherwise more recently updated and nicer than this one.

Grumped out over the guy who argued with me that lighting up a cigarette the second he got in the elevator with me was "totes fine" because he wasn't actively in the process of smoking it, I start my morning by going back to last night's bridge to make a video about the lions. Unfortunately for figuring out anything new about the weirdness Dr. M and I kept encountering on the Yellow River Road where both male and female lions had mouth balls, only the pair on the south side of the river follow this pattern.

Very long handled brooms for sweeping the ceiling

One of three in a row where the stencil was applied backwards

I've run out of icyhot stickum patches to put on my left arm and hand and my hand whinges every time I go over a speed bump or especially rough patch of pavement. Of course, having decided that this means I need to find a pharmacy and buy more of them⁴, I'm already past the end of pharmacy territory and won't reenter it for another 20km.

Because I spent last night in downtown Lin'gao and because I'm intentionally aiming to take a small ferry crossing between Tiaolou where I think I may have once attended a festival in honor of the fishing season opening and Xinsheng where I've never been before, vvery little of today is spent on the Coastal Tourism Highway.

Very nice life vests⁵ which the boatman remembers to distribute three quarters of the way across the water

Sometimes, especially in the mangroves south of Xinsheng, I'm very close to the Tourism Road, but it won't be until I'm already in Danzhou that I am finally forced by a lack of other options to get on it and enjoy its wide banked curves, gently graded hill cuts, and "nice but not exciting" scenery.

Within moments of this happening, I'm passed by a short pace line. Over the next hour, there's another five or six cyclists. Then, because it's a convenient place for food and lodging near the Road, I will see a group of three in Guangcun, will meet two round-the-islanders staying in my hotel on my way back from dinner, and will see another cyclist carrying his bike down the stairs in the morning.

Old and new signs for the Coastal Tourism Highway

I was heading down this road to look at this old gate when I decided "maybe I don't want to trespass on military property"

According to the hotel owner, since the Road officially opened last year, they get an average of four or five touring cyclists per night, every night, year round; and the most they've had at once was a "lobby full of bikes, must have been at least 10 or 20 of them."

They also get tourists traveling by car and motorcycle, but not so many as by bicycle. The cars and motorcycles aren't as limited by geography or nightfall and have more options for places to go.

Since I don't really believe in going the "normal" places that "regular" tourists go, I don't usually see just how popular bike touring has recently become, in part because of social media superstars like Hu Yuanxing⁶ and A'qiu⁷, but also because the more people do it, the more other people realize how difficult it isn't.

This town name is really funny in Chinese

This village name is really funny in Chinese⁸

I'm sure you could also say some things about the stagnating Chinese economy or the lie flat movement, but—even if we are staying at the cheaper hotels—the majority of Chinese cycletourists that I've met⁹ are at least white-collar class and the past few years has seen trends in who goes cycle touring moving farther and farther up the socioeconomic scale.

Other than it's existence in a convenient location, I'm not impressed with the hotel. At 90y per night, it's the most expensive so far this trip, the first one to have hard beds, and the first one to have "hot water" that's heated to barely warm. Combine this with an a/c that doesn't have a heat option and I'll end up taking a whore's bath of just the stinky bits.

Convention on the Provision of Rural Electricity

¹ If you've ever read Peter Hessler or any of the writers who discussed life in China in the 80s and 90s, a very common theme is the constant and unending sound of car horns. Over the course of decades of effort, and ways of figuring out how to fine people who honk near schools and hospitals, most urban drivers no longer think to use their horn at all. Ergo, ineffectively trying to get livestock to move out of the road by politely flashing your headlights...

² I have a second option that's only four or five kilometers more today and the same distance tomorrow, but it's a town that's already been marked as Somewhere I've Slept on Tour† and this one isn't.

† Now at over 700 unique locations in China

Achievement Unlocked: First Mao Heads of the Tour. They're paired with a faded "Follow the Party" and a "Listen to Chairman Mao's Instructions"

³ I don't have to take my bike up to room. I just prefer to do so.

⁴ These aren't usually something I keep around, however, they are also the easiest way to show that I'm trying to Do Something when I go someplace that would prefer my tattoos not show up on Official Media.

⁵ Not counting the time in 2021 when our boat was called back to shore by someone from the Maritime Safety Administration, I can only think of one time I've been made to use a life vest on a ferry in China. However, despite these being realllllllly nice life vests that clearly weren't bought† with the 1y per person fare‡, they were handed out more as a "don't let me get caught not having given them to you" than a "safety first" initiative.

† I'm thinking government subsidy

‡ 3y if you have a bicycle. 4y for an ebike.

My friend said he didn't think his car could fit on the mangrove road. I countered with a picture of this vehicle

A very confusing possibly modern ceremonial arch that mixes obvious use of mechanical cutting methods with chisel marks, and which isn't located anywhere that makes sense for modern construction of this type

⁶ Last year, a friend and I had a disagreement over whether or not Hu could possibly be making any kind of living off of social media, and if his continued status as a Round the World Cycling Hobo versus any other form of travel was proof that he must not be. As a definite answer to that question, he just publicly donated CNY 3,000,000 (USD 500,000) to the Tibetan Earthquake Relief.

⁷ Both of whom have over 10 million followers on their primary accounts.

⁸ Respectively, they are “Zealand" (as in New Zealand), "Manicures," and "Very Big."

A well and pump tower donated by Hainan Airlines Group as a "Repaying the Strength of the Hainan People" project

Speaking of the speed with which things change once previously acceptable behaviors become verboten, this is the second time today I've seen people neatly lining up to get their packages at a courier station.

⁹ For the longest time, cycletourists were mostly retired people and recent college graduates. Prior to the social media era†, there were also a few prominent handicapped people‡ who were known to the cycling community and who spent most of the year as "technically not homeless people" who were trying to spend as little money as possible.

† Online Bulletin Boards, chat programs like QQ, and forums like Tianya were obviously social media, but they weren't social media the way it currently is.

‡ One congenitally handicapped dwarf with a custom recumbent tricycle he designed himself used to annually go the 5,000km from Harbin to Sanya and back again, and there was also a guy with disfiguring burn scars all over his face and body that could be guaranteed to be camping at two out of every three events in Southern China.

Tile dragons on a temple that was rebuilt in the early 90s

Especially when compared to the generic sailboat on the tile mural outside, I love the detail on this fishing boat mural

Today's ride: 48 km (30 miles)
Total: 159 km (99 miles)

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