D14: 响水 → 保国

January 28, 2025

Looks like someone usually sells coconuts by the side of the road here

I was up bright and early today a x was caffeinated, fed, and emptied¹ by a time that I'm often not yet even awake².

However, a very good friend of mine who I don't talk to nearly enough is in the hospital recovering from a heart attack and there's a very good chance that he'll be conscious enough to want to chat with me, so I make four more moka pots of the old coffee beans (with powdered milk and sweetener to counteract their age) and shoot and mostly edit a video on the lack of anti-theft bars across my hotel room window and the disappearance over the past decade of most of China's petty crime³.

Oatmeal of the Day: Chestnut, Pickled Radish, and Vegetarian "Pork" chunks

It's not just that my 4th floor room has no window bars, its that my room used to have them and has removed them

It turns out that he doesn't have the spoons⁴ to talk to me, but—by that point—I've already determined that I'm almost certainly not making it to Potential Sleeping Point Number 2, so I've got a bit more time to work with than I originally thought I was going to have.

As it turns out, the level of construction on this part of the Rainforest Road—especially the initial big climb on a road that previously existed⁵ but has now been transformed beyond recognition—is so insanely good that I whizz past PSPN 1 and make it a further 14km down the road to PSPN 2 with plenty of daylight left to spare.

A mirror hiding in the greenery, there used to be a sharp curve here

A gentled curve through a hill cut that's been widened and deepened

Dirt piled over the former road make a good place to plant vegetables

In fact, by this time next year, it looks like I can start from the same town and either make it to PSPN 3 or take a still-being-upgraded spur line from just before the totally gratuitous tunnel that did yet have anywhere near enough lights and cut across the countryside to PSPN 2 without having to pass through PSPN 1.

This is important because one of the things that I hate doing in the morning (even more than waking up and exiting bedlandia) is retracing the previous evening's route and, this time, the way that I went to PSPN 2 puts me in a situation where the only way I can go to tomorrow's destination is by backtracking.

I must have counted over a hundred anti drunk driving PSAs today

Although it continues to improve, my left thumb is still bothering me. I've found icyhot patches to be the best way to keep it from hurting during the day. Most of the stickums sold by this morning's pharmacy, however, were ANTI RADIATION bollocks

I'm not sure if it's because different road crews working for different civil engineering enterprises were working on building the Rainforest Road all at the same time, if it's because my big uphill is all a reconstruction of a previously existing road that has already gone through earlier rounds of refinement, or if different counties' transportation administrations had different requirements for road construction, but the first section is mind blowing.

I realize that, owing to high school at a polytechnic and family friends in industries like sewage, I have a rather unusual tendency to notice infrastructure⁶ in the first place, but I cannot overstate how fucking cool this road was.

It helps that I was on this road about two years ago with Chinese Boyfriend. We went up to the (still) not very impressive Stone Forest karst cave site that was, at that time, the End of All Pavement and, even more than the bit where the GPS incorrectly took us into a small village at the top of the karstmount, my strongest memory from this was noticing his contributions to the conversation start trailing off on the climb to the point that I both stopped talking to him and took my hand off his leg because any form of distracting the driver seemed like a really reallllly bad idea at the time.

So, in addition to looking at the stubby scars of road that no longer exists and comparing them to the road that now is, I'm also comparing them in my memories of his slowing and honking before every blind corner just in case a motorcycle or tractor was coming the other direction.

View of a honestly not that old bridge from the new bridge

Viaduct looking down at dirt road and ahead at hill cuts

Scenic Overlook where I ate my elevenses⁷

But, I'm also comparing the degree of polish necessary for 8km of still winding mountain road to consistently maintain the same grade over the entire 8km climb to a long entirely new descent where first it was steep, then it wasn't, then it was steeper, then flat, then down again, and a short little bit up before resuming the down.

This is an ethnic minority region where Spring Festival isn't as important as their own New Year so it would stand to reason that things would be open. Of course, this is also a super poor area that, until six months ago, was very isolated from everywhere else. This makes it hard to say why I can't find lunch other than small convenience stores with selections less varied and abundant than what I've already got in my food pannier.

Bananas which are tall enough and isolated enough from other bananas that they might be wild

Looking down and far across the valley at the resort I stay at every time I go on a Media Trip to Baoting

I end up eating by the side of the road at the Stone Forest. There's a new parking lot and a toilet and both sides of the road are lined with ez-up pavilions that look like there was a market or a festival or something set up. It's weird though, cause the Site is small. Barely bigger than my apartment building. And, unless fenced off caves with "Danger, No Entry" signs and a single ancient banyan tree are your thing, there's nothing to indicate that this place is a good place to have a festival or street market.

The shrine to the God of the Cave is piled high with oranges and tangerines, and someone has left some big candles and incense burning in the brazier. I've been hanging out around enough Buddhists recently that—after a quick check for extremely moldy fruit confirms that no one is regularly coming by to clean away offerings—I don't feel guilty taking all the edible apples and four pockets full of citrus.

This adorable little monster was not having any of this "stand in front of things and be photographed"

She would stand and pose in front of anything and everything⁸ BUT the attractive backdrop her mother wanted to take a photo of her standing in front of

Just because the God of the Cave isn't eating the oranges for himself doesn't mean I'm so gauche as to eat my take in front of the shrine.. Instead, I take it back to the road, and have most of the mandarins along with two Snickers.

Then, I keep going.

There isn't too much more up after this, but it's a very engineered up with a viaduct over a dirt road that continues down below for a while before disappearing into the bulwarks built to support the width of the new road. I don't know if that road ever went up to the pass, but, if it did, it left no traces on the other side.

The whole of the Site is at the bottom of those stairs

Crossing from Baoting back into Sanya, I get my first inkling that every transportation administration responsible for an area which the Rainforest Road goes through must have had different requirements. Now, the stabilization nets to encourage plants to take root on the hill cuts and keep them from falling in have flowers among the first crop of grasses and vines; and both sides of the road are lined with saplings which will some day grow into shade trees that help make this bit of road just as pleasant in the summer as it is in the winter.

Passing through the plantation town where PSPN 1 is located, I see the 80s-era danwei guesthouse that's the only accommodation. With the price I've been told over the phone, I assume it's been refreshed at least once or twice in the last half century, but I've stayed in PSPN 2 before, and even if I probably won't pick the same hotel, I know it has multiple hotels for me to choose from. Plus, I've got scads of daylight left to me.

Merit is achieved by the act of leaving offerings, in this case cigarettes and fresh betel

Also, the Site had numerous signs like this banner telling visitors that the Site was undeveloped, potentially dangerous, and not open

Finding an open dumpling shop in PSPN 2, I head over to the most promising looking accommodation only to find myself unable to find any staff. After a significant amount of wandering around and picking through the contents of the Front Desk, I discover that the mostly broken scrolling LED sign over the entrance has a phone number, and if I watch it run though three or four times, I can even get it all written down.

They'll take another 30 minutes to show, but I've already decided that the first floor rooms have nice beds, a nice degree of shaded windows, and a nice lack of smell.

From the initial climb, looking out towards the plain

A single very tall betel palm in a forest of betel

Peculiar woven structure in the middle of rice paddies

Of course, because those rooms will go to people who are going to spend Spring Festival eve playing mahjong until dawn, they insist on putting me on the second floor, where the beds aren't nearly as nice.

However, one bowl of stewed apple⁹ and raisin oatmeal later, I'm unconscious despite the war zone level of firecrackers going off outside.

¹ There's a very specific word for how the act of eating can trigger the muscles at the other end. It's a word that I've previously described as one of my favorite "overly specific vocabulary words." However, because I still occasionally forget infrequently used words post-C19, I had to get this far into writing this footnote before I remembered that it was "peristalsis."

Does it count as "inviting myself behind the Front Desk without permission" if no one was there?

Graffiti begging his girlfriend to love him, because he now has a car

² I've mentioned a few times that the biking counteracts my natural tendency to go to sleep very very late and go wake up well into mid-morning; however, the blogging, video editing, and possibility that I may be doing translation work after I get to the hotel room regularly cause me to still only go to sleep after midnight.

³ This is specifically triggered by the sign telling hotel guests that the bars were removed in the interests of fire safety, but it's also because Tessa and Daniele's experience with crime is such that they were sure the parking lot security camera meant that the access road next to their restaurant was a suitable place to leave my bike for two nights.

⁴ A now more than 20-year-old analogy initially used by people with invisible disabilities to refer to their energy levels, I'm mostly explaining what this is because I've started having my trip journals translated into Chinese. Also, it turns out that one of the things he was on at the time is on his "list of contraindicated medications" because it is known to make him a cranky low-energy bastard.

⁵ Some parts of the Rainforest Road are entirely new

⁶ Bridges are like really cool, okay?

⁷ Five 150ml packets of sugar-free yogurt from a newly opened snack mart that isn't Super Ming

⁸ This included the garbage cans, an especially fascinating PSA on preventing forest fires, a map of the National Rainforest Park, and me.

⁹ I know I shouldn't cook in the kettle but I cleaned it both before and after

Family Planning policy slogan on an older building with a new building behind it

Today's ride: 69 km (43 miles)
Total: 955 km (593 miles)

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