D15: 保国 → 五指山

January 29, 2025

Screenshot from Douyin of what the fireworks looked like from the beach at Riyue Bay

I fell asleep while talking to Mike, but woke up enough when he asked me if I was asleep that, paired with the deafening crescendo of white noise that burst from literally everywhere at the strike of midnight, I didn't immediately go back to sleep.

Three times now, I've spent Spring Festival Eve in the countryside in a place that explicitly allows fireworks¹.

The first time, they must have had customs tied to the traditional division of hours² as the arrival of midnight was heralded by the chuffing sounds of crickets that had no idea of the hell that was going to break loose at 3am. The second time was a very rural area with very few people who mostly aren't Han and who have a different idea of what holidays are important. And now, tonight. This time, however, I'm in a plantation town.

I particularly enjoy the alternating fake wood and fake marble panels in my hotel room #CrimesAgainstWallpaper

The gold on brown bamboo print panels on the framed accent wall behind the TV and the cartoon clouds on the ceiling really tie the room together

Speaking of Mystic Deer in my hotel, here are some combination bicycle and mystic deer statues⁴ on the "huh, I seem to be on a Greenway again"

Plantation towns are settlements where literally everything used to belong to the government owned Hainan State Farms but now it's merely "most of the things" and they're only loosely associated with HSF Group. Maybe the farmers rent their land from HSF, maybe they buy their seeds or sell their harvest to HSF, but they don't give birth in HSF hospitals, send their children to HSF schools⁵, and buy their clothing from an HSF general store.

Dating back to the 50s and the drive to open up the countryside and modernize agriculture, plantation towns have people from all over the country who—even in the modern era—got up from whatever backwater they grew up in to move to this functionally identical backwater in search of a better life.

The NotChurch from last year's Round the Island is open and confirmed to be a pool hall

Outside of dancing in the park, Chinese people don't really dance. And yet, entertainment venues that are almost exclusively for getting drunk while being blasted by loud techno all call themselves "dance halls"

Ignoring the GPS's suggestion for best route in favor of shortest route may add some additional texture to your day

I've talked to lots of them and, unlike the universally disliked winter snowbirds, I really don't understand the thought processes that went into coming here. Rural to urban or urban to rural both have obvious reasons. But podunk nowhere to podunk nowhere when neither the job you have nor the place you've chosen have any special "in demand" reason to change, that just baffles me.

To say that I've never experienced anything like the cacophony of sound outside my window diminishes the experience of the times in Haikou where the explosions began a month before the New Year, continued until Lantern Festival two weeks after the New Year, and were at their loudest and most exuberant on the night of Spring Festival.

If you have to pick a road to ride from the coast to Ledong, this one is much nicer than the one that connects at Jiusuo

Wall paintings of the local ethnic minority with exaggerated facial features that are more "this artist's unique style" than anything else

I like that someone added a stuck on New Year's blessing to the painted door of the painted hut

After leaving the main road early, in merging onto a small road I took last year

However, there are so many strings of firecrackers all going off at the same time and from every direction that it stops being individual pop pop pop bangs and is more like the sound of the ocean crashing against the shore during a typhoon while golf ball sized pieces of hail simultaneously hit a metal roof above your head.

It's not so much a surprise that this keeps me awake as that I'm able to sleep at all. But I can and I did.

I am, however, low enough on sleep and sufficiently uncaffeinated that, returning to the room in search of my missing bidon after second breakfast⁶ at the same noodle shop as the previous night's dinner, I eventually find it in my rear pocket.

Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity⁷ "Spray painted no dumping signs next to a pile of trash"

Last year's spray painted surveyors marks have matured into gravel and metal stakes

In some places, lines of traffic cones have begun to form

While others have already ripened into half constructed replacement bridges

Navigating past the proverbial "ankle deep drifts of red firecracker paper," I stop at an open grocery store for two bottles of Coke Zero which my brain tells me I want to chug in one crisp, fizzy draught; but my mouth refuses to take more than large sips of⁸.

Even with an hour long emergency work break to do something which looked perfectly reasonable to do on my phone until I'd been doing it on my phone for 15 minutes at which point it surely seemed that I was nearly done and didn't actually need to pull out my laptop, I'll nurse those two bottles of soda for most of the next 40 kilometers.

I know that the Bridge Game is kind of silly, and yet it still frustrates me when entire counties fail to put out signs with names and ages so I can see if I won or not

Obviously, both of these are post 1990, but I want to know if I guessed right!

Site of my Emergency Work Break, they not only don't have a modern info sign for me, the original pressed into the concrete sign is damaged and I can only make out "19xx"!!

The quality of the concrete railings on this bridge that's in the process of being widened make me think late 80s, but the fact of it being well enough constructed down below that it's been okayed for widening rather than replacement is more like late 70s

Dr. M has said that she likes riding during the New Year because the countryside is full of people, and, while I usually disagree with this sentiment because I'm thinking of the hordes of tourists who descend upon southern Hainan and because I've never actually biked on the day of Chinese New Year⁹, and let me tell you there's something special about a dozen strangers calling at you to come drink with them, or roadside picnics that spontaneously start shouting "You can do it! You can do it! Rah, rah, rah" as you pass them.

I don't think I run into a single unfriendly person all day.

I feel like consistent crappy pavement would be better than tolerably good interspersed with sudden gravel

Given that all the cars are on the expressway, they don't really need to be widening this

First C19 prevention and control banner of the Tour

I'm probably going to forget to go back through my pictures but I have a feeling that C19 Banner No. 2 here was last year's "first C19 Prevention and Control Banner"

Even during my emergency work break, while I was sat by the side of the road in a shady spot with some lovely views, people came by to make sure that I was sitting there for reasons other than something being wrong with either my bike or myself. Then, they invited me to come drink with them.

AMap has suggested an alternate route into Wuzhishan from the G540 what used to be the provincial road east from Ledong. There's a few markers for "poor pavement conditions" and "narrow road" but the topo map certainly makes it look like a viable road and, when I cross over the boundary line into Wuzhishan the insanely comprehensive bike route maps posted by VeloChina confirm it as a "good" road.

The VeloChina maps at the Wuzhishan border

Ten out and back routes centered in the city with sites of interest, suggested restaurants, useful phone numbers

I wish I'd taken more photos, but I was rather busy not dying and it wasn't until I got to the halfway point at Maodao that I acquired pavement enough to realize I was just barely going to make it to the streetlights before it got dark.

¹ The cities have explicitly disallowed them as long as I've been here, they just only started enforcing it in the past decade

² There's twelve two hour periods and my recent discovery that "11am to 1pm" is a discrete time unit under this system explains soooo much about the timing of the afternoon siesta or how people interact with concepts like "can I have it ready by this afternoon" on something they didn't even give to me until it was already afternoon !

Another cyclist¹⁰ showed up just as I was finishing my late afternoon snack near this abandoned barracks area from no later than the mid 70s

³ Right, so, ignoring everything about the cultural context of why hotels and restaurants are often decorated with deer motifs, these trippy melted 90s computer art style deer with globular, often floating, boulders and metal trees just started showing up about three years ago. And, not only are they everywhere you expect to find random mid-priced decorations, there are clearly dozens or possibly hundreds of different unique designs.

⁴ You can tell that they are bicycle statues not because of the wheels but because there are three of them in red, yellow, and blue, and they are on the side of a Greenway

Achievement Unlocked, first road this Tour that goes through the same pass as an expressway

Particularly given the quality of the pavement, I'm not ashamed to have walked this

⁵ Even growing up in the era of the dismantling and privatization of the massive state owned enterprises, Kaylee—the woman who worked for me prior to Tyra†—was sufficiently a child of a Hainan State Farms owned village that the coolest thing I ever did during the three years she worked for me was send her to HSF's corporate offices to deliver a contract.

† Including the ones who did not last for whatever reasons, my assistants have been: Jimmy (1 year), Sansa (2 years), the Useless New Girl (2 months), Princess Lazy Baby (1 month), Kaylee (3 years), MumbleWhisper (2 months), Tyra (5 years), Temporary Replacement (4 months), and now Shawn

Sand, like this, is so much better than broken chunks of concrete

Rarely have I been so happy to see asphalt

⁶ I initially had oatmeal in the room but, as soon as I got ready to hit the road, I realized that this was likely my only chance before dinner to get cooked food.

⁷ This is probably an Ozempic thing.

⁸ "Chinese Spring Festival and it's customs" has just been approved by UNESCO for inclusion on the World Intangible Cultural Heritage list and if you thought the Chinese media and government were overly over the top about ICH†, it's only going to get a lot more over the top

This used to be an anti drunk driving PSA

† I suppose, for those of you who have zero work connections with Chinese media, you may be completely unaware of Intangible Cultural Heritage but it's a huuuuge buzz topic.

⁹ Though I did once bike over Têt.

¹⁰ Riding what looked like a 517 bike, the very fact of his being on that road made it seem like he'd be cool, but he was kind of antisocial and uninterested in info sharing

Today's ride: 80 km (50 miles)
Total: 1,035 km (643 miles)

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