D17: 水漫乡 → 红毛

February 1, 2025

I'm not the earliest person to wander out to the dining not-room¹. Frank's brother-in-law and one of the smaller children² that I'm pretty sure is related to him are already up and breakfasting.

I join them at the table with a bowl of rice which I'm rapidly exhorted to add fried egg or other "actually delicious" leftover things to. Turns out the egg is, in fact, really really good, as are the green veg. However, other than picking at the far too "poor" offerings of amazing tasting crunchy burnt garlic and ginger threads³ hidden underneath the chicken, I am persistently unconvinced by the meat, and they are persistently unconvinced that I'm not trying to be polite by only taking the cheap things.

Wall painting with kapok trees and rice paddies

Sent away with a bag of far more zongzi than I can possibly eat (even with the arrival of my next Ozempic pen being delayed by the holiday) and which I'd have felt really guilty about wasting⁴ even if it wasn't their homegrown rice, with eggs from their chicken, and meat from a pig they raised, I leave on the north road from Shuiman⁵ heading to the G224.

This is perhaps the only time I've ever gotten to do this road at a stop and smell the roses pace which is controlled by me, and all the time that I'm not whizzing down the very long hills at a very high speed, I'm just drinking in how gosh darn pretty it all is.

On what is easily my fifth time stopping here to use the toilet, I will never not be amused remember when Rocky⁶ asked about the hammer and sickle sigil on this village government office⁷

I wonder why this lightning rod has sticky outy things

This sign with distances and times to locations (by foot, bike, or car) clearly wasn't installed by Frank's people. For one thing, most people aren't a consistent 30kph in the mountains....

As an ethnic minority area that'sc been heavily sinicized, there's unfortunately not really a whole lot visibly going on above and beyond "things are pretty." As someone in the know, I can say that there's actually quite a lot of Li Culture that is both actively different from the Han and actively practiced, but—as sinicization and modernization happened at the same time—you can't tell that from the architecture or the clothing. You have to stop and talk to the people, go into their homes and eat, drink, and sing with them in order to realize that the Li are very, very different.

Out on the main road heading north towards Qiongzhong with luggage for the second time in two years and also the second time in fifteen years, I'm really noticing that I weigh 20kg less than I did last time I came this way. Sure, it's a little earlier in the year and temperatures are a little cooler, but that's not enough to explain how much easier everything is.

Up and down and up and down, I not only never need to walk (which I think was just a one time thing caused by a bad shift), I also don't need to use my granny gear.

At the beginning of this tour, one of the other folks who got recognized by the provincial tourism board as an "International Tourism Promotor" at the end of November told me about a hotel in Qiongzhong that I ought to check out. They're located in a converted tea processing building from the 70s and are apparently "really cool" but he didn't give me their name or exact location and I don't actually know anything about them.

First "please speak Mandarin and write standard characters" sign of the Tour

Image not found :( — First "doing X is shameful, doing Y is glorious" format sign

However, I've been in contact with someone I think is the owner. But, even with me telling her I'm going to arrive tonight, I don't actually know what's going to happen and am hedging my bets on the possibility that I'll be staying somewhere else.

Which turns out to be the case but completely not in the way I expected. I expected a "your follower numbers aren't high enough" or a "we only want you to take pictures and videos of you enjoying our property, we don't actually want to give you a room⁸." Instead, after finally sending me their location pin and surprising me with the knowledge that today is going to be 22km shorter than I thought, she tells me that they're actually sold out tonight so they're going to put me in at a neighbor's and give me a room for tomorrow night.

You can just see the bridge that replaced the ford this road went to

For some reason, it's the info signs like this, the ones that are nearly correct, that bother me the most

I will make a perfunctory effort to pay at the neighbors, but, like the dinner which is brought out to me in the courtyard of the very bougie very swank place that is nothing at all like what I'm used to staying at when biking, that was "all arranged" and "not my concern.."

I kind of want to know what the neighbors cost, though. Cause, for all that they can't hold a candle to a place that has a decorative rice paddy in front of their gift shop, they're really quite acceptable in terms of things like hot water pressure and washing machines that they let customers use.

I didn't stay here but I think "rooms available, third and fourth floor" has got to be the best hotel name ever

How many washing machines does one 15 room hotel need?

¹ I can't say how common this is outside the people I'm friends with, but quite a number of Hainanese village homes have the kitchen in a building that predates, by decades, the construction of the one people sleep in, and the table(s) for eating at are all outside.

² As with any collection of family members living near each other for generations, there seem to be more children than I can directly identify as belonging to the adults and I'm pretty sure not all of them sleep here

³ Seriously, have you tasted sliced garlic and ginger fried in lard and chicken fat? So good.

Bougie dinner in the courtyard near the decorative rice paddy

I rarely cook but I want to know what they did to make the beef this soft

⁴ After having one for a late lunch with some milk tea, I tried putting the others in the freezer at this night's hotel and eating them the next day but the texture and flavor had suffered

⁵ There's only two roads. One south to the city, one north to the G224.

⁶ Short for "Rocks" which, in turn, is short for "Dumb as a Box of Rocks," he was the sort of expat† who goes home to the US and bitches about illegal immigrants without the slightest degree of awareness that all those runs he did to Hong Kong to renew his tourist visa while teaching are because he was an illegal immigrant‡.

This was drying on the road near a different set of hives. I think it might be bee food.

† I don't usually win, but I'm pretty insistent that the Media Center not uniformly refer to all foreigners as "expats" cause most of us aren't corporate workers on short term high paying compensation packages

‡ To the point that this Einstein spent three days in detention, paid a hefty fine, and missed his initial flight back to the States all because he decided to stop doing monthly visa runs five months before heading home

⁷ We were stopped at this selfsame set of public toilets on a motorcycle ride back to Haikou, and someone who had been living in China for nearly a year at that point did not realize that China is ruled by the Communist Party. He actually asked me "isn't that a Russian symbol?"

⁸ Both of which have happened with companies that contacted me

Today's ride: 58 km (36 miles)
Total: 1,134 km (704 miles)

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