T5: 福山 → 海口

February 10, 2025

Does this count as "first pizza of the Tour" or must it be someplace I stop at while with my bike?

Did you know its possible to get drunk on caffeine?

I'm not talking the jitters either. I'm straight up referring to "being drunk." Because Yirgacheffe, which is what I was drinking, has a particularly high theobromine to caffeine ratio and is a very smooth, very relaxing coffee where you become increasingly aware of all the stuff you haven't done and don't give a fuck about actually getting up and doing it.

At least that was my previous experience with Yirgacheffe roughly 25 years ago when it was my gateway to expensive coffees.

And, with 11 cups of coffee in me today, I'm going to say that this experience holds true.

I did not make and consume 11 rounds of moka. Although there was one year when I was doing my Coffee Fairy thing at a camping festival in the States and I drank the dregs from enough rounds of Turkish coffee made for other people that I did get to the point where speaking English was hard, I do in fact know better than to make and consume 11 rounds of coffee.

However, there was this lovely Ethiopian lady who kept giving me more.

The polite thing to do when you have a full cup of traditional Ethiopian coffee made in a special pot over a special brazier because it's part of an EXPERIENCE for tourists is to drink it. Obviously.

At which point, I now had an empty cup.

Which, because the aforementioned Ethiopian lady was filling the cups of tourists who had just paid for a sample of the coffee which she and her husband's family are selling, led to her filling my cup again.

So I drank it. Of course.

And I sat there and I chatted and I edited the video of my first round of Yirgacheffe and she noticed my cup was empty and topped it off...

I started intentionally counting at what I'm very certain was the fifth cup of coffee. I thought maybe she would give me one or two more refills. Six refills later, and a trip to lunch with the sister-in-law and mother-in-law, I knew well enough to decline being given an empty cup into which coffee could be poured.

By then, I'd also booked my train back to Haikou, as, even if I didn't have two separate Work Things that need doing in person in the city, my putting off asking hotels if I could do my laundry because I knew I would be able to do it in Fushan means that (even with a round of hand washing last night) my stuff is getting to be on the whiffy side.

Also, despite the small number of train stations versus the large number of coach stations, my definitively being able to safely leave my bike here, and how late I would be getting on the road if I got on the road today, this is actually the most efficient use of my time.

If you really want to make someone miserable forever, teach them to recognize bad kerning and font choices

Fushan needs to start advertising how cheap a train ticket between here and Haikou is

So, I grab out the clothing, my laptop, and the things I want to dump off in my apartment out of my panniers, get a ride to the train station from sister-in-law and half an hour later, I'm in Haikou with little enough stuff that I can grab a share bike and go home on that instead of having to take a taxi.

A short taxi will still end up needing to happen later on in the evening as my lacquerista was working on someone else when I arrived and the two-toned nails I like take enough time that I'd otherwise be late, but my reason for biking isn't hating cars, it's liking bikes.

Today's ride: 15 km (9 miles)
Total: 1,610 km (1,000 miles)

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