D24: 福山 → 永发

February 14, 2025

Amusing Chinglish on the sign for the Sister Pagodas

Given that whatever it was I ate or drank that made my stomach unhappy made it unhappy enough that it took three rounds of Pepto to stop the diarrhea and then resulted in a full day of sulphur burps as the gas the bacteria were making needed to escape somehow, I am really fucking glad I insisted on going to a hotel.

Considering how unpleasant it was when I could just hop directly in the shower after a visit to the toilet and where I didn't need to care about niceties like sufficiently drying off afterwards as to not leave puddles on the floor, it probably would have been a million times worse if I had been in this condition while in a non private space.

I have a friend in the States named Yumei, so I take pictures whenever I find a shop owned by a Yumei

Market Supply Cooperative Tea Shop, sells coffee¹

The hotel in Fushan is at least the fourth where the Hainan government services applet Haiyiban has been used in an attempt to register me. However, it is the first one where I receive the correct "application passed" message in the morning; so, in recognition of this and the nice little "foreigners welcome" sign they have put up at the front desk², so, once I eventually come down in the morning, I spend about thirty minutes making a "Checking in While Foreign" video.

Then, it's off to the Ethiopian Coffee Experience Center to say "good morning," drink a cup of ethereal nectar, and get given way more coffee beans than I can easily carry on my bike.

American style BBQ place in the Coffee Culture Town

My stomach is too dodgy for more than half a sandwich but I drool over what other customers are ordering

Fortunately, they are in 225g bags, so I can easily mail³ one off to Dr. M and raffle two others off in the WeChat groups.

Starting out with the Chengmai county seat as my destination on small roads, my now medicated stomach is sufficiently behaving that I quickly scout out a handful of different Potential Sleeping Points and realize that, if I go to Yongfa on the G224 central line, I can come back west one road to the south tomorrow without crossing any of my previous lines of travel.

The weather has gone gray and drippy again so, once I'm on a numbered route instead of a series of higgledy-piggledy farm roads, there's not really a whole lot to see.

This is at least the third time³ I've taken pictures of this building

At a glance it seems like it could be 70s or even 80s, but it had⁴ hooks for oil lanterns

Looks like it might be constructed from stone instead of brick or concrete

Transoms over the doors, details in the plaster, and another place where a lantern hook used to protrude from the ceiling

I am highly amused by the residents of the new (and currently lived in) portions of the one abandoned volcano rock village I take a wander through as—even with the local government having explicitly started to safety-ify their village for tourists with facilities such as a new cobblestone path—they're certain I must be here by accident.

I've been to the nationally listed Meilang Sister Pagodas before, but I was always⁵ with other people and couldn't get all in to checking out if any of the surrounding signs or relevant websites had any info about the stuff I don't understand. Now that I can look things up, there still isn't any information and the peanut gallery of people who see and comment on my video asking for info generally know even less than I do⁶.

Giving up on finding someplace dry for my Emergency Work Break

Farm roads through the countryside don't go up or down very much, but they do a lot of upping and downing

Choosing a Place Named Marriott as my destination in Yongfa, I find myself wishing that I hadn't booked in advance or that I'd gotten there a bit earlier as it's already too late for me to cancel without penalty and—even for the price range⁷—it's an astonishingly uncomfortable hotel⁸.

However, if only because it takes the title of "worst hotel of the trip" away from that place in Sanya, and gives me storytelling fodder, the degree of discomfort is worth it.

Dinner is mostly date and walnut bread "cupcakes" found in the supermarket next door, because yum, and why not, and the day's gray has turned drippy enough that I don't feel like walking down the road to explore my options.

¹ As a coffee growing region with a robust coffee culture, it would seem that "Tea" in this part of Hainan actually means "Hot Beverage."

Brief interlude on the National Road, the hard shoulder is not paved to a rideable standard

² The combination of this sign with the online booking platforms (that, despite rather quite a few people filing complaints, still aren't in compliance with the July Notice) listing this hotel as "not taking foreigners" will prove the basis for yet another complaint that the pre-existing decision to list hotels as "taking" or "not taking" foreigners is a business decision made by the platforms† and not the hotels.

† Since foreigners are a category of customer that may have problems at check in, who are likely to call human operated Customer Service lines over these problems‡, and may be aware that the platform is responsible for compensating a completed booking without a room being provided, the "no foreigner" listings often exist not because the hotel said "we don't" but to save the platforms money.

I don't remember the specifics of this pair of "Drive Safely" slogans but they were offensively sexist

Memorial to the Liberation of Hainan Island that I may or may not have explicitly stopped at because I knew it had a bathroom

First of all, I've never seen a heritage marker sign for a "proposed but unlisted" site. Secondly, what is interesting enough about a specific Marketing Supply Collective that it is being considered?

‡ I only recently learned that many platforms will accept the booking automatically and without checking with the hotel. Effectively, this is because they have decided that the number of instances where a hotel room won't be available and the inconvenienced guest will demand the legally required compensation from the platform is sufficiently low that it's easier to inform hotels that a booking has been made instead of confirming with hotels that a room is available.

³ "Easily" is a bit of a misnomer. The courier company I stop by on my way out of Fushan refuses to give service to someone who doesn't have a Chinese ID card and, after giving him a right bollocking because he doesn't want to figure out how to do things with a passport, the post office in Yongfa takes the better part of an hour.

The presence of a concrete pylon as part of the base of this wall tells me it isn't actually that old

³ With Myf in 2015, on last year's Round the Island, and maybe on the October Holiday 2021 ride.

⁴ Only the tiniest stub of the hook remains. While I know that scrap metal was sufficiently valuable in the late 90s that, in addition to stealing the copper from electric lines†, there was a trope about people stealing manhole covers, but surely this tiny bit of metal couldn't have been worth the effort?

† Something common enough that warnings about the penalties of damaging telecommunications lines often come in the form of "does not contain copper."

Figures on the base of the Elder Sister Pagoda mostly lacking any iconography

Figures on the base of the Younger Sister Pagoda have iconography but I still don't know who they are

Buddhas inside the Younger Sister Pagoda

⁵ I say "always" because, even though I don't remember going to the Pagodas prior to the 2021 October Holiday Ride, they're so close to Haikou that I can't imagine that we never once stopped there when I was a regular on bike club weekend rides and there was a day trip with Tim Espinoza and Norm Houser circa 2008 where the locations of all the photographs shared on Facebook practically require us to have passed by.

⁶ Not that this stops any of them from commenting, mind you ...

⁷ The rule of thumb when picking hotels in an unfamiliar area is to divide the available lodging into three price bands and to pick the top end of whatever band suits your financial situation. However, despite this being the cheapest place† in Yongfa, it was named "Marriott" and I couldn't pass up an opportunity to stay at a place named Marriott.

A bunch of school gate murals mostly featuring new to me templates

Study to be a good person (like Lei Feng)

Different art, no Lei Feng, SAME TEMPLATE

† Which, even when it's only by 10 or 15 yuan, is never going to be a good thing

⁸ Having already carried my loaded bike up the stairs to the second floor lobby, I really really don't want to carry my bike up to my third floor room but the only available room on the second floor is windowless, smells moldy, and has nasty stained plaster walls both from people leaning against the wall and from spitting betel.

The kids doing laundry in this "be a good kid at home" mural are the reversed template of the kids doing laundry in the mural above

Love the People (I get the coin purse and the donation box, I'm not sure what's going on in the upper left)

Love Science (note the rockets and satellites in the clouds)

Love the Motherland (soooo much better painted than the one near Wanning)

Love Socialism (is the bird laying eggs as he is releasing it?)

Fairly common ethnic unity template, nicer than usual

I've mentioned that I'm moving soon, and I low key want to find a way to get one of these murals off of an abandoned school and used to cover an entire wall of my apartment

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 1,713 km (1,064 miles)

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