January 25, 2021
Day F1: Tried and Tested
What a Mad Start
This was not the way a school semester was supposed to end. After busting our butts in this cold weather, we should be all heading on flights to Thailand by now. But not so. With international trips out of the picture, even domestic replacement ones were fraught with difficulties.
You know what that menas: a cluster of locally transmitted covid cases made their way into the downtown area of the city. People everywhere started to panic, including my colleagues. On went the N95 masks at work, school shut down, and we had an emergency meeting on how to conduct online teaching after the holiday. The talk of the office was about stocking up on supplies to stay at home for a month or more. All of this panic over a mere 12 cases.
The school authorities had also recommended we stay put in Shanghai and don't travel during this holiday month. I had my doubts there would be another lockdown, but the panic at work was real, as well as evidence of fewer and fewer people out and about, or eating at restaurants, or attending social events.
If it was going to be like this, then I would have to act fast and leave the city as soon as possible. First order of business was to clear all my valuables out of school. Then I would rescue the Montague out of there that same day in case we were locked out of the property. That done, I biked to Carrefour and bought a handful of totes to move out all my stuff from a temporary shared apartment and into storage. I spent the better part of three days working my ass off to do all this. And yet I still managed to attend social events with my fiancee as well as a couple of group fitness classes.
Having totally packed everything, I then allowed the lease on my apartment to run out. There was a backpack full of stuff I could survive with on the road. It would only be temporary, we sure hope.
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Somehow in the mad flurry of activity I was able to make inquiries about how to get a covid test. The way things rapidly change around here, more and more provinces were saying that if you traveled from Shanghai to another area, you would need proof of a negative result. This was supposed to go into effect on Jan 28.
All this did was spur enormous demand for covid tests and people lining up for hours to get it done. I joined the queue and managed to get the results within a day. The Chinese people already had their New Year holiday taken away from them last year due to this virus, and I doubt they will accept it happening twice.
[Update November 2022] Actually for three years in a row the government tried to discourage or put a stop to the mass migration that happens this time of year. It is hard to say if they were successful at it, but the evidence seems to suggest they sort of were.
After that mad scramble, it was finally time to bounce. Sophia had been greatly helpful to order a large bike bag online and that was the right size to fit the Montague, and so it was a rather seamless operation to kick off this tour and bike to the railway station. There were several questions of course, such as whether I could get on the train with the bike, and if they would ask for my covid test or not.
There were no issues at the train station. Apparently you can take bikes on as long as they are in a bag. The amazing benefits of the folding Montague for sure. They also didn't ask for any health codes, temperature checks, or covid tests. The way it appears if you're leaving Shanghai they don't really care.
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The train ride was bliss and it didn't take very long to arrive in Wenzhou. On arrival, they did want to see my health code for that province which I had pre-loaded in advance. The first thing I noticed, they were a lot stricter with these health code checks. The codes display an active clock that counts time and the train police actually scanned it.
The plan would be to cycle from Wenzhou to Fuzhou over the mountains in a few days and essentially re-conquer this route from an abysmal failure that happened way back in 2003, i.e. the former SARS outbreak. Actually the failure wasn't connected to the epidemic itself. One of my first ever cycle tours in China was on this very same route and I'll recap the ride and the former failures as we go along.
For now I wanted to enjoy the initial ride to Rui'An where a luxury hotel was waiting for me. If people were discouraged from travel, then surely there would be luxury hotels available at huge discounts which was indeed the case.
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One of the first things I noticed, besides the better weather, was the fact that hardly anyone was wearing masks. This would only get more and more surreal as I got closer to the destination. In all these small towns there was a flurry of activity on the street: bustling markets, haircuts, street food, and tons of small shops selling their wares. It went on for miles. I managed to find some nice food at a sit-down stall and they were super friendly, again nobody wearing masks, and it was almost as if the pandemic didn't exist.
This was all a huge travel shock and it made me exhausted. It felt like I had traveled too far and too fast all at once. Ever since covid ruined my Thailand trip in 2020 I had mostly stayed put in Shanghai and adjusted to this new reality. Maybe it would have been better to stay a little closer to home. If this was causing a system shock, then I could only begin to imagine what international travel would do when that resumed.
Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 156 km (97 miles)
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3 years ago