July 29, 2021
Day S8: Power On
ShuangLong To ZhongTang
The hotels on this trip have been quite good. Compared to about 10 years ago, it seems a little easier and more affordable to do cycle touring with the current hotel situation. It's hard to pinpoint when things started getting better, maybe around 2018 with the advance of the apps and the proliferation of more and more hotels. It could also be area specific. Shenzhen seems to be quite easy.
There isn't much of an issue for foreigners to find hotels in Shenzhen. With a reasonable budget you can find amazing deals on trip.com by using some solid search skills.
The pattern seems to go like this: make a reservation and pay online, then show up with a mask. They'll ask for a health code and travel history. Most of the time they'll start the registration process while you're looking up these codes. You then take a picture to confirm the ID with the passport. It seems they don't ask for deposits anymore.
Where this is going is likely an AI-based system with a self check-in computer as well as housekeeping robots.
A lot of this depends on where you area. There are many places I would be interested to cycle tour in China but so many of these smaller places have hotels that don't take foreigners. I suppose that anything is possible, and with the right language skills and knowledge it wouldn't surprise me if a foreigner could stay in those hotels. But it's just not worth the effort. If I can cycle in Thailand and Cambodia instead where the people welcome me, then why the fuck not just do that.
But as is painfully obvious now, we can't. So on that note, today was another day of purely urban boring cycling. It was a simple matter of just following the route programmed into the smartphone and riding on smooth roads where I could stop off anywhere the mood struck me. Coffee shops, McDonald's, convenience stores, Walmart, traditional Cantonese food, clothing stores, shopping malls, Lanzhou noodles. Just whatever you want.
There was actually a notable difference from the riding in Shenzhen to later crossing into Dongguan. It seemed like things instantly went down a couple notches. The buildings became more grubby and the traffic got much more chaotic. People were breaking traffic rules all over the place, that is scooters going the wrong way, running red lights, also forklifts driving in the middle of the street. This kind of thing. There were even gas scooters tootling around Dongguan which have been banned in Shenzhen.
Strangely, about halfway in the ride there was a guy on an e-scooter breaking traffic rules and he yelled at me. Then suddenly he hit me from behind. Thankfully my bike rack absorbed most of the impact so the wheels and frame weren't damaged. He fell down. A quick look at this guy showed he was was either drunk or on drugs. His legs were bloody, not from hitting me but some previous incident. At any rate, there was was nothing I could do. I got out of there as fast as possible in case a crowd gathered and blamed me by default.
I was at the next hotel just like that, and it was even better than the previous one.
Today's ride: 87 km (54 miles)
Total: 919 km (571 miles)
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