D43: Đồng Đăng to Ningming County

March 18, 2018

On my very last morning in Vietnam, I woke up, put on my mostly dry jersey, my mostly dry shorts, my mostly dry gloves, my mostly dry leg cover (to protect my tattoo), and my not at all dry socks. They aren’t even cotton and they were just as much in the airflow from the fan as the rest of my clothing. I hate wet socks. I really hate wet socks. But I also hate unpacking my just packed pannier and finding the not wet socks. It’s a toss up that eventually goes in favor of just putting on the wet socks and letting them dry on my feet as unpacking and putting on non wet socks would then mean I’d have to find somewhere to put my wet socks to finish drying. The net pocket on the outside of the pannier (where I usually put damp socks when on tour) is not currently an option as I’ve not yet been completely able to get rid of all the pig shit from my hitchhiking adventure.

Much to my gobsmacked amazement, Google translate indicates that this sign is not telling people from China "don't stand on the toilet seat you retards" but is just saying "keep the bathroom clean". I'm going to miss having sit down toilets and toilet paper everywhere I go....

Later on, once in China, I had high hopes for the tourist toilet with the twee signs. Sadly, the signs were the nicest part of the facilities...

I head back to the cafe where I drank mango smoothies and iced Milo last night. They aren’t serving any breakfast but one of their neighbors is willing to deliver. I get my last cup of iced Vietnamese drip coffee and my last avocado smoothie. I now have a pleasantly full stomach and a good caffeine buzz.

The last of the Vietnamese spring rolls....

Just a man, hanging out on the street, playing with his cock.

There’s something going on at the nearby temple. Looks like a temple fair. I want to find out what it is. I want to leave Vietnam more. I take the shortest route to the border gate going up a steep little town road past the back gate of another brightly colored and interesting looking Vietnamese temple where I also don’t stop, this time because the temple is up a flight of stairs and temples at the tops of stairs have never much grabbed me.

Merging on to the main road at an uncomfortable little roundabout, there are surprisingly few signs that the border crossing is up ahead. Like don’t bother coming if you don’t already know where you are going. I keep telling myself that I don’t need to pull my phone and check the maps, that I am in the right place, but the doubt keeps clawing its way back. Considering my last three attempts to enter China, this really isn’t a big surprise.

Even with lots of space, there still isn't enough space

This appears to be a shuttle from where the taxis/tour busses drop people off but I'm not really sure

The Tà Lùng/Shuikou crossing really looked a lot more like a crossing. This road feels like a big road to nowhere. Divided highway with landscaping and separated side lanes that are ten times too big to be bike lanes but don’t seem to have any other purpose. There are a few businesses that seem to be aimed at truckers but mostly it’s not a very inspiring or convincing sight. Probably because, these days, a very large percentage of the truck traffic routes it’s way through the nearby Tân Thanh Crossing. (I was fairly sure I knew what would happen at Tân Thanh so I didn’t even bother trying.)

And then, I’m there. I’m at the border crossing. And the guard is waving me through. No one is stopping me and telling me I can’t go in the building. No one is telling me to leave. I’m going into the border crossing building and I am going to cross the border.

I've already been through Customs and Immigration on the Vietnamese side but I won't be in China until I cross to the other side of this border stone

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.... I'm in CHINA

They gesture at me to remove the handlebar bag and the pannier and run them through the x-ray luggage machine. The bottle bags (which are coated in a combination of dried on mud and probably some pig shit) are left in place. Maybe they look like a sufficiently integral and difficult to remove part of the bike. Maybe the guards are just as aware as I am that the x-ray is theater and I’ve played enough of a role by removing the easy stuff. Or, just as likely, they don’t speak English and they don’t feel like trying to tell me otherwise.

Getting out of Vietnam is the quick part. Getting in to China involves much longer lines. I borrow a pen off of a Vietnamese girl to fill out my Entry Card which, just like the international airports, is in Chinese and English. There’s a big sign with Vietnamese translations of the different fields on the Entry Card but, judging by the number of half-filled out and discarded Entry Cards scattered about on the table and the floor around the table, I suspect it’s insufficiently helpful.

A few hours down the road, I say my final farewells to Vietnam at the border area checkpoint. Vietnamese people who crossed into China via unofficial channels are not supposed to cross out of the border area.

I see some poor migrant worker looking types filling out Departure Cards on the other side of a low wall just as I finish passing in to China. I hand them my Vietnamese SIM card with nearly 2gb of data left on it as well as a VND 110,000 deposit. After all, if Viettel isn’t going to refund me (or if figuring out how to get a refund from Viettel is going to take more time than the amount of money), someone ought to get use out of it.

I’m totally, definitely 100% in China. Passport stamped and everything. None of the signs I can read nor conversations I can overhear are the slightest bit interesting but I can read signs and over hear conversations again! It’s like an incredible weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Even when I have to deal with the frustrations of people wanting to take a picture with me, or topping up my mobile phone, or my regular lens simply deciding it’s not going to work… I don’t care. I’m in China. It’s not like being home home but it’s back to a certain kind of familiar after a very long time with unfamiliar and it feels incredibly amazingly wonderfully good.

I read the whole sign about the history of the Friendship Pass Gate, the different names it has had since it was first built (5), the number of times it changed hands during various wars (lots), when the current gate was last restored (1957). I read it in Chinese and then I read it all over again in English. It’s a pretty decent translation. Definitely human done. I stop myself from skimming the Vietnamese to pick out cognates and things that look like words I might want to know cause I don’t need to do that anymore.

I might now know even more new words such as bếp gas (gas stove), chợ (market), and đi chậm (slow) because even if ALL OF THE SIGNS IN VIETNAM ARE CONSTANTLY SCREAMING AT YOU because the whole country has apparently left the capslock key on for the past twenty years, I can’t turn off my “read everything that looks like words” and passing through lots and lots and lots of small villages is certainly a kind of Spaced Repetitive System method of vocabulary retention even if the vocabulary being learned and retained is not especially useful.

You’d expect the country that invented bureaucracy and standardized testing to follow all sorts of standards and it does. The concrete road I take away from the border gate is a familiar width with familiar drainage ditches. Even the choices of trees with which to line the road and the amount of pruning that has(n’t) gone on because it’s not an especially important road what with the expressway that’s now been built, it’s all familiar.

Everything about this picture SCREAMS "this is China" from the kind of tarp to the kind of speed bump and the kind of wear and tear on the speed bump.

As I’m going uphill, I meet a Chinese cyclotourist coming downhill. He’s taking the border road up to Bản Giốc/Detian Waterfall. I mean to find out how long he’s been on the road for and all that but instead we get sucked into a conversation about panniers. It doesn’t matter how completely prosaic and uninteresting the communication is, I can communicate! I am so happy.

Now that I’ve crossed back into China, I realize that it was silly of me to think that the scenery would be similar on this side of the border. It changes dramatically enough when I go from one Chinese province to the next, of course it would change when I change countries. There’s no question that the buildings in China are uglier. But the landscape is different too. Much flatter. It won’t be until after I pass Pingxiang City that it actually stops being all mountainy but the Chinese seem to spend a lot more time than the Vietnamese in cutting off the sides of inconveniently located hills and even when they aren’t especially nice at all, the roads are still so very very nice.

God, but the buildings in this country are ugly

Downright hideous, even. You'd think the proximity to Vietnam would allow for some melding of styles but, apparently not

In Pingxiang the Giant Bikes help me adjust my brakes and mess with my rear derailleur for me. They notice that my rear cluster is weirdly loose and, since their good mechanic isn’t in today, send me off to the Merida down the street. I appear to be missing a spacer that should be helping hold the rear cluster in place. It can be tightened down but it will probably loosen itself up again. I eat a thoroughly disgusting lunch of fried noodles that tastes exactly like every other cheap greasy spoon fried rice noodles I have gotten in the past 16 years and, as a result, is wonderful. Then I bike to Ningming.

What an odd place to leave a bunch of bananas

It’s the G322 National Road the whole way so there’s not a whole lot of interesting to be had. It’s a perfectly pleasant road that’s far overbuilt for the amount of traffic it will ever get now that there’s an expressway in the region but that’s fine by me. I spend the whole ride reading every single sign I pass no matter how banal or uninteresting. I notice things that Vietnam didn’t have like bars on windows, cars, or ugly half built buildings with rust streaks. I try to ride up every hill without shifting down to my granny gear and I mostly succeed.

The contents of this sign are so incredibly uninteresting, I shall spare you and not translate them

Oh look! Underground communications cable. So fascinating.... umm, yeah, not really...

Leave only footprints, do not leave rubbish; take your rubbish with you, leave behind a civilized manner; rubbish has a home, please take it to that home; everyone hates a litterbug, everyone respects a person who cherishes the environment

Overloaded vehicles are dangerous for others and dangerous to yourself; following the laws when transporting goods is beneficial the country and beneficial to the people

In Ningming my first order of business is to find a shipping company. The friend of mine who I mentioned was bottled three weeks ago has had surgery on his face and China is stingy with pain meds. I picked up some OTC codeine for him which I promised I would mail as soon as I got in country. He also gets my spare gloves, the sleeves it isn’t cold enough for, my flip flops, my wrist brace, my non working lens, and the spare mobile phone I never needed because, despite roaming being on, my China Unicom SIM just didn’t feel like working in Vietnam.

My hotel room ends up costing the same as my massage. It wasn’t a great massage but, for the price, it was a perfectly acceptable massage. My hotel room, on the other hand, has limitless high pressure hot water and a sprung bed. For the price, it was less a “perfectly acceptable” hotel and more an “acceptably perfect” one.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this town grows watermelon

Heaven for fighting roosters after they cross the rainbow bridge?

Today's ride: 65 km (40 miles)
Total: 2,163 km (1,343 miles)

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