D44: Ningming County to Nakan Township

March 19, 2018

Now that my flip flops are on their way to Haikou, I'm very conscious of the fact that the sandals I'm wearing were already ready to fall apart years ago. Other than the initial work to have the lift put in on the right shoe when I bought them in 2010, I had major cobbling work done on them in the US in 2014 and bunches of minor trips to Chinese shoe repair because I really don't take care of them the way you should.

How can traffic laws be real if the police aren't real?

Even though I saw a whole bunch of shoe repair people by the side of the road in Pingxiang, I don't see any in Ningming. I tell myself that if my shoes suddenly fail, that's just the universe telling me it's time to go home.

At breakfast I speak to the person serving food and ask for what I want with words rather than grunts or gestures. She tells me how much it costs instead of my waving an approximate amount of paper money in her direction. I pay by using my phone to scan the QR code for AliPay. My food isn't half bad either. Rice noodles in soup broth rather similar to phở with some greasy roast duck, a poached egg, and a bottle of Coke.

The first part of the day is spent still on the G322. After Ningming it stops being quite so built up so, paradoxically, the volume of traffic is at least triple what it was when the road was extra wide. At one point, a big truck overtaking another big truck is pulled completely into my lane at a spot with practically no shoulders. I end up braking hard as I pull entirely off the road into the brush and almost into the drainage ditch. For all that the grades have been gentle and the scenery downright pleasant as these things go, I am thoroughly reminded why it is that I do not like main roads.

I really like these painted tile public service announcements from the 90s

Stylistically, I feel like many of them must have been done by the same artist but I've never seen any indicator of who that might be

Perhaps because some cliff paintings (that I don't go to see) to the north of Ningming have recently become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the tourist bureau for Ningming is working overtime at upgrading the tourism facilities for the county. It's not just twee representations of the stone age era cliff paintings on bridges, light posts, and random decorative fences, it's also building rest areas, opening clean public toilets, installing road signs pointing to sites large and small, fixing the roads leading to sites, fixing the facilities at various sites, and putting up you-are-here maps.

There's a definite "work in progress" feel about the whole thing probably because of the very obvious scaffolding and half done nature of a lot of the facilities. Although some things, like the apparently not yet open Container Hotel behind the one rest area, are a bit silly copycat hipster pastiche, it really looks like they are doing a decent job. I might even consider passing through again in another year or two to see how it's all going.

I do not go to any of the Forest Parks. I do not stop in at any of the pick-your-own fruit gardens. I do not take 10km detours to check out temples. I do make a quick out and back to see a large banyan tree and I make token efforts to find Somebody Famous's Ancestral Home in Beijiang and Some Other Famous Person's Home in Haiyuan. The building in Haiyuan still has signs for a "Dangerous Structure, Don't Stand Close" but it's now an active construction site that looks ready to open as a little museum probably before the summer is over.

If you squint, you can see the remains of Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward era graffiti. If this restoration is being done anything at all like the restoration of Haikou's historic downtown, the Maoist slogans will be removed but the "Follow the Party Diligently and Build a New China" slogans will be repainted.

From Beijiang to Haiyuan the road is terrible. It starts out bad like the scraping part of resurfacing was begun without new asphalt being put down and then, when I turn from the Provincial Road to the County Road, it gets worse. Much worse. I'm especially fond of the phenomenon where a pothole is patched with a stronger material than the original road and then the original road wears away to leave a pothole shaped projection in it's place.

If I thought the road was bad before Haiyuan, it's even worse after Haiyuan. On the one hand it's not as bad as the road over the mountain between Thạch An and Tà Lùng. On the other hand, because that road was basically lumps of road like material stuck in clay, and this road was rather definitely paved sometime in the last 20 years, this road is actually worse to ride on. That road had all sorts of singletrack trails worn into it by Vietnam's ubiquitous motorcycles. This road is just a jarring thumpa bumpa lump lump bang. I'm absolutely positive something is going to rattle off my bike.

Most of the bridges around here have a red ribbon tied to the railing near the end of the bridge. I suspect it's some kind of local sympathetic magic.

In perhaps the last 7km before Nakan, the road is suddenly replaced with a smooth strip of relatively recent asphalt. I breathe an internal sigh of relief as, were it not otherwise, I was seriously at risk of finding myself still out after sunset. Instead, now that gravel and potholes are no longer eating all my speed, I finally get to take advantage of roller coaster physics as I go up and down and up and down and up and down. I usually only have to pedal the last little bit of each hill.

For dinner, it's duck noodles again. Then I try the hotel next door only to be told they're booked solid. I've got other hotel options in town to check before deciding if they're actually booked solid or if I've been given the "No Foreigners Allowed" treatment. Hotel #2 has no problem taking my money and even lets me try to register myself on their slow-as-molasses Windows NT machine.

Including the large bottle of beer that I pick up from the lobby fridge, it's CNY 65 for the night.

Today's ride: 84 km (52 miles)
Total: 2,247 km (1,395 miles)

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