D45: Nakan Township to Shangsi County

March 20, 2018

I'm not sure if the sugar cane is these trucks is unprocessed and on its way to be made into sugar or already processed and on its way to be burned for electricity

Today the sky was blue. It was a gorgeous perfect beautiful amazing day. The sky was blue and clear but the temperature was pleasantly cool and dry. Other than the wind, you really couldn't have a more perfect day for cycling.

I don't know why I was so dragging ass tired. Sure I did a decent bit of distance yesterday and sure the road was in horrible condition for most of it but I've been doing a decent bit of distance for most of the past month with extended climbs instead of lots of little ups and downs and I'm sure I wasn't quite so dragging ass tired on the days after as I was today.

I think the hard bed might have had something to do with it.

It looked like a proper bed. With the exception of the ones that are literally just a thin grass mat over some plywood, Chinese beds usually look like proper beds. I'm not sure why. Like they get the whole concept of the appearance of posturepedic type mattresses and then they go and make them hard as a rock! Why not just do the Vietnamese thing and use a 2 inch thick overstuffed cushion? Why go to the trouble of making a full 5 inch tall mattress, or even something that looks like a boxspring with a mattress on top only to then be hard? WHY?

On the plus side, the past few years I've started noticing that the really cheap super grotty hotels that exclusively cater to poor clientele who make a living working with their muscles, those almost always have sprung mattresses and soft beds. I'm not staying at frumpy dumps because I'm a cheapskate (though I am) and I'm not staying in them because they often provide better and safer bike parking than a fancy hotel (though they do); I'm staying at them because of the mattresses, and the increased likelihood that they will let me use their washing machine, and the certainty that they probably won't cause trouble about me not having a Chinese ID card....

Basically, I don't like to stay anywhere that costs more than CNY 100 and less than CNY 500.

I woke up at something silly like 7am (which would be 6am if I were still in Vietnam), took one look at the glorious, amazing, stunningly beautiful blue sky outside my window, pulled the curtains shut, and went back to sleep.

The glorious, amazing, stunningly beautiful blue sky

All things being equal, it wouldn't have taken much effort to finish the whole waking up process and to start biking nice and early. However, Shangsi Town is a shade under 50km away and there's no lodging after Shangsi until nearly 30km later and that's 5km up a dead end in the Bazhaigou Tourist Area. Then, from Bazhaigou, it's another 30km to Qinbei where there are also hotels.

I stayed at the Bazhaigou hotel on the 2014 bike trip to Yunnan and most of what I remember about the area was the shockingly expensive food combined with the total lack of options for a single person. But, because I was massively overpacked, I was able to end up cooking noodles in my hotel room.

These days you really only see 'ethnic minority' clothing in China on special occasions or being worn by the poorest of the poor. Particularly with the man wearing a tunic, these two probably came in from the mountains somewhere to help with the sugar cane harvest.

Up again by 10am, I was out the door and looking for food by half past. My options were not especially promising so I ended up going to a fast food place where I got two chicken wraps. Actually, I went to two fast food places. The woman behind the counter at the first place only knew how to make drinks. She didn't know how to make chicken wraps (Step One: microwave chicken tenders, Step Two: put in tortilla wrap with lettuce and mayonnaise, Step Three: wrap) and wanted me to wait "10 or 15 minutes" while she went and found the person who knew how to make them.

Considering the lack of visible restaurants serving Chinese food, there was an unusually high number of places serving "Western" food including a pizzasteakcoffeedrinks that looked so much like every other pizzasteakcoffeedrinks (down to the fake license plates on the walls, the bar, and the mini stage for the dusty drum set) that it could have been ordered out of a catalog.

The brilliantly nice bit of asphalt I'd gotten in the last few kilometers before entering Nakan was nowhere to be seen when I left Nakan. Rutted mud and potholes belied the fact that there ever had been a paved road at all though occasional patches here and there remained of what once was. The brief bit of torrential rain that had happened last night while I was eating dinner made certain that the mud was nice sticky mud too. That lasted for the first two or three kilometers until I got to a very nice concrete turn off, checked the GPS and decided that this was, in fact, the shortest route both to Zaimiao Town and to the S311.

A matters of the home and family; a matter of the nation; a matter of the whole world that exists under heaven! Building a good Zhuying Reservoir is a Great Matter!

I wonder if the construction of Zhuying Reservoir is why this road is such utter shite.

The fabulous concrete lasted until I went round the bend, then it became rutted mud and potholes again. However, it only stayed that way for a while before I got onto a bit of concrete road so new that drainage grooves were still being cut in it.

Now, I'm not saying this is nice—cause it most certainly isn't—but I am saying that at least having all the local too be burned garbage in one place with a chimney is a ton better than Vietnam

Zaimiao seemed strangely familiar to me in more ways than just all dusty rural Chinese towns looking alike. It turns out that I spent the night here in 2014. I know this because I recognized the market where I bought oranges. More specifically I recognized the pile of bones on the roof of the market which I had seen one of the noodle shops throwing there at night. Didn't especially smell like rotting meat or anything like that nor did the pile appear to have appreciably grown so I suppose they aren't permanently storing the bones there but just as I didn't ask last time, I also didn't ask this time.

It isn't very hilly between Zaimiao and Shangsi and it isn't very steep. However, I just couldn't find the energy to pedal very fast. The headwind that was sometimes a sidewind pushing me back and forth across the road may have had something to do with it, but I mostly think I was just tired.

After Vietnam, this should not feel like a hill

This whole region is given over to growing sugar cane and the sugar cane harvest that was just starting a month and a half ago is now in full swing. Hundreds of trucks and tractors and random vehicles full of sugar cane were lined up outside the two sugar refineries I passed. Near the refineries the air smelled like molasses. Everywhere else it smelled like a combination of crushed sugar cane juice, fermenting sugars, and fertilizer. I can think of better smelling crops to be around during harvest but this certainly wasn't a bad one.

Most of the trucks were packed like the guy on the top. That made the guy on the bottom that much more impressive.

A surprising number of vehicles—instead of being the traditional Damn Blue Truck—are John Deere Tractors. Judging by the age of this thing, I'm guessing it probably came to China second- or even third- hand.

In Shangsi, I went looking for massage and actually found a whole bunch of places. None of them really struck my fancy as "definitely professional" and I decided that I'm close enough to home that unless I see a place where I know I'm going to get a very good deep tissue massage, I'm not going to bother.

Looking for dinner, I picked out the last two hotels before the end of town. One nice business hotel and one shabby dump. The shabby dump, which I checked first, charged CNY 50 for a room, had a sprung mattress, and let me use their washing machine. I never got around to checking the business hotel.

People People Dispensary (Should Read: "The Common Man Pharmacy")

Today's ride: 51 km (32 miles)
Total: 2,298 km (1,427 miles)

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