D1: 徐闻 → 英利

May 17, 2023

Despite a comfortable bed, I did not sleep very well. It may have only been a bit over two months since the last mini-Tour¹ but I was carrying substantially less weight at the time² and, even if yesterday wasn't much more than 20km, I'm feeling every gram of it.

The bubble gut I've had since late Sunday night isn't helping matters.

I wake up 15 minutes before my 6:30am "pee and turn off the air conditioner" alarm. Thinking I might actually be awake, I call Mike in the States but the effort of talking to him shows that I'm rather definitely not awake and should, in fact, go back to sleep.

I'm not entirely sure when I ended up waking up for real, but, by the time I'd made coffee and sesame nori oatmeal for breakfast, cleaned up my dishes, packed and gotten dressed, it was just past 10am.

I have never wanted before wanted so badly to have a pocket full of googly eyes

Judging by the number of signs I saw that motorcycles without license plates wouldn't be allowed into various parking lots, I'm guessing that they've only recently started really pushing number plates

First stop of the day is the Dengyun Pagoda (1619) in Xuwen Town. I visited this briefly in 2020, but, when you aren't allowed inside, and you aren't trying to make a video of a place, visits to buildings like this don't take very long. Of course, even before my video-taking days, being allowed inside (with the definition of "allowed" being expanded to include "not prohibited") would—at least in places where I wasn't worried about the bike—take quite a bit of time.

Once you are taking video, and you are making a point of introducing interesting architectural quirks (like dense brick stacked eaves) to other people, the length of time of a visit can get quite substantially stretched out. If your phone decides that now is the time to install updates and your phone also doesn't like the act of update installing because it's hot and you've been taking a lot of video.... a visit to someplace like this can be a very long visit indeed.

The updates will be particularly vexing as, despite my having disabled every single battery optimization I can find that might affect my GPS Logger, it is now regularly turning itself off for no apparent reason.

Heading out of town post-Pagoda, I stumble across the as-yet unrestored Guangdong Guildhouse. If, in fact, this is the road I took from my hotel to the Pagoda back in 2020 (and I'm pretty sure it is), seeing this is the perfect example of why it's good to revisit previously visited locations from different angles as this 17th-century structure is only noticeably not hidden by the surrounding buildings when going southeast to northwest.

The size and recentness of my breakfast, combined with the limited distance I'd done at this point, have me deciding to get lunch "first town after Xuwen." A cluster of village restaurants seen shortly outside of town erroneously convince me that I can go another 5 or 6km before eating. I will strongly regret this when I run completely out of water during the hottest part of the day.

Even with the cool bottle gifted to me by a Road Angel, I'm dragging ass when I get to a lunch stop at about 2:30 pm to the extent that the restaurant owner gives me extra salty veg on account of my looking like I need it.

Considering how many close Chinese friends don't hug me when I'm not sweaty, I'm a bit weirded out by his asking for a hug goodbye

From there to the thoroughly disappointing Thousand Person Grave³ that was my "Big Destination" for the day, I'll have all sorts of woobedy ups and downs that are mostly shallow enough that there's no need (even in my current state) to walk. I've done the Leizhou Peninsula a few too many times to be excited by rolling pineapple fields interspersed with sugar cane and windmills.

When its the seventh time you've done it, it's not exactly inspiring scenery

Despite both of the online bookable hotels at my destination being full, the hotel gods smile upon me, and, although I'm quite worried that I'm going to have to find my way in the dark to the town 20km farther along, the first place I stick my nose in not only has rooms (at 80y), they also have zero issues with passport +Form.

I suspect the reason this one was listed as full was because it's undergoing renovation

Giving me back my passport because the Form is more user friendly

¹ Is it still a mini-Tour if it's 27 days long?

² Lots of work trips in March and April meant lots of banquets which means that I've also got at least 3kg of extra Marian that I didn't have at the end of February.

³ Architecturally boring, the site also lacked sufficient information beyond "bandits during the early Republican era" to be historically interesting.

I'm not even going to tell you non Chinese readers which one of these is the Thousand Person Grave

⁴ Television Dust Quotient. Because my friends with high-end hospitality backgrounds needed a metric to understand the kind of rooms I stay in.

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 210 km (130 miles)

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