D4: 湖光 → 湛江

May 21, 2023

I was right, the reason that someone in my WeChat group found an article mentioning that the paifang no longer exists was the usual sloppy research that is endemic on the Chinese internet in combination with the village having oh-so-rudely changed their name.

Unfortunately for my chances of visiting it this year, by the time someone over on Douyin had found it and sent me links to all two videos that had been taken of it (one with 300 likes, the other with 9), I was already quite far away from it.

Sleeping late because the bed was just that amazingly comfortable, my digestion currently giving me grumbles over the amount of food I'm now passing through myself on a daily basis, and the knowledge that today was going to be very short, I further practiced my multi-shot video editing skills on 'making myself breakfast,' and decided that the Monday deadline for the automaker's marketing department's brief translation meant that I could put that off until I got into tonight's hotel¹.

Nothing of any particular interest happened during the bike riding. Zhanjiang is a big city, and I'm coming in through the petrochemicals and port district, and I don't think it gets much uglier than this.

Color LED screen with a kawaii police officer on the pedestrian crossings

My first stop of the day was the Merida that a friendly woman—identified as a cyclist on account of the upside-down Coke bottle² in her water bottle cage—guided me to when I arrived in Zhanjiang in 2008. That would have been something like five years before the Fast Road even began construction which kind of explains why "going to Zhanjiang from Leizhou" was one of my formative experiences in staying far the hell away from truck routes. In those days, I didn't know how to detour or wander, and, considering that I remember arriving quite early in the afternoon, it probably only took me 60 or 65km to go from the one city to the next³.

Fifteen years ago, the boss insisted on paying for my hotel room and treating me to my first-ever dim-sum breakfast. This time, while also refusing to take money from me, he merely helped with installing the wired odometer I bought too late to put on my bike myself and, in figuring out why the front derailleur wasn't doing exactly what I wanted it to do⁴, swapped it for a random secondhand derailleur previously belonging to someone who had decided not to have a front derailleur and took out three links from my chain.

So, I now have my 42-speed bike, and I'm pretty sure I've got better power transmission.

Picking the reasonably priced hotel closest to the Chillax Bar owned by a former coworker and intern from my Tour of Hainan and Ironman China organizing days, I ignored the "Mainland Chinese" only indicator on the booking platform with just the slightest degree of unwarranted trepidation as, not only would the front desk have no problem with passport + Form, the apparent boss who was on duty when I extended my stay the next day was only concerned as to whether or not my passport had been appropriately photographed for sharing with the police (cause that's what you do with passports when you have an expensive all-in-one registration kiosk).

Someone actually read the quoted law on the Form. I don't think I've ever seen that happen before!

In part because I'm planning on doing things with governments and media outlets, and in part because I've got an absurdly posh boyfriend who has been very insistent on teaching me the finer points of appropriate etiquette, I'm not only carrying deodorant with me this Tour, I've also got two different bottles of Lancôme perfume and one of Gucci.

¹ I'm glad I did. It was short, but it turned out to be quite painful.
² The better to keep it from falling out
³ Checking my archived journal from my days on the other site, it seems that I ate lunch in Leizhou rather than spending the night there, that it was a 91km day in total, and that the toll road past Taiping already existed. Since Maps currently show it as being 87km from Tiaofeng (where I spent the night) to the Merida, I really didn't detour or wander.
⁴ Even if I was at the lesser of his shops, I generally trust all of Feng Quan's employees, so, when the wrench said that my brifter could only do two speeds and, therefore, he had given me the middle and big ring out of a total lack of understanding of how much weight I carry, I didn't argue with him.

My first "yes, that's definitely a boy" lion of the Tour

And the much rarer, definitely a girl lion

Today's ride: 26 km (16 miles)
Total: 349 km (217 miles)

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