D5: 湛江 → 吴阳

May 23, 2023

Bessie is as impressed by this pagoda as I am

I wake up with a runny nose, a pounding headache, and a determination to keep going. I could call it a sick day but I'm not really that sick and Guy is in my live updates WeChat Group which would mean that—short of this being C19¹—I'd end up getting invited out to the Comedy Club tonight, which would mean a past-midnight kind of late night, which means no actually recovering from the cold.

First the grumpy stomach that has only just resolved itself and now I've got a head cold. This year, it seems my body really doesn't want to cooperate with me on this whole "massive amounts of exercise" thing.

Heading to the ferry crossing beneath the Haiwan Bridge, I pick up my first 100,000 view video of the Tour with a super short (8 seconds!) snippet of an Official Government Sign that somehow managed to get the name of the country wrong.

There are six ferry docks. There is one boat still running.

This will be followed by another fairly popular video (currently at 35,000 views, 532 likes, and 86 comments) of me very, very briefly discussing the history of the Bridge and how it's opening to traffic in December 2006 made a ferry port that was once busy enough to justify having six berths into someplace so devoid of people, I have to actively go looking for someone in order to pay my fare!

The weather isn't as hot as it's been the past few days but the "thinking about rain" that won't actually turn into rain until 8am the next day makes it incredibly humid and muggy.

Knowing how things have been going so far with finding meals in the Guangdong countryside, I stop for an early lunch of Fujianese dumplings and Diet Cokes on the edge of Potou Town. This puts me smack dab into the hottest part of the day when it comes to cycling through the countryside but, in terms of my not seeing anything meal like pretty darn near until dinner time, it seems to have been the right choice.

I recall a fairly boring ride west from the bridgehead at Guanjiao through Bajia and on to Potou last year but I was three months into the Tour by that point and multiple weeks' past the point where I wanted to go home but couldn't². In any case, although the only sign I see of a cemetery for the local martyrs who died fighting the French (must have been during the Qing Dynasty), my deciding to zig left at the "this way" sign when my GPS thought I should be zagging right gets me onto some truly stellar back roads.

I'll follow these most of the way to Sanbai Village where I'm searching for a mid-19th-century pagoda from the Antiquities Atlas. I'll see it from across an impassable stream perhaps an hour before I actually find it and, hoo boy, if it weren't for the fact that it perfectly matched the description³ in the Atlas, it was such an insipid and dull bit of architecture, I never would have thought it almost 200 years old.

I'm getting grumpy and low on water by the time I find myself a convenience store with some ice pops and drinks where I spend maybe 30 minutes rehydrating and redosing myself with more Sudafed and Ibuprofen.

Nice new additions to my collection of primary school murals

Reminiscent of the usual "Education must face modernity" mural but slightly different topic and some features have been changed

All are obviously the same artist. None are anything I previously remember seeing

The next official detour is also a pagoda, but this one is a Listed Heritage Site as well as being old (1599) and it's really, really cool. I am particularly enamored of the Atlas-like carved figures who are holding up the base of the pagoda.

Final stop of the day is the stubby remnant of the Wuchuan County Ming Dynasty City Walls in a back alley of Wuyang Town. My tendency to go from 0 to 100 in terms of being pissed off at the people who insist on laying on their horns the entire time they're passing through the gate is my first indicator that the painkiller is masking more than just a sinus headache.

Bit of road construction that involved carrying my bike over a ditch

Story goes that the City Walls were demolished by the order of the Mayor in the 1930s so that they wouldn't cause damage (how?) when being bombed by the Japanese

I'll then eat a pound of mangoes while waiting for my dinner to arrive and still have room for dinner.

I'm in the cheap rooms at what looks like a pretty swank (at least in countryside terms) place and, being a more proper accommodation than anything else I've had so far this trip, they are very determined to actually register me in the computer. Without my help. Because they can do it themselves. They've had training. And customers really shouldn't go behind the Front Desk.

As they are wanting to check me in, I generally keep the frustration tamped down but, again, as with my getting very angry very quickly at the nuisance people with their honking horns or their loud advertising driving slowly, I can feel it boiling over inside me by the time they cave in and let me do it for them.

Trying to check me works best when using the "foreigners" menu

¹ I admit that I haven't tested but my symptoms don't match any of the currently common variants

² Not entirely true. If I wanted to go into lockdown, I could have gone back to Haikou.

³ Three storey, octagonal, 'false rooms' style brick pagoda

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 402 km (250 miles)

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