D18: 西坑 → 大梅沙

June 9, 2023

My dude, it's a one-way road for a reason¹

Many some years ago, and I'm not sure how many, I had some kind of lung ailment - bronchitis or pneumonia. Don't know, doesn't really matter. The important thing is I was sick and I was having problems breathing and I got myself up and out of bed and made it to the hospital a few blocks from my apartment. I probably got one of the motorbikes that tends to hang out on the corner to drive me to the hospital rather than walking as much because I was sick at the time as because I hate walking.

In any case, I make it to the hospital, and because I don't have an appointment, I end up having to sit around the waiting room for a good long time to see the doctor. Long enough that I'm the last patient of the morning, and he insists on walking me to the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions. "I'm fine," I protest, as he forces the offer of a steadying arm on me the way that only people with a lot of confidence and a lot of skill at dealing with ornery assholes can manage².

"I'm fine," I protest, "My vision is only going slightly dark around the edges, nowhere near as bad as it was on the way over here."

And the steadying arm turned from us heading to the pharmacy via the escalators to heading to the pharmacy via the elevators.

I mention this because every single time I'm about to do something that's probably really dumb and medically unadvised, the mental imagery of Doctor Tim's expression when I declared that "I was fine" on account of only having my vision go slightly dark and only around the edges asks me in his flat Midwestern voice: "Marian, are you sure you want to do that right now?"

If it's biking the day after receiving the vaccine and not taking five whole days off without any strenuous exercise, then yes, this is what I want to do.

However, on the pretty green ride up and over the mountain that most traffic traverses via a tunnel, when the greens started getting a little too intensely green because I'm not actually stupid, I leaned my bike against one of the roadside fences and sat down on the ground for 20 minutes until I knew I wasn't at risk anymore.

Then, I walked my bike the last 350 meters to the pass.

Recreational boats against a backdrop of a container port and mountains

Hands cramping on the descent from just how hard I rode the brakes, I'm thrilled to have a client send me a yucky corporate PowerPoint presentation they need on the morrow, as this gives me an excuse (beyond desperately needing to do my laundry³) for stopping early in the beach town of Dameisha.

I call around in advance to make sure I can get a washing machine before I book my room, so I'm extra 'not having any of this shit' when I get the "no foreigners allowed" treatment because "our hotel doesn't haven't the requisite licenses."

Traffic police ticketing a moto for being on the car road

Projectors that presumably make pretty pictures on the sidewalk at night

I'll be the one to call the police, and I won't even raise my voice until a good thirty or forty minutes into things, at which point I get all up in the officer's face and bellow at him from about three inches away about incompetence and lack of legal knowledge and that this is not how one goes about solving issues when receiving a call from the public. Which might be the reason I won.

Then, again, by this point, standing in the poorly ventilated lobby, I had started to sweat, and my "least offensive smelling" jersey had grown damp enough to start growing progressively less inoffensive, at which point its also possible that I won the right to be allowed to check in at an ordinary apartment-style hotel (of the sort that has washing machines) and not a Hampton by Hilton (at 8x the price) because of how abundantly clear it was that I needed access to someplace where I could do my laundry.

¹ And because I didn't trust the dude who made the decision to go down this road, my getting past his vehicle (which involved saying to him I was going into his blind spot, then yelling at him that 15 seconds wasn't enough time to leave the blind spot) was rather harrowing

² Way back in the Summer of the Wheelchair, a great friend of mine offered me a hand up from the ground and promptly dropped me. As a result, there are very few people in the world who can get away with offering me a steadying arm.

³ Even after spending a night and a day hanging in a sheltered window and all night hanging in my room with the a/c on high, the stuff I bucket-washed the first night ranges from "not actively offensive" to "downright reeking."

⁴ She's making him sign off on my paperwork just in case someone from the police station, later on, comes back and says she shouldn't have had a foreigner

What's prettier: the view or the clean laundry?

Today's ride: 21 km (13 miles)
Total: 1,046 km (650 miles)

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