D26: 定南 → 小江

June 18, 2023

Today is a morning where I really want oatmeal and coffee in my hotel room before facing the world.

Unfortunately, the hotel I'm in is one without an elevator, and I've finally got my shit properly sorted to the degree that I can go up stairs with just one pannier¹.

When weighed against the known discomfort of carrying stuff up stairs, the potential added comfort of eating and caffeinating before facing humanity—particularly when I know that I don't necessarily do that every morning—is a pretty quick loser.

I don't even have any snacks in the room with me.

After an alternating succession of hot and cold showers, I harummph my way down to street level and over to the pair of bike shops I saw the night before when making a u-turn towards my hotel.

I'm not sure whether the Giant opened next door to the Merida to try siphoning their customers or the Merida opened next to the Giant, but Giant is slightly nicer looking and I go there.

I'll trust them with tightening my brakes, rewrapping the loosening handlebar tape on my right, and installing a new odometer² but the wrench doesn't instill the necessary confidence in me required to ask him to see if he can figure out why my front derailleur, once again, doesn't want to shift into the big ring³ and, although I've recently found myself on a couple of long broad downhills where I wouldn't have minded going past the middle and 14th, going fast is never a necessity.

The bike shop is fairly insistent that I stay for lunch, and given the on again off again rain plus my unexpected need for a new phone, I'm happy to save money by doing that. Besides which, from their description of the two roads available to me, I won't have much reason to be stopping for photos⁴ along the way.

Not quite a truck route, my day's road will very definitely be my first proper mountain roads with a lot of up and a lot of down. The other day, where I not only got off and walked on the up but also got off and walked on the down failed to be considered a "proper mountain road" as the steep bits generally didn't go on for long enough nor have enough altitude change to be considered anything more than very aggressive hills.

Today, however. Today gets me my first tunnel of the Tour⁵. Lit throughout with streetlights, it's still an old enough tunnel on an unimportant enough road to have traffic running both directions and an unmaintained footpath. The trio of teens on a single motorcycle who are determined to try hallooooing me and to ask me stupid questions while I'm on the narrow approach and even after I'm in the tunnel don't seem terribly concerned by the possibility of being smushed, but teenage boys are known more for their sense of invincibility than their sense, and they've already shown themselves dumb enough to be crammed helmetless⁶ onto an undersized motorcycle.

I don't generally get rude with random people but yelling "FUCK OFF" at the top of my lungs finally gets them to go away and leave me to finish hyperventilating my way through the tunnel.

Making note of a petrol station that advertises washing machines shortly after I join the trunk road, I won't actually see clearly open lodging until I'm in town three or four kilometers later. The one I pick, the first one I see, doesn't really want to let me use the washing machine as it's not really for customers, and even tries to convince me that my clothes will be much cleaner if I wash them by hand⁷.

Now granted, I smell ucky because I've been biking all day but a "yes, I've been handwashing and I know you can smell me from over there, I saw your nose wrinkle" gets me use of the machine, so I change into something cotton, dump all the bike stuff in the machine, and go to dinner.

¹ I can't not take the laptop, but if I got rid of the oatmeal and fixings and the normal people clothing⁸, I could probably pare 9 or 10 pounds of stuff from my rig.

² All things I could do myself but not to the standard that I want them done

³ This was noticed something like two days after it was successfully twidged by LKLM in Shenzhen.

⁴ Clearly, we have very different ideas about what's interesting.

⁵ Technically, there was a tunnel in Dameisha, but it was one that was built to keep the traffic away from the pedestrians and not one that was built to facilitate crossing a mountain.

⁶ Chinese motorcycle users are roughly divided into "zero safety awareness or concern" and "body armor". Should I continue to date Boyfriend—as it makes him very uncomfortable for me to only have a helmet, gloves, greaves, and an unzipped jacket—it is very likely I will acquire my own set of body armor.

⁷ I am ordinarily of the opinion that, although there are people who prefer handwashing, no one who says this to me actually believes it. However, I saw how little wash powder was put in the machine and I know how not thoroughly cleaned my laundry smelled after the hotel owner insisted on the QuikWash cycle as the only usable cycle for clothes, and—on account of her not knowing how to properly use the machine—it may actually be true in this case.

⁸ Are two dresses, two t-shirts, and two pair of shorts really necessary?