I'm not going to make it to Jingdezhen—the home of fine Chinese ceramics for over 1,000 years—today. I could make it tomorrow morning if I pushed myself to leave at a reasonable hour¹, but my lone contact in Jingdezhen is flying to Beijing tomorrow afternoon and won't be back until the 9th, and the sorts of places I want to visit in that city are the sorts of places best visited as part of a government- or state-owned-media-sponsored work trip² and I'd rather have a bit more cushion between "Hi, my name is Marian!" and "can I leave my multi-thousand dollar bike in your shop for a few days?"

Thus, and after checking which of the nearby counties has both a train station and a bike club, I buy a departing ticket from Leping to Yingtan and a second ticket from Yingtan to Guangzhou.

As I think things what used to be the main road but aren't anymore (because they decided a new straightline route slightly east of here was easier than dealing with the decades and centuries of towns and villages that had accumulated alongside the main road) still count as main road, it's all main road all day.

Sometimes, it's pretty crappy main road of the kind where I end up eating beef dumplings for lunch at a halal restaurant because the Han-owned places literally smell like rotting food. Other times, it's an elderly blacksmith using his forge to also make tea. There's a Sinopec that not only has drinking water³, they've also got showers and a lounge for drivers to rest in while waiting for their laundry to finish up in the tumble dryer.

(Some future trip involving Chinese Boyfriend and his RV will have to involve a video series on my Impressions of Petrol Stations⁴ Over the Years but, for now, as I'm rarely a paying customer, barely a customer when all I'm buying is a cold drink,vand all my video is made of my phone, I don't want to push my luck.)

The bike shop in Leping, a shiny Merida located across the street from their distinctly less shiny original store, is already a hotspot for people in spandex just wandering by on their way to or from evening rides and it gets even more once the boss drops notice in their group chat that a touring cyclist is hanging out on the front sidewalk.

I'll be handed so many pieces of pocket fruit and local "you should try these" cookies that I won't be hungry for dinner until 11pm. 

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¹ As if that ever happens

² While I wasn't real into the visit to the electrical transformer factory, I think watching the train board the train ferry while standing on the train tracks and getting an introduction to Unique Aspects of This Train Line by the sort of weebs who went to Railway University twenty years ago may have actually been the highlight of my year.

³ Notable because of the recent number of petrol stations—including the one I peed at five minutes before this—that no longer have free drinking water.

⁴ That egg salad sandwich at the Petronas outside of Kuala Lumpur on my 2015 Malaysia Tour is still a fond food memory.