So glad that I spent the night in Mingkou. Not only because the road from Mingkou to Dexing was the sort of stunning beauty that doesn't photograph particularly well with my level of skill or equipment, but also because I got to talk with the hotel owner over breakfast and get told about all the things I missed by coming to Mingkou 20 years too late.

"It was like something out of a movie set. We used to get visitors from Shanghai who would come just to buy the carved rafters and window frames off of people's houses."

But no one really wanted to live in places that were 200 years old when they could have modern buildings and China's heritage protection laws—if they even existed at that point—were still toothless, so, one by one the buildings that were left over from the Qing (and even the Ming) Dynasty fell to the march of progress.

And the worst part of it, as someone who grew up in a Heritage Listed property in the United States, is that I have intimate knowledge of how difficult and expensive they are to maintain and how much more comfortable a modern building (with multiple stories and piped in water) would be by comparison and I can't find it inside me to blame the people who did this. Point fingers at the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution all you want but it's actually the banality of day to day life that crushed most of China's "5,000 years of history".

I still follow his directions into Mingkou's downtown for a gander at the few structures that are left. I even get invited into a home that started life as a merchant's godown and shophouse before being taken by the government to become the Agricultural Supply Collective and then, after Reform and Opening-Up and the dismantling of state-owned assets, was sold to the man who lives there now.

The kitchen was cobblestone but the living room had a flat concrete floor installed over top the stonework from the years in the 90s when he ran a kindergarten from here.

Leaving there, I start in earnest on a day with as many detours as possible because the distance from where I started to where I was surely ending was not quite 40km. My next stop was Daicun where I don't think I found any of the Listed Buildings that showed up on Maps (with pictures even) but I got superbly lost in twisty alleyways that were a mix from mostly the 20th century but with just enough 19th and 18th to spice everything up.

As a living, breathing, historic town with people in all the houses, just as I'd I felt too awkward to take pictures of the inside of the man's home, I also didn't want to actually ask anyone if they minded me barging into their living room and satisfied myself with looking around as I tried to find my way out of the maze.

Starving hungry by the time I hit Dexing Town, I found a coffee shop that looked like a proper coffee shop (franchised out of Shanghai as the case would turn out to be) and got a made-with-beef hamburger that was actually pretty darn good¹.

I then planned on a circuitous route out of town that would get me nicely up to 55km for the day only to fuck it up by deciding to check out some unusual bridge architecture I noticed downstream of me as I was crossing the Jishui River and, once I was there, going to my other route would involve backtracking.... and, as we all know, backtracking that involves admitting that you've gone the wrong direction is one of the Cardinal Sins of cycletouring.

Nothing notable between Dexing and Sizhou and, unless "the largest copper mine in Asia" is of interest, barely anything notable in Sizhou. Got my packages. Found my hotel. Found dinner.

Easy peasy check-in with a hotel owner who wasn't there when I arrived and who just told me which room to go up to "the doors are all unlocked" and that he'd be by later to get me registered. Unlike the time two years ago when the same thing happened to me in Inner Mongolia, the hotel owner actually showed up.

Nowadays, with no Health Code or Travel Code to scan, places like his have completely reverted to using a logbook so, even after he arrived, there wasn't the slightest of hiccups in getting my presence noted.

-- 

¹ Not Roxy's good but better than the hamburgers at the consulate event.