I'm getting very close to Hangzhou. Close enough that if I wanted to wake up at early o'clock and I could find it in myself to not dawdle, I could conceivably be at Sophie and Sully's place tonight. I'd be a physical wreck unfit for human company but it is an actual possible thing.

Instead, I get up around 9am, make myself oatmeal with curry mix, eggplant jerky, and raisins, spend 30 minutes in the lobby talking with the hotel about the origins of last night's problem and why "just going somewhere else" couldn't work in this specific instance¹. This is followed by an hour over coffee at my friend's place and the usual finally starting out during the hottest part of the day.

Actually, on account of all those rain storms that never rained on me and which are probably related to Hainan's most recent typhoon, the weather is wonderfully cool.

I'll do my best to take anything but the main road and proceed, quite scenically, to Huangzhai Town just to the north. It seems I spent the night in Huangzhau in 2019 and there were all sorts of lovely historic but not restored buildings that I got pictures of during what is remembered as a truly great morning. If my gpx tracks from back then were saved elsewhere when changing phones, I don't know where that elsewhere is off the top of my head and, since my phone was only used for the photos that were going to be shared on my WeChat Moments, I don't have anything with location data and it's both too early in the ride and too late in the day to justify going looking.

I wind my way through a few more scenic towns, some of them even marked as such, before getting forced onto the main corridor going north to Hangzhou. Mixing hill cuts with an almost expressway-level number of viaducts as well as onramps and offramps whenever level crossings can be avoided, the road is impressively wide and I move along at a pretty good clip.

I'll get off the road in search of food and once again later to take a road round the outside of a large reservoir². Now I'm in the area where the road has been big and straight for a longer while and it's not only not quite as big as before, it's also got more traffic and more traffic lights.

I'll try anything to stay away from the trucks and, as I've got the habit of GPS navigation that I didn't have in 2019, I'll manage it for a pretty decent chunk of kilometers that include a faint "Agriculture Should Learn From Dazhai" and a "Chairman Mao is the Red Sun in the Hearts of the World Revolution" before, once again, being on the main road.

Arriving to the outskirts of Zhuji, I've got a long, long, loooooong way in to the city on roads that are effectively urban/suburban mix in their design and construction but which don't seem to have anything that looks like food. In point of fact, I'll make it almost all the way into the downtown proper before I see an obvious restaurant that looks edible³.

I think the dumplings cost a bit more than they should but they give me big slices of watermelon and the three men at the other table with their attempts to use English on me are amusing.

I'm heading towards a specific reasonably priced hotel and I take the opportunity, now that I'm close, to book it online. This gets me a call from the OTA "hey, we see that this booking has an English name" and the hotel owner isn't sure about talking to a foreigner followed by a call back with "even though you said you speak Chinese, the owner doesn't feel comfortable" which I'm actually kind of okay with.

The place I'll book is a little more expensive (by the order of a dollar or two) and a little farther yet to ride (including my GPS being slow at updating my position and my getting turned around) but I'm there within 20 minutes of finishing dinner and, as a Chinese speaker who knows what words to say to someone who is afraid they can't take foreigners, they aren't that much of a hurdle.

I do find it weird that the room type I've booked (single large bed) are all on the floor whose rooms haven't been entered into the PSB system as bookable and that I therefore need to get stuck in a 3-bed room on a different floor but it gives me the opportunity to pick and choose among mattress types so it's all good.

The evening ends with a trip across the street to a convenience store for bottled water⁴ and avocado sea salt ice cream.

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¹If only I'd been allowed to do it my way, I would have been checked in someplace 20y cheaper and 5km outside the core area frequented by middle eastern traders.

² Written about in 2019, photographed in places in 2019, and completely unfamiliar to me. However, I suspect this is more because there are plenty of options including tertiary routes, bike trails, and greenways than because of memory issues or anything like that.

³ Unless it's completely the wrong time of day for anyone to be eating, you want a place that has some sign of customers.

⁴ I prefer to go with boiled whenever possible but the dinner restaurant's water had tasted terrible and the hotel taps had the same metallic smell.