After an excess of pagodas during the earlier parts of this year's Tour, it's been quite a while since I've stopped for one. That's not to say that the places I've gone have been completely pagoda-less. While it's true that they've had far less pagodas than places along the banks of the [Name] River in Gansu, there haven't been no pagodas. There have, in fact, been a number of quite famous ones.

It's just that none of the pagodas I've passed by or passed near have excited me enough to go and visit them.

This is not the case with [Name] Pagoda in [Name] Temple. Chosen partly because it's been too long since I've had a nice detour to go check out something random and historic and partly because picking it as an intermediate destination meant spending very nearly the whole day on non-major roads, I won't know that it's 1,000 years old¹ until after I get there.

Feeling awkward about being a tourist² in a temple that clearly has both worshippers and monks, I only poke my head inside the one building. It appears that there might be some fairly nicely done folk art Four Kings of Heaven underneath one of the worst paint jobs I've ever seen and I figure—on top of the preexisting awkwardness of going into a place where people are praying to do anything other than take part in the same activity—if that's the quality of the maintenance work on the art³, I best not be checking out the rest of the place.

The stop at the temple coincides with the arrival of a few more documents that need translation and I spend a lovely half hour sitting on the ground in the shade of the pagoda working on those.

Leaving the temple once my work is done and my video has been shot for editing, I get constant gorgeous farm roads almost the whole way to Funing. There's a bit of fast national road but it comes at a time when I've started to grow tired of meandering and avoiding cracks in the pavement.

Next stop on my list is a Historic Town that's obviously a recent victim of Ye-Olde-ification. There's nothing worth seeing. I try to take small roads from there into the city, but my persistent belief that "this must go somewhere" (despite Maps telling me it didn't) leads me down a dwindling track that grows smaller and smaller before eventually ending at a dock with a houseboat that appears to belong to the Coast Guard⁴.

Once in the city, I get myself a huge watermelon thinking that it is so big it will surely be my dinner but it's not a very good watermelon and, after eating as much of it as I could in a waterside park, I end up throwing the rest of it out and having oatmeal for dinner in my hotel room.

Unintentionally booked in at a place with a third floor lobby, the stairs are wide enough to be doable and I'm pleased to say that—although I still need to stop and catch my breath on the landings—I can pick up my bike and panniers as a whole and carry them up a flight of stairs in a single go.

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¹ Thoroughly rebuilt both within the last decade and during the Ming Dynasty, it's doubtful that any 1,000 year old parts still exist.

² An awkwardness that doesn't stop various loud Chinese visitors (including the people who insist on getting a photo with me)

³ Although I really love poorly done art, poorly done restorations are a completely different thing altogether 

⁴ Actually the "Ministry of Transport, Administrative Law Enforcement Division" but six of one is the same as half dozen of another.