D4: Nanhancun Town to Anguo City 南韩村镇→安国市

August 30, 2018

Deepen the removal of black and corrupt elements, protect the stability of society

The hotel I stayed at last night was only built in 2010 but, even though that was less than 10 years ago, it was still an entirely different era. At first glance, particularly from the outside of the building, it looks rather like you would expect a hotel building to look like. There's even a dramatic and quite unnecessarily large double staircase leading up from the lobby to the nicer hotel rooms and the rooms where the owners live.

Now I admit that I never actually saw the "not nicer" rooms and that one of the selling points on spending 50元 for my room instead of 30元 was that the 50元 room came with the ability to take a shower (down the hall) and use a flush toilet instead of an outdoor latrine but both those abilities were temporarily disabled due to the water being off. This wasn't discovered until after I had unloaded the bike, taken everything up to the room, and spread everything all over the room in a Marian-explosion because I suddenly couldn't find my serious painkillers.

It really does look like a proper hotel, which makes the toilet-down-the-hall phenomenon that much more suprising

Opening ceremonies for a new Children's Shop

Mind you, I didn't actually need to be using my serious painkillers. I just needed to know where they were. Like right now. Considering how rarely I take anything stronger than Naproxen, and how much effort I put into avoiding needing to even take something as harmless as Naproxen, it's funny how dependent I am on the comfort of a security blanket made out of pills.

Because of reasons related to the Incident, my stash is currently smaller than it's ever been at any time other than immediately after the Incident. As a result, instead of having many multiple items hidden throughout every piece of luggage and backups in Haikou that could theoretically be mailed to me, I've just got the one blister pack of Tramadol and the foil wrapped dispersibles from Vietnam. Which for some reason I'd put together in the same place. And then I couldn't find where that place was.

As traditional culture makes a resurgence, so too do paper grave goods

The mysterious person who cures stuttering has upgraded from painting on walls to printed banners

With everything rather thoroughly no longer packed, I didn't have any interest in packing up and moving to a place one block past where the water pipes were being worked on. For starters, I really didn't feel like taking the necessary effort to put things away where they belonged. Secondly, just because this hotel had no problem with me being a foreigner didn't mean that the neighbors down the street would also have no problem. Hebei in general and the area around Shijiazhuang in particular is consistently reported as being the longstanding worst for No Foreigners Allowed.

I got lots of apologies from the hotel owners for the lack of running water which led to a fair amount of conversation with the hotel owners (some of it while awkwardly having a sponge bath in the kitchen) and, honestly, they were both such pleasant people that I ultimately didn't mind.

Whatever the characters over the doorway may have originally been when this home was built, they probably were not the current "Love the Motherland".

Now, if I'd found myself with a lack of running water at the end of the day after a day like today, it would have been a completely different story. Yesterday all I had was sweat, and lots of it. Today, there was also rather a lot of mud splatters.

Mud splatters were, by and large, the primary feature of the day. GoogleMaps, AMap, and my paper maps all think that there are plenty of roads running south from Nanhancun in the general direction of Anguo [安国市] that do not involve getting on the main road. Technically, all three types of map are correct and, as we all know, "technically correct" is the best kind of correct. Most of the time the roads were even something that could generally be described as "paved". Sometimes paved with a collection of interconnected potholes and other times paved with bricks but, quite definitely, paved.

Other than the Ranzhuang Tunnel Warfare Site [冉庄地道战遗址]—which I visited in 2012 and don't really need to visit again—there were no potential sites of interest for the day and no real detours. I stumbled across the Northern Shaolin Temple [北方少林寺] which appeared to mostly be a martial arts school rather than a temple, and a locked up but beautifully painted Hall of All Spirits [全神殿], but that was generally it. Farm roads and mud and mud and farm roads.

Different eras of development and style at the Northern Shaolin Temple including the ever popular Fake Rocks. At least on this occasion we aren't in an area with massive quantities of Authentic Rocks.

And "really wants to make art but not actually competent at making art"

As these things go, considering that it was pleasantly cool and that I was completely truck free until I decided entirely of my own volition to get on the main road, it was not a bad day. My surroundings mostly weren't ugly. There were enough older buildings or odd signs around to keep my mind occupied whenever I wasn't dodging potholes or trying to figure out where I was.

It just wasn't an interesting nor especially colorful day.

Colorful murals inside a locked up temple

The inside of this temple, built in 2017, was about the only colorful part

One of the door guards isn't even finished being painted

Today's ride: 66 km (41 miles)
Total: 358 km (222 miles)

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