D12: Jiangjunmu to Bai'an 将军墓镇 → 白岸乡

September 15, 2018

Trio of lovely folk Guanyin in a temple over top the entry gate in the (no longer extant) defensive walls of Dageliao Village

In 2012, before I got to the stretch where the S322 and S202 merge between Yegoumen Reservoir [野沟门水库] and Jiangjunmu [将军墓], I had planned to stay on the 322 west into Shanxi. Instead, faced with Trucks of Doom, I ended up turning south and heading to Jiangshui [降水] where I spent another not exactly super comfortable night in a rural hotel and, in the morning, I started my "easy day" off by climbing lots of stairs and visiting the utterly worthless and uninteresting Museum of the Revolutionary University in the Resistance Fight Against the Japanese Imperialists [抗日大学博物馆].

Last time I was here it was sunnier and there were less buildings

Today, as I was starting very well rested from Jiangjunmu, I knew I wanted to at least stop in at the Museum though I wasn't at all certain after that.

My route planning at the time theoretically called for me to head into Shanxi on the S323 from Luluo [路罗]. When the 322 from Jiangjunmu turned out to be an unacceptable truck hell, Luluo and the 323 were my first backup only for the 323 to be at least as bad if not worse. If the little bit of time I definitively was spending on the 323 turned out to be as bad as it had been in 2012, my current plan was to keep heading south and take the maybe-no-longer-dirt trail over the mountain which I took six years ago. If, however, the 323 had improved anywhere near as much as the 322 had (even though some of those improvements were caused by it being closed to big rigs for the next four months for construction) then I would take the 323 into Shanxi and maybe, if the weather and my mood were right, detour up the mountain from the Shanxi-side to see if the unfinished tunnel which I'd referred to as "the Hall of the Mountain King" was any more finished or less scary than it had been.

The intentional efforts to look scenic were often rather twee

And sometimes went past the merely silly to over the top

In 2012 I described the Museum as follows:

"[It] had air conditioning. That was about its only redeeming feature. Most of the building was still under construction so there were only two exhibition halls.

The first dealt entirely with development of the area and featured long winded governmentalese passages that no one would find the slightest bit interesting to read matched with over blown-up photos where you could rarely tell what was going on. A lot of this exhibition hall reminded me of the tumblr Kim Jong Il Looking at Things as the few photos where you could tell what was going on were of government officials standing around looking at things, occasionally pointing, and seeming rather detached and bored about the whole thing.

The second exhibition hall was dedicated to the school and had the potential to be really interesting. I'm not sure what was done wrong and never having gone beyond idly thinking about getting a masters in museum studies, I haven't the slightest idea how one could fix it.Suffice it to say, although I liked the artifacts from student daily life, and found some of the pictures intriguing, it was a dead dry dull museum of the kind you are forced to go to as a child because it's educational."

It's improved a lot since then. Like, to the extent of actually turning into a museum which someone might actually visit on purpose. There was still a large section full of long winded governmentalese passages on local development topics that no one would find the slightest bit interesting but I now have slightly more context in which to place those kinds of exhibits and, honestly, right now, reading anything in Chinese that wasn't put together by poorly trained monkeys who—for some inexplicable reason—someone with deep pockets wants to pay good money to have translated into English is such a refreshingly wonderful experience that I actually kind of enjoyed those sections as much or more than the "cool history stuff".

At one point, there must have been like 50 cyclists in groups of 2s and 3s and 5s

Besides which, there was some kind of big county-wide tourism promotion event going on and most of the visitors to the museum were crowded around the actually interesting content.

When I left, I thought I was going to lunch with one of the many groups of cyclists that seemed to have all independently converged on Jiangshui this morning but, somehow, people kept disappearing as I was following what I thought was the head of one the larger groups and it ended up being just me and four other people eating noodles.

The stark black branches of date trees in spring against the brown dirt were actually more visually appealing than the pretty greens of summer. (I'm kind of astonished that I stopped and took pictures on the same switchback in sufficiently close to the same location that I could merge these pictures.)

From Jiangshui to Luluo, I had planned for the minimum possible amount of time on the S323 by using a very rural side route from Dageliao Village [大戈廖村] on what I'm almost certain is the same path which was being taken when I split ways with the two hikers I'd encountered while pushing my bike up the mountain in 2012. I found the route but the size of the theoretically "paved the whole way" road didn't give me a whole lot of confidence as being something I wanted to take down a long steep descent so, after some time spent exploring Dageliao, I took the main road anyways.

Folk Guanyin who, judging by the bits peeking through the crack, may be made out of plaster and mud straw.

If I had been amazed by the changes on the temporarily mostly traffic free S322, the S323 literally blew me away. I literally could not stop grinning the whole way into Luluo Town. There really wasn't anything super special about the road. The scenery was nice enough if not anything amazing. The traffic was well enough behaved. The trucks stayed in their lanes. The shoulders were wide. The safety barriers were safe. It was just a road like any other road. It's just that it was no longer the scary horrible horrific psyche scarring road of terror which it had previously been and I knew it.

This is what the road looked like in 2012

Complete with deep grooved scars in the rockfaces along the road to show where the road has been widened

I suppose the trees must have been in the way of the Widening

The whole way in to Luluo and back out the other side and for quite some time after Luluo I kept passing various police officers who had been co-opted into standing around waiting to direct bus traffic for the Great Big Tourism Event that I'd run into over at the museum and every single one of them, standing bored on the side of the road, grinned back at me and most of them waved because the kind of happiness I was feeling from this road being anything other than horrible is that sort of infectious happiness that bubbles up and out and spreads to everyone who sees you being happy.

Different stages of development and redevelopment in Luluo - Old

At just under 50km, Bai'an Township [白岸乡] was the last possible site for lodging I'd marked on this route into Shanxi Province. In an attempt to push myself up over 50 kilometers, I decided to first check out the hotels in the newly developed for tourism area on the far side of town and that's when things got interesting.

Over the years, one of the constants I've noticed in rural Chinese art is that no-one can paint a tiger

I've always liked it when people take an actual wooden beam, cover it in plaster, and then very carefully do a really bad job at trompe l'oeil painting wood grain on to the wood beam

Cleaned up shrine to the local Earth God and a very artsy fartsy mosaic of river stones with the character 福 "Good Fortune"

Stunning countryside around these parts. You can certainly understand why they would think it's worth developing for tourism.

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 770 km (478 miles)

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