D16: Yunzhu to Laiyuan 云竹镇 → 来远镇

September 22, 2018

At best guess, knowing what the road looks like and what the 'closed in the 2010s' restaurants about 30km away look like, I'd say this restaurant probably closed sometime in the 1980s

Everyone I spoke to this morning thought I should take the "Round the Lake" road and that it was completely unnecessary for me to go to Heyu Township. In that much of the road to Heyu had been torn up by giant trucks in the process of creating a Very Beautiful Tourism Area, they were probably right. In that I wanted to see what Heyu had developed in to over the past six years, however, they were completely and utterly wrong.

Also, it's somewhat questionable whether or not they realized exactly where I was going and if the road they were suggesting actually went through to that location or if it merely was what they thought I might want to visit because that's the sort of thing most of the visitors coming to spend tourist money want to visit.

Gas station on the outskirts of Heyu Township (2012)

The whole area has changed over the past six years. A lot. It's not just the general "everything is nicer" changes which have happened because it's the end of summer and the green leaves are starting to change to red rather than the beginning of spring with the dead branches beginning to go green. It's also not the basic forms of environmentalism (like not throwing rubbish everywhere) that I started to notice in a few locations about four years ago and which have been getting increasingly more common. There's also less dust, less random weird smells, and the new countryside buildings are better built; the random government sponsored decorations—while still mostly propaganda—are trending more towards pictures rather than LARGE SLOGANS SHOUTING AT PEOPLE FROM THE WALLS and the pictures are more likely to be some kind of interesting. Also, holy shit the tourism area looks (at least from the road) like something I'd expect to find in the US. There was even a coffee bar with a very obvious espresso machine inside a transformed shipping container.

This certainly was not something I was expecting to stumble across

In Heyu, the school where I glommed on to the wifi for a few hours looks to have been completely razed and rebuilt with multi storey buildings that probably even have plumbing and heat. (I'm not sure, but I think this reconstruction would have been a part of the National Primary and Secondary School Dangerous Building Remediation Project [全国中小学危房改造工程] ).

In 2012 there were single storey brick buildings with large windows to let in light.

In 2018, there's a three story building with smaller windows (to keep in heat)

I can't tell if the place where I spent the night is still there but I didn't see any real reason to go by and visit.

"Hey, I spent the night here 6 years ago. Remember me?" You gave me an awesome private room for 10 yuan + 2 more for the right to use the even more awesome electric mattress pad. Then, in the middle of the night, the police came to register me and, because they were already there, decided to do an ID check on all your other guests—some of whom didn't have their ID cards with them. Remember that? Yeah. They probably do. And if not in a negative "blaming Marian" type fashion, I can't imagine it's a "wow, we'd love to see her again" fashion either.

This remains one of my favorite "cheapest ever" hotel rooms. Possibly because the other option was the oversized, heated communal bed in the common room.

Besides which, even though there weren't very many houses, there were just enough that figuring out exactly which alleyway I'd wandered down to which specific identical looking two storey grungy courtyard would be difficult. Instead, I went on to Shipan [石盘] (shown on Google as a village but on both Amap and my paper maps as a township) only getting the slightest little bit lost along the way. Considering that some of the roads that do exist aren't shown at all in my various online options while other roads that don't exist are so clearly signposted that a car which was also going to Shipan got lost in the exact same way I did, I'm not too bothered with my navigational misadventures.

In both 2012 and this year, I planned to go west by northwestish on the north side of the new expressway from Heyu to Laiyuan Town [来远] on the G208. The final pass over the Taiyue Mountains [太岳山] appears, from OpenTopoMap, to be crossing at around 1600 meters above sea level; it's also the only route which Google can come up with. When AMap is used, however, two more routes, to the south of the expressway appear. Furthermore, AMap only gives me my originally planned route when I set Heyu→Laiyuan as "walking". Set as "cycling", it insists that I must take the northmost of the southern routes and a pass that OpenTopoMap indicates is 1400 meters above sea level. Set as "driving", and picking a midway point which is sufficiently inconvenient that the AI won't say "take the expressway" and I get a pass which is 10 kilometers in the wrong direction but only 1100 meters above sea level.

Clean Water and Green Mountains are the True Mountains of Gold and Silver

Following a Path to Prosperity, Casting Off Poverty, You Help Me and I Help Them

Six years ago, I took the advice of the police in Heyu and got on the unfinished expressway. I then stayed on it until I got to the 4382 meter long Fenshuiling Tunnel [分水岭隧道]. At the time, Fenshuiling Tunnel was technically traversable, but it was also unlit, dusty, and rather full of large pieces of equipment doing various tunnel finishing tasks. After asking "umm, gee, what should I do now?" and being rather nastily told off by some middle management type because I shouldn't be on his expressway at all, a couple of construction workers waited a few minutes after he had left and told me to get in their pickup truck. We made it about halfway through the tunnel before we were stopped by something making large grinding noises, turned around, and then took a tiny little mountain road barely big enough to fit their pickup truck all the way to Fenshi Township [分石] and the G208.

Given the number of hotels that aren't showing up anywhere in the mountains along either the new or old G208 and remembering back in 2012 (a mere six years after the G208 was upgraded) the shambling zombie remnants of a town near where I'm later scheduled to leave the old main road and head to Qi County, I'm thinking that even though it's much much longer, the "car routing" route is the way to go. Among other things, at the south end of things, it gives me access to an additional town that is governmentally designated a "town" rather than a "township".

(2012) The dead town without a name on the old G208 where once the Road turned west to Guxian [古县镇] but now it goes north to Yukou [峪口乡].

By and large the government designated structure of places in China from small to big goes village → township → town → county → district → city → prefecture → province. There are some exceptions to this rule such as the Beijing, Chongqing, and Shanghai (the municipalities directly under the administration of the central government) which have the bad taste to be 'cities' that have lots of completely non urban areas, that include other cities inside them, and that happen to be the size of provinces. However, by and large, the name which a place has reflects the size and the structure of the place and when the size or structure of a place are changed, the name is also changed.

Politically a township and a town are basically the same. If there was a difference in the past, there isn't one anymore. I know that there exist towns that do not have lodging cause I bumped into one in 2014 at the edge of Guangxi Province near the border with Vietnam. However, it's generally a safe bet that something called "township" needs to have food and lodging confirmed before trusting to blindly go onwards and something called "town" does not.

(2012) The guys from the expressway construction site dropped me off at one of the first restaurants on the main road. Shortly after having lunch with some guys from a trucking company, I met this cyclist heading the other direction. Somehow, he wasn't bothered by the trucks.

That plan lasts basically up until I get to the turnoff where I absolutely have to choose between what AMap thinks is the shortest distance for a bike and what AMap thinks is the shortest distance for a car. The car friendly road has lovely smooth blacktop that couldn't have been laid much more than a single winter ago. It's gently rises off into the distance promising a nice easy ride. They might even have improved the hill cuts when they repaved. The yes-a-bike-can-do-this road, on the other hand, has older trees.

I'm not sure exactly when China started planting rows of trees alongside all the major roads but in some areas it appears to date back to the waning years of the Qing Dynasty. That, or the trees in northern China grow unusually quick. Now sometimes, when they widen a road or decide to put in a large solar farm, they cut down the trees and then you can't really tell. But most of the time, the bigger and older the rows of trees are to either side of a road, the longer that road has been important. Also, although they'll disappear at some point about halfway into the mountains, there's a nice battered concrete milemarker on my left (the counting down direction) that lets me know it's 20km from here to wherever this road started.

This road, which doesn't exist at all according to Google, goes through villages with names like 内义 (Inner Righteousness), 胡庄 (Hu Manor), and 嵩庄 (Song Manor). In the first two I come across remnants of the gates that would have been set in the defensive walls around the village. The third has a lovely, mostly empty, temple where I stop for some explorations and a candy bar. Although I must have passed at least a dozen places that once were restaurants, none of them looks like they were ever very lively or like they've been open anytime in the past decade.

Gate in the no longer extant wall. The propaganda graffito scrawled on the building in the background reads: "脱贫致富" Cast Off Poverty and Become Wealthy

Another gate for a defensive wall that isn't there.

According to the inscription stones, the temple was built during the 24th year of the reign of the Ming Emperor Jiajing (1545), and refurbished during the 16th year of the Qing Emperor Qianlong (1727). What little remains of the badly damaged remnants of fresco in the only building not to have had the walls repainted looks to me to be more like the early 19th century but I'm not exactly what you'd call knowledgeable about random aspects of historical Chinese art. There's a stone Buddha head being used as a doorstop in the empty chamber that currently houses a mass produced printed banner with a picture of the Buddha so I'm hoping that the not repainted status of the walls in the building with fresco is specifically because of the remnants of fresco and not because they haven't gotten around it to yet.

The larger of the two pine trees in this picture is over 300 years old according to the sign

a kneeling scholar or official (based on his hat)

In one place where the mud and straw was clearly on top of the fresco instead of being a divot visible through the plaster, I tried to wipe it away. I only succeeded in wiping away frangible bits of century old plaster and the painting on top of them

Even more unbelievable, this is all that was inside the hall

After Song Manor, things start going rather dramatically uphill and I find myself repeatedly going "this looks kind of familiar" with a certain kind of insistent itch at the back of my brain every single time the road makes a sharp curve to the right that I'm going to see a vista of mountains marching off into the distance. I don't and I don't and I don't and I don't until I've basically convinced myself that there's absolutely no possible way that the road I'm on is actually the road that I was on six years ago in a pickup truck with nice construction workers and that maybe I shouldn't have gone this way without at least food and water and a headlight.

Maybe I should have taken the roads that the GPS software recognized as existing?

I mean sure, I've got some indication that this road has been around for a while (like at least 500 years worth of a while) but, other than the newly installed crash barrier, I've got no indication that it's been maintained much any time this century.

As I go higher, the number of permanent structures still being lived in goes down

Depending on what your goals are (and whether or not you are carrying food and water) getting to the places where, in addition to motorcycles, they are also keeping horses to get around, you have either dramatically succeeded or are possibly about to be in a lot of trouble.

And then, I do! I get to the curve and I see the mountains.
It's the same road. The exact same road!

For completely different reasons at completely different intersections under completely different circumstances, I've chosen not to take the same road I didn't take six years ago and instead ended up on the same unplanned road I did take. How cool is that?

I was so uncertain and so unsure about it being the same road and so convinced that it couldn't possibly be the same road that, when it turned out to be the same road, I was ecstatic.

Once I crested the familiar ridge, it was down and down and down and down until, with a brief stop to notice street opera and find my way out of a village, I hit the G208.

As a cyclist, the G208 has gotten a lot better than it was. Better isn't good, however, and it's still a truck infested nightmare. As a restaurant owner or other service provider, traffic has died down so much that there's no point in staying open. Every single shop of any kind, including little convenience stores, is closed and dead. They haven't even bothered with the "We Moved!" signs that the nameless corpse of a town that no longer is had scrawled on the walls in 2012.
They're just gone.

For lunch I have one of my bags of sour gummi watermelon wedges and an apple from one of my panniers.

I'm reasonably sure it's not the same restaurant as the one I met that other cyclist outside of, but it's the same general vicinity

(2012) Closed. We've moved 500m to the south on the new main road. Call 1383 408 8851.

The road isn't quite as badly truck infested as it was in 2012.

I mostly take the old G208 (now the S220) which mostly parallels the new G208. Pretty much the only time I end up on the main road for any length of time is at Sizhuang Village [司庄村] because the small tunnel from the 1960s has collapsed and I have to walk my bike through the big tunnel. This is still at the stage where the S220 is in even worse of an unmaintained condition than it was six years ago so it never even occurs to me to see if there's an even older route that goes around the edges of the ridge as, on the off chance that it exists, I can't imagine it being passable. (Satellite view seems to indicate that the route exists and may, in fact, be passable for people who really don't want to go through a truck tunnel).

That tunnel I almost certainly should not have climbed over the pile of rubble to go through in 2012 is now completely blocked off.

It was one of the only times I was forced to get back on the main road.

Not long after that, I change counties and the S220 becomes a quite respectable country road that's an absolute joy to ride. There's still the occasional rock to dodge as they aren't quite as proactive about cleaning up falling rocks as they would on a road that gets traffic but it's a sweet downhill ride that takes me into Laiyuan about 20 minutes before sunset.

The first time I tried (and failed) to find someplace to buy lunch, a truck driver told me there'd be stuff open in Laiyuan. The same driver said that Laiyuan had a hotel and I vaguely remembered seeing a sign in 2012 for lodging. I'm not entirely sure the place I stayed should be graced with the name "hotel" but it was definitely a bed and definitely better than setting out in the dark for the next who knows how long to the next open place.

It's obvious that this road has long since stopped being the Road.

One wonders how old the cobblestone ford underneath the peeling asphalt is.

Today's ride: 65 km (40 miles)
Total: 988 km (614 miles)

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