D23: Shilou to Shilou 石楼县→石楼县

September 29, 2018

And the really frustrating part is that I'm probably going to ride this same road again tomorrow.

I try to make an effort to do preventative maintenance but I'm not as handy as I'd like and most of my maintenance efforts involve paying other people who seem like they know what they're doing. This is how I end up with trashed bearings in my front hub from them never getting greased.

I swear I had spare brake pads in my luggage somewhere. I also swear that I checked the level of brake-ness that my brake pads had left to them before I left. And I'm sure that more than one of the shops who has fidgeting with things also checked.

At the same time, however, I did have a 30 kilometer descent the last day that I rode my bike and I did do that descent in the rain.

I'm not sure but I think that particularly straight section of hillside might be a part of the old city walls

It wasn't long after starting out that I discovered the abysmal state of my rear brake pad. Metal was showing. But I could fidget things into place so that I was wearing a different part of the brake pad and get myself to a city that actually had a bike shop. Cause Shilou definitely wasn't the sort of place to have a bike shop. (Shilou has a bike shop.) And there was no point in turning around and going back to someplace that didn't have a bike shop. (The internet is useful for more than just posting cat pictures. Shilou has a bike shop.)

I was most of the way to the place where I intended to spend the night (but might not cause I'm not sure if a hotel exists) when I discovered that the front brake also had metal showing. And had already started to scrape my rim. And didn't really have any part that could be made usable.

Brilliant blue skies and hardly any traffic

Absolutely forbidden to use drippers to cool brakes on this section of road

This particular tunnel didn't have lights when I went through it 6 years ago

Back in the CGOAB days, my Chinese slogan for biking was 一路顺疯 (always ride crazy) which adds a single radical to the Chinese idiom 一路顺风 (safe travels) but doesn't change the pronunciation at all. This restaurant is called 一路顺饭店 (along the way restaurant) and plays on the same idiom.

So now that I was far from everything, now I decided to look at the online maps and try to contact bike shops. Lots of bike shops to be found (including in Shilou) but, with the exception of the one place in Yan'an that didn't answer the phone, none of them had phone numbers. Nor WeChat.

Eventually I found a number that was answered. Turns out though that he worked (past tense) at a bike shop. Not that he works at one. And he's touring as well. On his way to Lhasa. But at least he had some resources to go looking for ways to contact people. And via god only knows what connection, he managed to get a phone number for the bike shop in Shilou and confirm that they were open. (They told me that they got a call from a Xinjiang phone number.)

I was actually taking a picture of this rather crumbling yaodong.

But the sign, which states that anyone who shits or pisses here is a fucking donkey, is pretty epic

It seems that at some point after this yaodong was dug out, the people who no longer live in it decided that they didn't want the hillside there. It's being used as a storage shed.

They could have potentially sent me brake pads via a complicated and circuitous method but the brake pads they were going to sell me actually came off of the only road bike in their store and attach with a nut rather than a hex bolt. I'm not carrying any wrenches.

Back to Shilou. Back up the 18km descent I just came down. Back down the 10km ascent I just came up. In the interests of saving my rims, I remove the worst brake pad and find that all I can really do is occasionally slow down. I can't stop. I've also got an annoying out-of-true type thump going on in the rear (turns out my tire unseated itself again when I reinflated this morning). And sometimes my freewheel pawls just don't engage. Which actually started after I turned around and is probably just dirt from one of the recent nasty muddy days. Probably. Or I need a new hub. But that's not going to happen when the bike shop is one that has to cannibalize brake pads off of a bike because they don't normally stock spare parts.

empty roads, brilliant blue skies, and cornfields

Despite the very nicely finished stone front, I think this is a pair of rather old yaodong as part of the reason the abandoned one is empty was that they built the road and cut into the cliff which it was dug into.

Since I'm potentially considering taking a different route (but only if I confirm that the hotel in Gaojiecun still exists) and because the hotel I spent the last two nights at kind of sucked, I go round to the expensivish place I stayed 6 years ago. She doesn't remember me and won't give me a discount for having stayed here before because she already gave me a discount for walking in the door on a day when she doesn't have many rooms filled. CNY 100, I get to the use the washing machine, the room is clean and big and has an air conditioner that probably has heat. There's soap. Towels. Toilet paper. The bathroom doesn't flood.

Basically, in every way possible, it's a lot better than the CNY 80 I spent yesterday and the night before. But I didn't know. And, honestly, on the verge of hypothermia the day I came into Shilou, I was really aiming at the first place after food where I could get undressed and into a hot shower. After that I was too busy with work type stuff to really bother trying to move. Besides which, if a dump like that cost CNY 80, I assumed something nice would cost a lot more. I guess I assumed wrong.

Single children are a bridge to the 21st century

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,278 km (794 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0