The day begins cool and drizzly. Despite the amount of coffee consumed yesterday, I've gone to sleep at a reasonable hour and I've woken up at a reasonable hour. I won't, however, get on the road at a reasonable hour.

There are numerous factors behind this. Questions and answers in the two Hainan Helps Foreigners groups is a big one. (I totally realize I have no obligation to volunteer on except that I still remember how miserable the lack of knowledge was for me during SARS and I was merely stuck in the city I'd lived in for the past 8 months. I wasn't even quarantined or particularly restricted from doing anything¹.) There's also the 'missing bike' panic attack followed by waiting for the hotel owner cum convenience store operator to come back from whatever errand he was running and retrieve my bike from where he locked it up "just in case" someone realized the stairwell at the back of the building was unsecured and had something expensive in it.

Passing through town, I stop at the local bike shop to get my tires pumped harder than I can do on my own with my little pump. It's been ages since I've added air and each tire gets at least 20psi or more in pressure and holy fuck, this, plus the weight sent back to Haikou makes it feel like I'm flying down the road.

The bike shop people very politely ask if I've eaten and, had I said no, were almost certainly going to invite me to eat with them, but I passed a McDonald's on my way over and something about having had totally non-Chinese (but also not western) food the day before, I'm craving hamburgers and french fries.

The road out of town starts as one of those major urban things before coming to a sudden developmental stop and becoming so completely rural that barely a tenth of the buildings are less than a decade old and I even manage to come across a 1976 "Strike down the Gang of Four²" slogan which, unlike a lot of slogans, is the sort of thing that rarely survived on account of later people thinking this is something extremely political and I want to cover it up with the newest local or national whatever.

Because I'm aiming for a historical site that apparently doesn't exist, I'm dumped off this road onto the main road which, being as I'm low on water, I choose to stay on rather than leave so I can cut a kilometer or two off the day's total.

After an interminably long time on the main road with no shops that are obvious places I can stop for water, I'm back on the little roads and still no places with open doors other than people's homes and I'm not that desperate just yet.

When I go left instead of the right the GPS tells me to take, aiming for the village that will hopefully have a store (but doesn't), and ending up at the absolutely no fucking way in hell is this 2,200 years old stone bridge³, I finally bite the bullet and ask for water from someone's house. She fills my 750ml bidon and I basically finish it in three big gulps which is enough to tide me over through photographing and videoing the bridge and making it to an intersection where I can get ice cream and drinks.

Distracted by fascinating things like automatic weigh stations that don't require vehicles to slow down at all, I'm on a big main road now and then an old main road paralleling the still being built new main road. Even when it starts raining, the scenery is jaw droppingly pretty and there's plenty of signs ranging from a 200 year old ceremonial arch to petrol stations with a free lunch buffet when you fill up your tank to show that this is not only a primary north south thoroughfare but that it's been one at least as long back as when that aforementioned bridge was first built.

Two emergency work breaks and a long conversation with someone who rather definitely isn't going to hire me at my prices push me over into biking my last few kilometers in the dark and I arrive at a farm restaurant on the far outskirts of the city where "I thought we checked 'no foreigners' on CTrip⁴" doesn't at all prevent me from checking in.

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¹ Prior to my school closing, there was a roughly one week period where I wasn't allowed to go to work on account of my having visited Beijing right around the time they sacked the Mayor for his failures as a leader meaning things weren't properly handled but, for all that they wouldn't allow the kids living on campus to leave, no one ever stopped me from coming and going as I pleased.

² Impeach Nixon!

³ Bridge of Theseus.

⁴ They did. I noted that everything I could find was thus listed and, because it's CTrip⁵, ignored it.

⁵ Some of the OTAs won't let foreigners book at all, even on rooms that they list as foreigner friendly. CTrip, on the other hand, will allow me to book any room and will usually auto-approve. Since I know that there is no legal basis for "No Foreigners" as well as knowing that Chinese Consumer Protection Law will force the hotel that—having accepted my reservation—rejects me into paying for my upgrade, although I won't go out of my way to choose a "No Foreigners" room, I also don't give a fuck if it says that.