D8: 昌江 → 昌城

February 4, 2024

Little did I know, when choosing not to have a "sadwich" for breakfast today, that today was going to have so much shit go wrong

Rather than ask what went wrong today, it's better to ask what didn't go wrong as it was one of those kinds of days.

First, I went over a bump and broke the mounting bracket holding my handlebar bag in place. The LKLM handlebar bag currently on the Tour Bike has been discontinued and, as bikepacking and straps are currently the "in" fashion, this is the only model of bracket mounted handlebar bag I could find on Taobao.

On both this and the LKLM bags, there's a crossbar that connects underneath the stem and which supports most of the weight of the bag. On the LKLM bag it's a very flimsy looking rubberized bit of wire. On this bag, it was a very sturdy looking well-engineered seeming piece of plastic¹.

At least on this particular segment², both very low car traffic and relatively high bike traffic³.

Then, and this is a particularly perplexing one, the lid for the new bidon I bought in Danzhou at the Danzhou 517 has gone missing. It had been refilled with fresh boiled water at breakfast and, fearing that I might splash water and burn myself, had been very carefully screwed on quite tightly before being picked up.

I don't think I stopped to drink from it at any point between breakfast and discovering it missing. I'm not especially in the habit of drinking while in motion and I often unscrew the lid in order to take big gulps of water⁴, but it was the backup bidon rather than the primary and, even if enough time had passed for me to be thirsty, that simply should not have been the case.

Approaching the Tourism Road, this is much more my style

I like the way all the mountains around here make it easy for the road to completely avoid them by actually being Very Large outcroppings of non-interconnected rocks

The next disaster came in the form of a missing stuffy. My Crutch Monkey. Carried on almost every self supported Tour I've done including the attempt to ride from Guangzhou to Haikou in 2005, the only trip I'm not sure he was with me on is the 2008 Tour⁵. He had been tied to my rear rack with his spider monkey arms but, when I put my handlebar bag on the rear rack, I had to move things around and he clearly wasn't as well tied in place as he subsequently fell off.

I had hoped that the falling off took place at the stop previous to my noticing him missing but he wasn't there and the options for where a ratty mud encrusted stuffy might be were over 20km long and, even if I had considered trying to hail a share car, would assume that no road cleaner had already trashed him.

#LastImages (You can see his face just sticking out behind the handlebar bag)

There is supposed to be a Monkey here. There is no Monkey.

The next disaster isn't really a disaster per se. It will hugely interfere with my riding for the next couple of days, but it's generally what one might refer to as a "good thing." That, or maybe "the beatings will continue until morale improves"?

I have mentioned that a publisher client that currently has me polishing a 41,000-word dreck-quality manuscript where I've yet⁶ to see any of the kind of errors that are clearly the translators' fault. Or, at least, if there are errors that are the translators' fault, they are buried in the morass of irrelevant, often insensitive, sometimes cheesy content that doesn't logically fit within the context of the preceding or following sentences and paragraphs.

Although it belongs to the power utility, there is no obvious reason why this apparent office building was built on stilts over top of a dam outflow.

West line National Road from Haikou to Sanya. Almost all traffic has been displaced to either the expressway or the high speed rail

A more modern boulevard that I totally promise you actually had traffic, you just can't see it because of the median strip landscaping and the speed at which it's passing me

They've got another project on the table. Around 60,000 words. And they want at least half of it done by the end of the Chinese New Year holiday because someone in Authority has decided that this book is Important and should be published Immediately.

Now, given the number of things I've broken or damaged so far this Tour⁷, and given (on account of what traffic is already getting to be like⁸) what traffic is bound to be like during the Official Golden Week, I had already planned to start heading back north again, get a bus in the next "two or three days", swap bikes, and use the holiday madness as a good reason to not be biking during my period. Instead, however, I'll find some kind of transit back probably tomorrow.

Locals tell me it used to be the gate to the village hospital and that the building was demolished around 20 years ago as improved transit conditions made it unnecessary to have one that close

The content of the quotations has people in the video comments section saying that it ought to have been the gate of a small military facility

Pardon me while I geek out over this really beautifully written 马 in 马克思（Marx)

Which brings me to the next disaster. The cargo service Huolala doesn't operate in the county I'm currently in. I've also tried booking a cross county hire car and had the app tell me "no," even though I know it will do it for other counties on the island. As for the non-app-based service⁹ whose contact I have, they're based out of Wuzhishan and would have to drive something like 200km just to pick me up and they want a comparable rate for doing that.

Then, for the final disaster, my phone screen (which is one of those horridly expensive things with the fingerprint reader inside the screen) is beginning to experience burn-in. The lighter section along the bottom third that I'd thought was caused by me dropping the phone has started to resolve itself in certain conditions as having visible letters and numbers that line up exactly with where the keyboard displays.

Number One recommended app by the crazy people who think 200km days are reasonable for what you should do if you don't want to or can't keep riding anymore. It's my first time trying to use it. I'm not impressed.

What do you mean "no cross county" service?

So, yeah, while some cool things¹⁰ happened, today was mostly a total disaster.

¹ As the larger capacity LKLM bag is already 9 years old and this bag has barely made it past 9 weeks, "flimsy looking" and "seemingly well engineered" are obviously appearance-based descriptions rather than functional ones.

² The only other section of the Coastal Tourism Highway that I've been on since it was officially completely finished and opened to traffic is the Mulan Bay section in Wenchang on a random Friday in December. Failing to take into consideration that that section of the Road has been open for a while and that it's kind of close to Haikou, I had expected the sheer number of RVs, motorcycles, bikes, and day trip drivers to be the case on the whole Road, and was thusly avoiding it.

The healthy and safety posters in the lobbies of small hotels have an astonishing amount of cultural and anthropological content. Seen here advice on preventing the Flu (get vaccinated!) and detailed instructions on the requirements for washing linens between guests and how they must be washed.

Photos of the local police and the hotel owner. I was mostly intrigued that the sort of men who went on to become police officers were, respectively, named 军明 (military bright) and 荣勇 (glory brave) while the hotel owner is named 旭初 (breaking dawn)

On the desk of this opened in 2007 hotel in Changjiang, we have an all-in-one registration kiosk that I can't use, hand sanitizer, mosquito spray, laundry soap (for sale), large boxes of condoms (for sale), spare bars of soap and toothbrushes, something that looks like it might be a first aid kit, and a pamphlet on the dangers of drug abuse

³ Including the two Dahon riders who had been riding the Tourism Road and gotten a car to the not-a-Matriott in Wulie Town, I saw a total of eight other cyclists today. An older guy on an out-and-back and five heavily loaded college aged guys that were probably camping. Since the trip started—and including the seven guys in Baisha—I've seen a total of 25 cyclists.

⁴ Yes, I am aware that both "not drinking while riding" and "not using the sippy lid" completely defeat the purpose of carrying bidons or using the center of the triangle for anything else. I don't really care.

⁵ I don't see him in any of the photos, his predecessor (June 12, 2000 - June ?, 2006) went missing during the 2006 Guangzhou Shimano Bikers' Festival, and the next time he definitively shows up again is 2012.

Reminds me of the Giant Pyramid Roofs that were a thing in 90s petrol station architecture

⁶ On the admitted basis of not having actually requested the source text

⁷ Top Tube Bag, Presta valve attachment for my battery powered pump, the disturbing looking thin patch in my front sidewall, any of the random weird noises I can't find sources for...

⁸ I'm not exactly sure of the how or the why, though I expect that the tipping point probably came from yelling and fist throwing, but some guy literally got arrested for setting up a "I'll park in line for you at the ferry" service

I also saw a nearby Wen Jiabao quote but the mural wasn't in good condition

⁹ They're kind of, sort of, what is called a "black taxi" (meaning: illegal) service, except that they don't have touts outside the bus station and, if you need one, they can give you a fapiao†.

† Tax receipt

¹⁰ Like stopping to take a photo for my Places Named Marriott Series and randomly meeting a pair of Dahon riders who had given up 30km earlier and gotten an in-county hire car, the gate that was the stop where I'd hoped the Monkey had fallen off, or the really quite pleasant police who, instead of telling the hotel "no" or "wait" said that I should get my key first and who then came by something like two hours later to get me "properly registered."

The gate where I had hoped the Monkey had fallen off

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 439 km (273 miles)

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