T-2: 海口 → 海口

February 15, 2024

18,000 cars left the island yesterday. This is roughly 17× the usual volume. When I look at things that way, maybe it's a good idea to give it another day of departures before once again hitting the road

I could have left Haikou today.

After taking a slow day on Tuesday to acknowledge both my having already put in a bunch of work for the Big Media Client and my mood after having gotten some really heavy news¹ about someone I really actively dislike², I powered through Wednesday with 16,000 words of proofreading and finished both the dreck and the important project (which I really, really, really, want to talk about, but—other than most people finding it boring—I almost certainly don't have permission to talk about the content until after it's been published³).

Checking with the bike shop and confirming them open, I sort of had the idea that I'd ride the no longer a race bike over, swap bikes (including getting the pedals, saddle, and fork bags currently on the de-raced bike moved over), settle my bill, ride back home, pick up my panniers, and restart touring.

Courier stations have reopened and I have picked up my, oddly not listed as pay-on-arrival, thermals that I shipped from Danzhou

This idea was immediately borked by my messaging Sarah and asking when she was going to be back from the Philippines.

While I've been miserable about no one to see and nothing to do in the breaks between digging myself out from under a mountain of work, it turns out that the entire time I've been in Haikou, she's been here too.

Oops.

So, instead of riding 11km to swap bikes and heading straight back home again, I dropped the one bike off, grabbed a share bike, and went over to Sarah's place for wine, wine, more wine, gin and tonics, gossip, and eventually an afternoon trip to the Provincial Museum for a speed run of the Exhibition of Relics of Su Dongpo cause we didn't get there until 4:30 and they close at 5:00pm.

I probably would have liked our Thai dinner better if I'd gone with someone who hadn't lived in Thailand. Our massage at the Thai-themed spa was also sufficiently non-Thai that if I hadn't cheated and used my magic powers of literacy, Sarah—who's been going there for like three years—wouldn't have even known it was a Thai spa.

¹ Although I cannot be a big enough person to pity her or feel any kind of compassion for anyone other than the kind souls who have made taking care of her their responsibility, I also wouldn't wish her current condition or living situation on anyone. No one—no matter how nasty they are or how much of their situation is the inevitable† consequence of their own actions—deserves to go out like this.

I do believe this is the only time I've ever seen my local police driving their little open air electric buggy instead of leaving it parked in front of the station

† The first big medical emergency, two or three years ago, was caused by allowing a diabetic-neuropathy associated foot wound to go gangrenous in a country where both blood sugar testing and in-clinic bandage changes cost fuck all.

² To call her a "miserable bitch" would be to unfairly tar miserable bitches by associating them with her.

³ My ongoing refusal to consider moving to Beijing to work in Publishing Client's office means that I am never going to get assigned the actually "classified until publication" type work on account of it not being allowed to be transmitted through the internet.

Now, both phones' cameras and rear screens are working properly

Today's ride: 12 km (7 miles)
Total: 548 km (340 miles)

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