D50: Anpu Town to Jianghong Town

March 25, 2018

(The tile mosaic in the lead photo is now available for sale on Redbubble.)

I'd kind of forgotten just how loud middle class Chinese can be. Which isn't to say that factory worker class are quiet, just that people who live more communally seem to be better at taking other people into consideration. In Haikou, I live in a very local neighborhood which some people might uncharitably describe as a slum. My neighboring buildings on two sides are close enough to reach out the windows and touch. A less fearful person than I am could probably jump from my roof to the roof of the building on a third side. I know at least two neighbors snore.

While my neighborhood is hardly quiet by the standards of an American suburb, it's substantially quieter than every prior apartment in China which I have lived in. Even when some of my neighbors were doing things like tearing down their building and putting up a new one, they still managed to take into account when people might be bothered by a jackhammer.

Middle class Chinese seem to have completely forgotten this lesson.

For a guy who is selling chicken shit off of handmade signs, Mr. Chen really has some lovely handwriting

I'm awake until 1am because of presumably non-sober hotel guests returning from the hotel's attached entertainment facilities while having loud conversations. I'm awoken at 6:30 because someone is having a conversation about luggage practically outside my door and someone else—I think upstairs—is watching TV. I will manage to get back to sleep for a little while but it's really not enough sleep.

I toss my hotel keycard on the front desk, deliberately interrupting their conversation with other guests who are checking out, and say rather brusquely and with deliberately over formal Chinese "your coworkers need to make a point of conscientiously studying the laws of the People's Republic of China before blathering nonsense about whether or not foreigners can stay at a hotel". The women on the front desk clearly haven't heard anything about last night as one of them starts to say something like "was this the front desk, Ma'am?" as I'm walking out the door.

Usually I don't take pictures of people's weird English clothing, but sometimes, you kind of have to...

I'm technically due a CNY 2 refund since the room was only supposed to be CNY 98 and I put a 100 in the till but explaining that is going to take a lot more time and effort than I want to put in. I may have needed to rehearse my lines a few times before I went to the lobby, but I've sufficiently made my point. That I had spare hotel guests to watch my performance only makes it sweeter.

Even though I don't actually enjoy the confrontation part of confrontational hotel encounters, I enjoy winning arguments and winning a hotel argument is like shooting fish in a barrel. Only with fish that don't know they are in a barrel.

Last night, when I was looking up information about Anpu Town online (things like population and the distance to the city the police were trying to convince me I needed to be driven to) I found out that there's supposed to be a couple of defensive towers and old cannons at the south end of Anpu nearing Jiepao. This is already on my route so, of course, I have to go looking.

I manage, with great effort, to find one tower and no cannons. My tower still has scars from being hit with some kind of small artillery and I can go inside so the hunt was definitely worth it.

Although we aren't that far away, this is basically nothing like the Kaiping Diaolou

There would have been a wooden floor held up by posts in those holes

I don't think these farmhouses are long for the world

Most of the people I ask are pretty sure that the towers probably still exist maybe unless they've fallen down because they are old and no one uses them. But they can't give me directions to the towers. They can only wave their hands in a general "over there" sort of fashion. At one point, I'm in the middle of asking a local on a motorcycle when a car driver with his window rolled down interrupts me, asks me to repeat myself, and then says "oh, I don't know where those are, you'll have to ask a local".

Jiepao is tiny for being a town rather than a township. I wonder if Guangdong Province no longer makes a distinction between the two kinds of government entities. My hunt for lunch feels like it takes almost as long as my hunt for towers. I inadvertently pull a crowd when an elderly man with really good Mandarin for his age but really muffled and unclear speech tries to ask me what I'm selling and I try to ask him "what are you asking me?"

He really couldn't wrap his head around the concept of my being on a bike and on vacation. I had to be selling something.

The road is mostly straight, mostly flat, and mostly uneventful after Jiepao. I'm passed at one point by a police car who waves out the window at me but, even though they pull over shortly thereafter, he was just waving to wave. Lots of wind but that's the mixed blessing you get with flatter terrain. It's a strong enough wind and a constant enough one that the farmed trees are all growing at a slant.

I'm super tempted at one point to detour to Lemin because of a sign telling me that it's 13km to the memorial and former home of a famous person I've never heard about but, in trying to find out who this guy was, I stumble across a picture of the memorial and decide that even though it's nowhere near interesting enough looking to justify the extra kilometers.

For my evening's destination I pick Jianghong Town on the coast over Jijia Town on the road I'm already on as Jianghong has significantly more hotels showing up on the GPS. It'll add some distance to my final total but probably no more than a few extra hours of biking.

In Jianghong, I end up checking out four hotels as two of them have no one at the front desk and no one around in shouting range when I try to find staff. Hotel number four is very reasonably priced, has a soft bed, and is willing to bring me a fan so I don't have to use the air conditioner. They also insist that just writing my information down in the guestbook is enough. No need to turn on the computer.

In multiple villages, they were oddly concerned that people from neighboring villages might .....

....come on to their land and bury their dead without permission.

Today's ride: 92 km (57 miles)
Total: 2,761 km (1,715 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0