D9: 沙扒 → 大岗

May 28, 2023

Lot of dragonboats recently, I hope this means I'll actually get to see Dragonboat Racing this year

Since I'm still warming up, and still acclimatizing to being outdoors all day in the heat (plus the whole 'falling in a hole' thing from a few days ago), I don't want to make plans for days over 60km. As a result, I originally set my destination as a town just past Yangxi and a place named "Marriott."

Obviously, since I'm cheap, the hotel in question was not actually a Marriott, but it was—in fact—named Marriott, and I like staying in places like that and making sarcastic videos about them, so I was all for it.... up until I got there with 90 minutes of sunlight left and a phone call¹ to the Front Desk told me that they wanted a shocking 158y for a room!

Casualty of the Road: As traffic grows faster, the number of restaurants necessary declines

They grow watermelon in this town. The guy with the nicer watermelon has "Town Name Watermelon" written on his sign

No matter how fascinated I am by his solid tires, he and his companion have definitely crossed the "cycletourist/homeless" line

I'm not paying prices like that for some countryside knockoff.

So, I got on the truck route, cranked out an extra 14km, and instead stayed at the aptly named "We Have An Elevator" Hotel which—and I know this will shock you—has, among their various amenities, an elevator. Although it was not mentioned in the name of their hotel, they also had a convenience store and a for-pay laundrette².

I believe the highlight of the day was probably the lady with the lychee.

At "We Have An Elevator" Hotel, getting checked in by the method of photographing my Form. He doesn't speak English, he spent five years working in LA

The aforementioned lychee and an ice cream

Packing up and mailing 1.5kg of stuff I haven't used over the past 11 days

Unfortunately, I wasn't as nice to her as I ought to have been but she wasn't made out of ice cream and the ice cream that I was eating at the time was made out of ice cream and, although I wasn't trying to give her the "fuck off, go away" monosyllabic grunt of GO AWAY, I pretty well succeeded at doing just that. Even with mumbling a sort of vague apology at her for not being up for social engagement with anyone at that time, she left before I could finish with getting enough fluid and sugar and fat into me to become nice.

On account of people in BMWs stopping their cars to give fruit to cyclists (who they haven't even recognized as foreign yet!) being rare treasures who ought to be encouraged, I hope I wasn't too off-putting with my half grunted answers but I'd stopped specifically because I was feeling crappy.

Since diaolou encompass all southern Cantonese mixed defensive/residential towers from the 17th century until the early 21st, this is technically a diaolou. However, unlike the famous Kaiping Diaolou, it's made out of stone block instead of rebar and concrete.

In case you need to water your pigs (presumably for people transporting livestock)

The lowlight of the day has got to be the scabs over my scratches. They keep breaking open with the movement of my legs as I cycle, and the fluid that isn't blood which is oozing out of my wounds is extremely attractive to the small black flies that seemed to populate every place I stop during the day. Not only am I concerned that, even with the antibiotics I'm taking, they are going to introduce an infection to the wound, they are a horrible itchy tickle that I can't really do anything about because the skin is all ragged.

From the developed-for-tourism roads at the beginning of the day to the truck routes at the end of the day, the flies are this constant annoyance that I can't seem to get rid of which, along with my consistently refusing to behave properly Bluetooth speakers (they just stop accepting power from the power banks and immediately run out of battery), is constantly yucking the yum I've got of perfect weather, pretty scenery, interesting buildings, varied terrain, and bucolic farm animals⁴.

I'll even encounter a wall slogan which I technically must have seen before on account of having been on this road before but which I'd never previously recorded.

¹ They didn't have online booking

² As recently as March of this year, I was running into the situation near Sanya of hotels insisting that tourists ought to either bring enough clothing with them for their whole trip or hand wash in the sink. Near the truck routes, however, (and this may be the only positive of being near the truck routes) they expect people who haven't been home in weeks and increasingly³ have customer-facing public washing machines.

I love the way the trees are growing inside the courtyard

You must have received a childbirth permission certificate prior to giving birth

³ First for-pay laundrette I encountered in China was a hotel in Guangxi in 2014... But, even so, although some hotels will agree to let you use their washing machine (for free or for money), for-pay self-service laundry is still extremely rare to the point that when I was in Sanya last February and knew I would be needing to do my laundry, I had to call over 20 small hotels before I found one who said they had facilities.

⁴ The people seem less surprised by my presence than the cows

Bits of fresco peeping out beneath the whitewash

Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 622 km (386 miles)

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