D15: 斗门 → 深圳

June 5, 2023

Apparently, this courier station (rather than the open café that my package was addressed to) is where my oatmeal ended up

I need to practice my skills at calm zen meditation in the face of stress. Not because my GPS clearly tried, on multiple occasions, to kill me today, but because of how poorly I handled the hour-long ferry across the mouth of the Pearl River from Zhuhai to Shenzhen.

It took over an hour sitting in the terminal at my destination before I felt baseline normal enough to face urban traffic. My dark mutterings at the traffic, my decision not to turn around a photograph something cool¹, and a hair-trigger (but effective²) "You will do your fucking job or I will call the police!" when the Front Desk was all "Oh but we can't check-in foreigners" at me, all go to show that "better than terrible" ≠ "good".

In the terminal in Shenzhen (you can tell how I'm feeling by the state of my forehead wrinkle)

The first 20 minutes at sea were fine. Then, we got far enough into open water that—even (or perhaps because) this boat was a hovercraft maintaining an average 50kph—we started pitching and yawing. Then, the kid in front of me started caterwauling. While I so happen to be child-free by choice, I describe him in this way not because I hate children (I don't), but because he was like 7 months old and having your world move around like that as a 42-year-old who knows what's going on is already pretty damn disturbing and it was probably the literally worst moment of his short life.

This is about when I realized, they had me leave my bike on deck and I didn't know if it was tied down. I just blindly trusted that the crew knew what they were doing when they told me where to leave it.

The English could use work, but I'm really pleased with the number of places around China that have acquired (and not lost) safety rings over the past 4 or 5 years

Which came first, the sign saying "large vehicles use this underpass" or the mangled safety gate?

So I get up on this boat that's rocking in every imaginable direction and there's no window at that end.

Everything is on my bike.

And I don't just mean my clothes or my food. I mean everything.

I mean my laptop.
My passport.
My portable hard drive with years of photos.

The crewman who told me where to leave my bike grudgingly agrees to check on it "if I go back to my seat" because passengers aren't supposed to be moving around the cabin at this time, and I go, but I can't tell if he actually went out on deck, and all I can think of is my 2012 Tour where the person watching my cats³ just didn't bother to tell me they got out on roughly Day 5 of 85 because that would "ruin my vacation".

My GPS is trying to kill me. Even if this Pedestrian Overpass wasn't blocked off, it has stairs.

I do believe this is the least camouflaged cellphone mast I've ever seen. Like the fake tree aspects bring more attention ...

From their point of view, the only thing that's going to be doable if my shit goes overboard is to file an insurance claim, so, as long as we are still half an hour from land, there is literally no reason to tell me anything other than "your stuff is fine".

As it turns out, my stuff was fine. In fact, given how splashy the waves were at the window I was staring out while attempting to meditate to the rhythm of my repeatedly saying "calm and serenity, calm and serenity, calm and serenity," I'm kind of surprised by the total lack of damp or spray.

I'm also shaking with nerves and so tensed up with stress that I'm going to have sore muscles all the next day.

As for the riding part of the day, whichever route I took from Zhuhai to Doumen four years ago, it clearly wasn't this one. At least up until I hit the city and the traffic lights and the bike lanes, this one was a marked Scenic Byway⁴ with fish ponds and banyan trees.

Sidewalk mangoes are ready to eat (after being washed)

Some people don't wait for the mangoes to hit the ground

The weather, which kept threatening to rain but never really got beyond sprinkles, was gorgeous in terms of temperature and dramatic skies, the traffic was well-behaved, and the people I saw all smiled at me. With the slight exception of my GPS insisting that I do things like cross eight lanes of traffic or jump off a flyover for the road beneath, everything up till the Terror on the Ferry was basically a perfect day.

Next time I do something like this, I'm not going inside until I see them lash my bike down

¹ A painted warning on a crosswalk telling people from Hong Kong to look left for oncoming traffic.

² The hardest part of breaking myself off the habit of yelling at people is, whether I'm putting on a show or actually angry, it works substantially faster than being nice.

My philosophy when it comes to why I yell

³ In the now, if I were ever to be a pet owner again, I would ask for regular photos and all that jazz. In the then, there weren't yet video calls or chat programs on your mobile phone, and it never even occurred to me ...

⁴ Although most scenic byways have only been labeled as such within the past couple of years, they are uniformly roads that already existed.

19th century local Weights and Measures Standard

These are the studliest "please don't hit the bridge" pylon protectors I've ever seen

Today's ride: 52 km (32 miles)
Total: 967 km (601 miles)

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