I'm beginning to realize that I don't particularly like this part of China. It's pretty enough (albeit flatter than a pancake) with nice enough scenery and nice enough bike lanes, but there's fuck all to see.

Unlike poorer areas of the country where successive waves of development have, like the receding tide, left successive generations of what was once the latest and greatest, there is very little "old" and most of the "old" has been well enough maintained that it takes a particularly critical and knowledgeable eye to tell the difference between "actually old stuff" and "stuff made to look old".

And did I mention that it's flat?

You'd think, since it's so much easier riding on flat, flat, flat, flat that flat would be a good thing, but it's really quite monotonous with all the roads being straight lines and whatnot.

Plus, unless I'm putting a lot of effort into getting onto rural roads that rarely last more than the distance from one big canal to the next, the roads are absurdly big for the amount of traffic they don't get. Like why? Why have such big roads? Even if it's relatively easy to build big roads in a place where you don't have to deal with hill cuts and viaducts and all that jazz, the vast majority of local freight tonnage is moved—as it has been for the past 1,000 years—on the canals.

I recently got hooked by a suggested video on Douyin of some lady showing off the residential quarters on the barge she and her husband pilot up and down the Yangtze which, of course, led to me getting a lot of barge videos for the next couple of days and now, every time I cross one of the really big canals with traffic flowing in both directions, I find myself wondering if it's possible to somehow rent a small apartment on one of them for the month and change it takes to go all the way upstream with a load of cargo and back with a different one.

I imagine, probably quite incorrectly, that if one could rent a place as a passenger, that I would spend the day alternating between actually working and just looking out the window at the world passing by. More likely, given the inability to stop and look at any of the things seen on shore, or the similarities of all River Dyke Scenery, even having internet and my laptop wouldn't be enough to keep me from getting bored out of my skull by day three.

Now that I'm passed Hangzhou, although I'm in an area where none of the people who stop and talk to me to ask where I came from or where I'm going are followers of mine, they all uniformly get the same expression of wow. More than a few ask me "where is Haikou?" because they can't imagine I actually mean the one on Hainan Island.

All the way from there?

By bicycle.

Get my photo taken with someone at lunch who pays for my meal. Get my photo taken again twenty minutes later when I borrow the tiniest hex key from a motorcycle repair shop so I can adjust my brakes¹. And again when I stop at a pharmacy to weigh myself and pick up the decongestants that aren't prescription in this part of the country.

But it's flat, and boring, and there's nothing to see that isn't exactly like everything else I've seen all day. The historical towns I pass through have been Disneyfied, some to the extent of having entrance tickets and passenger rickshaws. So I keep going and going and going, Energizer Bunny style, grinding out those kilometers at as fast a pace as I'm generally comfortable² with the only sign that I've crossed a provincial border being my placement on the map.

Grumpy interaction at the first restaurant where I try to get dinner. After the fourth item I order is "unavailable", I get the message that they aren't interested in serving me. Not sure if it's my nationality or apparent ethnicity but—unlike the time last year where I hangrily refused to leave³ a restaurant on the truck route in rural Hebei—there are other places open, so I go to one of those.

Get my hotel booked while I'm eating then ride another 17km to the hotel where, now that it's approaching full dark and there's no time to spend wandering around looking for information on things like 19th century lighthouses that, despite not having a Heritage Site marker, have manicured lawns and fancy footpaths. This is followed by fields of sunflowers over which I can just see the edges of the Grand Canal and its barge traffic, and then, night.

This time I really should have gotten the headlight out.

The streetlights were aimed at the car road rather than the bike lane and the bike lane wasn't in the best condition.

I'd like to comment on how incredibly easy my first night in Jiangsu was compared to all my nights in Zhejiang but this was a stubborn refusal to even let me attempt to show them that I could be registered and it was matched, at 6:45am by the hotel owner bursting into my room to tell me that the local hotel owners' chat group was reporting that the police were going around checking registrations and if they came to my room, I needed to hide in the bathroom and not answer their knock.

So far as I know, they never came by her hotel, but I had to get woken from REM twice to deal with her frantic self ballyhooing about how much trouble she was going to get into and how I needed to help keep her out of trouble.

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¹ The handle on my multitool is blocked by the frame.

² With the exception of the 5km stretch where I successfully drafted a roadie, this would be between 16 and 22kph.

³ On that occasion, the only way my disease vector self was leaving their establishment was by getting served a meal. Until then, I was perfectly happy to sit there breathing the same air as everyone else.