Saturday, 19th December, 2015
- Day 109/298
- 36%
With my senses pounded by trucks and smog and my data locked in the cloud, I reflect that much of the latter is self-inflicted.
Smog and Cloud
A smoggy morning at the trendy Thank hotel.
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A smoggy morning at the trendy Thank hotel.
Trendy glass bath room.
I awake to a sunny but smoggy morning at the Thank hotel.
It is a nice, somewhat trendy place, the usual fittings supplemented by a glass shower cubicle, frosted for privacy.
When I arrived last night there were partying neighbours and drop sheets covering the hallway carpets. But now both are gone and I feel tired, having not embraced my bed until the wee small hours.
The free breakfast down the hall is calling me, so I shower and evade the unfriendly kitchen staff to fill my metal TV dinner plate with rice and buns.
Breakfast time is a chance to briefly check out the other guests. There is a clean cut business man, a couple of young ladies and some generic middle age travellers. If I didn’t stick out like such a sore thumb I would happily merge with the latter.
My laptop is back on charge thanks to a replacement power plug.
Costing an exorbitant 358 Yuan (NZD 82) it's an investment in my blog and better utilising the facilities during the obligatory hotel stays to which I have become resigned.
It doesn't solve all my tech problems though. The internet remains a challenge, specifically my dependence on The Cloud.
As a former tech professional I was an early adopter of it, dutifully digitising my life and uploading it to Soundcloud, Google Music, Google Drive, Dropbox … cloud services accessible anywhere, anywhere that is except China.
The Cloud, which being in the sky should be free to float over geographically discrete territories for global coverage is actually just a handful of very physical server farms hosting synched copies of their clients' data. Every service requires you to log in so that you can access your specific machine and data. Logging in requires access to the address of the host and when this is in a foreign country with questionable motives that access can be turned off. Hence The Great Firewall, protecting the citizens of China from knowing things they shouldn't and the inevitable exploitation by the West.
I could have saved myself a lot of time, money and hassle by simply saving my data to a portable harddrive and carrying that around with me. If I filled up that harddrive, I could buy another. And so on. With new cities popping up all the way down the line, China is the master of rolling out infrastructure only as needed. It's a hard lesson but one I could only learn by being here. With around a terrabyte of data in cloud storage there's no practical way to get it onto a harddrive until I get home.
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Frozen landscape.
Trucks and prayer flags.
A strangely truckless stretch.
Back on the road, I continue my ride through the frozen countryside, where temples periodically puncture the hazy monotony.
The constant presence of large trucks continues to wear me down. They remind me of the 2004 TV remake of Battlestar Galactica, where the remnants of the human race were under relentless attack by their mechanised creations the Cylons.
As the Cylon Raiders poured out of their base ships they made a sound (space notwithstanding) not at all dissimilar to that made by the heavy trucks bearing down on me now before passing at speed. Their shots in anger were like the trucks’ horns. And, just as the regular and effective Cylon attacks drained the humans’ energy and morale, I also cannot relax lest I let my guard down for a second and be squashed like a bug.
I imagine how serene and beautiful space would be without the disruption of the Cylon offensive, and this countryside also.
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Ferris Wheelerʼs day off.
Hilltop temples.
Layers of bridges.
City skyline.
Tidy boulevard.
I ride on and enjoy a brief interlude from the trucks as I pass through the substantial city of Xinfu.
Here, classical modern bridges and rows of high rises co-exist with hilltop temples and watch towers. The riverfront has much signage and is clearly a space that people are supposed to relax in, but it is cold and lifeless so I leave the few brave locals to their walking and badmington.
As the day comes to a close I stop to put on Zhihong’s flouro vest and headlight. My drive and energy have been seriously lacking today. I feel exhausted and over the smog which is diluted in the countryside but still ever present. Do they even have smogless days? Perhaps when it is windier. And the noise of the trucks, the smell of the smog, the smog in your eyes… The constant noise and dirt are always harder to cope with when you’re tired. I need to get more sleep.
On the upside, I've ditched my merino layers and am now just riding in synthetic tops. I seem to be as warm as before - and drier. It is still cool when I stop so I guess that the outside temperature has not changed much.
I am also listening to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It is much more comedic than I imagined!
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Dining hall.
Mix it up.
I reach Douluozhen after 52 km, making for a less productive day but probably the best that could be expected.
My room is a carbon copy of the rest but the dining hall has style and the freedom to build my own delicious dinner - though it's been pointed out that I'm not constructing it correctly. I've eaten Vietnamese before and thought I had a pretty good handle on Asian meal assembly, but apparently not.
At the next table, Chinese alternates with laughter and I feel like they're laughing at me. Maybe I'm wrong, the translation app does require mental gynmastics to get to the true meaning. Some people are good at that, but others will just type something in and point at it. More laughter.
Touring can be so soul destroying. My Chinese fantasy involved riding over lonely mountains, visiting monasteries and meeting ancient sword-fighting monks - not riding down the highway with trucks 24-7. When I get to my place of rest I just want to chill out and have some quality time to remind myself that I'm human. But instead I feel like an abomination, an outcast.
To be fair this is a little bit like how I felt in New Zealand. I was focused on this trip and not down with what everyone else was into. So other people were like, well, we don't understand, so you're an outcast. But now that I'm here? Well, I'm still an outcast.