October 16th: Guanghaizhen 广海镇 to a dam near Yekeng 叶坑 – 37.55 miles
Day 3
I slept horribly. Guanghaizhen had a stressed feeling. There were very few smiling faces, however there were plenty of idle young men hanging about, just waiting for any stimulus. There was banging and shouting all night long inside the hotel, and then at 2 am the hammering started. It has the distinct sound of metal on metal and it was vibrating the walls. I thought someone was trying to break our locks on the trikes we stored on the first floor so I ran downstairs to check and everything was ok. If I hope to get any sleep I’ll start storing them in the room.
We started at 8am and it was mercifully cool today. The further we progressed, the more rural it became. We are finally beginning to feel as if we are breaking away from the gravity of big cities. Now instead of cars and trucks, we have begun to see tractors and bicycles. Buildings and exhaust fumes have given way to fields, trees and cool breezes. S365 is serene. A wide shoulder and very little traffic. However, we were still harassed by curious drivers.
A car stopped in front of us blocking the shoulder and part of the road, expecting us to pass so he could get a good look at us. For safety concerns, we decided to wait behind it instead of riding into the oncoming traffic. A second later a pickup truck going the opposite way began to swerve wildly across both lanes before gaining control. Our first thought was that it was a flat. We then realized the pickup truck hit a dog curious about the car on the other side of the road. We are quite strange, but I hope their curiosity isn’t terminal for either of us.
We got to take another ferry today. Cher found out that we might have to wait for at least an hour for high tide to come so the ferry could dock. However, as soon as the ferry came in, a young passenger hurriedly waved us on and with just the three of us, the ferry departed without any delay. We soon found out that the young man was on his way to see his seriously ill father in the next town, and had paid 200 RMB for the immediate departure. He was kind enough to let us share the ferry ride.
As we had decided to cook our meals, we stopped at a little town to buy groceries. I waited outside to guard the trikes, while Cher went in. In 2 minutes I was surrounded by 20 people, blocking the street and crowding the market entrance. Cher heard a worker in the store yelling to her friend, “Come quick, there’s a foreigner outside.” Not sure how to respond I gave them the wide foreigner smile and decided to take a video so I could be a voyeur of the voyeurs. Unsettled by the camera some began to disperse. One young man encouraged by the camera wanted photos with me and a photo in the trike. Since I was holding his brand new I-phone 5 I let him take a seat. I-phones are definitely more common than foreigners.
We decided to camp tonight. We searched around some villages and were chased out by 3 dogs doing their job. Later we found our perfect spot – a dam overlooking rice fields and small villages on one side, and a lake on the other. Cher had the opportunity to practice her small chat skills, since we needed to ask for permission from the dam care takers to camp on there. As we were settling down for the night, a duck hunter came with a gun as long as the man was tall. The hunter wore an electronic duck caller clipped to his waste that called out a randomly generated series of quacks, a social quack then an annoyed quack and finally an encouraging quack. Squatting five feet from where we sat, he settled in and waited. As night fell a duck flew overhead and he took a shot. His gun, a flint lock, popular during the 1800’s went off with a shower of sparks. The curious duck was lucky as the hunter missed, but the duck was dumb enough to come back again against the warning of the gun shot. Lucky for the bird, the hunter’s gun took a long time to reload. The hunting went on until at least midnight.
