Beasts in Jungle

October 26th: Rest Day and B-day in Gaoqiaozhen 高桥镇

Oct 29, 2013

Day 13

To begin the celebration, Cher surprised me with a card she had stowed away since Hong Kong. Instead of our daily ration of oatmeal, we went out for a lavishing 2-course breakfast: first a stew made of offal and some leafy vegetables in a thin broth. Despite much western squeamishness at liver, intestine, heart, kidneys and the like many of these have a lot of vitamins, such as vitamin C, which you don’t get in the skeletal organs. Next a rice sheet roll (much like crepe, but made with rice flour) with minced meat and an egg, covered in fresh cilantro. It was delicious. I spent the afternoon reading. We carry a Kindle and a Google Nexus Tablet. Both of them are excellent e-readers. Since we’ve started I’ve finished Don Quixote and Cher is reading the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Thanks to the technology, we are free from the heavy lifting of the books. I’ve since decided to call my trike Dapple, named after Sancho’s ass, due to its incredible comfort and faithfulness. Since many books are free 90 years after the death of the author, my reading has been around the late 19th and early 20th century. For anyone looking for books of adventure I recommend Don Quixote, Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen, Roughing It by Mark Twain, and Typee and Omoo by Herman Melville, all for free! Other than updating our website and checking emails, we have also been using the Google Nexus tablet for navigating. I previously chose a route and downloaded each section of the map for the first part of our journey so we have offline access. There are some limitations to this. First we can’t get directions so we have to estimate distances. Secondly, Google maps is not very accurate in China. The information is very outdated. It gives you a good idea about the roads and general direction, but don’t depend on it for anything else. It does pin point our location when we are lost, since our tablet has satellite GPS, and it has been good enough to get us from town to town. Knowing our general heading I also carry a good old-fashioned compass so if all else fails we can continue in the correct direction, which we have used several times when the road are lacking signs. While I was leisurely reading away my birthday, Cher busied herself updating our website. Due to some technical difficulties (long story), the pictures had to be uploaded from a computer instead of the tablet. Not being able to use the computers at the internet cafes, she took advantage of the niceness of the people in this town. The receptionist offered a room with a computer for her to use free of charge. However, the computer was locked and she couldn’t upload the pictures from our SD cards. Then the receptionist offered a computer at the neighboring truck scaling business, where Cher spent a good 3 hours working on the computer while people minded their truck weighing. We were both struck by the kindness and openness of the people here. Cher told me that they have been the first bunch of people whose first question for us wasn’t “how much are the trikes?” Instead, they were more interested in our journey itself and genuinely excited for our adventure. As we were stealing their Wi-Fi in the hotel lobby, we were invited to have tea with the staff. Cher found no difficulty in small chatting with them, as they were very passionate about the town they live in. They proudly talked about their local mangrove forest, red crabs, oranges and lychee, and promised that if we come back next year during the lychee season, we will have free access to the orchard. It was what we needed, after seeing many frowny faces along the way. We also went out for dinner and had a very fatty but delicious fish cooked in a clay pot and a heaping tray of vegetables, which we washed down with two large cold beers. It’s a great change to go out to dinner, but we haven’t been exactly starving. I’m still maintaining some good insulation and haven’t suffered in the least. Our breakfast has always been oatmeal with condensed milk or soy milk powder, mine with a cup of coffee and Cher’s with a cup of green tea. For lunch we eat at road side restaurants where we get to sample the fresh vegetables and fruits that are grown locally and for dinner we have noodles with pickled vegetables and some type of protein, such as sausage, eggs, canned fish or spicy tofu. We eat many of our meals voraciously even though many of them are the same with hunger being the best sauce.

Our rest day was restful. Nearing our 2 week mark it’s hard to believe that we’ve planned to do this for at least a year, but sitting here content, housed and fed it’s easy to imagine that we will both celebrate at least one more birthday on our tour.