By Evan
NOTE: This is about a stretch of a few days I had after Hainan and before Guangxi, where we are now. It’s a new style of writing for me. Hope you like it.
We just finished riding like hell through the inner mountains of Hainan, a gravelly, steep, sweltering experience that forced Andy onto a bus on a mountaintop. It was beautiful but gruesome, the biggest physical challenge so far (to be chronicled in a post). After the hardest bits, Andy’s axle snapped unfixably, and so he bused ahead while Alexis and I took a day and a half to finish the 150 km into Haikou, giving us a long time together to discuss out personal issues on the trip, resolving many interpersonal conflicts that had arisen, discussing revolutions we would or would not like to incite, and just generally enjoying the ease with which our giant legs carry us over vast distances.
We find Andy in a hotel in Haikou at 6pm nursing a bottle of whisky. No surprises there. I know that Pete is in Hong Kong enjoying the Rugby 7s with thousands of drunk white people who speak in funny accents. Andy’s mishap is going to allow me to make my necessary visa run two days earlier than anticipated, which means I can be a drunk idiot again for a day too. Great. I make plans on the spot to leave Haikou as early as possible, be in Zhanjiang before noon, then Hong Kong before nightfall on Saturday.
I wake up in the pitch dark room. It’s 8am. Crap, I overslept. I pack the bike quietly, but Andy and Alexis wake up anyway. They want to come with me. We eat at the giant outdoor dim-sumery downstairs and race across the city as fast as Andy’s broken bike will roll. We decide at the ferry terminal to take a bus the whole way. It’s now 11, and the bus takes 5 hours. My plans for debauchery are disintegrating. We barely get our bikes on the bus in time. The bus takes us to the a ferry terminal where truckloads of pigs and busloads of LBXes are loaded. We fight through throngs of drably attired Chinese to the heart of the big ship that carried us to the island in the first place when we were on a train in the hold. A short old woman wearing a matching brown long sleeves and pants peasant outfit sits next to us holding a baby to whom she speaks in unintelligible dialect. She, like nearly everybody else, eats a bowl of instant noodles. Minutes later, she spends about five minutes undoing all that chewing as she fills a red plastic bag with vomit that undulates up in evenly spaced waves. When she stands up, the bag breaks, and her vomit spills all over her baby and her pants and the floor. She walks away. Nobody is phased but us. Pete sends me a text from Hong Kong. He’s stumbly drunk at 1pm — in a different world. Jealousy ensues. (more…)
