After another only 5-hour sleep I woke up early today (considering I went to bed at 2AM as I was trying to catch up with articles) and was on the road by 8AM. My goal for today (well, more like a wish since one never knows what kind of roads he will encounter and how many times the road disappears from beneath the wheels rendering one lost) was to break the record of distance traveled in one day and possibly conquering 700km mark, which is actually a whole hundred kilometers more than my previous record.

However, after venturing a few kilometers each way on the roads leading from the town I bet on one that was closest to what my GPS was showing me as the road I needed to take (there was no exact much this time) and was back when I started within an hour as all I found were dead ends and people who would deserve a similar description as they could not understand a single gesture of mine when I was trying to communicate to them that I was lost and needed some help by simple pointing in one of the two possible directions. That was an hour lost right there. My plans to get myself very far today were getting jeopardized.

At the end I was sent on the road that I originally tried first and after actually heading almost backwards for a few dozen kilometers there was a turn not known to my GPS and in about half an hour I was firmly on my course and on a road so good that it could have made up for the time lost in the morning. To my happiness in this respect the road stayed great for a few hundred kilometers. When I already saw myself getting the 700km mark under my belt today I turned left and the road become a potholed hell. This road surely must be listed in a handbook named “Training routes for self driving in Cambodia”. In fact it was so bad that I suspected the Chinese stealing the pothole making technology and further improving on it. There was definitely more surface covered by potholes than an even material. At the beginning I thought that such bad surface couldn’t last long but to my unpleasant surprise it did. After riding for about 30 kilometers on this “training course” I finally reached a nicely surfaced road again.

I continued riding as long as it felt reasonably safe. When I started feeling tired enough to expose myself to a danger of too low attention to my driving I started to look for a smaller town that could offer a cheap hotel. It was complete night by then. So after 12 hours in the seat of my motorbike and 10 hours of pure driving, skipping lunch and not even feeling like having a dinner I turned off the main road and asked the first people I saw for a direction to a cheapest hotel.

The hotel was just around the corner. It was managed by a young couple with a 3 month old baby. These people, as so many other Chinese I meet every day, were very nice people indeed. The young mum could speak reasonably good English and was interested in practicing it with me. Her husband could understand and talk a little as well. They first wanted 20 Yuan but since I was informed by the people who sent me there that it cost 10 I requested to pay 10 only, on which we shortly agreed. Then I asked if there was an Internet café around and the girl offered their computer with an ADSL connection for me to use. My question about how much per hour they charge was answered with two surprising words: “No charge”. “Wow, OK, thank you!” I could not believe my ears. And really, I spent over an hour in their bedroom while in the meantime the guy tried to find out for me what was wrong with the SIM card I bought for my mobile phone and that stopped working after just a few minutes of calling to Australia. Then we took some photos together and I finally went to bed.

In the morning I gladly gave the girl 15 Yuan instead of 10 for their kindness and the Internet access.

I haven’t written anything about the landscape I was riding through the whole day. It is because I’m not sure if this part of China is really so unattractive or if it is just the state of mind I’m in that makes it so for me right now.

Actually, the only thing that I noticed again and that I think I haven’t written about in any of the previous articles is the way people here as well as in Cambodia, Vietnam and I’m pretty sure in Thailand too, are drying any agricultural products on the roads. Be it a highway, normal road or even a smaller road where the spread out products are taking more than one half of the road’s width you can see corn, grain, nuts, mushrooms or simply just about anything that needs drying on the sun. If the products need to be turned they do it by hand, rake or just simply by shuffling their bare feet through them. It is quite amazing to realize that at the end you might be the one who eats food made from these products lying here freely on public roads.

Oh, actually there is one more thing one cannot miss noticing. It is the huge number of unfinished houses with no windows or doors installed (that is if they ever plan to :-) ). In fact, most of the towns and cities I went through in the second half of today consisted mostly of such houses. I guess that the finished (but still quite ugly) houses would make up for only about 20 percent of the total. Are the Chinese really building houses in such an amazing rate for their fast growing population or are these in fact finished houses where their inhabitants don’t care that they don’t have windows or even doors?

About three weeks ago I went through a complete city where it was very clear that it was a brand new city with no inhabitants so far. There were shops, offices and lots of residential houses but clearly nobody in it. After the deserted ghost town in Cambodia this was a second one with an eerie, but yet very different feeling. In the first case the people left the town long ago while in this case the town has not seen any people yet. And it was clear that this town is planned to be much bigger than it is now. When I first arrived into it I actually was not sure what was happening as the normal road changed to a very wide street with street lights on the sides but no houses around or even in view. Only after a few minutes of riding I arrived to the built up city centre described above.

The water in my hip seems to be disappearing slowly - that is good.

(684 km)