The Long Road Home

I was hoping to make it to Zhaoqing yesterday, but after 120km flaked out at Gaoyao, which is on the West River, directly opposite Zhaoqing. It was nearly 7pm and I didn’t want to cross the enormous Great West River Bridge in the gloom. So I stopped here at a hotel overlooking the river.

I had a huge tailwind all day, so bowled along, on winding minor roads the whole way. There was hardly any traffic, just a few folk on motorbikes, farmers cranking their way along on old bikes, some chaps driving little tractors carrying sacks of things. Apart from that, a few local buses, some goods trucks, and a few private cars. I saw one container lorry which had got itself stuck in a muddy hamlet on a tiny road, and was causing great interest for local people trying to help him manoeuvre. He got himself out of trouble and I watched him slowly wind out of the valley, and turn west towards Xinxing. Up till now, most vehicles I’ve seen are from Guangdong province, but now I start to see some trucks from Guangxi, Guizhou, and a few from Hunan. You can read it on the number plates.

The wind was REALLY strong. Sticks and twigs were breaking off and blowing up the road, and bamboos at the roadside were creaking, and the lines of willows along the roadside were rattling and bending. Thank goodness it was a tailwind for me. For the poor people cycling the other way it looked really tough - people’s straw hats were blowing off, and old blokes going home up the lane with hoes and ploughs on their back were getting blown around shouting ‘gam dai fong’ to each other.

Near Kaiping, I did see tons of watchtowers, in fact every village seemed to have at least one. All abandoned. A guy at a little roadside stall told me he was born in one, but now his family had built a nice new house next to it, so they don’t use their diaolou any more. The watchtowers petered out 40km north of Kaiping, and then there were just red earth villages, small towns, paddy fields, banana palms (no bananas, so actaully I’m not sure), bean canes and maybe courgette things (yellow flowers?), a few fields of pineapples. I ended the day on a tiny single track road which wound through hamlets north of Jiaotang town and dropped down to the West River. Then v tired. They have chips at this hotel so I had chips. Bad but good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 3:41 am and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.