Chapter 168

Distance covered: 83 km

I woke up at 11 and finished packing. After a lunch of scrambled eggs and hash browns with mozzarella, I double-checked and triple-checked to make sure I brought everything, and the dog and I got on the road. I wanted to get to Nanjing by Friday and spend the weekend with my friends there, I left one day ahead to camp along the way. Just from looking at the map it’s a bit hard to find a spot in advance, I just knew I’d roughly go towards the Yangtze river and hope to stumble upon a suitable spot in the countryside. So I made my way west via country roads and muddy paths that got our white car all covered in brown dirt, looking up places at random on my phone GPS. The problem is very few of the river banks are usable, most are taken over by farmland or industrial areas or are just swampy, so my utopia of parking the car by a beach and camp by the river is all but impossible. Man-made parks are a no-go, I’d get shurgwaydinged out of there by joyless security guards within minutes. And villages or areas near villages might be OK, but most of the land there is used for farming.

Eventually I drove along a road that had a patch of forest on its left side. Now that would work! The road itself was too narrow to safely park the car, but eventually it branched and I could park a little out of the way and go down a small slope to a clearing. It seemed nice, so I got the tent out of the trunk and set it up. The dog was running around happily, and after a bit I tied him to a tree with a long rope, I didn’t want him to wander around too much, who knows if there are some feral dogs or whatever in the area.

I brought the ground pad, sleeping bag, change of clothes, and other things I might need from the car, and sat down on my camping chair. I considered getting a beer from the cooler but it was still light out, and though my tent wasn’t really visible from the road unless you look for it, the possibility of having unwanted uniformed shurgwaydingers tell me to fuck off was there, and that’d mean I’d have to get behind the wheel.

It felt good to be in nature a bit, even though it was by a country road with occasional cars or motorbikes and a few pieces of litter left by cunts who’d been here before. The dog was sniffing something that looked like a plastic jar, I gave it a kick, and some white foamy filling came out, with a hole in the middle. A sex toy, left there to rot by some pervert! I pushed the foam back in with a branch and chucked it over the fence.

First order of business was to change from my flip-flops into shoes and long socks, and even then, the mosquitoes managed to sting me through the wool. I knew I’d forget to bring something, the question was not if but what, and now I regreted not having my baggy sports pants. The only long pants I brought are nice dress pants for if I want to look decent in the city.

The dog and I explored the surroundings a bit, on the other side of that ditch we were in was a large pond with groups of ducks of different sizes. Then I read my Kindle for a bit and had a dinner of Doritos, tuna paste and tortilla bread. When it started getting dark I did get a German beer and sipped it, annoyed by the mosquitoes but content nonetheless.

I went to bed a bit after 8. Not that I was that tired, just that there was not that much to do.