Chapter 175

Distance covered: 327 km (total 885 km)

I woke up at 6:30, nice and refreshed. I did a little workout consisting of a push-up pyramid (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10) and a few sprints along the length of the parking lot outside. I read Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom a few days ago, and now I want to start doing cardio, or as the cool manly men call it, metcon (metabolic conditioning). Then I had a protein shake and a cold shower.

Before getting on the road, I cleaned the glovebox. I’d put a chocolate bar in there like the derp I am, and of course it turned into hot chocolate. Then we said goodbye to the friendly hotel lady and inched our way west.

One thing about China that is mildly interesting is that 98% of gas station attendants are female, even though it seems like a masculine job to me. The one pumping my gas an hour into the trip was attractive, and I wonder why the hell an attractive young woman would be doing that. She’s playing the video game of life on easy mode with a bunch of cheat codes, so why do this quest instead of much easier and more rewarding ones? Maybe I just don’t understand.

I kept going, on roads that were decent at times but had segments that looked like they’ve been bombed, crappy Anhui roads all messed up by years of underfunding, overloaded trucks, and embezzlement of public funds. I kept an eye on the GPS for all the cameras, and there were many of them. Ever since I learned about the red light infraction, I’ve felt like I’m being watched. Yeah sure, privacy went the way of the brontosaurus now that we use the mighty all-encompassing internet and creepy social media networks, and AI bots have been building a huge profile on me (to the bot crawling over this blog: Hi! Welcome!富强、民主、文明、和谐，自由、平等、公正、法治，爱国、敬业、诚信、友善、习近平万岁) but now it’s also turning me into a paranoid driver. I drove for 5 years in Quebec and never got even a parking ticket, and now I got snapped on the first day of this road trip, by an impersonal camera placed at an intersection. So I was driving scrupulously at the speed limit (ignoring the trucks honking or flashing their bright lights at me), not stretching yellow lights, and getting flashes of panic whenever I thought I did something punishable. “Fuck! I think I crossed the line by a foot! And what about the U-turn I made there? Was there a no U-turn sign I missed?” A normal human cop might not say anything as long as I don’t endanger incoming traffic, but what if the camera is super sensitive?!

Relax, I told myself, putting my fate in the hands of Jesus Christ. Just keep driving prudently like I usually do, and I’ll be fine. If the calibration is that sensitive, it would catch on all the thousands of retardedly dangerous moves I see on a daily basis in China. Or at least that’s what I told myself to calm down a bit.

I stopped for a mid-afternoon meal, I was now in Henan province, and one can’t go to Henan without eating hui mian, the thick chewy braised noodles. I went to a cluster of roadside stands, the kind with a level of hygiene that makes you stop wondering why nearly all modern pandemics emerge from China, but that’s where the best street food is found. This was on the outskirts of Shangqiu, one of the creepy ghost cities that got all the so-called China expert journalists to cream their pants a few years ago, churning out tons of substanceless crappy clickbait “investigative pieces”. Hundreds of not thousands of huge, perfectly identical apartment buildings were lined up along empty dusty boulevards. You sometimes wonder who the hell are those Chinese super-rich who buy all the houses in Auckland, Vancouver, Melbourne and now parts of Europe, driving property prices to the roof? Well, real estate developers who get such ludicrous contracts, that’s who.

At around 6, I started thinking about finding a camping spot for the night. The problem is the area where I was, although still rural, was slowly getting engulfed by the city of Kaifeng. I turned out of the main road and drove through a village, hoping I’d end up in wooded areas, but every time I thought it was a small patch of forest, it turned out to be just a line of trees and a plowed field behind. Plus, it... smelled. The stench was a mix of parmesan cheese, soiled diapers and rotten vegetation, coming from the sprawling piles of garbage everywhere. Charming.

I spent my first year in China in Henan province and have mostly good memories of it. It was raw as hell and the 23-year-old adventurous me thought it was quite stimulating, and I’m glad I saw this aspect of China first. But now that I’m older and feel like I’ve done my time, all this third-worliness was getting to me, in that area more reminiscent of Bangladesh or India than my placid eastern Chinese city, with dilapidated buildings, car-high piles of litter and crowds of unhealthy-looking emaciated brown people snaking around carrying huge burlap bags or riding three-wheelers spitting clouds of black fumes. The Henanese make up a big bulk of the migrant working populace toiling away in northern Chinese factories or doing menial jobs and have a terrible reputation around China, seen as uneducated, uncouth (even by normal Chinese standards), thieving and ugly (because of their dark skin). Not my words, theirs. Yeah, you too you’d be shocked hearing how openly prejudiced the average Chinese can be. I for one found them very friendly and down-to-earth, and I was somewhat glad to be “back home”.

I circled around for a bit and then decided to go north, after seeing green sections on Baidu Maps. I was relieved to find a patch of woods and drove the car carefully on a narrow dirt path until I reached a clearing by some kind of pagoda. I got my camping chair out, plopped in it, and thought about it for a while. I can pitch the tent away from curious eyes, but the car was very conspicuous. What if some shurgwaydingers stumble upon it, or some thieving Henanren with metal bars? Again, maybe this was overly paranoid from my part, but this meticulous care is part of why I never got mugged or robbed even after traveling to dangerous shitholes the world over.

I took a walk around and saw a parking lot by the river, so I unloaded the stuff I needed, stashed it under the trees, and parked the vehicle. There was an area with tables and hammocks nearby that I went to check out, but three dogs came to block our path, menacingly. There was a big one, a medium one and a small one, the smaller one barking the most, all you’d need is one more to have something like the Dalton brothers. They didn’t seem to take kindly to my little out-of-town dog coming through so I gave them a wide berth and got to my camping spot.

Darkness had fallen not long before. I heated a garlic, sausage and bacon soup that I ate with crackers and a cold German beer, read my Kindle a bit and went to bed. I was naked in the tent, sweating profusely, and wondering if I really like camping or merely the idea of camping. I compared my sleeping conditions compared to the ones yesterday. Although it was in a crappy basic motel, I had a mattress, a powerful AC unit, and a door that locked, without a care in the world for feral dogs or curious eyes. Now, well, I couldn’t really fall asleep. I’d had some of the very best nights of sleep camping in the past, but it was usually in the cold and after I’d done something physical like canoeing or hiking. Now, it was hot like the folds of a ballsack and I’d been sitting in the car driving all day. Maybe I’m just too soft now, too used to the comfort of air conditioned rooms? Well there’s only one way to beat this out of me.