Chapter 202

Distance covered: 460 km (total 5521 km)

We could sleep for a bit, as the tent was somewhat sheltered from the sun by the farmstead’s walls and trees, and also it had been raining gently. The tent held up 100%, not even a trace of a leak.

Even though it was still raining, I started the day with a jog, down towards the main road and back, and the car’s GPS informed me later it was 4 km total. It sucked but felt great, simultaneously, in the weird way that fitness endeavors do. I carried our camping chairs and cooking stuff to the abandoned farm’s kitchen, which was dusty as all hell and a mess of straw, discarded wool and stray bricks, but the roof was intact so it was a nice shelter from the rain. I cooked bacon, eggs and leftover tudousi potato wedges from the Sichuan restaurant, and peeked around. There was no plumbing, and the oven was made with bricks, piled up at ground level. “Man, Chinese people lived 1000 years in the past before Deng Xiaoping came in”. The girlfriend quickly lifted her head from her bowl and seemed startled for a second, before she shrugged and nodded in approval.

She had been talking to her mom on the phone and gave me the news. We were heading south to Henan province to meet up with the in-laws and travel the four of us together in their car, but now there are some serious floods in the central impoverished province. So we’ll head west to Shaanxi instead and have them meet us there from Hefei.

Yeah, we just came from Shaanxi, didn’t we?! A bit of a waste of time to go east and then west again, but it’s not that bad, it leads us to potentially interesting places in the meantime. I took the wrong highway ramp like a derp and could only backtrack 13 km later, which added to the feeling of time wasting. But hey, what can we do but laugh?

It was a long day of driving with little to mention. We stopped in a highway rest area for a very scenic lunch with a view on a bunch of parked 18-wheelers, and I rolled us tuna wraps with mozzarella cheese. The girlfriend had a bit of a stomachache after the Sichuan food from two days ago, but it wasn’t even that spicy, especially compared to some stuff she manages to eat back home. Me, I was fine, my digestive system is coated with a permanent layer of protective oil. I don’t really get the dreaded “ring of fire” that much.

Ahem. Details. Anyway, while the girlfriend was driving, she asked me to scout on Baidu Maps for possible areas to check out for camping, as we were reaching the end of the afternoon. There was a city called Yuncheng that is next to a big salt lake, which was a little intriguing, so we headed there. We parked the car and walked a bit to a park with a view over the lake, which was in fact many shallow lakes. Weird, it had been raining a lot recently and parts of Henan province (not that far to the east) were flooded, I thought the water level would be higher.

From our vantage point of view, it seemed like the southern shore of the lake was very rural, with fields and small farms. So we crossed the long bridge and went that way, criss-crossing the small dirt paths until we found a spot at the edge of a field, with a view over the lake on one side and mountains on the other. Nice. Very nice. I cracked open a NEIPA from Panda Brewing, plopped in my camping chair and enjoyed the surroundings for a bit before setting up camp and making a dinner of sausages and asparagus.