Allotments, Curry, Curious Duck, Men down Holes, Flowers

March 31^st Today was my Mam’s birthday, she would have been 96. I still get a reminder on my phone every year; in fact Mam and Dad are the screen saver on my phone. I don’t think any of us children realised just what she gave us and how much she sacrificed for us until we had left home and started families of our own. She was a very special woman.

So, we were late out, again, my fault, again. I let Huan have her choice today, she wanted to go over the bridge to nowhere just down from our house and then check out the other side of the river again. We walked over the irrigation viaduct on our way.

Sometimes we like to walk this way instead of down on the road, we can check out the various allotments and see how they’re doing. They looked quite good today.

Just after the allotments we stopped at the makeshift cowshed where I fed the cows last time, so of course I had to do the same again. They’re still a fussy lot but Huan found some vegetation they would eat. We carried on to towards the town, to check on the work going on in front of our house. They seem to have elongated the hump over the sewage pipe making it more teardrop shaped. I wonder if that is to aid with the flow of the river but then, if it is, why not both sides, upstream and downstream?

Our next stop was to see a canine friend of mine, I don’t know if you’ve seen him before. He starts off placidly enough, then gets a bit more playful trying to eat my arms but he’s not too bad. Here he is in the first picture making sure with his paw that I give him the attention he so deserves and in the second one having a good chat with me just before we left him.

Up on the main street we met with some of our other doggie friends, a strange mixture, one small male, one large bitch, the third large male was not there today. The female likes all the attention so keeps trying to come between me and the small male. If the large male was there, the small one would be fighting him off. All part of life’s rich tapestry.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I had to have yet another OAP nap in the afternoon, a solitary one today. Perhaps I can blame it on the monthly needle, I don’t sleep very well these days either. I blame that needle for many things. It’s a female hormone, to keep my testosterone levels down. I blame it for the ongoing loss of my body hair and the strange way that I feel hot and sweaty for what seems like no reason at various times of the day.

April 1st “When April came with sunshine, And showers and lilac bloom, My heart with sudden gladness, Was like a fragrant room.” (Aprilian - by Bliss Carman). That’s this month’s poem and very nice it is too.

Today’s amble was not a long one, we had a new TV walk planned for the afternoon. I managed to get some good photos of a lizard in our compound, I chose this one as it looks like a good movie still. Imagine having it enlarged beside a normal person!

As we were a little late going out we passed by the Xinjiang bread stall first to make sure they still had some to sell us. If we had gone on the way home we may well have been unlucky. Here’s the stall along with the two gentlemen who run it. They are both very pleasant and one of them speaks very good English. He finished his university studies but we’re not sure what he studied. He told us he didn’t want to work for someone else, he wanted his own business.

Walking up the main street we were horrified to find a tree missing. Huan asked why they were chopping it down and they told her it had died. They had given it two years to see if it would recover and bloom again but as it didn’t, down it had to come.

A quick trip half way up the river and down again and we were back home. Once lunch was over I began the curry. First off was a side dish, cucumber raita, made with cucumber, (obviously), yoghurt, sea salt and mint. Second was the curry itself, ours are not the normal restaurant type, they have a lot of vegetables along with the meat. Once that was merrily bubbling away it was time for our TV walk.

Huan woke up from her OAP nap just about the right time and we got down to it. This new one lasts half an hour and it had us both working very hard. By the time we finished there was a pool of sweat on the living room floor where I had been walking away like mad. We will make a video for this one too but not until we are more used to what comes next. According to the coach, this one is equal to a two and a quarter mile (very) brisk walk and it certainly felt like it. We will log it as 3.6 kilometres in 30 minutes. The advice is that we should do this two or three times a week. Maybe we’ll start with twice and see how we get on!

The curry went down very well indeed! No photos today, we didn’t have rice, we just had some of our Xinjiang bread. Tomorrow we’ll be having rice, I’ll try and remember to take a foodie then. Our side dish went very well with it too. I’ve had yoghurt with hot curries before, it helps cool them down, but this dish, with the cucumber and mint, was much better. We both had so much of it; I will have to make another one tomorrow.

April 2^nd A very lazy morning was had by all, due the weather looking miserable. It didn’t rain so we could have gone out. After a lunch, in my case consisting of Xinjiang bread and Cambozola cheese, we went out anyway. (Very versatile Xinjiang bread you know, in fact in Harbin, where we had a tiny kitchen and just a small toaster oven, we used it as a pizza base.) Neither of us fancied repeating yesterday’s TV walk yet. In fact, we’ve now worked out a programme, we will do the TV walk every three days but when the third day is a Monday, we will ‘reset’ to Sunday. That should give us enough for the month.

So, a short countryside walk was the order of the day, it still gave us seven kilometres though. It could have been longer if we’d gone Huan’s way, but as I only had my sandals on that was out of the question. Did you know that just as you have plant nurseries in the UK, some farmers here appear to have coconut nurseries. I thought it was something growing inside the coconuts but Huan assures me they will become big coconut palms.

And what’s this, is it a chicken nursery? Most of the chicken we eat here in Wuzhishan free roams around the mountainside, or in this case, someone’s cabbage patch.

This was the view as we walked back towards a paved road, as you can see the weather still hadn’t perked up.

There is a plus side to an afternoon walk though; all the locals are on their long lunch break so it’s a lot more peaceful. It’s not so good in the warmer months when the sun is shining but days like today, as long as the rain holds off, are made for it.

And finally, as promised yesterday, here’s our curry, together with the side dishes of cucumber raita, raisins or sultanas, and desiccated coconut. I thought I had made enough for two days but it looks like we’re in luck and a third day can be had tomorrow.

April 3^rd Today we thought we’d have a walk to the village of Changhao and back, it’s been quite a while since we went that way. Just down the road we passed the mechanical monsters all in a line waiting for someone to call on them for work.

Next up we passed what may be our exit from the highway in the future. It’s difficult to say exactly, but it appears to be roughly in the right place. (Presently we exit the highway via the on ramp much nearer the town.)

Unfortunately, the roads were just as dusty as last time so we had to take a detour through the countryside. That does of course have the advantage of being both cleaner and quieter.

The route we took used to have a short stretch of paved road which has now been substantially extended. We did still have to branch off into the wilderness though and that had also changed. It had become a lot more overgrown. A farmer tending his herd of water buffalo told us we couldn’t get through where we had gone before and then he guided across his field. Here’s the undergrowth and the farmer, spot his boots au naturel!

We saw a fair amount of wildlife today, caterpillars, spiders, water buffalo, dogs, chickens and of course ducks. You had to see this one, just look at that little face.

By the time we reached Changhao we had covered just over eight and a half kilometres and we didn’t fancy a dusty walk home so took the bus instead. The driver wore his mask, as did we, but by the time we set off, less than half the other passengers were wearing them. Mind you, the bus was less than half full, not many people go into town at that time of the morning, almost lunchtime, so no real worries for us.

I managed to avoid the dreaded OAP nap today by looking for some new recipes for my next attempt at cooking I think Huan dozed off in front of the TV but she denied it, said only that her eyes were closed!

April 4^th Well, where do I start? There are no photos from today at all. I took the little Nikon out with us this morning to do a video of the three minute silence, sirens and car horns that was being held nationwide to show respect for those poor souls who have died from Covid-19. We managed to get to a reasonably busy part of the town, usually, only to find that it wasn’t as busy as usual. Quite a few of the shops were closed; the occupants may have gone to visit their ancestors for Qingming, tomb sweeping day. Anyway, just before ten o’clock I started recording. We heard the sirens off in the distance, but nothing else and nobody seemed to take any notice of them. Music still blared out of the shops, people still carried on with their business, some still tried to sell us stuff. Never mind I thought, I’ve got a video, we can use some screen shots for the blog. I took a second video going around the market so you could see how life is back to normal. Imagine my surprise when we got home, to find only one video. I switched the camera on before going into the market but I must have forgotten to press again for record! The first video was there, and would have been OK for some screenshots. However, despite the fact that I could view the video on the camera I could not upload it to the PC, either from the camera directly or from the SD card removed from the camera. I then spent the time while Huan was having a kip trying various ways to ‘repair’ the file in question, without success.

After Huan had woken up it was time for today’s TV walk. We’re getting there but we still aren’t quite right on moving between the different parts so it could be a while before we make a video of that. Choreography was never my strong point on the stage!

After that it was back to the computer, and the internet, to try again to repair my video file. I tried two different softwares downloaded from the internet, and an online file repair. None of them were able to open the file and all of them caused the SD card to ‘lock up’. Later on I did a full format of the card, not a quick one, filmed three videos in the house and could only upload one. The other files locked up the card again. Hopefully, this is only an SD card problem, we’ll find out in the next day or two.

April 5th Amateur weather forecasting went well today. The computer forecast rain, in fact it’s the same for every day this week. Yesterday it bucketed down late afternoon and evening. We both looked out of the window and decided that it would probably do the same today, and, lo and behold we were right. That meant we got a good ten kilometres in this morning. Our first photo is water buffalo, one that for a change didn’t get up and run away. The difference between the pictures is my Fuji versus Huan’s Huawei phone.

Our route today took us through the countryside up to one of the small villages we often visit. Chinese villages are not much like English ones, there are no pubs, no restaurants and instead of a village green there’s usually a small village government office and a basketball court. There are friendly people of course and we were chatted to by two young boys as we took this picture just outside their balcony. I suspect they wondered what the crazy foreigner was doing.

We took a different route home which started off with some quite nice scenery.

That led us to a small farm with a duck strutting its stuff on a wall alongside a chicken. The chicken hopped off but we got a couple of decent photos of the duck. However, for you, we have what we found after the farm. Obviously the construction of apartments is spreading even further out of town. Every umbrella you see in this picture hides a man working down a hole!

We managed to get back to the road home by sneaking through the back way of the apartments they are extending. In doing so, we stumbled across Wuzhishan, or a mini version of it anyway.

And to finish off today’s blurb we thought you might like to see some more pretty flowers. One of my gripes about Hainan is the lack of variety of flowers, I don’t think there’s any that I haven’t seen before. They are pretty though.

As for the rest of the day? It rained of course.

April 6^th Buzzing like a bee today, busy bee, busy bee. After the worst night’s sleep I’ve had in ages I was at least up early enough to get started on my list. (He’s got a little list!) From breakfast time until coffee break it was a long guitar practice to make up for being lazy yesterday.

After lunch and shopping it was dashcam work, uploading to the PC before our next run up north.

Another guitar practice was fitted in after dinner as well as my daily Chinese lessons. I can’t skip on them, I have to keep an unbroken run.

In fact I was supposed to check the laptop today, we may need it in Haikou next week to ensure an unbroken run. Ah well, I’ll just procrastinate and do it tomorrow. See you!