April 20th Almost NTR today, just shopping this morning since we weren’t here yesterday. We did think we might have had to go to Sanya for more landlord duties but it seems that has been temporarily delayed, the tenant will be away for three days.
Being five days since my last visit to the dentist I did have to go there this afternoon, with Huan in tow for moral and linguistic support. It was a different dentist! It seems today’s dentist is the regular dentist at that clinic but he’s been away on an extended break. Huan wasn’t even sure it wasn’t the same man even though I could tell. It seems they are brothers so she is forgiven. I must say that this brother has a better bedside manner. After making the hole bigger to find out where the guilty nerves were he stuck some ‘poison’ in and said we would have to come back in another five days. Of course, that tooth is rather thin walled so will require a cap to stop me chewing it up with my dinner!
Our plan had been an after dinner walk but the heavens opened up. Mind you, if we have to have oodles of rain then after dinner is the best time for it!
April 21st School for Huan today at the OAP place, I would have preferred to stay home and rot but decided I should walk her there. Once out of the house though, as is usually the case, my spirits perked up. Here’s Huan having a pre-class gossip.
After dropping her off and keeping one eye on the weather, one eye on the distance and one eye on snapshot subjects I set off to try and get ten kilometres in.
Wildlife was proving elusive today, probably because of where I was walking to start with, well away from the river. I did find this one near the old ICBC bank wall though, and thought I had to take a photo of it, for no other reason than because my daughter hates them! (Sorry Sammy!)
Today’s route, or at least parts of it, were not the habitat of the lesser spotted snowbirds. What they were was me going up and down roads to try and get my distance in without leaving the town and the possibly needed shelter of the buildings.
An unusual sight in the city gave me the next snapshots. The ‘Billy goat’, at least I think it was a male, was tied to a tree so I stopped for a chat. To my surprise it came to me and allowed me to pet it, only getting wary if I tried to approach the kid. Normally most of the goats we see are black, this one, I think you’ll agree, is a handsome wee beastie.
Later on in my meanderings, as I crossed the bridge to begin making my way home, I heard the dulcet tones of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, not instrumental but singing. I kept looking all around me but couldn’t find out where the voices were coming from until I crossed the river and looked back. It would appear that we have another church, one that we knew nothing about.
Finally, on the last leg, I found a butterfly, just the one. One was enough though; this one allowed me to get very close, so close that some of my photos would not focus at all. In fact it only flew away after I tried to get it to hop onto my finger.
My meanderings were successful, just, and I got my ten kilometers in just as I arrived at our building. Huan was having dumplings for lunch so I only had mine to do, it was supposed to be the two remaining bratwurst from last week. Checking them out for touch, feel and smell made me change my mind and stick to a good old fashioned ‘egg banjo’. (Google that if you want to know what it is and why it is so called.) Somehow, for the first time since I was a baby, (I think), with my first bite, I ended up with egg in my hair! Still, that’s much better than hair in your egg and it tasted lovely.
Staying with food it was my turn to cook today, something I know some of you like to read about. Where do my ideas come from? Well some come from the scrambled egg between my ears and some are (roughly) based on recipes I have, here is today’s base.
As you can see from my ingredients, ‘roughly’ is perhaps an understatement. Dill is from the celery family, so I used celery, instead of green onion I used an ordinary one, heavy whipping cream is not available here so I used yoghurt instead, (with a hint of cheese). I also added a yellow bell pepper and a tomato for colour and taste. The end result may not resemble the original recipe much; in fact today it was too ‘wet’. I would have preferred it creamier, but it suited Huan perfectly, she loves noodle soup.
April 22nd We were a little late out this morning so no ten kilometres. Early in our walk we tried our hardest, again, to snap some of those pesky birds. This is the only shot worth sharing, and if I cropped it any more it wouldn’t be very good at all.
Not much else was seen until we came to a woman climbing over the wall to the river. She and her companion had been shopping and they had bought live fish which the lady in the photo was releasing into the river. It’s a Buddhist thing I believe and can cause problems when they release non-native species into a habitat. Hopefully she was releasing river fish and not sea fish, and also fish that had been caught locally in the first place.
Our walk took us past the outdoor
market where the bap man lives where we heard bad news, they will be returning
up north until September! Luckily for us he offered to bake us twenty that we
could collect this evening.
Finally, just before we arrived home, we tried again with some more birds. This time we caught two but again, further cropping would spoil the photo.
Only one of us had to have an OAP
nap today, I must be getting long in the tooth! I whiled away the rest of the
afternoon by watching movies. Youtube has a movie channel where you can find a
lot of ‘free’ movies, my choice today was Minority Report. I’m lucky in that I
can watch movies, or read books, and come back to them in the future without remembering
enough to spoil the experience. I guess that’s one benefit of having a lousy
memory!
After dinner we had to go out to collect our baps, it also gave us a chance to reach the daily target of ten kilometres. We did that with ease ending today with just over thirteen. The only difficult part was trying to take a selfie while holding two bags of baps and holding the phone with two fingers so that I could use my thumb to operate the ‘shutter’. I know, I could have asked Huan to hold the baps, my poor old brain just didn’t think of that!
April 23rd Two lazy people in our house this morning, each blaming the other for not asking if we were ready to go out. Sometimes it’s good to just do nothing! Mind you, Huan didn’t do nothing, she had some hulusi and guitar practice, even I did a couple of new songs! Lunch was different today, Huan had been busy on Pinduoduo again and had ordered some Russian bread. It comes from somewhere north of Harbin and takes about four days to get to us. That’s not a big problem as it doesn’t go stale very fast. This was different to the Russian bread we used to buy in Harbin, more like the hard German bread. It worked though and should keep us going once we have finished our baps and we’re waiting for the bapman to return.
Huan had a class again this afternoon and I was supposed to escort her and her companion but when we got downstairs in the lift I realised my phone was still upstairs. I need that to keep track of how many kilometres are walked so I had to go back up leaving the ladies to walk alone. I’m sure they were safe enough! Ten kilometres was off the cards today as I had to come home first and finish off dinner so I set off on a meander. My first photo was just to check the camera lens, it had appeared a little grubby, it wasn’t but the sky was.
I headed off on the lower bridge across to the island; the entrance looks quite good now.
Looking back towards our buildings I could see the goats were out in force today, I guess there was a lot of greenery for them to munch on. What happens when the sluice gates are opened I don’t know, perhaps the farmers get an early warning.
Pretty soon I realised that my chosen route was the wrong one, it was chock a block full of students leaving one of the local schools and spreading out in all directions. Added to this were lots of buses and scores of motorbikes, all with their horns going so I changed my mind and headed for the riverside. On the way I played with the camera taking photos of holes in trees and trying to sort out manual focus.
Soon I saw the welcome sight of the steps down to the riverside. You might notice the absence of people, there seemed to be no snowbirds on this side at all, maybe most of them have now flown back up north.
I did see something rather unusual, two lovely brown coloured birds, as always just a little bit too far for my camera but I’ll put both photos here anyway, someone may recognise them.
Apart from the usual scenery and the occasional fisherman in the water that was it for my afternoon walk. No other creatures popped into the frame, although I did chat to some of my four legged friends and their owners. Should that be two legged friends and their owners?
Just before five I reached home having only done six and a half kilometres today. Even though I had started cooking dinner just after lunch it still needed finishing off and the noodles had to be cooked too. Here are the ingredients, no recipe this time, it’s all from my head. If you’re looking at the jar of chillies, only one was used, they are quite hot!
In my eagerness to get everything right, and to make sure enough water evaporated from the chilli, I have to admit that it did start to ‘stick to the bottom’. Luckily, not enough damage was caused to stop us enjoying the finished product.
Rain stopped play after dinner so
no more walks today.
April 24th Huan was first with the photographs today, before I was even out of bed. She took them with her phone but still managed a couple of decent ones. There was a dragonfly admiring its reflection in our living room window.
Being Saturday, again, it seems to come round faster every week, we didn’t walk far, just a stroll around the riverside market. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m looking at so I have to ask Huan. In this case she didn’t know either but the stall holder told us that they were the leaves from the bitter gourd vegetables. I don’t know if you have tried bitter gourd, but it’s very well named. I’m not sure I’d want to try the leaves.
Next up was a large bucket full of rice, of three different colours. This is one I would not like, not because of the colours but because it is glutinous rice. Note the QR code on the trolley handle, nearly everyone pays using their phones.
The last one for the market is superglue. Check out how they are demonstrating it. They probably aren’t cheating either; I hate superglue, well, when I miss the target and get my fingers instead!
Huan was a happy bunny again today, she spotted another lizard, I missed it completely! It was on the back side of a tree making it very difficult to get a photo, so this is the result.
Let’s finish off today’s walk with two more bugs, neither of which I was able to identify with Google’s image search. In fact both pictures brought back the word ‘parasitism’ which doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. The first is obviously a beetle of some sort and the second is a hairy caterpillar, quite a small one.
Being the weekend it’s also my turn to cook again but for a change, this weekend is not a stew. It is vaguely based on this recipe, courtesy of the BBC.
I must admit to not being a great fan of egg plants except when Huan slices them and fries them up with some minced pork inside. In that case, they are very ‘moreish’. However, I do like the occasional moussaka, even if I do add some extra ingredients. In this case, apart from what you see here, I also added one more egg, another tomato and a dollop of tomato sauce. The recipe calls for Greek yoghurt which we can usually find but this week they only had it flavoured with various fruits. The celery, parsley, onion, garlic and carrot were cooked with the meat, the green beans were for added vegetables.
I’ve already told you that cooking with only one hob can be a real pain in the rear end, even more so with a dish like this. What’s worse is using the oven too, (not at the same time, we don’t trust our wiring). Checking progress through the door, even with the light on, is not so good, so the door has to be opened. Invariably, when we do that, the oven switches itself off so we have to start it again, sometimes by removing the electricity completely and then re-connecting it. Today I was lucky, it started again fairly easily. If we ever get rich, we will buy a new oven, but when we do, it will have analogue controls! So, after all that, how did it turn out. You can judge the pictures for yourself, the dish out of the oven and then set on the dinner table, with a glass of wine for me. Huan told me that I ‘broke it’ putting it on the plates, maybe I needed a different spatula! Did it taste all right? Well we both thought so and it’s definitely not off the menu for future weekend dishes.
April 25th Would you believe our plans didn’t go wrong today? We were out of the house just before quarter to eight and on our way to try and find Ya Ri, a little village with motorway access, we’ve seen the exits often as we passed by on our way to and from Haikou. Huan thought we might also get to Maodao, the village on the next exit, I suspected otherwise. The route was ‘hard top’ all the way, just as well as I was wearing my sandals.
First off, a couple of bugs for your delectation.
Our route took us past a school for disabled children where this time, I remembered to take a photo of the ‘carvings’ on the wall, not sure if that is the right word at all. Whatever they should be called, they are very well done and nice to look at.
Before long we were well into the countryside and marvelling at the height of the river in these next photos. There used to be a ford style bridge somewhere in the first photo which, now that a much higher bridge has been built, has disappeared below the surface.
This is the dam that now holds the river back, I wonder if it’s been done to ensure the farmers downstream always have enough water whatever the weather is like.
Not worried about the scarcity of water at all were three ducks sitting on a wall, sounds like a song doesn’t it. One was hidden by the foliage, here are the other two.
Just in case my explanation of ‘ford type bridges’ confused you; I found one to show you. As you can see, under normal conditions, the water would flow under the road, through the pipes, but during periods of fuller flow the road would actually become impassable.
In the ‘old days’, those roads would have been the only routes through the mountains, these days it’s a little different. Here you can see the ‘old and the new’ side by side and the village of Zaping Cun at the head of the valley which is now much easier to get to.
Looking back down from the village you can see the highway. What the photo doesn’t show you is something we overlooked when we set out. Highways tend to go in fairly straight lines whereas mountain roads tend to follow the curves of the rivers and valleys. We went under the highway quite a few times, twice in this view!
Eventually, we came to this traffic sign, Ya Ri left and Maodao straight on. I could see how near we were to the Ya Ri highway access and neither of us had any idea how much further it would be to Maodao, so we turned left, and headed up the hill with no shade.
I was right though, and just around the corner of the hill we came to Ya Ri. Why would I want to visit the highway access roads for this tiny village? Well, I thought you might like to see how short and fairly steep they are, you really have to be on the ball to come off the highway at 100kph or to accelerate to get on it at a fast enough speed. The first two photos are the northbound on and off ramps and the second two the southbound.
Of course, we had to go back down the same road to where the signpost was, where we sat and waited for a bus. I did take a little video, but the bus shook a lot, here’s a screen shot of us waiting and a view through the centre of the bus.
Back home, we decided to take another photo to show you one of the perils of living in Hainan and owning a car. We’re not sure where this car was parked when the ‘incident’ occurred but we do believe we were looking at the result of a falling coconut! Thankfully, it wasn’t our car.
By the time we got home, having walked from where the bus stopped in town, we had completed 12.8km, not bad for a morning’s walk. Mind you, after lunch we added another 3.1km going to the dentist and doing a little shopping for Bob. That’s enough for one day I think. The dentist managed to find that I still have a live nerve somewhere below my tooth so another return visit has been booked, after the Mayday holidays. He also gave Huan the price of a cap, for one tooth, ¥1,000.00, at the same time, recommending that I should have all my old fillings treated in the same way! I suppose I could consider it, but it will be one tooth a month to ration my pension!
April 26th What a miserable day, rain, rain and more rain. It’s a good job al I had to do was go shopping with the boss. She had to go to her hulusi practice in the afternoon, I stayed home because of the rain and took the toilet seat off and cleaned it. Didn’t I have an exciting day?
And that’s it, another week over, stay tuned to this frequency; we’ll see you next week!
