Walking Partner Back, Happiness Reigns

September 28^th Should I be worried? Another night of very broken sleep followed by another morning where getting out of bed was almost impossible. Maybe it is just age. Still, it gave me more time to do some binge watching.

September 29^th A much more normal day today, well for me anyway. I planned to walk the ladies to their final rehearsal but they had a lift from “the lady with the funny eye’, another member of the hulusi group. That meant I could wander off on my own straight away so I headed for the clockwise route around the mountain park. Going through the area with the ‘no title deed’ houses I checked up on the empty villas, if nothing happens to them soon they will disappear under the foliage never to be seen again.

Walking on this road I always want to burst into the scout song, I don’t really know why.

Snowbirds are returning, I passes some going up and saw some, the early birds, coming down. However, it was still mostly a quiet and pleasant walk.

Men at work are up next, or at least one man is, he is harvesting the rubber.

Birds are quite vocal on this walk but we never see them, in fact we don’t see much life at all, apart from other people of course. There was some fowl play today though; these chickens were not running away from me, at one stage they seemed to be following me. I suspect it must have been close to feeding time.

Going down was just as quiet as going up, just the off few people to pass the time of day with. At one stage I spotted a large spider’s web so took a snap of that for you. Only when I got home did I see the rather large spider in the middle.

Nearing the bottom I thought I would show you another bridge to nowhere, a pedestrian one this time, with a chain at the other end.

What is at the other end? Somewhere that we probably shouldn’t go exploring down without long trousers and boots on. It doesn’t say “Here be dragons” but there may well be leeches, other bugs and maybe even snakes!

This was the view I had heading over the road bridge into town, nice isn’t it? Given the choice I would rather live near the sea but I can’t complain with the river and the views we have here.

Reaching our gate I found a surprise, loads of electric rental scooters, or mopeds. You use your phone, scan the QR code and off you go. One of these days, perhaps a quiet afternoon, we’ll have to get one each and try and teach Huan to ride.

That was my morning plan complete, I felt quite pleased with myself for a change. In the afternoon I planned to chauffeur the ladies to their show, my services were not required, their morning chauffeuse would be doing the job again. Normally I would go with Huan to provide moral support but on this occasion I decided against it. They were not playing, or singing, any new songs at all, only the same ones as the last show. In my mind that was a mistake on the leader’s part, the audience will know. Huan did receive some photos via WeChat so I’ll put two of them here. Forgive the quality; the files are much too small really.

September 30^th Is life back to normal at last? It would seem so, Huan had no classes at all today, and she should be free at least until after the holidays. That meant a joint walk was on the cards and Huan had the choice of which route to take. She chose to go down the main road out of town and then back through the countryside, not a bad choice, a long way but no hills to worry about. Normally we would find a fair amount of shade going down the main road but as you may remember they chopped a lot of trees down. We had no idea why but today we saw that they are digging a long deep trench where the trees used to be, could be water or gas pipes or maybe storm drainage. There were no pipes to give us any further clues.

Coming back through the countryside and the villages we spotted a lady weaving. We have seen this before in tourist places but this is the first time we have seen it anywhere else. She was happy enough to allow us to take photos and even gave us a big smile when we asked.

The weaving lady was just after our first water stop, a very necessary one because of the road ahead. As you can see there is no shade at all and it was a hot day!

We turned off this road to take our normal route back into town down a shady track. That track is now being converted into another access road for the villages so most of the shade had disappeared and the going underfoot was not so easy either. Luckily, the drainage ditch had concrete edges so our feet stayed mostly dry and clean.

Eventually we were back to the town river walk, no market today, but you can see all the flags are out for China’s National Day tomorrow.

Next up was something we don’t see very often, big motorbikes, well, big for Hainan anyway. I was once told that there was a limit on Hainan motorbikes of 125cc, the largest bike in this collage is 500cc and the other three are 600cc. Three of them are registered here in Hainan, in fact in Wuzhishan, the fourth is a mainland number. The rider of the large bike was there so we had a chat with him. He and his friends, there was a fifth one who hadn’t arrived yet, are taking a road trip to Tibet over the holidays.

Yesterday, just before home, I spotted lots of rentable electric scooters. Today I spotted the service ‘truck’ for one of the brands, not the yellow ones. Here it is, full of spare batteries which they were replacing in some of the bikes outside the local vocational school. Unfortunately I didn’t take the photo as he was replacing the battery, I went back to capture it, but by then he was ready to move on to the next bunch.

We did well today, 11.3 kilometres! Mind you, we both needed a kip this afternoon, me more than Huan, I ended up having about two and a half hours!

October 1st Happy China’s birthday to all! Today is the National Day of the People's Republic of China 中华人民共和国国庆节. “When is your National Day?” asked Huan and of course had to tell her that we don’t have one. Another lovely day beckoned today and Huan was again at my side. Do you remember the electric scooters we showed you earlier this week? Well we headed off over the bridge to nowhere this morning and stumbled into the breeding ground!

Beyond the bridge to nowhere the road is coming on, not ready for progress photos yet though. At the first village I went for a look at a very old ruin, (no it wasn’t a mirror!) and Huan took some photos of me heading back to the road. She took too many as always.

You read a lot of stories about the mistreatment of poultry in various farms around the world and I’m sure China has those farms too. However, chickens in Hainan are most definitely free range so although they will still end up in someone’s pot they have a fairly good life before that.

Today’s route was fairly new, Huan didn’t remember walking this way before. I chose it for the trees and the shade but also found a large dead machine. Huan was very impressed that the tyres were nearly as tall as her. I was impressed that nature was reclaiming it.

We couldn’t hide under the trees all the time, sometimes we had to ‘hit the road’. This is the view from one that used to be a dirt track but it has been upgraded for the farmers. I managed to find a spot with no power lines, near or far, this may well end up as a Facebook cover photo at some time in the future.

We haven’t had many individual dragonfly photos this year, not sure why, but while taking a landscape photo I ended up with a few. Skipping the landscape I cropped out the ‘cluster’ or is it a ‘flight’ of dragonflies, there’s quite a few there.

Leaving the villages we passed by the pond where last February, we watched them ‘corralling’ the fish for their Spring Festivities. Will they do the same next year and if so, what will they do with all the vegetation that has taken over the pond? There are still fish in there, eagle eyed Huan spotted a few of them.

Perseverance is the word and we still keep trying to get nearer to those pesky birds for you.

Being a Friday we had to film another episode of “Eating Out In China’ so we headed out to our new little shopping mall to visit a ‘rotating individual hot pot restaurant. To our surprise it was empty, in fact we were the only customers all through our meal. The owner explained that we were early and also, being the first day of the holiday, some people would have been having dinner at home with their families. You can view the result here - https://youtu.be/u7yKxserN1k

October 2^nd The weather has certainly changed for the better although that also means it’s warmer. No long walks today, Saturday is market day so it was just a walk down by the river, via the lottery ticket shop. To our dismay, that was closed for the holidays. Never mind, at least it means nobody else can win either!

We spotted a miniature taxi, actually another Wuling Mini-EV. I told Huan that her picture was on the side so she pointed out the monkey driving the car at the back and said that one was me!

We were asked to wear our masks going into the market so we dutifully obeyed. Can you spot the others who did the same?

Huan was explaining this next chicken for me, telling me that it was ‘no longer a boy’ since it had been ‘chopped’. It looked a bit on the chubby side so I explained to Huan that the reason for my pudginess was the same, too many boy bits have been chopped!

Next up was a strange hat; we’ve included two photos so that you can see why. I guess the idea is to keep the sun off your neck but I’ve never seen anyone actually wearing one.

For our last picture of the day we are back to cars and a quiz question for you. What is this? I’ll give you a clue, it is a Volkswagen. Now did the letters fall off and they put them back in the wrong order, or is it perhaps a different model altogether?

October 3^rd Sunday brought another choice from Huan, she decided on the walk to the fish farm in the small reservoir. As usual on the way we passed the ‘villas by the lake’ and as usual we wondered why on earth people bothered buying them if they never meant to live in them!

Passing by the cement works we thought we would try and be a little artistic, here we both are at opposite ends of the same storm drain.

Just after that we took a diversion and instead of heading up to the reservoir went exploring instead. At least the surroundings weren’t crawling with leeches, in fact it was a very pleasant ramble during which we found a new ‘back road short cut’ from the fourth main street turning to the fifth. Finding these odd routes gets us off the roads and into the countryside.

Usually it is Huan who takes too many photos of me which I then convert into a gif for your amusement. Today it was my turn although I only took two photos; I do like the gif though.

We came back out of the woods near a militia training base; Huan doesn’t think they have such things anymore. Discretion again was the better part of valour and no photographs were taken.

The lady with the pointy finger was beckoning me back again, she often does that, this time to a butterfly. Surprise, it was near enough for me to capture a snap!

Different kinds of bugs are up next, snails. Yes, we’ve seen them before and we’ve even showed you some but we’ve never seen them in a cage before.

More bugs follow, this time photographed by Huan. She spotted something on my hat after I’d been walking in the bushes at the side of the road. As you can probably guess I am still trying to help her get the hang of what little telephoto we have so the creature is very small. I wondered if it was looking for the ‘human’s brain cell’ or whether it was an escaping brain cell!

Why don’t we finish with yet another bug today? I reckon this one is an alien spaceship with the aliens sitting in a cockpit towards the back. What do you think?

Not much rest for us on the Sabbath, we walked just over ten kilometres today. That’s the third long walk for Huan this week so we’ll give her a rest tomorrow.

October 4^th Sheer bone idle! That describes us today, apart from the mandatory weekly shop. We’ll be back on our walking feet again tomorrow, we’ll see you next week. Bieeeeeee!