Day 6 | Xianning to A Town Outside Chibi
September 10th
409km to 478km
Leave Xianning (International City of Hot Springs) at noon, at the city outskirts we stop for a bite to eat. Have tasty noodles and even tastier zhou. Having munched them down we head back onto provincial road G107 which will take us all the way to Changsha, and are pleased to find that is generally very smooth and not that busy.
We cycle through bamboo forestry with lots of old men chopping bamboo, and lots of young men loading incredible amounts onto flat-bed lorries. Saw world's smallest car. Cycle through lovely undulating bamboo valleys. Seems strange to see autumn coming; lots of yellow leaves on the ground. We arrive at the city of Chibi, but with time and sun still on our side, we carry on hoping to make the most of the day.
20km down the road in a small town a stranded Chinese cyclist waves us down, and asks if we can help him repair his puncture. We have the tools and experience from our training and so offer the young lad a helping hand. We get chatting and find out that ‘Tom’ is quite the cyclist and is also heading to Changsha. However he plans to complete the feat in only two days on his super-fast Chinese racing bike. Unfortunately the repairs to Tom's inner tube take quite some time and it is dark by the time we wave him on his merry way. Luckily for us there is a small hotel in the town we are currently in, so we push our bikes back down the road and ask for a room. They are happy to oblige and very excited to use their pristine, as yet unused foreign visitor registration book. They show us to our room which is nice and contains yet another excellent bed headrest.
We head downstairs looking for something to eat and discover they themselves are getting ready for dinner, and very kindly invite us to join. Spinach, lotus, chicken wings, and regional sticky spicy rice meat dish are indulged. The dinner conversation primarily consists of us either comparing national populations or price per kilogram of various edible produce. After running out of items to compare the dining party disperses and we retire to our room, where we write our blog while listening to Chinese karaoke through the wall.