day 30: 井陉 (jingxing) – 天长 (tianchang) = 14,9km

The towers behind my hotel turned out to be a power plant indeed.

I had a good warm night and then took a picture with the super-friendly hosts before I left:

Back on G307, I saw something unexpected:

Beautiful. No idea what kind of bird this was, but I thought: Majestic wings over the Gates of Hell.

Now why would I think that? Remember I used the phrase “Nature bleeding away” yesterday?

Well, I found some of her blood today:

A deep red rivulet, barely streaming at all… – this could have been a tourist attraction if it had only been natural.

But of course it wasn’t.

And neither was this one:

Kind of looked like some weird sort of mint-milkshake to me. Or mouthwash. Who knows?

I didn’t try it anyway.

Here’s some more:

What can I say? It’s oozing, sweating death.

Period.

This is what I’ve been looking at most of the day:

But then it occurred to me: This is not entirely a Chinese problem.

I think the industrial revolution is just hungry, that’s what it is. Don’t forget: Early nineteenth century England saw something that was probably even more of a ravaging beast than this one!

Photographs like this make more sense in that context:

I love this: The BBML – big black misplaced limousine. You’ll find them everywhere – once you start looking!

Some people make decisions. It’s usually the same people who own the BBML’s.

Of course, not everybody can be a boss. Not everyone gets a large share of the pie:

They’re grinding charcoal here I think.

I found these people nice to talk to, even though they wouldn’t talk much, because they were too busy and it was too noisy anyways.

Others just kind of hid in their homes when I walked by:

I noticed there seems to be an extent of xenophobia around here. Folks are not unfriendly, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that virtually every home and every junkyard outside of the village has one or two mean dogs to watch over the place. And we’re talking mean as in malicious, and dogs as in mongrels!

Taking a leak off the road can get quite unpleasant that way.

Well, despite of all the destruction I had seen today, and despite of all the ashes and the dust that had colored my hands black, I made it to 天长 eventually, and there I found a bit of peace:

This is unfortunately not my hotel. But it is someone’s home, and it is clean and nicely taken care of, with the little Buddha statue watching over it all. So that’s a good thing!

Then it got even better:

(My German friends are going to understand this.)

If you were a shopkeeper in a little store in a tiny place on a dusty road, and you somehow (magically?) had got your hands on a stock of Capri-Sonne, and in the door came I, your new German friend, then you would be looking at something like this:

Beeeeautiful!

Good luck to the bird.

Soundtrack: Foo Fighters – “Everlong”

—total: 419,2km