day 107: 罗夫 (luofu) - 华县 (huaxian) = 21km

Today might have been even hotter than the day before; I’m not wearing my long johns and my sweater anyways, and I’m definitely not cold.

Anyways, warm or not, it seemed like it was going to be another boring day on the road at first:

Somewhere after the railway tracks I came across a couple of green dudes standing around on the street, apparently doing something out there:

Now here’s the thing: there’s some army barracks in that area, and the two guys are there to supervise their fellow comrades getting on and off public transportation properly:

I had lunch in a little restaurant that seemed to be only frequented by military.

…and there was the chubby little son of the restaurant owner:

Eight years old, so shy he forgot his own age at first, but then he told me he had made some awesome fireworks a couple of weeks ago.

What a cute kid.

Then the stone pits started to appear:

Lots and lots of gravel - this area seems to thrive on gravel like the province of Shanxi (山西) thrives on coal:

Ok, this is going to be like some boring educational article: “How do you make pebbles?”

But anyways, here we go - first, they break big chunks of rock out of the mountain side:

This gentleman then makes sure a mighty stone-busting machine chops up all the rocks into little pieces:

Then the gravel gets separated from whatever else went through the machine, and they haul it to the gravel pit:

A ton of gravel sells for about 30 to 50rmb.

Okay, this is not gravel, it’s corn:

Someone dropped a couple of these on the highway, and the poor dudes were desperately trying to get them back.

I didn’t help, I had my own stuff to carry.

It’s funny at this point I really don’t know how to make a connection from the military guys over the gravel and the corn to this:

发展 (fazhan - development) - a magical word in modern Chinese society, almost like a talisman; societies can 发展, people can 发展, everyone can 发展 - but for some, the way to 发展 is as long as the distance between the two characters on that wall.

Sometimes 发展 means that a society doesn’t want its trees to be eaten by bugs, so some people have to go and apply a protective coating on the trees:

Somebody else will then draw a red ring around the tree, and I forgot to ask why they would do that:

Anyways, after all this excitement, I finally got to 华县 (huaxian), a place that looked like socialist city-planning gone wild:

Just huge empty spaces:

I got a room in a tiny hotel in the old north part of town, mainly because it seemed a bit more lively up there:

And since it had been so warm for the last two days, there wasn’t going to be any heating that night.

Okay, thought I, that makes sense.

Little did I know.

Soundtrack: DMX - “Damien”

—total: 1433,7km