A Brand New Yu?

So, I took of again this morning (June 10) - a little bit later than usual because of the late night festivities with the Chinese old folks the night before. My destination today was a place called Xinyu (literally new surplus, and the source of the cheesy title of this post), which was 120km to the northwest. I had changed my plans from going to Ji'an after carefully looking through my maps and figuring out that this was the quickest path to the west.

In the morning it was raining pretty heavily, and I was moving rather slowly, so I was a little doubtful at times whether I would make it or not. I travelled first to Badu (22km from Yongfeng), where I started heading north towards Xiajiang (also called Shuibian as I found out from talking to people - I would ask "how far is it to Xiajiang" and they would say something like "Shuibian is only 10km away" - and I thought they misheard me so I would say "I meant Xiajiang, not Shuibian" - and this continued until I figured out that they were the same place). Anyways, from Xiajiang (Shuibian), I took the road towards Baqiu, where I crossed a huge river (The Gan River) - I would have taken a picture of it because it was a pretty cool bridge - but it was pouring rain at the time. I ate lunch in Baqiu where I talked with the locals and found out that the road I was going on was under construction, which can be pretty bad in China. However, this road was still pretty easy to travel on, and evenually I got to the other side where the road connected up with a national highway that was pretty big and had two lanes on each side. Nice - but this also brought a lot of traffic. This last stretch of highway lasted about 25km, but I made it into town in about an hour - I was really surprised how fast I could go on the nice highway - just having a level surface makes a huge difference - it makes me grateful for the nice roads that we have in North America.

Anyways, Xinyu is a big city - by far the biggest city I have been in since I started biking, and it really highlights the difference between country and city life here - it's just a different world here, and Xinyu isn't all that amazing of a city - very midsized by Chinese standards, but I feel a bit in awe at all of the activity. For dinner tonight, I even found a KFC. This is the first western food I've had since.....Fuzhou, I think. Sometimes, it's just nice to switch flavors. I'm sick of having fried Kongqingcai (Chinese vegetable that I've never seen outside of China) with some meat in it. Nice to switch things up.