Hardcore Journey to the West

Well, I have started my journey to the west - I have decided that I can push myself a bit farther and harder than I have been - I should be able to do at least 100km a day when I'm on pavement. For the last few days I haven't had access to the internet, so my posts have been lacking - today you'll get a bunch. Anyways, I left Anyuan, Fujian on June 7, and headed west into Jiangxi Province. This was a mountain road, but it was paved, and it actually went fairly quickly, and once I crossed into Fujian I had a nice long downhill stretch, that if it wasn't raining quite hard, I would have taken some pictures because it was incredibly scenic. Just prior to crossing into Jiangxi, I had stopped at Wujia village in an attempt to drum up some conversation with village leaders, but nobody was around. Oh well. Anyways, I continued downhill in the rain, and eventually made it to the national road that headed towards Guangchang (a county seat) - however, instead of pulling into Guangchang, I veered to the southwest along a road that headed towards Ningdu (another county seat). My plan was to turn off at Toupi township to go towards Luokou township - but after talking to the locals, I decided to take the longer route around (about 30 more kilometers) than the shorter route, because the locals said that it was a muddy mess - and with all the rain that I got that day, it wouldn't be that fun to travel on. So I stuck to the pavement, continuing southwest until I hit Shicheng, where my back tire popped again. At least this time, it happened right by the township and I found a place to repair it in 5 minutes. However, this was not very auspicious given that the same tire had popped only a day earlier on the way up to Anyuan. I kept on riding on to the north, and by now it was starting to get later in the day (around 5pm), but Luokou was only another 20km further and it was a good road, so I figured I should be able to make it by 6 - 6:30, but after awhile, my back tire popped again! Something was clearly wrong with that tire! I felt exceptionally lucky though, as it happened directly in front of a tire repair shop. However, the owner wasn't around. I asked the village locals and eventually tracked him down to a Majiang (Mahjong or however you spell it) place behind a shop, where I begged him to take the time to fix my tire. But the guy was quite rude to me, and completely ignored me. He made up a lame excuse about his tire shop not being able to fix tires (yeah right) and told me to leave him alone.........it was pretty rude - but I learned my lesson - never interupt a Chinese person when they are playing Majiang. So I left the Majiang parlor, where all the locals had gathered to see the foreigner attempt to get get the owner to fix my bike when he was playing Majiang. At this point, I had two options - wait it out in the hope that eventually the Majiang game would end (not likely), or keep on going. So I started pushing my bike, and made it to the next township (called Dongshanba) at around 6:30pm. At this point, I was exhausted, (I later checked the map and I had gone over 120km) and I found a cheap hostel (10 yuan a night), and a nice local who I met invited me to dinner, so I felt better. Most importantly, I got my bike tire fixed, so I could keep on going. I fell asleep that right immediately after talking to Melanie. Today was tough!