empires
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This post is about a 25km walk from Shouyang to Taianyi. The road takes me to an altitude of about 1000m, and it is pretty rural.
The world has two faces. There is the city:
And there is the countryside:
It seems as though more and more people are living in more and more populated places. This is called urbanisation, and many countries seem to want more and more of it.
So if a lot of people are leaving the countryside, does this mean that there will soon be parts of the world with nobody inhabiting them?
A beautiful and yet scary thought.
I mean, I like the countryside. It feels much calmer than the city. It doesn’t have parks. Instead it has forests and fields and rivers and mountains.
But to me it’s not just about the nature itself. I like the interaction of humans with nature:
Big bull, small man.
Empires have been built upon this.
the road gets higher
I had reached an altitude of over 1100m by now. The 40km of the day before were wearing me down, and walking didn’t feel like fun this way.
The malicious mongrels were still everywhere on my walk from Shouyang to Taianyi:
I think this was actually a dog family. They were okay thought. They just quietly feasted on a pile of garbage and didn’t even take notice of me.
Goooooood doggos!
Then there was this building on the side of the road that called itself “Grand Hotel”:
I didn’t go in to inquire.
There were more things to see on the road:
Things that were falling apart. Like me.
Well, no. It’s not that bad with me. I’m in a small guesthouse in the countryside, there is a (working) radiator next to my bed, and I am watching a Chinese TV series about women in the military.
I have banana chips and nothing to worry about.