Zhuhai to Macau (Stage 7)

I am behind with the blog, so these entries are from memories 4-5 days old. Hopefully that means the journal will get more concise!

First of all, I have to thank my sister Erinne for posting the slideshows to the last round of blog entries from China. Due to government restriction of www.blogspot.com, I had to use a proxy server to post my daily summaries, and the connection was much too slow to upload photos as well. So Erinne added the photo slideshows remotely from picasaweb.com to the blog. The genius of technology plus the willingness of sisterly help in action!

The transfer to Zhuhai in the morning was unremarkable until suddenly the sea came into view. I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the maps in my guide book, and my general sense was that we had been traveling steadily north – away from the South China Sea. However, it now looked as though we’d made a loop counterclockwise around the enormous bay (or river delta – I’m not sure what to call it as it’s not named on any of my maps), at the outlet of which lies Hong Kong.

Anyway, the coastline looked faintly Mediterranean, with the narrow road winding among coves with palm trees lining the beach (OK, so that’s maybe not typically Mediterranean, but the general look was). There were some great views of boats at harbor, but we were moving too fast for my camera to pick them up.

We arrived at the race start: an empty stretch of boardwalk with the regular tents set up. Behind the boardwalk were tidal flats of mud, wafting the stench of sulfur. Amaurys improvised noseplugs out of tangerine peels. There was a brief diversion when, one by one, the soigneurs of all the teams stealthily snuck over to the media tent and stole plastic chairs for their riders to sit on; the team tents had been empty when we’d arrived and of course it wouldn’t do for the racers to have to stand!

Amaurys had great position once again as the race drew to a close, but ended up only 5th, I think, in the sprint. It had bunched up around the last U-turn and he’d lost some position. I think we were all thinking about how different the race may have been for Mengoni if that first stage hadn’t been first, and if Pollo and Wilson had still had their numbers pinned on. Just a few more men for a lead-out, and Amaurys had the goods to win a couple stages. Ah well…excuses always sound bad, and of course if everyone who felt he had a chance of winning always DID win, there wouldn’t be enough space on the podium!

Tout de suite after the race, we piled into buses again and drove all of about 200M to get off to pass through Chinese immigration and customs again in preparation for our entry into Macau. This was supposed to be easy…but for whatever reason, Macau isn’t as cooperative as Hong Kong, and a bunch of people associated with the race were detained and made to purchase special visas. Among these were Amaurys and Pollo, as well as all the Russians and Uzbekis. We ended up waiting almost 2 hours for them to get out of there, and the whole time that Eugene, Alberto, and I were sitting in a piss-smelling corner waiting, the steady stream of people shuffling across the border never stopped or, indeed, even slowed. There must have been almost 200 people per minute passing through. I wondered how many Chinese nationals work in Macau.

Finally we arrived by minibus to our Macau hotel. This place, although not egregiously horrible in any respect, was our least favorite of the lot. Even though the rooms were less than spotless, the staff stopped us from bringing bikes in (Pollo wanted to change the brake pads on Amaurys’ bike, and Alberto likes to sleep with his bike under his bed, or so Pollo teases him). I couldn’t claim my luggage (which had arrived earlier) without giving the desk staff a copy of my passport….even though I was wearing team clothing and the bags had team decals on them too. Small stuff, but annoyances that set me on edge more than they should have; probably because of the frustration of all the waiting we’d already done.

The race organization had given us money to spend on dinner (and lunch the next day) since the hotel didn’t offer a dining room. So we all went out to find food. Eugene was incensed by the street design of the area around our hotel: the street was divided by a median with a large, formidable fence in the middle to stop anyone from crossing the street except at the extreme ends of a 3-block-long stretch. And then, to cross, one had to climb stairs up to an overpass! “This is so wrong, all wrong,” he kept muttering, and I was inclined to agree that it was incredibly unfriendly to pedestrians. We found a restaurant and chose to enter based on the fact that one of the Chinese teams was already seated and eating. However, we proceeded to piss off our waitress so royally by our indecision and changing of orders that I was actually surprised we ever got our food. Eugene was about to die from mortification, and Alberto and I tried, to no avail whatsoever, to placate our seething table server with plenty of “Please” and “Thank you” (both in English and Chinese).

So far Macau has failed to impress. Hopefully tomorrow’s stage – the last – will redeem the island in our eyes.