17 Oct - Cenxi

Another grey day. The good news is that that makes riding a bit cooler, and since it was 146 km today with a number of hills, some quite steep, cool was appreciated. However it also makes the scenery look a bit drab, which gets me to my rant of the day; that is, that the scenery and indeed the whole riding experience is already adversely affected by pollution - air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, and garbage pollution. Garbage is everywhere except the pristine centres of major cities. Garbage floats in the rivers that are polluted enough by stuff you can't see. It's hard to believe that with all the advanced technology that we have that we haven't figured out a better way of dealing with garbage.

So apart from garbage, what did we do today... well we rode through busy towns....

...and not-so-busy places... this one looked like a ghost town although it is inhabited and seems to be under construction (slowly)...

We took pictures...

...of this cactus... there were fields of these...

 

...of kids in school doing their exercises in this area open to the main street...

...and if you're too young to go to school, then Mom takes you to work strapped to her back while she carries what she needs for field work in front.

We passed by an enormous ultra-modern cement factory and moments later, around the bend, found the old one that it replaced.

Remember yesterday the town that had dozens of little sawmills. Well today it was stone cutting - marble and granite?... I'm not very good on exactly what - but in today's town, this was the scene on both sides of the road for nearly a kilometer...

...the sound of these big saws cutting the rock into slabs of various thicknesses...

...and is this an illustration of how tightly integrated the work and home life can be when the laundry can be hung beside the saw that isn't going full tilt?

Weather was good enough to us that it was dry for the ride but a bit of rain after dark tonight... can't complain about that.