The day starts out with a flat tire. It's on my rear wheel and, being as I've got very little practice in getting the Rohloff off and back on again, I decide to pull the inner tube out and patch it without removing the wheel. This is a massive pain in the ass but given how fumble fingered I currently am at remounting the front wheel¹, I really don't want to take the rear wheel off unless I have to.

This gets me to nearly 11 by the time I'm on the road. Last night's nectarines and some more of the walnut candy in the morning have left me sufficiently sated that the lack of any food options on my way downhill and out of town don't bother me very much.

The first climb is a nice gentle one that's interrupted three times by people who saw me on TikTok. 

Bearing in mind that I'm still a bit confused about this whole "having fans" thing or how to handle it but the weirdest of the three was definitely the guy who drove up behind me solely to give me a bag full of drinks before turning around and going back the way he came. He didn't even ask to take a picture with me nor did I see him take any pictures of me.

Just a "hi", "here, for you" and "bye".

At least the second car and driver were passing by and recognized me rather than specifically having gone out of their way to ambush me with a gift². The third was parked by the side of the road overseeing a construction site.

It's the third who told me about the landslide near the top of the big climb that ought to have been the middle of my day but which turned out to be most of my day. I suppose when he said "a bicycle will have no problem getting through", he probably meant the alt route. I'm not sure. All I know is that the work crews didn't have "no through road" signs up until 100m before the impassable bit and, by then, I'd already done three kilometres of unpleasantly steep climbing.

Being as I'm running my GPS navigator and being as I'd turned it off on the climb because it's insistence that I turn around for the farm road alt route was annoying me, while I'd like to grouse about no one specifically telling me that even bikes couldn't make it through, I really can't blame anyone other than myself.

The alt route climb only went about 20m higher in elevation but, despite being substantially longer, it was also substantially more brutal with stretches of near flat followed by crazy steep switchbacks that somehow always seemed to be the time that cars now wanted to pass in both directions.

As a result, I got to the intersection for Paosha Town on the cusp of sunset and, being as it wasn't showing any lodging that seemed likely to have a shower, I decided against going a kilometer west to the Paosha Police Station in favor of another ten east to Cheng County.

I turned up at the police station as I've been doing most nights in this province and got told—as I haven't gotten since Tianshui—that I'd be needing to go to the Foreigner Hotel.

This, of course, went over with me like the proverbial lead balloon and—as is so often the case when this happens—I demanded documentation. So, they went looking for documentation. And couldn't find it. Could only find the same laws I've already got bookmarked. The ones that don't mention any special lodging regulations for foreigners on the grounds of those regulations not being allowed to legally exist.

They weren't real happy about that.

But they (or at least the senior officer who had taken over the role of arguing with me) weren't ready to back down yet. Still wanted me to go the Foreigner Hotel. That's the one that knows how to register foreigners.

But it cost substantially way too much. Like 3x the top end of my budget level of too much. 

By now both sides of the argument were firmly entrenched and neither side was budging. I'd also drawn quite the crowd of curious onlookers from the police station's overnight dormitory, phones in hand trying to find any law that wouldn't—inconceivably— continu to not prove them not right.

Then, I brought out the mortars and fired shots across No Man's Land. "I've got a tent. If you won't let me pay an ordinary price for an ordinary hotel, I'm perfectly willing to sleep in my tent."

So, instead, I got to pay an ordinary price for an extraordinary hotel.

I've mentally tagged the various officers who've been involved. My favorite is the guy who would have been doing his BA at Hainan University about the same time I was studying Chinese there, who had been chatting with me all friendly like before the Powers That Be had answered the question about registering me with "may only go to a luxury hotels" and who clearly wanted to chat with me more about people or places we might have in common but who couldn't do so while I was frustratingly arguing his entire police station to a standstill. 

Next favorite was the guy that had come out to rubberneck perhaps ten minutes into their ordeal. He came up to me as I was leaving to express his admiration for me at my successfully holding my ground when haggling with the police³.

"What do you do in China?

"I'm a translator."
"Oh, like for foreign tourists?"
"Like for the government."
"The American government?"
"The Chinese."
"Ohhhh. I see." 

Back in Qingcheng when the PSB paid for my hotel⁴, the hotel was able to register me on the computer. However, both here and when I went to the "able to take foreigners hotel" in Jingchuan, it was still photocopies and an ordinary notebook which, combined with the way things happened in Ningxia in 2018, is really making me wonder if the computer system for registering us isn't disabled so much as broken.

¹ Once upon a time, the roads in China were much worse, they didn't get swept very often, and the tire quality was terrible. In those days of yore I could swap a tube and remount a wheel in 15 minutes or less. 

² I think I need to make a specific video on what sort of bottled drinks I like, and why I really would prefer local fruit (in moderation) or something that can be pannier snacks.

³ I'm annoying. I'm frustrating. What I'm not though is anything that gives them the ability to do anything to me. 

⁴ For values of paid for my hotel that include having someone who owed them a favor foot the actual bill.