I'm stuck riding on the National Road for the next while and some. 

My originally planned route calls for me to be swinging north for a bit here and hitting up some potential grottoes but I wasn't looking at any of those Maps when I picked Ankang city for Tyra to mail my camera to. I could get off the National Road and do some fun stuff in the pretty mountains by swinging to the south but doing that more or less guarantees that I will, at some point, however briefly, end up in Ziyang County.

I'm not checking the relevant government bulletins the way some people are but, apparently Ziyang has a case of Covid. Whether its an imported case from someone coming back from overseas who somehow managed to pass through all the hoops (testing before you fly, testing on arrival, testing on days 7 and 14 of centralized quarantine, and often doing an additional 7 days of home monitoring) and still ended up Covid positive after they were released into the community, one of the cases that's shown up via cold chain imported food products¹, or a false positive doesn't matter. What matters is that no few people have told me that I shouldn't even go to Ankang because Ankang is near Ziyang and that tells me that I really, really, really don't want Ziyang showing up on my trace code².

As a result, it's the National Road for me.

It's rained at some point during the night so the insanely hot temperatures have cooled down to merely hot but despite my spending the whole night in air conditioning, the heat rash that I first noticed on my right upper thigh near the skin graft donor site has now spread to a large patch about the size of my spread out palm and fingers. Much of my right arm is also bumpy.

There's nothing inherently wrong with National Roads. In fact, if you want to go fast, they're a great improvement over the sorts of roads I usually take. It's just that there's rarely anything worth stopping to look at as they are corridors of constant traffic that haven't gone through the boom bust boom bust cycle that produces interesting developmental contrasts or historical flotsam. 

The scenery (while pretty enough) is far distant from me; the majority of cars and trucks have been siphoned off by the expressway; it's hot; and, there aren't even any marked sites for me to stop and be disappointed by. I'll manage a street of old buildings as I pass through Hanyin County, a temple with an enthusiastic caretaker who appreciates my interest in the idols but who can't speak standard Mandarin well enough for me to understand the answers to any of the questions I ask him, an urban pagoda that's not really in a location where I can leave my bike, a temple that doesn't excite me enough to go the last 20 meters uphill, and finally the town of Jianchi where I circle circle circle half checking out all the lodging options in order to find the one that "feels" best from the outside and half trying to get my daily distance up over 50km.

As the one that feels right decides, rather than let me attempt to touch his computer, that we will register me by way of walking to the police station (which has recently moved from barely 200 meters away from his hotel to 1.5km away), this turned out to be an unnecessary effort on my part but it was at least an unnecessary effort that gave me a good feeling for the layout of the town and its few remaining historical buildings.

We spend what seems like forever at the police station but was probably only two hours. As no one is angry or annoyed or telling me I can't do something, I find the whole thing quite amusing as I live update my friends over WeChat with important information like "the guy in the purple basketball shorts is being yelled at over the phone by someone with access to the police station security cameras" as none of us (not me, not the hotel owner, not the police) were wearing masks and the person who Basketball Shorts had just called to ask "how do I do this?" was more concerned over us not wearing masks than he was with actually answering Basketball Shorts' question. 

Being the kind of lush who has his own still, the hotel owner is annoyed that time that could have been spent "doing business" (read: getting drunk with or without friends) was wasted by the police and local government being inefficient. 

Having experienced the Chinese police actually being inefficient and/or incompetent (versus merely not knowing how to do something they'd never encountered before), I thought things could have been handled much quicker but that they were done reasonably well. Besides which, with the exception of the part where we trying to get their attention from outside so that they'd let us in, we spent almost the entire rainstorm inside the police station and if they'd been any quicker we would have had to walk back in the rain.

¹ I realize that a lot of people are dubious about the idea that Covid is being occasionally reintroduced to China via imported food but it's either that or it's sporadic cases with no other traceable link and did you read about the number of Covid positive cases some meat packing plants in the midwest were having at one point?

² Everyone has two codes: the health code³ and the trace code⁴. 

³ In theory, whenever you go somewhere crowded, you are supposed to scan that location's code. At least in the places I go, no one does though I understand its different in some of the big cities. If people actually were following this rule, then, if someone who was suspected of having Covid had been in the same place as you in the same time frame, your code would turn yellow and you would be notified to go get tested. 

While I find the implications of what a bad actor could do with the health code to be more than a little chilling, it's also a real cool application of Big Data for Public Health.

⁴ The trace code is the useful one for proving you haven't been near any outbreaks as it shows the general geographic location of the towers your mobile phone has pinged in the last 14 days.