The map shows three hotels in Liuquan Township. At least two of them exist. The third one probably exists as well, only in Taiyangshan Town rather than Liuquan. For reasons I cannot begin to understand nor explain AMap, Baidu Maps, Google Maps, and my paper maps all insist that Liuquan Township is Taiyangshan Town. There's about 35 kilometers between the two places so, while it's certainly possible—especially given the games China likes to play with renaming places—that the place which is currently known as Liuquan was, at some time in the past, known as Taiyangshan, it's certainly not the case right now.

I found the Liuquan Local Police Station while I was looking for Hotel #3. I was looking for #3 as it was specifically a 商务宾馆 (Business Hotel) while #1 was a not especially inspiring looking 招待所 (literally means "Hostel") and #2 an only slightly less uninspiring looking 宾馆 (Hotel). If only I'd known that the owner of #2 wasn't completely finished all of her paperwork to operate legally and only cared about the color of my money, I'd have skipped the hassle and just stayed there.

Instead, I had the hassle.
I was the hassle.

By the time I left the police station, I'd already figured out that #3 was a map error and I went back towards the main area of town. As #2 was the first lodging I came across and was conveniently close to food, I went there. It was quite nice. Sprung mattress. Decent sized room. Decent sized bathroom. Owner helped me carry my stuff up the stairs. And it was only 80 yuan a night.

While I was eating dinner, the police called me. They wanted to know if I'd checked in yet and where so they could finish filling out the form with the correct details. They weren't happy with me for being at #2. I was supposed to be at #1. Not that I recalled them saying anything to me regarding #2 versus #1 but, yeah, they made her refund my money, made me check out, and made me check back in at #1. This was how I found out that she wasn't actually completely legal yet.

Hotel #1 was significantly less nice than Hotel #2. The entrance was through a hardware store. He did not help me carry my stuff upstairs. He did not offer to help me carry my stuff upstairs. The room cost 100 yuan a night. The mattress was the kind of soft foam topper that's supposed to go, well, on top of a normal mattress and not just the bed platform. The room was slightly larger than the beds. The entrance to the bathroom, which was tiny, was partially blocked by one of the beds. Like the sort of proper hotel that has a mini-bar or things you might damage, I had to put down a security deposit equal to the cost of one night's stay. A sign on the wall in my room none too prominently indicated that check out time was 10:00am (in China, it's pretty much always noon) and that checking out after check out time would be charged one full night's stay (the norm is to be charged a half day if you check out by 3pm).

I did not like Hotel #1.

So even though I had a good long think about the fact that I really wasn't very nice to those police officers, the unquality of Hotel #1 versus Hotel #2, and making me move hotels, and the probability that morning shift would be different people anyway, it all combined to make me decide not to go apologize to them in the morning. When you think about it, it's not specifically their fault that the people who should be training them to do their job have deliberately misinformed them with unwritten rules, but it was specifically their fault to make me move hotels.

And, to be fair, I was a bully and should have at least stopped by and made the effort to see if the guy was there.

After breakfast, it took me a little over an hour to get to Hongsipu—where they were trying to send me last night. I definitely could have made it yesterday. I just would have had to skip taking pictures of any of the many fabulous mosques and would have spent the whole ride obsessing over whether or not I was going to make it before sunset. Then I would have gotten to the police station tired, cranky, and hungry before probably finding myself in some version of the exact same situation I ended up in. Only tired, cranky, and hungry. Which is never a good recipe for pleasant social interaction.

In Hongsipu I spent at least 30 minutes wandering through the Halal livestock market. At one point, for what seemed like no obvious reason at first, a police car inched slowly forward into the crowded market. I didn't see exactly what was happening when the person (or people, at least one woman anyways) ended up in the back of the police car because I was doing my best at that time to get as far away as I could from any potential riot.

Wiki tells me that 30-40% of the population of Ningxia is Muslim. Mostly Hui, their relationship with the Han isn't quite as shaky as it is in places like Xinjiang but, from an outsider's perspective, China seems to have diligently studied the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians and is now determined to repeat every single thing which Israel has done wrong. (I'm not saying that the Palestinians are innocent. Just that Israel has done plenty of damn stupid things over the years.) 

Again, speaking from an outsider's perspective, it's almost like China is trying to radicalize their Muslim population.

From Hongsipu, AMap gave me two options to go to Zhongning. I picked the closer of the two which meant that my first 20 kilometers or so was done entirely on a narrow concrete farm road through the desert. Eventually, I merged on to a main road and stuck with it the rest of the day.

My very late lunch in Enhe Town happened to be just across the street from the China Tractor Museum. A semi-private collection of an enormous number of tractors in different sizes, shapes, colors, and eras, it's also a parts yard and repair shop. They're pretty sure I'm their first foreign visitor and I'm pretty sure the private tour I got was as much because they really wanted to show off their tractors to someone willing to listen as it was because I'm their first foreign visitor.

In Zhongning, I did not argue with the police. I did stop by the police station ostensibly to "ask directions" to a hotel they knew would take me without problems. They were actually quite friendly. Their knowledge of what was required for my registration at the hotel was completely wrong but the hotel they sent me to (which was more than I wanted to pay but not a ridiculous price for what I got) had taken foreigners before and sort of kind of knew what they were doing.

Scratch that. They knew it could be done. They just weren't willing to accept my help with registering until a good two hours had passed with me in the room. And then, when I came down, it still took me another 30 minutes to untangle the software gore.