Last night, after I got to the hotel that the police picked out for me, the hotel owner was like "of course I can register foreigners, there's this tab on the menu that says 境外游客 (Foreign Hotel Guest). Why wouldn't I be able to register foreigners?" And then everyone crowded around behind the front desk, myself included, for the tab to open but not work just as in Yanchi and Fengjigou and Taoshan.

Xingren is a small town with pretentions at being a big town. It looks like a big town but only so long as you travel along the axes of either the National Road (east to west) or the Provincial Road (north to south). Having an expressway exit and being the first town in Ningxia for people coming from Gansu also helps. Xingren Town has 11 Neighborhood Committees and an additional 8 Village Committees in the outlying suburbs. The total registered population (including people who have gone somewhere else to work) is 41,939.

Not counting the Traffic Police, who have their own separate police station, and who don't do the sorts of police things that local police do, there are 15 police officers in Xingren. Fifteen generally quite bored police officers who were initially quite pleased by my existence in that they had Something New to do in a Being Helpful sort of way that didn't involve any of the unpleasant raised voices physical danger parts of policing but who now are faced with the most unpleasant part of police work—paperwork.

I don't think they were actually serious about suggesting that I just go knock on someone's door and offer them money to let me stay in their home. More that by making the suggestion (and, more importantly, having me agree to it) they could truthfully tell the county-level superiors that I was going to do that and, as a result, break the registration logjam and let them go back to whatever it is they normally do on a quiet Wednesday night like badminton or cellphone games.

Now that it's been done, however, and I'm safely tucked away in a hotel, those same superiors keep coming up with new requests. Different very specific ways that other pages of my passport have to be photocopied. Things like that. Probably more but I'm only privy to the parts that intersect my world. I wish I could say I'm surprised but I'm not really. I recognize a punishment when I see one. 

I'm reasonably certain that every single page in my passport has, by now, been photographed at least once and photocopied at least twice but, because someone got their panties in a twist, come morning, despite having had my passport taken once after I was in the hotel room, it still wasn't done "right" and I'm met at breakfast by a somewhat apologetic officer to take my passport again and do it over again. I go to the police station to wait for him, to play with the station mascot (a three year old boy who clearly has at least one parent working there), and to wait.

Because I have to be different, because I can't be like most other foreigners, I don't have any tourist visas or business visas or entry visas. I have multiple residence permits. I have multiple residence permits with cancellation stamps. My first exit stamp is 10 months after my passport was issued. My most recent entry stamp is from someplace hard to find on the list of potential entry locations. I don't fit inside any of the badly labeled boxes. 

But mostly, it doesn't feel like this is because I'm different. It doesn't even feel like the people above these guys are trying for a "cover your ass" situation to make up for them, honest to goodness, having no clue either about how to go about registering a foreigner. It feels like a punishment. Tit for tat. The local police made things difficult for the higher ups so now the higher ups are making things difficult for us.

Things are not helped along in the slightest by the fact that, this morning, power is out to half the town—including the police station. This means that the police station's color scanner cannot be used. This means that the umpteenth copy of every single page of my passport cannot be sent via the Public Security Intranet. This means that while I'm at the police station seeing how loudly I can make the three year old giggle, they are off somewhere that has both power and a—no shit in 2018—fax machine.

At 9:30, I start getting antsy.
At 10:00, I start getting pushy.
At 10:30, I get insistent.

I've seen the topo profile for today's ride and if I don't leave very soon I'm going to have a rough time making it to the closest of the three possible places to stay assuming that AMap is even correct about there being lodging in a random village. Otherwise, I might have to actually go with "randomly knocking on someone's door". It might even be at someplace still within the technical bounds of their jurisdiction.

I'm not sure if they actually were finished by 10:45 or if my subtle threat (that was less a threat and more a realistic assessment of the situation) percolated upwards to the person making busy work punishment duty but, at 10:45, with a surprising amount of good cheer considering what I'd put them through, I was waved on my way.

There weren't very many interesting detours available to me throughout the day. Just two more rammed earth forts. Unfortunately, with the clock ticking down until sunset and sunset at 1700m being a very cold proposition, I couldn't stop to explore. I briefly stopped near the one inside a village and asked someone questions. Either he knew nothing and was making stuff up by telling me the fort is "50 or 60 years old" or Ningxia's recent history is a lot more interesting than I thought.

It was a pretty day with lots of dramatic distant mountains and not-so-gradual uphills which the intersection of the terrain and my perception made into false flats. Given the brown and gray colors of the autumn landscape, the cold gray weather and looming clouds actually made things prettier in an odd sort of way.

With no time available in my pinched schedule for meals, I snacked on the road from calorie dense things like oily dried tofu and jars of canned fruit in sugar syrup.

When I got tired and wanted to rest instead of continuing to bike, I put on Escape Pod, listened to stories, and kept riding. I made it to the first lodging point early enough that, if the terrain favored me, I probably could have made it to the second before dark. The first place, locked up though it was, answered their phone and, with that, I was done for the day.