When I take my PulseOx reading in the morning, it's a nice healthy 97. Once I start really moving around, it'll drop some, but I swear, I feel like my body went into overproduction last night with the red blood cells. I've got perfectly good double fudge chocolate chip cookies in my care package from Hainan and I've got literal cravings so bad that all I want to do is get down to the breakfast buffet and stock up on as many hard boiled eggs as I can consume.

It's a fairly standard Chinese hotel breakfast buffet. Nothing is straight up inedible but, at the same time, none of it is as good as the same versions of the same food would be from the usual small cheap breakfast place. All the nights in all the hotels I've stayed at in countries not in Asia throughout my entire life is probably still less than the average number of nights I spend at hotels in Asia in a single year but, I suddenly realize, it's not just a China thing, the breakfasts at most hotels suck.

Frozen bagels.
Bags of pancake mix.
Microwaved muffins.
Watery orange juice.

Bare minimum type effort sort of things.

I can't imagine why, all these years, I was expecting China to be different. Why I kept being bothered by the fact that middle class Chinese hotels have sucky breakfasts that are only marginally salvageable by the fact that you can eat before you check out.

If I was staying at a Days Inn in the US, I would get a better breakfast at a Dunkin' Donuts. So, of course, it only makes sense that if I'm staying at the local equivalent (okay, in this particular case, it's maybe the Hilton equivalent) I would also get a breakfast that is demonstrably worse than the breakfast I would find if I left the premises.

Today we've got hard boiled eggs, hot milk that is definitely at least half water, two kinds of congee, some steamed vegetables, and at least six different variety of bao. To avoid spending money that doesn't need to be spent, to avoid annoying any Muslim guests for serving pork, and to avoid annoying the non-Muslims for serving any meat products which are less delicious than yummy yummy pork, the bao are all various vegetarian fillings.

The new G341 National Road that I joined up with yesterday seems, for now, to have stopped at the edge of Haicheng. The combination of the ongoing upgrades being made to the S202 immediately to the east of town and the Baidu Baike article on the G341 lead me to believe that I was right in the X404 county road I planned to take being in the process of getting upgraded to a national road, it's just that it hasn't happened yet.

In addition to the *cough* problems *cough* I'm otherwise having in Ningxia with lodging, I'm also having some map related issues. The number of roads which exist in reality but not on paper nor electronic format is highly unusual for China. Much of the road information is wildly out of date with all sorts of National Roads still being shown as dirt tracks and dirt tracks being shown as the planned major road that they will someday be.

For example, instead of being in Haicheng Town, my paper maps showed the Haiyuan County county seat as being another 40km farther east in Sanhe Town. I figured that Haicheng Town—conveniently located in the center of the county—was the new county seat and was kind of confused yesterday to find, amid all the flurry of new construction, that it looked like it had been a city for quite some time. According to Baidu, the plan is (that's is not was, the Chinese internet is not so good about updating things) for the Haiyuan government to move to Heicheng in 2008, after which Heicheng will be renamed Sanhe. For now, however, Haicheng Town (and, yes, the similarity is just as confusing in Chinese) is still the county seat, Heicheng Town still exists as an entity, and there is also a teeny tiny town near Heicheng called Sanhe.

In any case, when I get to my turn-off, my X road is still an X road. It's an extremely wide and well paved X road but, in terms of little things like the sharpness of curves, the depths of hill cuts, the grade of hills, and the way in which it doesn't completely avoid small settlements or towns, it's still very definitely an X road. Which is fine by me. Given the choice, I'd tour on nothing but X roads.

Today is a mostly downhill sort of day. That's not to say that I don't have quite a few uphills. In point of fact, I've got two major climbs of over 300m elevation gain per climb. It's just that I've got a lot more cumulative descent. So much more in fact that, by the end of the day, I'm some 300m lower than I started out and I'm feeling fiiiiiine.

I'm sure that people with a more expensive pharmacopoeia of experience than my own, would tell me I'm wrong but, so far as I'm concerned, there is nothing in the world quite so nice as oxygen. Even when you aren't running low, it perks you up like a cup of coffee. And when you are running low, it's like coming out of a fog to crystal perfect clarity of vision. And energy. So. Much. Energy.

Despite the statistical unlikelihood given that all of the music on my phone is randomly downloaded off of Netease, I swear I didn't get a single boring song all day. I was even singing along sometimes. Mostly not when on the uphills but sometimes, even on those. And I generally didn't even snarl at people who were being pushy and annoying about trying to take a photo with me at lunch despite not bothering to ask.

I take the time to explore one of the the four forts that I see from the road only to find that it has currently lived in houses inside of it. Two of the others are on high bluffs above the road with no obvious way up while the fourth, clearly unoccupied and falling down, is on the far side of the river. Even though it's chilly and threatening drizzle, it's still a fine fine fine day.

I've got a few more days to go yet before I dip back below 1500 and stay there for a while but if this is how nice I feel merely getting back to 1500, getting back down to 1200 or lower is going to be amazing.

Heicheng certainly has the look of a place that they were intending to develop into something bigger but than got distracted and decided not to. It takes me an age to find the police station and then, once I find it, an age more to find any people other than an inexplicable 9 year old silently waiting in one of the offices. He doesn't know where the adults are and he doesn't volunteer why he is there so I leave him to go back to sitting alone.

I try my new tactic of "the system is broken and no one knows why" which, coupled with the fact that this is my ninth day in Ningxia (or is it my tenth?) and I've volunteered that I've successfully registered in all sorts of places which they think I oughtn't be able to means that they have a surprisingly smooth time navigating their way through to getting a paper copy of the Temporary Residence Registration Form for Foreigners (which, by the way, is completely different from last night's which was completely different from Zhongning's).

Again, I am sent to the most expensive place in town. Again it is someplace I would never stay of my own volition. However, unlike every other place I've stayed so far (including places the police have sent me to), they are able to make the online registration system work. At 188 yuan for the night, I'm ecstatic to find that I've got a bath tub but saddened to discover a lack of hot water or heat. (Even though the in room thermometer is reading 13°C, October 20th is 5 days too early for them to turn the furnace on.) Thankfully, around 8pm, they come by with an electric mattress pad as, otherwise, it would have been a very miserable night.