I'm not sure if the people who tell me how far it is from where I am to where I am going in terms of minutes spent have a really optimistic idea of how fast I can bike, a really poor concept of the passage of time, or both. It's 17 kilometers from the hotel to the Xumishan Grottoes. I'm pretty sure, even in a car, it would take me more than the "30 minutes ride" I'm told as I'm waved out the door by the staff.

I'm a little bit trepidatious about the Grottoes when I see that they are a nationally AAAA ranked tourist attraction because, frankly, there seems to be a direct correlation between how highly something is ranked and how little I like it. My personal ranking system for tourist sites starts from a low of "I was paid to go. You could not get me to go back even if you paid me." and continues through to a high of "I paid my own money to go. I would pay my own money to go again."

Much to my surprise, even though the site is sufficiently developed that the dedicated bicycle greenway is signposted more than 5km away from the entrance, it gets top marks.

To put it in perspective, I hate walking, I hate stairs, and I'm not especially fond of the cold. Despite that, I spent three hours walking around on stairs in the cold. 

Now some of that time was actually spent indoors at the attached museum and some of that time was spent waiting around the office area to talk with the management about errors in their translated signage and a certain translation company boss who once thought she was going to go to grad school for museum studies and who would bend over backwards to please be allowed to help them do all their wonderfully difficult (and untranslated) signs on the complicated aspects of the history of Buddhist grottoes in China.

However, most of the time was spent outside, in the cold, on the stairs, going up and down and up and down. Over here. Over there. Peeking in through gated off and grated niches until my eyes adjusted to the dark inside and I could catch the remaining hints of thousand year old wall paintings or statuary groups. This way. That way. Up again. And down again. Do I follow this trail or that one? How far to that bigger grotto?

By the time I got round to the Buddha who is big enough (about 20 meters tall) that he can be seen across the gorge from the museum I was like, yeah, nah, and went straight for the shuttle stop. Cause after all that time, I'd managed maybe 15% (20% tops) of the site and, once you know you are going to be coming back, the urgency no longer remains to absolutely try and get all the good bits crammed in. Attitudes like this are one of the things I like about the bike touring mindset versus, say, the tour group mindset. (Well that and the ability to eat 5,000 calories a day and also lose weight.)

I was told to make sure to go and check out the Ming Dynasty gongbei I'd seen from the Greenway on my way up to the Grottoes and I specifically made a point to take the road back down to Huangdou Town so that I could stop and take a look. The (apparent) caretaker was utterly and completely uninterested in having anyone who looked the vaguest bit like a tourist stopping by his tomb in the off-season and after listening to him yell at me for a bit in a language that might have been related to Chinese, I gave up with trying to respectfully indicate that I wanted to take a look because I'm interested in the history and the culture and just got back on my bike.

Since the ruins of the Huangdou Walled City were there for me to take a look at, I rode partly around the walls, through one of the gates, and around the dirt trails and farmland inside the walls.

The ticket takers at the Grottoes told me that, despite what AMap said, there were a couple of small hotels in Huangdou and I was sorely tempted to consider trying to spend the night there. However, it was still pretty early and, so far in Ningxia, my longest and most grindingly unpleasant police experiences have been the ones where they potentially thought they might be able to fob me off on someone else. It's far better to instead show up on the cusp of sunset when they have no choice.

With two hours and fifteen minutes left to go before official sunset and thirty kilometers to the town of Pengpu, I decided I should have no problem making it to Pengpu. Of course, that would assume that the topo profile on Google Maps had been correct, that my memory of the topo profile was correct, and that the road be consistently paved or at least more than a collection of interconnected potholes.

With 9 kilometers to go to Pengpu or 7 kilometers to go to Touying if I turned past the big factory complex and took the clearly newly built big wide smooth road towards the expressway and the former provincial road turned national road, I went to Touying instead. I'd really wanted to go to Pengpu, however.

Last night, when I was doing my research and trying to find out useful information (something the Chinese internet is not exactly well known for) like the address of the Pengpu police station, I found a great article about a possible wolf attack on someone's flock of goats complete with photos of the Pengpu police standing around looking very police-y at a bunch of eviscerated goats. There was also a drug bust article with a couple of cops in the middle of an enormous field of weed.

The hotel in Touying, which I found before the police station (located across the street it would turn out), didn't bother to register me and I didn't bother to push the issue.

I did get to deal with the police over dinner, however. An acquaintance of mine, back in Haikou, was recently involved in a hit and run and is currently in the hospital. She's not been having the greatest experience communicating with the Traffic Police and was somewhat uncertain as to whether anything was actually being done or if she was getting brushed off and jerked around because she's a foreigner. She put out a public request for assistance asking if anyone in our social circles knew someone in the Traffic Police, and, well, I do.
Or, I thought I did anyways.

I mean he was in the Traffic Police. It's just that promotions are something that happens. Department changes too. He apparently hasn't been in the Traffic Police since at least 15 years before I met him working traffic at the first Tour of Hainan in 2006. And he never saw any reason to correct me on my notion that he was merely in charge of some level of traffic cops.

It turns out that she wasn't being ignored; that it was in fact just poor communications; that they are trying to find the driver. However, by contacting my friend (who rather definitely is not in the Traffic Police), we didn't so much light a fire under their ass with regards to improving their communications with her as we sent a tactical nuclear ICBM from orbit.