Yesterday evening, at the police station, when they told me it was very nearly all downhill from here to Jingyuan County, what they really meant was "if you arrived in our town with two hours to spare before sunset, why didn't you keep going? Why did you have to be our problem?"

Now, it so happens, that it is, in fact, mostly downhill from here to Jingyuan County. That even with the uphills and the general tiredness of a long day in the saddle, I probably could have made it to Jingyuan County if I'd had the necessary information about there being that much downhill and trusted the source of that information.

It actually took me two and a half hours after breakfast to get from Liupanshan to Jingyuan but I was riding slow and enjoying the scenery. The trucks have all but completely disappeared. Despite distances I would think far too far for walking, the side of the road between villages has sprouted a sidewalk and it seems to be in use. In many places, there is even a designated bike path. It's narrower than the road, steeper than the road, has more unpredicatable curves, and sometimes ends in decorative stepping stones or a arched half moon bridge across a creek but, other than being completely unsuitable for biking as compared to the road, well, at least it exists.
Existence is an acceptable start.

Nothing especially interesting happens for the first part of the day. On one of my few uphills, I get to watch as the traffic police pull a trucker over Fast & Furious style by cutting him off and nearly forcing him off the road. I watch them pull him out of the truck and cuff him. By the time I'm passing close enough to properly rubberneck (no way in hell I was stopping), the cuffs had come off. The only obvious thing I could see going on was that his license plate was rather deliberately obscured with mud but that didn't really seem to justify the degree of response.

Five or ten minutes later the police van passed me. The truck, which had initially been going the other direction, never did. Even having been arrested and then unarrested by the Chinese police, I can't imagine that any situation grave enough to involve handcuffs was so quickly resolved. Best I can assume was that the original driver was in the back of the van that passed me and some officer was left waiting at the truck for a tow or a driver or a team of people with single-use rubber gloves and digital cameras.

More downhill after Jingyuan. So much downhill in fact that even though it's now fully sunny and actually getting to be pleasantly warm, I have to stop and get out my windbreaker and my silk glove liners.

A bit past Jingyuan—on the approach to Jingheyuan and my last confirmed potential lodging in Ningxia—I see yet another giant rammed earth fort with bits of greenery and stuff growing off of the walls. This one, however, appears to be new. I mean, it looks just as old as many of the old ones but it has to be new. The gates of the fort are conveniently just the same width as a driveway and it's got a luxury housing complex inside it.

Jingheyuan is where the expressway ends. It's also where the upgrades to the S101 completely stop. From wide sweeping National Road standard lanes with gentle grades, broad curves, and decorative bike paths, I go to a mix of dirt road semi-destroyed by construction vehicles working on the expressway, completely unpaved dirt roadbed that sometimes has been compacted, and rutted potholed mess of really badly maintained provincial road.

As I continue towards Xinmin Township and the border with Gansu, I start to think that maybe my plan of checking out the Song Dynasty Shiwan Buddhist Grottoes, seeing if Xinmin has lodging, and flipping a coin between going back to Jingheyuan or going ahead into Gansu might maybe not be such a great plan after all. In Gansu I'd have two townships that show no lodging but which might have something available if I rock on up close enough to sunset and then a town that definitely has places to stay.

Despite the road conditions, I'm making really good time. The road which the Grottoes are just off of is actually a currently paved road and seems to pretty much be all downhill the whole way into Gansu. It also gets me a couple of additional route options that, GPS being what it is, aren't actually optimal routes but that's why I prefer to tour in countries where I've got at least some language ability to ask questions like "should I really try to take this track over the mountain?"

The Grottoes were not exactly easy to find. Then, when I found them, they ended up being impossible to visit. Not that I didn't try. Not that I won't perhaps try again some day. Just that the landslide which had very definitely damaged one of the two caves was not something sufficiently solid for climbing up it to be a good idea. Things observably being a "bad idea" rarely stops me from doing them but when bits of dirt started skittering down around me, I decided that the risk of causing another landslide and damaging more of the cultural site (or myself!) was too high.

(I've since managed to get in contact with the Ningxia Provincial Bureau of Cultural Affairs and Antiquities to report the landslide to them. One of my friends also found the contact information for someone in the People's Government of Xinmin Township who I will notify as well.)

Since the farm road which I was now on was paved whereas the main road which I had been on wasn't, I was inclined to stick with back roads. To get into Gansu, AMap wanted to send me up and over the mountain on a track which looked unpromising from the moment I turned down it and was confirmed a really really really bad idea when I asked the locals.

They thought I could stay on this road all the way to Huating. Granted, that would turn this into an unusually long day for a day when the sun sets at a proper hour (i.e. 8pm or later) but I hadn't really taken any particularly long breaks, had only made the one abortive attempt at an off-bike detour, and was mostly going downhill.

After Hexi Town the roadworks started up again but the scenery was so pretty I didn't mind. Then, after Cedi Town, the trucks started up again and that I kind of minded. However, the trucks and the buses and the volume of traffic and the potholes also came at a time when I was down to around 1400m elevation and there was so damn much oxygen in the air after last night's 1800m or this morning's peak at just over 2000 that I simply could not be grumpy. Even grinding up nasty switchbacks only to ease my way down again in the middle of traffic, I was having a brilliant time.

I made it into Huating as the sun was going full dark. Found massage before I found a suitable seeming hotel and realized that I had been something like three weeks without a massage. It was a good massage too.

Aiming for a combination of "low hassle" factor and nearness to food, I picked a moderately expensive place (118 yuan a night). The Gansu version of the Hotel Guest Registration Software was something I'd never seen before and the foreigner part of it wasn't so much not working as specifically not enabled. (Not in a disabled fashion so much as a "This Site Temporarily Under Construction" sort of warning when you clicked on it.) They called the police to let them know I was there and to ask what to do and the police were like "she's biking? That's so cool!" Then they sent the police a photo over WeChat of me holding my passport.

Later on, when I came back from dinner, they would tell me that the police had specifically asked them to photocopy the pages of my passport with the information that I would have filled in if the foreigner part of the registration software had been enabled but that's sort of to be expected and was no great bother.