It's a really, really, really short distance from Yanguan to Li County. So short, in fact, that I'm going to have to find a lot of detours to keep myself occupied today because the lodging situation past Li is sufficiently uncertain that, unless I can find someone with road info, it's not a good idea for me to go past the county seat until I'm well and truly ready to go into the wild.

Today is Market Day so I start out by wandering around checking out all the people who have come into town for the social event of shopping for groceries. It doesn't add much distance to my day but it eats up a good chunk of time. Another chunk of time is consumed by the Post Office as I found a gift I want to mail to a friend in Chengdu and the lady behind the counter really doesn't want to deal with a passport. Can't I just, you know, carry what I've bought until I get to the next city?

And while it's not that I can't carry what I bought, it's more that I don't want to. I am at the Post Office now and I want to mail my gift now. Just because you've never entered a letter based name into the "sender" field on the computer doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to mail things. 

I thought the temple I headed to after the Post Office was the Salt Well Temple but it turns out that that temple is another 150 meters down the street and currently locked. There's a phone number to get it unlocked but, by this point, I've already spent well over an hour templing and my tolerance for slightly different interpretations of familiar themes in art is waning. I don't even go to revisit the Daoist Temple I spent some time at when I was in Yanguan six years ago.

Don't get me wrong, the art at the temple I visited was very impressive. The faces on the various aspects of Guanyin as mother, maiden, and crone were amazingly lifelike. It's just that it's all late 90s and early 2000s stuff. Post Cultural Revolution, there's nothing old except the building and you need to be told the building is old to know that it's old.

It's a straight flat ride from Yanguan to Li. There used to be a short steep climb but it's been routed around. The mountain is still there, it's too big to be cut away and the road's not important enough to get a tunnel but, a clever series of curved viaducts has been built and the road now goes through the bottom of the nearby gorge instead of along the top of the ridge.

Despite the circuit around town for Market Day, the time spent at the temple, the detour to check out a tourist site ultimately deemed not worth paying the entry fee to go in to, the second detour to see if the remains of the ancient city of Changdao (in Changdao Town) were worth visiting, and all the time I spent lost trying to get back to the main road from Changdao, I haven't even reached 40km by the time I reach Li.

In search of a bike shop and route information I go first this way then that way then this way again. The first two bike shops which are very definitely shown on the map just as very definitely don't seem to exist. The third bike shop is closed. The Giant, which didn't even show up on the map, is open but they don't know anything about "bike touring" or "bike clubs" and are just kind of in awe that someone would ride a bike multiple days with luggage even. From a casual glance, it also looks like the most expensive thing they sell is under 1000 yuan.

I've seen a number of people riding nice bikes. Never close enough that I can catch them but definitely sports bikes. And even if some of those people are teenagers on their way home from school, they are still quite definitely being ridden by people who are riding them because they want to rather than because a bike is the only form of transportation available to them. But, even though I've found places which sell bikes, I'm not finding a Bike Shop.

The closed place called itself a Bike Club. It sold a brand that, although not one of the major Chinese brands, is still a decent enough brand. A reasonable brand to be the flagship for a shop in a county like this one. In the hopes that he'll know something, I ask the neighboring shop (who also sells bicycles, just not nice ones). He can't give me directions to where they moved but he confidently tells me that he knows all the roads in Li County and can give me all the road information I need.

Road information like whether or not the tiny road south from Jiaokou, the one that six years ago, when I made the decision to take the bus from Li to Longnan, the "Bus of Terror" used instead of the main road, is it paved now? Yep. Paved the whole way. And what about hotels? Shiqiao (first town south of Li) doesn't have anything but Jiaokou has three or four places.

So I keep riding. I ride downhill another 20km along the banks of the Xihanshui River. Nice gradual downhill through wide open farmland flanked to either side by tall mountains. It's a warm sunny day. The little traffic I had when I was still between Li and the expressway has all but vanished. I recognize flashes of scenery from my bus ride from before it got scary. It's all wonderful.

I see one Park & Sleep when I get into Jiaokou. I assume there are others so I go looking for dinner first. This was my first mistake. Dawdling over dinner was my second. Trying to get more information about things like the location of other hotels from the owner of the Park & Sleep after he tells me he is full up tonight was probably my third mistake. I wasted at least 10 or 15 minutes that way.

I'm disappointed in the Jiaokou Police. Not in that they didn't help me find a place to stay. That was on me. My lack of planning does not constitute their emergency. Just that once they didn't help me beyond letting me know that something was available a further 15km downhill, they also didn't tell the police downhill. Which isn't just me projecting the desire that they'd been more useful for me, it's also the cops from downhill out on a safety patrol of their mountain roads discovering me walking in pitch blackness and, once I told them how I came to be there, being less than perfectly able to hide their annoyance at uphill.