Back in 2012, when I went over the mountain that isn't there any more before Li, I could feel that me and altitude still weren't friends. Since the topo map showed the main road as going up over 2000 meters (with a peak at nearly 3000 meters) for some 40 kilometers, and since I'd just recently ended up spending the night in the hospital while on supplemental oxygen after peaking at a mere 2200, I didn't think it would be such a good idea for me to ride that road.
So, I took a bus instead.

Li County is under the jurisdiction of Longnan. So, you'd think a bus from Li to Longnan would take the main road. What with there being two buses a day from Li to Longnan in 2012, there's even a possibility that the earlier bus—the one I missed—might have. In any case though, I ended up on a rural bus which took a rather more circuitous route (or not, as the case may be, Google seems to think it's actually a whole 6km shorter).
I called it "The Bus of Terror".

Early on, it wasn't too bad. Uncomfortable, perhaps. But not too bad. Being "not too bad" didn't last however. Soon enough it was on narrow dirt roads often hanging on to the edge of cliffs with no safety barriers of any kind. I spent much of that part of the journey playing a mental game called "if we fall over the edge here, how quickly will we die?" My constant sense of fear was not in any way, shape, or form helped along by a driver who regularly answered the phone with both hands while steering with his knees or who thought it was a good idea to completely turn around in order to gesture out the window for me at something interesting I really ought to see.

In retrospect I realize that he drove that bus on that road in that direction every other day and that just as he knew where to show me to postholes down near the water's edge that had once supported a boardwalk so boatmen could pull rafts upstream, he also would have known exactly how long this straightaway was or when the next curve was coming. Also, over the entire journey, including the rare paved bits, assuming my recollection of "six and half hours" is right and that the distance hasn't changed too much, we seem to have averaged a mere 26kph.

The current situation couldn't be more different.

Even before I got to Jiangkou, it was obvious that the road had been upgraded. I mean, for starters, the whole thing was paved. And not just patchy here and there paving to take care of the gnarly bits, completely and totally paved with drainage ditches and shoulders and everything.

After Jiangkou, I was mostly too busy concentrating on riding as fast as I could before the last light completely went away but I noticed that some of the fords which had been there last time still were. 

Last time, throughout the course of the day, there had been fourteen of them, including a ford just downstream from a closed-to-traffic dangerous bridge. The dangerous bridge is still there. The ford downstream from it has been replaced with a modern bridge. Four other fords that I noticed have been paved. Two more have acquired a wonder of civil engineering where the often dry, currently dry, but sometimes very wet watercourse has a dedicated aqueduct going over the road.

The road doesn't currently have a route number. Just a name. The signs put up by the Road Management Bureau with info like the name and phone number of the person responsible for maintaining this section of road indicate that it's been paved to "National Road standards". There are scenic pull overs with public toilets and nice little tables to sit at. If it weren't for the flash of memory here and there, or the things that I'd rather definitely taken photos of, I'd've had a very hard time believing I was in the same place.

Working on the information that the Longlin Police gave me before they saw my photos from 2012 I turned east at Leiba Township and continued along the Xihanshui River. Both of the potential routes I'd worked out as probably being what I'd done on the bus had had me going south from here but, even if the police were completely wrong, they specifically felt that turning east here gave me the best balance between potential food and lodging options and reasonable levels of road construction. (In terms of road construction levels, they actually felt that their roads through the remote mountains were better than the main road since their roads had all been built more recently.)

For most of the next 30 kilometers nothing looked the slightest bit familiar. It was all beautiful, however, and I really didn't mind that they'd sent me somewhere that wasn't the road I'd taken on the bus because this road was pretty awesome. Then, perhaps a kilometer or two before I got to Daqiao I came across the raw rocky tunnel which I'd photographed six years before and discovered that, actually, they were completely correct and I'd been on the same road all along.

In Daqiao I found lodging first then I went to the police station to register. They were friendly, professional, thrilled to have a foreign tourist who was happy to be in their grotty little town, and willing to fight their way through the learning curve of the not especially simple to use nationwide Public Security Intranet Temporary Residence Registration for Foreigners software which is mostly non simple because it presumes that all foreigners who will be registering using it are registering homes and not hotels.

(I kept dodging the "what's your salary" question, so one of the officers asked what I pay my employees. He then asked if I had any interest in hiring any monolingual soon to be former police officers from Gansu. As I was not interested, he said he guessed he'd just have to continue being a cop.)