I am so glad I did not follow the Trek shop's suggestion on going to New Beichuan first and then Old Beichuan. The road up and around and through the mountains to Old Beichuan is a beautiful twisty country thing. The road from Old Beichuan to New Beichuan is, well, large.

It's not a bad road per se. Certainly if I hadn't been spending the past two months traveling through scenery, I might even call it scenic. As large straightish roads that aren't expressways go, it very nearly was scenic.

In this direction at least, I'm pretty much only going downhill. The other way I'd have the bursts of truck traffic and general uninterestingness while creeping my way up into the mountains. So yeah, definitely a good thing that I didn't follow their instructions.

I make very good time to Anchang Town what used to be the county seat for An County before they decided to redraw the boundaries of Beichuan and build a new city for the displaced to the south of Anchang in Yongchang. Without actually going southeast of Yongchang to Huagai (the new county seat for An) and just looking at the map, it seems likely that Anchang would have eventually lost the county government anyways as Huagai is at least five or ten times the size Anchang and suddenly deciding to move the government to the biggest and most important city in a region is the sort of the thing China does.

From Anchang Town to Beichuan, I ride entirely along the Anchang River levee in traffic free bliss. I'd meant to get a minor, persistent, and annoying shifting issue fixed in Jiangyou but when I discovered that the shop I'd picked had already decided to unpack their wheel truing stand in order to help me, I looked around, realized that the necessary tools were almost certainly also already packed away, and decided to quietly not mention it.

Despite having a few pricey items, the Giant in New Beichuan, when I found it, was so thoroughly not what I consider to be a bike shop (like seriously, the tires on the mountain bike in the window were so flat that the bike was basically sitting on its rims) that I just used their bathroom and made small talk.

There was a Xidesheng showing up on the map if I headed into Mianyang but I decided that I'd gone this long without fixing my problem, I could go a little longer and, after leaving them, I went to rejoin my planned out route by heading towards Tashui Town. By the time I got to the intersection that would take me to Tashui, however, I had quite a lot of daylight left to me and Xiushui (with a dozen or more hotels to Tashui's two) seemed a better end goal for the evening.

Particularly after the very nice very rural ride I had south from new Beichuan, this wide flat straight road (even cut in half for roadworks) was pretty boring but the kilometers went by nice and fast.

In search of the best prices and best quality on food and lodging, I aimed for the central part of Xiushui where the main road passes through town. Nice cheap dinner. Nice cheap hotel that was excited to have their first foreign customer and let me behind the front desk to register myself on the computer.

About an hour or ninety minutes after I was in my room, heat on, laundry done, and a glorious hot shower taken, the police knocked on the door to ask if they could see my passport and photograph the pages that would have been photocopied back in the days of a paper registration form and to just generally be nosy (but friendly nosy) about my trip.