I didn't think I was sick last night.
Miserable, yes.
Sick, no.

However, after finally getting to sleep around 1:30am (I probably napped some during the chilled hibernation between 6:15pm and 8:00pm while I waited for the just turned on hot water heater to finish heating up my shower water), I woke up around 4:00am covered in that slimy film of stinky fever sweat you get after a fever breaks.

It was nearly 11am when I woke up for real and started packing to go. Since I'd basically unpacked nothing, this was over and done with in about 15 minutes.

I've decided to follow the Xijiang River south by southeast until it turns into the Mianjiang and then eventually going north into Chengdu along the banks of the Fuhe. I thought I might possibly make it as far as Xinjin County but given how late I started and the possibility that some of the places I was passing through might be interesting, this looked unlikely.

Huaiyan Old Town, my first stop of the day about 4 or 5 kilometers after I started, was a proper old town. It had gotten some restoration. You could tell because the stone supports for the wood columns were mostly identical. But it hadn't gotten very much restoration and the shops in the historic section were the sort of shops you expect to find in a completely untouristified historic section (i.e. the ones that can't afford the rent in nicer places).

Haikou's old downtown used to be like that. All plumbing supplies and electric lights, agricultural chemicals, wholesale dishes, and bolts of cloth. Now it's got antiques and boutiques and cafes and people taking pictures of themselves posing with the bronze statues. For the most part, I prefer the way it is now but before they started fixing it up and gentrifying it, it was more alive, more vibrant, more messy.

From Huaiyan, the next stop was Yuantong. This was very nearly done entirely on the main road but, owing to stroke of luck where I saw two wobbly tourists on bicycles coming off the turnoff to the levee, I spent about half of it up on the levee. If only because I had to stop and take more photos (and not because the surface was often potholed dirt), the levee was much slower than the main road but I didn't care.

Yuantong is a much better old town than Jiezi. From what I saw of Jiezi last night, it could have been created out of whole cloth two or three years ago. Yuantong, on the other hand, actually looks old. The buildings are different sizes and shapes and colors and architectural styles. There's a healthy mix of shops aimed specifically at tourists and shops that have been there since forever.

I probably spent about an hour or an hour and a half in Yuantong. Although none of the signature important buildings like the Guangdong Guild Hall appeared to have entry fees, they also didn't feel like the sort of place where I could ask to leave my bike in the courtyard while I wandered around and the sheer number of people around meant that I certainly couldn't leave it on the street.

I would have liked to have sat at one of the big teahouses that were spilling out onto the sidewalks and into the open squares but none of them had food, they only had tea. Instead, I ended up down an alley where I had a nice bowl of soft tofu for lunch accompanied by some fried pig's liver and green peppers.

For the rest of the day I would be on and off the levee and on and off pavement. I mostly kept the GPS running because it knew better than I did when the levee trail was going to stop half a kilometer past the last way down.

On the one hand, it makes threading my way through a city a bit easier. On the other hand, I doubt the savings in distance make up for the difficulty added by having nine extra turns.

In Shaqu, I decided to look for massage and found it. They decided that my feeling icky from yesterday's weather meant that I needed cupping and guasha and I decided that everything else they were doing (including about 30 minutes hooked up to a TENS unit) felt so good that I wasn't going to argue. 

I guess I must have been sick yesterday because cupping causes much much worse marks when your lymphatic system is in the process of draining crap. My back now looks like I was beaten to within an inch of life.

After the massage I went looking for (and found) dinner and a hotel. Same place even. The dinner was overpriced, the room was underpriced, it all worked out to about the same amount spent. Oddly enough, when the hotel (who had never had a foreigner before) realized that registering with a passport was going to be difficult, instead of letting me sit down and register myself, they decided I simply didn't need to be registered.

Since I'm actively trying to convince people that letting foreigners stay is a good thing, I'm not going to rat them out on this but, really, I can't understand why a hotel would want me to skip out on following the proper procedures when there is a very specific and very known penalty in place for a hotel having an unregistered guest.