At first, I thought someone must have told the Longlin police to go looking for me. I really wanted it to be the police in Jiangkou but, even from the very beginning, I didn't think it was. If it had been them, their counterparts from Longlin would have arrived much earlier. Instead, it was much more likely that one of the cars which passed me on the road thought that I looked like I was in trouble.

Judging by the GPS data, they showed up about 45 minutes after I decided that, even with my incredible night vision, it was no longer safe to ride and I'd need to walk. That's about right length of time for them to respond to one of the drivers calling and reporting that they saw me in an incredibly suboptimal but not actually dangerous situation.

Instead, it turns out, they were on patrol. The town had hosted a Temple Fair that day so there were more than the usual numbers of people traveling after dark. Probably, if it's anything like holidays in other places, more than the usual numbers of people drinking and also more than the usual numbers of people getting home and getting in to fights with their family or neighbors.

If I'd known what the lodging situation was going to be like, I would have called today a very short day and ended it in Li County. However, I assumed that when the guy at the bike shop like place told me there were multiple locations with lodging in Jiangkou that it was safe to ride on to Jiangkou. I assumed that once I found one of those locations that I would be okay with going to dinner first. I assumed wrong.

I spent nearly an hour of perfectly acceptable sunlight eating dinner. I used up most of the rest of what was left to me trying to understand the garbled directions being given to me in non-standard Mandarin by the owner of the place I'd found to someplace else that might have lodging because, tonight, he was sold out. 

After that had gone on for far too long, I gave up and went to the Jiangkou police. They weren't completely useless. They let me know that Longlin Town has lodging. Maybe they weren't as helpful as I would have liked them to be but being randomly helpful isn't necessarily in their job description. The police's job is more about dealing with dangerous situations or crimes or the related paperwork. It's not, no matter what the optics of it may be, just being randomly helpful. 

However, as I unfortunately had to admit to myself when it was still just barely light enough that my freak eyes could still see the road enough to pedal, "my lack of planning does not constitute their emergency" and nothing was stopping me from biking until full dark and walking for an hour or three after that if that was what it would take to get to the next town with lodging.

I was just hoping that showing up on the cusp of sunset with a tale of woe based on my being an overly trusting idiot would get me a suggestion for somewhere a bit closer than 15km away.

Certainly, back in the days when I still carried a tent with me, when I ended up someplace that didn't have a hotel, asking "where can I pitch my tent?" seemed to always be the perfect lead-in to people offering me a place in their home.
Not tonight though.

Tonight I had an hour of cautious riding in semi-darkness, forty five minutes of walking under an incredibly spectacular canopy of stars, and fifteen minutes of police escort with nice bright headlights.

They guided me to the only lodging in town, told the owner that the price he was asking for was ridiculous (which it was), negotiated it to something reasonable on my behalf, got me registered, and got a bunch of photos of "Local Police Helping a Foreigner". Only time this trip where I've not so much as whispered about badge numbers or full names and they made sure to send those to me over WeChat. (The unwritten subcontext of that being that I should send a letter of praise to supervisor type people. Which I will. Cause they deserve it.)

They also gave me an incredible wealth of data about the many little roads that crisscross the mountains. What is paved. What isn't. Why the old main road is actually not as good an idea as one of the more recently upgraded former dirt roads. What would be easiest on a bike. Which towns and townships very definitely had food and lodging. Really, just an overall pleasant experience.