Qinghu in 2008 was the first time in China that I got my hands on a good map with accurate representations of small roads. This led to my inadvertently ending up, after a very very long day, in a town so small that they still don't have rooms for rent. How I ended up 'not camping' that night in 2008 is one of my favorite stories about how awesome the people in the countryside are.

In leaving Luchuan I was mostly heading in the direction of that same little town though, as in 2012, I did not plan on stopping or seeing if anyone remembered me. I'm pretty sure that my evening was uniquely weird enough that I must be remembered and I kind of don't want to spoil things by being unable to find the right house or by having them not remember me. 

I just wanted to see how things had changed.

However, despite the fact that I was starting from a point much closer, I'm also older and fatter and slower and by the time I was faced with a choice between "continuing uphill" past the village where I once didn't camp to a town with all of one hotel on the map or going "mostly downhill" to an actual city; well, I picked the latter.

As it was, for the parts which I did manage to repeat, things had sufficiently changed that it was only the occasional presence of some rather obvious landmark or another after lengthy periods of "I'm sure this must be a different road" and "I wonder what road I actually was on" that let me know that I was in fact on the same road. I know I'm carrying a good 20kg more than I was in 2008 (mostly on my body) and that it was a warm day in May rather than a hot day in August, but 27 year old me must have had legs of steel.

For example, the turn-off just before Shapo [沙坡] that I took all the way to Liuma [六麻], in 2008 I knew to take that turn-off because a truck driver who had seen me struggling my way up the hill (was I walking? I think I must have been walking) and who might have exchanged words with me at the top of the climb, waited for me at the bottom to tell me where to turn. I remember it mostly being in the middle of nothing but now it's very nearly in the middle of the town with hardly a field or paddy to be seen between groupings of houses.

Because there were multiple places which confirmed that I was, in fact, on the same road, I know that the century old buildings that I came across must have been there a decade ago but damn if I remember any of them. Of course, since there were fewer new buildings, the remaining old ones were less obvious. Also, I was far less knowledgeable about what I was looking at back then.

Dumpling lunch in Liuma was when I made the decision to most likely head for Beiliu and the stop, about an hour after that, to chug vast quantities of water and just sit and stare at nothing for a bit, confirmed that there was simply no way I was going to manage a route that had more available up to up when there was a down option available to me. If I had the choice available to make again, I would have taken the smaller road south of the Gui River [圭江] to Qingshuikou [清水口] and stayed in Qingshuikou because 1) the big road north of the Gui was a miserable truck infested hellhole and 2) Beiliu is a city and cities generally tend to be more troublesome than towns when it comes to lodging issues.

Speaking of lodging issues, I've reached a new high (or is that a new low?) in outrageous behavior on my part but my patience with "I need to call someone for permission so that they can tell you no because I'm not willing to say no myself" normally isn't so great and the extra uncertainty which Covid has caused in terms of unwritten restrictions has worn my patience even thinner.

At least I didn't yell at anyone this time.

I started by inviting myself behind the Front Desk "here let me show you how to do that". This is a fairly well practiced move that tends to confuse people into just agreeing with me. Only, sometimes (like this time), they don't want to give me a room number.

She tried a face saving lie about not actually knowing how to operate any of the programs and how she was just sitting there watching the Front Desk until the boss came back. As a friend.

Then the boss came back. Emphatically told me that I couldn't stay. That I needed to leave. That foreigners weren't allowed here. Not that we weren't welcome but that we weren't allowed. That he wasn't allowed to have me.

I wasn't quite at the point of being horrible just yet. Not until after he refused to so much as look at the computer to see that "I've already loaded the foreigner registration". That was when I sat back down at the Front Desk and let him know that his options for getting me to leave my current position were a) giving me a room key, and b) calling the police and having them make him give me a room key. When I'm less tired, or the person I'm talking to is making an effort to listen, I'll be apologetic regarding giving them these choices. But tonight wasn't one of those times.

I gave them a full minute of standing on the sidewalk not making telephone calls before I announced that they were taking too long and I was going to assign myself a room. This isn't the first time that I've assigned myself a room or even the first time I've grabbed keys without permission but I've never before used the front desk software to register a keycard to the empty room that I've assigned to myself.

Despite my loudly announcing to them each step of what I was doing, they still hadn't called the police by the time I finished scanning to pay so I tucked my stuff back in my pockets, got in the elevator, and went to my room.

Took a cold shower, ate a bowl of oatmeal, ordered delivery fried chicken, and had a phone call with Mike before they came by the room to ask me the Covid related questions the police had and to get my phone number so the police could call me and ask all the same questions over again.