As part of my way of forcing myself not to take the easy way out and flag down one of the many passing buses on the main road, after I pushed my bike pretty much the whole climb up from Dishui Village [滴水村] to the turnoff to Changdong [长垌], I took the road down to Changdong (which is much wider than it was in 2012, and has possibly been regraded as well as having added a few hill cuts), passed through Changdong, and took the old road back up the other side.

This was a sadistically bad idea.

Scenery was definitely better than it would have been on the main road (as in, there was some) and, if it hadn't been on and off drizzling, I probably would have had a bit more shade but the GPS's record shows me as having a cumulative elevation gain of 1200 meters for an average 6% uphill grade all day, including the flat parts and the downhill parts. Change the math to only the uphill parts and it becomes an average 17% grade (which is probably a bit over steep because of dither but really isn't that far off).

By the end of the day my arms hurt from the effort of pushing my bike.
I won't even mention the way the rest of me felt.

The old road joined up with the main road at the pass and it was almost entirely downhill from there on out. I briefly considered dining and staying at a place that advertised a Yao Ethnicity style Long Table Banquet starting at 6pm followed by a song and dance show at 8pm, even knowing that such things aren't my style but thinking that I might enjoy some of the random other people who happened to be there, but it was already a quarter to 6 and no other tourists had shown up yet.

The place I ended up at quoted their hotel room at nearly twice the price (150y versus 80y) but was bargained down to 100y and, for all that they were just as much something that existed solely for tourists, they seemed to be aiming at a classier segment of the population (by which I mean they didn't have tour bus parking).

A "rural tourism bed & breakfast" (which didn't come with breakfast) class of hotel/guesthouse, they had a phone app for registering guests rather than something on their computer. And the phone app was completely unwilling/unable to register a foreigner. It was, however, able to take the "I'm a dumb fuck who lost my ID card" paper ID that the police in Pingnan had given me so that's what we did.

Come morning, their local police wanted me to be properly registered though and another copy of the phone app was produced on a different phone. This one was able to take foreigners but it had been programmed by someone who never thought that visiting foreigners might live somewhere other than Guangxi Province. I wandered off to make coffee and left them to deal with it so I have no idea what the final result was.