In defense of the pathetically short distance I did today, I'd like to point out that with all the police related stuff that happened yesterday (after riding past dark) I wasn't even on the phone with Mike until past 10pm and once all the other "things that need to be done in the evening" were taken into consideration, I really only got to go to sleep at about 1.

Also, Wusheng has an old town.

I suspect it's more of a case that there's an old town near what is now urban Wusheng than "Wusheng has an old town". With regards to areas that currently aren't being used for shipping or manufacturing, there were a number of patches of riverside park that looked far more likely to my eye to have been where the core of old Wusheng would have spread out from¹. I could be wrong though; I often am.

From a commercial street lined with 8 and 10 story buildings that looked to be from the last 30 years or so, I went down a very steep hill to Yankou Old Town white knuckled as I zigged and zagged my way down the mercifully wide street realizing that I had let myself get into a position where - should any traffic happen - stopping was not going to be easy. I didn't have a whole lot of brainpower available for checking out the scenery to either side but the apartments on this hill were the rather tired looking sort that aren't actually all that old but which are sure to get torn down and redeveloped in the near future anyways as people's standards in acceptable housing no longer include 10th floor walk-ups that are only 50 or 60 square meters.

Down by the waterfront, there's a pair of streets with some late Qing wooden buildings and a few 1950s warehouses or factories (datable by the just barely visible slogans that no one ever thought to paint over)². Continuing past the five or six very active restaurants closest to the waterfront, the road looks like it intends to go back up the hill I just came down but it rapidly turns into a dirt singletrack and I'm not feeling that adventuresome.

After a frustrating inability to find the source of a Noise that I'm pretty sure I didn't have last night but which seems to be related to my chain tensioner³ and which I can't get rid of, I continue being "not adventuresome" for all of about 5 or 6 kilometers before I go back to my usual "main roads are boring". I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that, at least in eastern Sichuan, main roads are also specifically graded for wheeled transit. It might look from the topo map like this isn't a particularly hilly area but that's because nothing rarely gets about 20 or 30 meters of elevation gain or loss.

The Noise gets to bothering me more after I'm on the small roads, probably because the only other sounds to distract my ear are coming from my speaker and rhythmic shhh shh shhhh noises are remarkably noticeable no matter how loudly you turn up the music.

By this point I've decided that Wanlong Town on the G212 National Road at the border with Chongqing is going to be my destination for the evening. Although one of the "hotels on the map" will turn out to be a misplaced location pin and two of the "hotels I saw with my eyes" turn out not to be mapped, it's a decent sized place along a major trucking route. Even back in the days before Chinese online mapping had any idea that such things as "hotels in rural towns" existed, this would be the sort of place that I would aim for because it was totally going to have hotels.

I'm not especially thrilled that everyplace which seems to actually exist has, at a minimum, a second floor Front Desk but that's a pattern I've noticed from this area on three past occasions so I accept that I'm going to be humping my stuff up stairs. A nearby restaurant to the hotel I pick (well, the hotel that everyone on the street nearby says "you should stay there, it's the best in town") volunteers their back courtyard as bike storage, promising that they've got security camera and I've got nothing to worry about. (This does not stop me from worrying but, by the time I'm seriously considering that I ought to just go back down and get my bike and carry it upstairs, I'm already well known to the police. Plus, the stairs are super narrow.)

A 10 or 11 year old boy who seems to belong to the downstairs restaurant heralds my arrival to the Front Desk by announcing "a guest, a guest, I've got a guest for you, a guest, a guest, an American guest, a guest, she bicycled here, a guest, a guest, a guest who bicycled from Hainan, I've got a guest who came on a bicycle" so when the lady tries telling me "oh gee, we're all sold out tonight" after she's taken my passport and looked at it funny, the response from me is rather predictable.

It's the first room I've had in quite a long while to have a bathroom down the hall as the ensuite was a ridiculous 180y a night. Probably worth the 60 I paid though I've had more comfortable 60y a night hotels this trip.

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¹ Wikipedia English was pretty useless and Wikipedia Chinese was an annoying mix of traditional and simplified but I am in fact wrong. Wusheng is a river town that didn't even start getting roads for wheeled traffic until the beginning of the 20th century. As of the beginning of Reform and Opening Up in 1976, the entire county only had 309.3km of unpaved roads. As of 2007, the county had 1532.3km of paved roads.

² Speaking of "barely visible slogans that no one ever thought to paint over", I've more or less confirmed that reading out loud any slogan that mentions Chairman Hua Guofeng absolutely will get that TikTok video delisted for "violating community standards".

³ Spoiler: it wasn't.