I don't like to let myself get this far behind on text entries but the daily hour I spend on the phone with my Best Beloved is time I could be writing; also as TikTok gets more views, more comments, more interactions, video editing is also time I could be writing. Furthermore, evenings in northwestern China are particularly police-y.

Tonight's saga went on for over three hours.

Now, some people might say (some people have said) "why the fuck would you put up with that?" and frankly, if I were the me I was 10 years ago, I wouldn't be putting up with it. However, the me of now is not only acting with malice aforethought, the me of now also used a substantial portion of those three hours to both work on a bid and passive aggressively be very rude to the people whose time was being wasted as much as my own time was being wasted.

And then, when the magic "I've given you until x o'clock" deadline hit, after I'd been verbally announcing the deadline in every interaction over the past thirty minutes, I got up and walked out. Told them they'd wasted any opportunity for cooperation and I was now going to camp.

It so happens that I didn't camp, that I did find a hotel¹ which was willingish² to accept me without being able to scan an ID card and with my being "I'm so sorry it's so late but your local police are terribly inefficient and I've been at the station all night, here's a picture of the police captain holding my passport³". But, believe it or not, even if I'm not filing a complaint there is method to my madness.

You see, while most of them don't argue with the police (in fact I actively recommend not arguing with the police until you know exactly what you are doing), there are lots of other foreigners living and traveling in China who are active in places that I'm active and these people are also starting to push back against "it's the law" with "great, can you show me that in writing?⁴"

I also guaranteed that enough people got involved that night that, other than the paperwork whose generation I witnessed, other paperwork also had to be generated to eventually explain why I neither went back to the city nor ended up registered at a hotel.

In short, it's no longer just returning the favor of being annoyed and inconvenienced by being annoying and inconvenient, it's about getting an end result. While obviously, I'd prefer that end result to be more openness, I'd really be happy with just having a similar situation to the parts of Qinghai where there's an actual fucking printed list of places we can't go⁵. As things currently stand, the only reason there isn't a printed list or printed rules is because they explicitly are not allowed to be doing this.

I realize I didn't divide "the police" and "the ride" into separate entries for this day but part of that is because it wasn't really all that interesting in terms of riding.

The up and over the mountain which I did was a valley road that's been important for millenia⁶ so it was therefore well graded and utterly lacking in historical points of interest as you need a certain ebb and swell of ages of importance and unimportance for the flotsam and jetsam to be left behind without someone coming by and cleaning it up before it became old enough to be valuable.

Only real interesting thing I think I saw all day was guys in climbing harness performing environmental remediation and stabilization of a former rock quarry. This was doubly interesting in that it showcased current approaches to safety along with the slapdash measures of not that long ago.

Also had someone stop me by the side of the road to chat and then a little later to pass me a bag with two cans of Red Bull out his window.

But yeah, although it was pretty, it wasn't interesting.

¹ On the second try

²So, I actually (unintentionally) woke them up and I was already in the room and paid before they came awake enough to decide maybe not. At which point, I'd already locked the door which was now refusing to unlock and it required morning and power tools to get me out.

³ Actually a still from a video of him and me arguing, but they didn't need to know that

⁴ In a couple days I'm going to be meeting up with a frequent traveler who, over the past 10 months, has probably cost CTrip ten or fifteen thousand renminbi in forced upgrades because he refuses to accept the generous offer of a free cancellation on the basis of "but the hotel says they can't take foreigners".

⁵ Scuttlebutt has it that these places have military connections but I don't care what the actual reason is, I just care that it's possible to know in advance here "yes" and there "no".

⁶ Kongtong Mountain is regarded as the birthplace of Daoism