The PSB in Zhuanglang County absolutely loves me. By this I mean that if my no longer living body were to be found (in someone else's jurisdiction - preferably someone they also don't like), I don't think they would be very sad.

Once again, my evening interactions with the police are one of the more interesting parts of the day. However, in this particular case, it's not even because my day was all that boring, just that my night really was that interesting.

I start out making coffee in the hotel owner's office chatting with him about his two sons, one of whom just took the gaokao college entrance exam yesterday and the other one who is a soldier (possibly an officer) stationed in Nanjing and wants his brother to come to the same city he lives in which you can tell the Dad is happysad about. 

There just aren't the same opportunities available for someone who stays here¹. As a result, the countryside (even those parts that aren't poor or which are near cities) in China is increasingly the very old, the very young, and the handicapped.

I don't figure that any of the police who added my WeChat last night or who took pictures with me that they have not shared² will actually join but I invite them to coffee as well.

I've had my morning albuterol (short acting) and ventolin (long acting) puffs, coffee (vasodilator), methozolamide (altitude sickness medicine), and a combined guaifenesin/dextropamorphan (cough reliever and decongestant) pill and other than my resting heart rate being a bit faster³ than I think it really ought to be, my numbers are good. Really good. Practically sea level good.

I'll supplement with some more caffeine (a bottle of Coke) about halfway up the climb but I'm pleased to say not only did I manage with all my luggage to never need to get off and walk, I still had a 96 on my pulse ox as I was getting ready to go into the tunnel at the top⁴. 

I can't remember for sure if I didn't walk in 2012. Mostly I just remember this one long straight bit where I was passed by a butterfly. I know I didn't walk in 2018 but, in 2018, I was only half loaded instead of fully.

Despite substantially more traffic and a lack of people I feel comfortable asking to follow me for safety⁵, the tunnel is nowhere near as terrifying as I remember it being. I kind of miss that they've stopped whatever keep drivers alert experiment they were doing in 2018 where tunnels were playing opera music but only a little, not really really.

Mostly, what makes the tunnel fine is that there are not only cameras which will issue fines for people overtaking and passing inside tunnels, this tunnel is now enforcing a 40kph average speed limit for the whole tunnel with one camera at the start and one at the finish. As the descent starts with the tunnel, I'm actually catching up to the motorized traffic.

Long steep descent of the "I'm not sure I really like being on a road with runaway truck ramps" variety. Lots of pretty danxia redrock formations to look at. I skip the Yunya Grottoes Park for the third time as the ticket office tells me the round trip walk from the entrance to the grottoes and back is 3-4 hours, then I decide to keep on going after Handian as I've got plenty of sunlight left to me and the "extra nice" place I was taken to last time through here (when I made a point of visiting the hospital to say "hi" and see if they remembered me) wasn't particularly good value for the money.

Dinner in Zhuanglang, and then a trip to the police station.

Where, well, I could report how it went. But you already know how it went. Cause, as I mentioned at the start of this entry, the PSB in Zhuanglang County love me.

¹ A few days after this conversation, I'll be having a conversation in which I learn that big cities taking people away means that the county of Qinan went from a permanent population of 600,000 in the 2010 census to 500,000 in the 2020 census.

² I never expected them to. Not only because 90% of the people who promise to share the photo they took with me never do but also because each and every one of them was in uniform at the time and they very well may have had second thoughts about a photo of them when a smiling ambiguously ethnic looking me escaping their personal control.

³ Almost everything I'm taking raises your heart rate so another one of the medical tests I had before I left was an EKG.

⁴ Per my chat history with my doctor, at this same place in 2018 and on only altitude medicine, I was hovering in the 93-95 range with the occasional 91. The "something isn't right" range of numbers starts at 95 and the "something is wrong" range starts at 90. My consistently staying at 96 and above is wonderful news.

⁵ In 2012, after initially being refused assistance, I found that the tunnel had a lot of burnt out lights and I managed to convince someone to follow me. In 2018, I couldn't convince anyone. This time, there were no small vehicles parking before going through.