Today is the 21st anniversary of my being not dead. Along with Arrest Day (May 16, 2018), it's one of my most important self created holidays for enjoying the act of being alive.

Today is a day for celebrations.

Today is a day for chocolate.

Unfortunately, when I wake up for a hurried and shameful pee on one of the temple's few flat grassy spots, I do not have chocolate. In fact, until I make it down the stairs and back to my bike my choices are nectarines, nectarines, nectarines, and water.

It wasn't until morning that I figured out that the kang's fireplace was on the outside of the cave but I'm not sure as this really would have mattered all that much as I barely managed to get the tea stove lit and then only by sacrificing one of the votive candles I'd taken for light.

I'm normally pretty shit at starting fires anyways but I think I managed okay given my combined lack of tools and the fact that whoever had collected the kindling had already cut it down into nice stove sized pieces for someone who already has a decent fire going.

I'm either a lot more recklessly stupid this morning or a lot less exhausted as the stairs don't present nearly the challenge I thought they would when going up them. I mean the risers are still almost knee height and the runners are still narrower than the width of my feet, but if I lean my back against the wall and scuttle down sideways like a crab, it's not anywhere near as impossible as I thought it would be.

Even if you factor in the rest periods spent hyperventilating, I doubt it even took me more than five or ten minutes per flight of stairs.

I redistribute the stuff from my pockets back into my panniers with both the small power bank and the new phone plugged in to the giant battery that turns out not to be capable of powering my laptop after all. The pocket with the big battery isn't big enough for all three items and, as I've done quite a few times before, I snake the charger cable between pockets and put the phone in an upper compartment.

After I bumped my way down the dirt road for a while, I would discover what a Bad Idea this was when an SUV honked to pass, pulled up alongside me, and handed me my surprisingly still functional phone.

I'm sure the compartment was zipped tightly enough that it shouldn't have unzipped itself from the motion of stuff within bumping and tugging and pulling on the cable snaking out through the gap but, rather than the spirits retaliating for my stealing their votive candles or nectarines, I prefer to blame a poor night's sleep and a mostly empty stomach.

At 11km, I get to the first town downhill and after a breakfast which is also my first real meal since my fast food binge yesterday at around 10:30, I dawdle, charge my devices, thoroughly rehydrate myself and set off again only to immediately stop perhaps a kilometer outside town at the tent of some itinerant beekeepers that are, quietly, one of the most obviously gay couples I've ever seen in rural China and the only clearly gay Chinese I've seen in their age cohort.

I mean I could be wrong but there's only one tent, they spend five months of each year together on the road, the tent only has one very small bed, and—after it becomes apparent that I want to make a short video about beekeeping and how lucky I am to have shown up when they were harvesting honey—one of the men asks if I'd mind editing it in such a way as to only obviously introduce or show the face of the other man.

In the spirit of Pride Month, I'm sure I'm actually mistaken about them being gay and they're actually just really close friends and business associates whose shared experience of life on the road means they just work well together.

Down, down, downhill to Zhuanglang. I whizz through the city and out the other side where I'm delighted to discover that the first 20km or so is neither impoverished enough nor developed enough to be interesting in the slightest. You see, when I passed this way in 2018, even though I had come this exact same way in 2012, I had no recollection whatsoever of the space or time between Zhuanglang and the bit I had described as being where "my ears popped, my breathing got easier, and color returned to the world".

It now seems that this is most likely not—as I had feared—because of oxygen starvation, but is actually because everything up until my ears popping, my breathing getting easier, and color returning to the world was colorless and unmemorable.

Even stopping beneath the statue of the God of Wealth that I climbed up to in 2018 to pull out my laptop and work on something for Media Client, there are currently so many hours of daylight in the day that I've got plenty of time still when I pull into Lianhua Town.

I eat a quite mediocre meal of donkey soup with a hard flat bread then, with a bit of help from my GPS tracks go to the hotel I stayed at three years earlier.

The hotel remembers me. The hotel is fine with me. The police, who claim both to not remember ever having met me or any other foreigner and to have surely been the officers who would have come out if any foreigners had ever stayed in this town (which, despite my personal experience of being a foreigner who stayed in this town at this hotel, has never before happened), they're not nearly so fine with me.

Per the usual though, I'm not going anywhere else unless someone gives me something written to prove that he's right, and after about an hour of hanging around at the station (time well spent editing videos) I return to the hotel to do my laundry and go to sleep certain that the next foreigner to come this way will also be the first to ever spend the night.