My first task of the morning is to take a video of some postholes in a cliff wall just above the waterline of the Xihanshui River that are all that remains of a boardwalk which would have once existed as part of how rafts got pulled upstream in an era before wheeled traffic or motors was available to mountains like this. The Xihanshui moves fast enough and the valley is narrow enough that sails would never have gotten enough wind to go against the current.

Even at the speed I move, and even with my ability to notice the sorts of things that are generally quite missable, this is not something that I found on my own. Instead, it is something that was pointed out to me by the bus driver in 2012 and which was so incredibly fucking cool that I asked him to stop for a moment and let me take a picture. 

Then, because of the 2018 trip and some signs which I saw downstream of here, I know that this was one of the spurs of the Great Siberian Highway which the Chinese call the Tea-Horse Road. The video doesn't get quite the number of views I think something as cool as this ought to be getting but it does get quite a lot of Chinese people going "how do you find this stuff?" and that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Lunch is dumplings in a village beneath the Chouchi Mountain which is one of the almost developed tourism sites around here. There so bad that I can't even finish them and, being as this is the only restaurant in town, I don't see any reason to try to find out contact information for the place signposted Lodging as I wouldn't want to subject anyone who might be getting info from me to the possibility of needing to eat here.

Heading to Shixia, where I plan to visit the Bafengya Grottoes, my options were to go up and over two mountains (from the valley that Daqiao is in to the middle valley to the valley with Shixia Town) or to go round the long way. The long way only adds five kilometers and it means that all of the climbing to the turn-off in the central valley is done alongside a stream and is therefore never worse than fucking steep.

I'm not only farther down in elevation than I've been in a long while, today is also quite hot, so I'm pretty exhausted when I get to turn-off option number one and see that it's a terrifyingly steep dirt road. Everything but the sign which says "this way to Bafengya Grottoes" tells me that this is the wrong road and, while sitting and eating icees from a rural convenience store, I check and recheck the various maps at my disposal and decide to take a different route altogether.

It's quite obvious from the map that the entrance to the park where the Bafengya Grottoes is located is near Shixia Town and the Shixia Town expressway exit, so my plan is to cross over the mountain to Shixia and (either tonight or tomorrow morning) find some car full of tourists heading that way.

So I take the much longer way (28 kilometers to Shixia and Bafengya instead of 14) to cross a pass that's at the same height as the one I'd be getting if I took the road that the shopkeepers tell me totally gets pavement only a kilometer or four past the turnoff. I mostly manage to bike the bits that are next to my initial stream or the fast running rivulet of the pass. And if I end up walking my bike for the dreadful parts of the climb, I'm actually almost all the way to the top before I end up hitchhiking and the reason for hitchhiking is not the up but the down.

Night is approaching and, even if it weren't, the prospect of something the same amount of steep and the same amount of narrow as what I just went up tells me I'm either walking down or I'm camping.

The driver is delivering something to a village just about where the slope flattens off to something that I'll merely coast down at 40kph so I get off there and ride the rest of the way in to town and to both the old and new police stations. The old one is being extensively reconstructed by construction workers who are very vague about where the new one is (it's 2km away but they've apparently never been) and the new one, when I get there, is dark and apparently closed.

I persevere and, after wandering around shouting "hello" in both Chinese and English, I find the police on the second floor and they are so excited to see me it isn't even funny. I'm not being sarcastic here. They are actually excited to see me.

Anyone with a decent grasp of the geography of this area would have realized that I was in the first valley and they were in the third valley and therefore I'd have to be a fucking idiot to be heading this way so, even though they've both seen a whole bunch of my recent videos, and even though one of them is following me on TikTok, they didn't think I was heading this way. They thought I was heading somewhere else.

Every phone call to every Higher Authority to ask the steps of what to do to register me starts with "you know that foreigner whose been posting videos traveling around South Gansu recently? She's in my police station!"

Then, once everything is sorted, and its decided that I'm probably staying in the hotel closest to the police station (not, as they initially think, because it's clearly the nicest of the three but because it's the closest), they drive over to meet there because the owner isn't picking up her phone and one of the checkboxes for registration is the number of the room I'm in.

I take a lukewarm shower that's all that much nicer for the previous night in Daqiao not having showers at all and crawl into bed where my legs, being fully relaxed, promptly start to pulse with cramps that I have to gradually work out before I can reach any of my pain medicine. Once I'm limber enough though to be thinking over the decision of OTC, prescription, or narcotic, exhaustion catches up with me and I fall asleep instead.