Last night, after having given the woman a 100y note, I waited about half an hour for her to return with my change only to have her come back holding my money and say that she'd spoken to her husband and the police and I couldn't stay so she wanted to give me my money back.

No can do. Just call the police¹ and tell them I'm here. Tell them you have the Form you photographed while I was downstairs. If the police have a problem (and they might not) then the police can come here and talk to me. I'll wait for them, okay?

Still holding my hundred yuan note, she left again and I resumed waiting for her to show up with my change or the police or both. Neither ever came.

In the morning, I found two 20s loose on top of the stuff in the pannier I'd brought up to the room but as I'm not really in the habit of paying in cash (or using my wallet at all) there was a decent chance that they had fallen out of the upside down wallet also loose in the pannier and not that I'd somehow missed her giving me change.

My attempts to talk to the almost completely non-verbal (I think from a stroke) wheelchair bound husband or his caretaker got me kind of stonewalled regarding change and after nearly 10 minutes of "you'll just have to wait for her to come back" and "I have no way to contact her", I said fuck it, I'm just going to take three bottles of juice (between 10 and 12y in total value) from your downstairs store and put them in my handlebar bag and call it even.

Which is when she arrived.

"I don't think you gave me my change last night. Shall we call these three juice bottles my change?"

Massive explosion of anger. Of how dare yous. You are so rich you have a camera and two phones and I don't even have one phone and I gave you the money last night. I did. I did give it to you. I went up to the room and I gave it to you. In your big bag². Your change is in your big bag. You should open your bag and look.

I put the bottles back while she's yelling and yell back. "It's 40 fucking yuan. I don't care about the amount. I just care that you never gave me my change last night. You came back and you said you were going to call the police about registering me and that they would be here soon and I waited and waited and waited and you didn't come back again."

This all continues as I'm pushing my bike out the door. Her following me down the street yelling at me about having money to go on vacations and my saying back "I don't care anymore. It isn't that much to me." just unleashes a new wave of fury about my phones and cameras and if I don't care then why did I harass her poor voiceless husband to give me my change and how a rich person like me should be happy to pay 100 for a room like the one she gave me.

Which makes me think that maybe I'm right and she didn't give me my change but fuck it I really really don't care by this point, so I get on my bike and pedal away from the yelling.

During an amazing breakfast of roujiamou and raspberry Diet Pepsi, I get a piece of work from Large Media Client that requires my pulling my laptop out as opposed to working on my phone and I'm still sitting there doing that when the police arrive.

It's a bit rude of me to not look them in the eye or to keep going back to my computer after handing them things but super politeness isn't going to change the speed at which their stuff gets finished and my paying stuff has time constraints.

By the time we're done, they've thanked me for being cooperative, taken my Form to keep and failed to get me to go with them to explicitly point out for their bodycams that "this" is the guesthouse I stayed in last night. It's pretty clear that even though I'd told her both before we went upstairs and after she came back to try to get me to leave "you need to call the police and tell them I'm here" that she didn't and that she's about to be in a clusterfuck of trouble. 

I'll give them info enough that they know where I'm talking about but I flat out refuse to be giving evidence. Not for something petty like failure to register guests. Not even when I'm pretty sure I didn't get my change.

My ride into Henan is nice and downhillish the whole way. It's also a truck route the whole way. I can't decide if the various closed shops and trucker restaurants (of which there are many) are closed because whatever's going on now, closed since Covid, or just closed because the local economic conditions don't support them. Things feel desolate but they felt desolate the day before when I got lunch and by the time I'd fed and rehydrated a lot of the initially closed up shops that had appeared to be closed for years were open again.

The checkpoint coming into Henan that ought to just be checking cargo trucks for fatigued drivers is checking everyone's 14 day travel history including drivers and passengers and cyclists. A passenger in line ahead of me who left his ID card in the car (possibly with intent) gets to use biometrics instead. One of the soldiers is dicknosing and  their guns don't have magazines in them, so things aren't Real Serious yet.

Other than the fact that they're also stopping cyclists, the whole scene reminds me of that amusing (no really) time at a checkpoint near the Vietnamese border in 2014 where I'd been accidentally threatened³ by the armed soldiers. 

The Zhangjiajie super spreader event and one other tourism linked Delta outbreak mean that Covid is currently in 18 provinces and everyone is freaking out (in ways that, as long as they aren't singling me out for being  a foreigner, I'm not always 100% sure I disagree with). As these 18 provinces include both a case in Haikou and a Yalong Bay resort being sealed after the two cases were identified on their return to Beijing, the safest place for me right now is to keep on biking and to keep on staying well away from groups of people.

¹Given the number of people who are able to successfully call the police and inform them of my existence without a problem, I am increasingly baffled by the ones who refuse.

² If, in fact, this is true it means she dropped it in my bag without telling me.

³ A strap had popped loose and caught in my wheel as I'd gone over the speed bump. Kneeling down just past the controlled area to untangle this mess, a man with a harnessed gun and a lack of practice at talking to someone kneeling came over and excitedly babbled questions at me until he realized that I was looking up the barrel of his gun.