Given the hassle I had to go through getting to Luoyang from Xixia on the grounds of the road passing through all three of Henan's closed counties, I decide to take the train back. This has the added advantage that I'd get to keep Margaret company and help her with "going places as a non Chinese speaker". Or, at least it would if we left from the same train station.

If I'd realized this was going to be the case, I could have gotten an earlier train. As making connections with the non high speed trains is a dicey proposition, I likely still would have missed the Nanyang to Xixia train but I might have been early enough to get the bus.

Instead, one of the taxi touts snagged a nice day fishie and I overpaid (by a lot) for a ride in a van with a driver who didn't leave until he was almost full and the other passengers (many of whom had also overpaid) were bitching. To make matters worse, even after he got passengers to fill the last seats, he took surface roads desperately in need of repaving instead of the expressway (the toll might have been 25y, I was one of three passengers paying 200y on a 50y route), regular passed trucks on blind curves (on either side of the vehicle), and answered the phone to yell into it while driving one handed.

I seriously thought we were going to die.

I picked the same hotel as my previous two nights in Xixia only to discover shortly after arriving (and long before check-in was finished) that this had been enough time for my brain to associate this place as "somewhere I can take a shit" which meant that the moment I walked in the door, my bowels decided now was the time to go.

Luckily they had a public toilet on the third floor cause I don't think I'd have otherwise made it through the laborious step by step process of using my registration as practice on how to correctly register a foreigner (though they didn't upload it while I was still there as they needed the WeChat group who had been sent pictures of the process to first confirm that everything matched).

Room wasn't as nice as the previous stay but, unlike the past few days at a swank hotel in Luoyang, it didn't have central air so I could set the temperature to what I wanted¹ and sleep comfortably² for the first time in a week.

That I also wasn't wine drunk for the first time since I arrived in Luoyang probably helped with the good night's sleep but it's hard to say.

¹ I have a lot of complaints about the hotel in Luoyang. As setting the central air at 25℃ and not providing fans in the rooms is also something the Haikou Marriott does, this is one of the things I won't whinge over.

² With a fan, 29℃ is acceptable and 27℃ is fine. Without a fan, I want 22℃ or lower.