I'm still feeling pretty wiped today but it's mercifully downhill the whole day. I'll occasionally swerve off the main route and it's habit of cutting directly through hills to catch a bit of old road or Greenway type bike path along the river but the realization of the realities of geography in combination with my having another Train-Related Side Quest coming up make this a fairly detour-free day without any exciting side paths or old buildings.

Which is not to say that there are no old buildings, just that there were places where I could have gone out of my way to go looking for specific old buildings that I probably would have liked and I didn't.

Morning breakfast at the closest restaurant to the hotel where I Goldilocksed my way into a room the night before, the heat rash that is most likely from the trains to and from Guangzhou has gotten so itchy that I'm dosing myself with Benadryl at a level where I'm also over-caffeinating to fight the wooziness and getting jitters instead of alertness. 

One of the laborers eating an early lunch at the same time as my breakfast has a jacket with a pair of battery powered fans inside it puffing the whole thing out and making him look mushy. It must be comfortable though as he¹ has the jacket zipped up to his neck in ways that would otherwise be unbearable in this kind of heat and humidity.

Lunch comes in a town just after I rejoin the truck road and I'm sorely tempted to just check in at the hotel next door and go to sleep but that fucks with the train plans even worse than anything else so I sit under a fan sipping Diet Coke until temperatures are beginning to slip down from their peak with my GPS pointing me to the closest train station not because I'm leaving from there today but because it's the only way to fix the clusterfuck caused by my buying a ticket from a station that I'll be 80km passed by the time I want to take the train.

So brand new that the associated parking structure and ramps crossing the road haven't even finished being built, the train station is so brilliantly cold that the last doubts of "is the heat rash or is this something else" are wiped from my mind. I get my wrong ticket cancelled, get my right ticket issued, get my account with the China Rail website hopefully fixed, and decide—since I had to go 5km east from downtown to get to the train station—to keep heading east to a small town where the "small town"ness of the town is sure to make the hotel issues easier.

Maybe it did and maybe it didn't.

The hotel didn't have a problem with me.

The local police, when called by the hotel after I was in my room, didn't have a problem with me.

The person in Exit & Entry, whom the local police called after the local police couldn't figure out the registration system (that I should have done for them except for not wanting to leave the a/c and rekindle the burning itch), that person was a fucking useless tool who told the police to tell me to get out and go to a proper Foreigner Hotel.

At which point I made the discovery that quietly smiling at the police while refusing to even consider the possibility of complying with them is even more fun than yelling at them.

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¹ And the other people I will later see with similar jackets