Then, because everyone's trains were leaving just after noon, we had time enough for breakfast, a not-at-all leisurely visit to the historic mansion where I annoyed the docent by asking questions she didn't have the answer to¹, a boat ride² that I would have hated if I'd been paying for it, hand making of local yellow glutinous rice cakes, and an overly large lunch eaten too fast.

The overly large lunch was especially a problem for me as the drive from the historic town we were visiting back to the city and the train station involved a lot of not straight roads and the longer I go not being in cars, the easier it is for me to get motion sick.

Burdened this time with the box of off-bike clothing and getting off the train somewhere other than the terminal station (all while still suffering the dizzies from the drive) made this a somewhat less pleasant train trip than the day before but not unbearably so.

When I got back to my original hotel, my barely having energy enough to get everything into their washing machine and feeling the need to take a 3-hour nap would add a sense of unreality to the evening that wasn't at all helped by the stunt the local police pulled with calling the hotel owner, saying "we see that a foreigner has registered at your hotel again," and telling her she didn't meet the "qualifications to take foreigners" and I needed to leave.

Notwithstanding my usual refusal to listen to the police merely because they are uniformed officers of the law, what is effectively every single piece of clothing I own³ is currently hanging up to dry on the hotel's clothesline, and I'm registered correctly⁴, and I was registered correctly and trouble free two nights ago. The hotel owner, nice lady that she is, is frantic with worry. She's even offering to drive me somewhere else, to pay the difference, and I'm like "45 seconds ago, I was literally sleeping, huh..."

After a few rounds of trying to calm her down, and telling her to call the police back, that the foreigner is demanding them to show up and "say this to her face, as that will make it more convenient for her to take down your badge numbers and file a formal complaint about overstepping your authority", and being "no, really, trust me on this" and it still not working, I go and get the shiny new backpack that was part of the swag provided by the recent media trip, and show her the logo on it.

Tell the police who and what I am, okay?

That's all I need you to do. If they're still bothering you after that, we'll go on to the next step, but if anyone is going to get in trouble, it's not going to be you.

Then I went back to sleep for another four hours.

--

¹ Specifically, I was trying to figure out when the wooden board over the entry was from as, instead of using the format [XYZ year] of the reign of [Dynasty's] [Emperor Name], it used the equally valid but less common [Emperor Name] + [Year Name Within the 60-year Astrological Cycle]. I couldn't read the key character for figuring out which year it was in the astrological cycle while she really didn't care about specifics of that nature.

² Looking at scenery that was all easily visible from the riverbanks we'd already walked up and down, the boat was a slowly poled 'bamboo'⁵ raft that went as far as the not very far upstream dam and then drifted back.

³ Clothing in Hainan or the United States not counting for these purposes and with the exception being the green Hainan dress and the pyjamas I'm wearing at this moment in time

⁴ Even though I'm really certain I'd said that my return train was leaving the coast at around noon thirty, my not being back by noon meant that—even though the registration of me⁶ at the media trip's nice hotel had not kicked me off her system—the hotel owner checked me out when I hadn't gotten back by noon, I had to fill everything in all over again.

⁵ Green painted PVC

⁶ I strongly suspect that all they did was photograph the relevant pages of my passport