Today was an incredible day. In the back of my mind, I hadn't really believed the police officer when he told me he recognized the tunnel I had a picture of and that it conveniently was on the same road that his colleagues had already said I should take tomorrow. Because that road, unlike either of the roads I had initially planned on taking were in the next county and, moment of total honesty here, I figured they were just trying to get me out of their county as fast as possible so that—having already displayed my ability to get myself into potentially dangerous situations—should anything happen to me, it would be someone else's responsibility.

Not only is this a totally uncharitable thing for me to have thought, it was also wrong. By the time I reached the turn-off where I could either go a) the route I thought most likely to be the one the bus took, b) the route I thought most likely to get me food and lodging, or c) the route they suggested, I was already out of their jurisdiction.

Coming across the tunnel meant that I was, without question, on the road which the bus had taken. Since there weren't many places the bus could have gone from Daqiao and since none of those places, save the route the police had suggested, managed in any way to go even vaguely in the direction of Longnan, I knew that I was continuing on "my" road. 

Therefore, when I left Daqiao, it was entirely my plan to continue downstream to a nameless intersection that required a lot of zooming to force to show up on the online maps and which didn't even exist at all on my paper maps. Then, I would go south to Longba Township. From Longba Township I would continue to Longxing Township. And then, from Longxing, I would go to Anhua Town on the main road.

Partly because many of the barely not showing roads were marked on my paper maps as dirt trails, they went over this with me multiple times. Drilled it into my head. Made sure that I knew exactly what I was doing. Knew that it was going to be some pretty gnarly uphill sections. Knew to either stop early at Longba or Longxing or, to at least check for lodging before continuing onwards so that, if necessary, I could turn around and go back downhill.

All in all, this batch of cops really were pretty awesome.

When I got to that nameless intersection, however, after a morning of some truly epic wonderful riding where I recognized all sorts of things (and even got high quality pictures of things like the postholes down by the water's edge), I noticed that I had a couple of options available to me. And that one of those options was on the already finished Provincial Road that I'd just come off of the "in progress" construction work for.

After a lot of hemming and hawing and looking and maps and looking at topo features and more hemming and hawing, I decided that even though Longba to Longxing to Anhua was almost certainly the bit of road which was "mercifully paved" six years ago, it was a bit of a road which had been paved some time more than six years ago and this other road looked to be no more than a year old at most. Sure, as I would discover, it already managed to have washouts and landslides and stuff like that but this was a road which was being built to a standard that included landscaping. This was also a road which would continue to go mostly downhill alongside the banks of the Xihanshui for the next 20 or 30 kilometers.

So I did that instead.

Shortly after leaving Daqiao, there were some directional signs that had the names of a village or two and a Such & Thus Gold Mining Company. At the time, I didn't think anything of it. "Gold" shows up in lots of words where it doesn't actually mean "gold". On my personal list of curious words that I really wonder the etymology of, a hardware store is "五金店" or "Five Gold Shop".

However, when I came to the group of people a bit downstream from one of the combination landslide, undercut, road construction sites scooping mud off the river bank into shallow wooden trays which they were carefully washing in the waters of the Xihanshui, that "gold" came back to me and I only needed to ask to confirm that they were, in fact, panning for gold.

As I got closer and closer to the main road, the finished landscaping became more finished. Around Taishi Township a batch of murals let me know that I was again on the ancient Tea Horse Road (the Chinese part of the Great Siberian Highway). Particularly given all the very many interesting places I've stumbled across this trip that just happen to also be on the Tea Horse Road and considering that my looking like an ethnic minority could either make travel in Xinjiang a fabulous idea or a horrible one (but nothing in between), I may as well make the Tea Horse Road the topic for a future tour.

When I got to the main road, I discovered that it is one of the 82 newly designated or currently under construction National Roads that starts with a "5". So far all of the National Roads which my maps did not think were National Roads were extensions of preexisting roads. This is the first time, however, that I've come across a "5" road. 

National Roads (or Provincial Roads for that matter) which start with "1" begin in the capital. Roads starting with "2" run from north to south. Roads starting with "3" run from east to west. Nothing starts with "4" because that's an unlucky number. Now there are "5"s. I'm not entirely sure what that means though.

Because I'd been going downhill all day, even if sometimes my downhill had short bits of uphill, and even though my downhill had to wend and wind and twist all sorts of extra distance to follow the river through the gorges, I had tons of time left before sunset and, even though I was now going uphill, I barreled my way through Pingluo and on to Wangguan.

Had a bit of a hiccup finding lodging in Wangguan as the first place (who might actually have been doing renovations) said they were doing renovations and the second (who might actually have been full) said they were full. By the time I'd been to the third, paid her so that there would be no confusion over whether or not I was coming back after dinner, and gone to dinner, I was too tired and it was too dark and cold for me to bother with dropping in at the police station unless the hotel owner insisted.

She didn't insist.

She knew that she didn't know what to do with a passport but, when told that I was supposed to go to the police, she accepted as an excuse my gesturing to the pitch blackness that, using my phone as a flashlight, I'd just walked back from dinner in.

At 30y with both a flush toilet upstairs and a hot shower that I could use, the room was very alright for the price. The bed was even comfortable. Moreso in that the electric mattress pad was good and warm. It's just, the transom window over the door didn't close. Didn't even have any glass in it. So all parts of the room that were not the nice warm cocoon of my bed were very very cold.