Conditions start to get seriously rough today, and I start to feel the cold and the altitude - at times I feel I can't get enough air into my lungs - but none of it can detract from the beauty of the scenery, which is becoming markedly more Tibetan the further I venture into the mountains. I pass women in elabourate headdresses, prayer beads swinging from their belts, and a monk chanting the Namo Amituofo through a village of tamped-earth houses in the Tibetan style. The compulsory Chinese flag fluttering on their rooftops is as incongruous as it was in the sherbert-touting bazaars and artisans' workshops of Xinjiang.

I'm about to venture into one of the many terrifying mountain tunnels (completely unlit, and stretching upwards of five kilometres in length) when an official on a motorbike swoops down from nowhere and informs me the way is blocked. He tells me I should join the S-road - basically a huge motorway which advertises pretty specifically that bikes are not allowed. When I raise this objection, he responds with a 'pffff' and a series of keyi keyi keyi! (it's fine, it's fine, it's fine!). Left with no other option, I testily take off down the hard shoulder. It turns out to be in many ways a safer route - their tunnels have lights in them for a start - and soon enough I'm back on the GD213, cruising through villages like a two-wheeled John Wayne, Mao suit-sporting old timers gathering to stare from the hilltops as I fix my errant chain.

A few hours in, I exchange fist-pumps and shouts of jia you! - a kind of encouraging 'go on my son!' with a raggle-taggle bunch of army recruits out for a run. It felt like it came at just the right time for both parties - the poor guy charged with carrying the Chinese flag however many miles of run through mountain terrain looked fit to drop, and my mantra 'Maoxian for dinner' had started to feel a little like 'Jam tomorrow', or that bit at the end of Blackadder IV when they're talking about having sausages on sticks in Berlin on the evening of the Big Push.

I do make Maoxian, however, and my dinner of dry-roast spicy chicken (foot included) certainly beats any 70s cocktail appetiser hands-down. After discussing my journey, my panniers, my height and yi ge ren-ness with the laoban'r and his family, I pitch my borrowed tent a small way outside the town. It is only as the sun is setting and the wind getting up that I realise there are significantly fewer tent pegs than needed, so I improvise with a pair of scissors and by distributing my heaviest bits of baggage at the tent's corners. By the time I've had second thoughts as to the reliability of this project, dark has well and truly fallen, so I chuck my bike into the tent as extra weight insurance and fall asleep to the sound of the wind in the trees and the rush of the river in the gorge below.