Wow - that traffic jam sounds wild.. four days to get out of Shanxi! That little detour road looked great. Glad to hear both rider and companion are holding up well - keep the updates coming!

(as an aside - the pictures look great - but it'd be great to see larger versions too... posting from the road can be hectic - but if you have time, you can upload them to imgur.com or another such site and then link back to them to get the large version.. see here.)