Everyone has rules in life that they live by. I'm not talking things like the Golden Rule or "don't take the last cookie". I'm talking less codified more personal type rules. Rules that we might share with other people but which ultimately are our own rules which we have made up over the years based on our own situations.

Some of my rules include sitting with my right side against the wall in restaurants and on airplanes; never making u-turns; trying to get small quantities of dairy regularly enough that I can stave off my body's tendency towards lactose intolerance. 

One particular rule I have, which I've refined over years of bike touring, is to never ever under any circumstance ever go anywhere that is signposted more than 3km distant. Cause 99 times out of a 100, the farther away you start seeing signs telling you to come visit a place, the less interesting and more expensive it ultimately turns out to be. 

The best example I can think of to describe this rule was on a trip in 2014 when I went to the Bản Giốc–Detian Falls on the border between China and Vietnam. They managed to hold my interest long enough for me to stop in the parking lot and use their toilet but no longer than that. I think I may have also had an ice-pop from a convenience store nearby.

The Tongwan Ruins are better than 50 kilometers away from Jingbian City. Furthermore, they're famous enough that the road which both the Giant and the Xidesheng are located on is named Tongwan. I should not be going to the Tongwan Ruins. They will disappoint me. I know this. They are going to be an utter waste of time with an expensive entry fee and nothing worth seeing.

However, it's either go to the Tongwan Ruins and then head west into Inner Mongolia, or it's starting off my day by heading to Inner Mongolia. If I go to Tongwan, even if I don't actually go in to Tongwan, I'm reasonably well placed in terms of lodging. I can get ~70km today and around ~70km tomorrow and around ~70km the day after that. It's silly but, having done less than 50km yesterday, I don't really want to have another short day today and the distribution of known hotels past Chengchuan is, shall we say, suboptimal.

What can I say about today's riding?

It was pretty flat. Mostly scrubland. Sometimes the desert had won out enough to create actual sand dunes. But mostly, it was scrubland and mostly it was flat and mostly it wasn't really anything spectacular either in terms of being spectacularly interesting or spectacularly boring. It just was.

After dozens of signs, at least one at each intersection (including intersections I wouldn't have thought needed a sign), I got within 3km of Tongwan and the signs stopped. By climbing up on top of a sand dune, I could see the ruins in the distance, on the other side of a nice steep gorge but I couldn't figure out how to get to them without using the GPS. So I decided, fuck it, I won't go. I'll just go straight to the town with the hotels.

Only going to the town with the hotels meant that I still had to go into the gorge so I went to Tongwan anyways.

Somehow, I was under the vague impression that this was another one of those crumbling Ming Dynasty Great Wall forts. Not sure why I thought this but I did.

They are not a crumbling Ming Dynasty Great Wall fort. For them to be a crumbling Ming Dynasty Great Wall fort they would have had to have been built in the 15th century when, instead, they were built in the 5th century. By the time the Ming were going around reviving the concept of a Great Wall and making a long interconnected thing that stretched from one end of the empire to the other, the Tongwan Ruins had already been abandoned as a settlement for half a millennia.

To date, the Tongwan Ruins are the only Xiongnu city to have been discovered.

I didn't spend too much time at the site - maybe an hour - since there's really not a whole lot to do at ruins that don't have a museum. I imagine, if I hadn't biked out there, I probably would have enjoyed taking a long walk on some of the many paths that crisscross the ruins in parts that are deemed "tourist safe" (both in that the tourists won't kill themselves and they won't damage anything important). As it was, I decided an hour was enough time and to go on to my evening destination.

I picked my lodging based on it being above the place with the most people eating. Neither the food nor lodging were spectacular but they were most assuredly okay. The registration software on their computer didn't have an option for foreigners (though Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan residents were lumped under "Chinese") and it didn't want to let me type in fields like "name" so the hotel owner ended up taking my passport and contacting the local police.

They weren't quite at reasonable as the many different local police down in Guangxi Province who were just like "yeah, take a picture of her in your lobby and send it to my WeChat" but they were still pretty reasonable. I especially liked that when I opened the door to my hotel room, he saluted me as he said hello.