I ended up never turning on the space heater the hotel owner brought to my room for me. That's not to say I didn't need the space heater. It's just that by the time I really wanted the space heater, the blankets were generally warmish and the rest of the room wasn't (possibly because, and I know this will be a shocking revelation, the space heater wasn't turned on) and getting out of warmish cocoon of blankets to figure out the difficulties of a) turning the space heater on and b) making sure that it was positioned such that nothing flammable or meltable was within range seemed like far too much work.

I'm not sure if the room being chilly made it easier or harder to get up in the morning. Once again, having fallen asleep quite early, I was up with the sun. Since the sun was going to take a while to warm up the world, I did my best to dawdle with packing, but this newly formed habit of only carrying stuff I actually need as well as temperatures so cold that there's no way in hell I'll be riding if it starts to rain makes packing quick and easy and its hard to dawdle.

I initially rather liked the place I was staying. The price was reasonable. The room was comfortable. The food was good. The somewhat crude jokes regarding my size and how it must be a good thing that the husband (I've lied about having) is American because I'd crush a Chinese guy, those kind of put me off. It's not like Hainan where I've actually met a full grown adult woman who only weighed 37kg and who looked perfectly normal so long as you didn't stand her next to non-Hainanese people or office furniture, ethnic Mongolians and people from northeastern China are tall and broad.

I start the morning's ride off with the mythical occurrence known of as a "tailwind". This lasts for approximately 20km after which, despite my turning at a right angle from my previous direction of travel, I am now faced with a headwind.

I only really had one potential site of interest marked out for the day - the Hetao Site for the bronze age Ordos Culture- but it's very clearly closed. Everything else which I stumbled across was completely unmentioned anywhere. Some of it, like the museum on cattle breeding and the work done by Erwin Engst and Joan Hinton probably would have been interesting if I hadn't been so concerned about being out on the steppes once night fell and the temperature plummeted. Others, like the great defensive walls that surrounded an ancient city near Chengchuan were completely cryptic in their near total lack of information.

Seriously, someone had somehow gotten permission to inter Engst and Hinton at the south gate and the sign (which was basically all about Hinton with hardly any mention of Engst) near their grave—which I totally was not expecting to find—had at least five times as much text as the sign about the archaeological site where they were buried. The area surrounded by the walls of the old city is bigger than the entire area occupied by the current town of Chengchuan.

I rolled into and through Chengchuan. It's definitely getting a face lift but it felt empty and abandoned not because it was actually empty or abandoned but because everyone was quite sensibly indoors. The sun was still out by the time I finished dinner and just setting when I started looking at hotels. 

I wasn't thrilled with the first place I went into and went off to check out others. In the time it took me to ride down the block to a second place, the temperature had dropped so much that I would have stayed at the second place no matter what but they gave me the wishy-washy "No Foreigners Allowed" excuse that all of their rooms were rented and I went back to the first place, shivering, to find that he'd dropped my price 50% in the hopes that I'd stay as the current ratio of guests to hotel rooms isn't so good for hotel owners.