For planning a bike trip in China I usually start with GoogleMaps. Once I have the rough outline of I absolutely want to go to A, B, C, and D worked out, I start figuring the fiddly bits and detours. In a second browser tab, not logged in, I search for 景点. This broadly means "sites of interest" and, for some reason, covers the map in hundreds of red pimples that include all sorts of sites of interest including parks, temples, and plazas.

Toggling back and forth between this tab and my logged in "designing a map" tab, I look for interesting looking things vaguely near my A to B to C to D route. I then modify the route to go to the detours along with other further tweaks to make sure that I'm just about never on the National Road, don't get too near major cities, and avoid anything that looks like it might be industrial.

This usually takes me anywhere from 6 to 8 weeks. Once I'm satisfied, I then get my paper maps. I used to use the large water resistant provincial wall maps by 星球地图出版社 but these aren't updated as often as the atlases by the same publisher, so I now use the atlases alongside a prodigious amount of sellotape as waterproofing. 

When transferring my route from Google to the paper maps, I work on the assumption that roads which aren't on paper maps produced by a military publishing house are probably roads I don't want to take. Sometimes, I'm really really certain that the way I want to go involves something that isn't shown and I'll find myself switching back and forth between Google, AMap, BaiduMaps, and Google Satellite View.

In addition to being the most accurate maps I've found of China in terms of what is or is not navigable, the paper maps I'm using have a lot of details that are not found in any electronic maps I've used. Things like the line of the Great Wall or cultural sites of major historical interest.

It was when I was in the process of transferring that I decided instead of swinging far to the north to see the ruins of the Huaiyuan Fort near Hengshan before continuing on to the Tongwan Ruins and Inner Mongolia, I could actually go a bit south to Longzhou, ride alongside the Great Wall practically the whole day, and end up in Jingbian. From Jingbian I could go to Tongwan (or not, probably not) on my way to Inner Mongolia and get a head start on being not in the mountains.

After yesterday's mountains, this seemed an excellent idea.

Also, I noticed yesterday, when I was poking around in AMap that Longzhou seems to be one of those places with enough danxia rockforms that it has a danxia geo-park and, holy whatever it is you find holy, the photos of the Longzhou Danxia Park are stunning.

First order of business today is to ask about the road along the Great Wall. The people at the place where I'm having breakfast don't know anything about it. They also don't know anything about the Danxia Park. It's 10 kilometers away from their restaurant. A restaurant they've owned for 3 years. They've never seen any point in going to check it out.

Second order of business is still to ask about the road along the Great Wall. This time I go to the petrol station close to where I had breakfast. I wouldn't normally ask directions at a petrol station in China as I've found gas station attendants to be remarkably ignorant of their surroundings (as well as often being non-drivers) but there's a great big sign welcoming visitors to ask for information about the Danxia Park. He doesn't have much information to give me, none of it is answers to the questions I'm asking him, and he's wrong on just about all of the items which I am able to independently confirm throughout the day.

I'm specifically told by both the attendant and some other guy who wanders over that the road to the Danxia Park absolutely does not run alongside the Great Wall and that there is no Great Wall to be seen at all in this area with the exception of a little bit near the expressway exit south of Jingbian. 

While it's true that I don't see much of anything identifiable as Wall until I get to the place where the road and the Wall intersect in a magnificent line of battered earthworks that marches off into the visible distance in both directions, well, that's Strike One against there being "no Great Wall to be seen at all in this area". Strike Two would be the Longzhou Fort. And Strike Three would be the 9 kilometers of Wall running alongside the road west of Longzhou and south of Jingbian. Oddly enough, or not, as the case may be, I don't actually see anything particularly identifiable as "a small section of Great Wall near the expressway exit".

I did not follow the Wall along the farm roads as the farm roads which followed the Wall were expressly closed to all traffic—vehicular and foot—specifically to protect the fragile danxia rock formations. Instead, I followed the main road down an extremely steep and mindblowingly gorgeous valley, back up again onto flat uninteresting plains, into Longzhou Town where the plains suddenly dropped off hundreds of feet to the blue greenest bit of lake made even bluer by the striped redrock walls.

I stopped at a large temple just to the south of Longzhou Fort initially to look for the bathroom but then to just be amazed at the statues. After about an hour of temple wandering and faced with increasing pressure to pee and no sign of a public toilet or latrine anywhere to be found, I rather rudely ducked behind some shrubs behind one of the older buildings. The remnants of weathered toilet paper and a single human turd told me that I wasn't the first person to have picked this particular set of shrubs.

The climb from Longzhou Fort back up to the high plains was intense, to say the least. I'm pleased to say that I never walked it. I'm especially pleased because, at 1530m above sea level, I was sufficiently feeling the effects of the altitude that, shortly before the long gradual descent started, I had to stop by the side of the road to cough until I vomited.

Once I was sure I wasn't going to vomit again or start coughing again, I set off at an easy pace helped along by the downhill. I skipped a number of potentially interesting looking structures on or near the Wall to focus on getting downhill as soon as possible. By the time I reached Jingbian (at 1000 meters), I felt perfectly fine. Even the slight crankiness I'd had all day from dealing with people who simply did not know things they really ought to know had completely gone away.

The Jingbian Xidesheng couldn't get my tour bike on his workstand without a lot of effort so he flipped it upside down to take a look at my newly acquired shifting issue and we immediately diagnosed the problem. Not having a rubber mallet available, I'd been lazy with properly placing the metal sleeve that holds the take-apart part of the downtube in place and my frame had started to come apart. It speaks of the robustness in Japanese engineering that I had managed to ride 150km in this condition.