I faced an even greater distance - 130 kilometre - on the next day’s ride across the plain to a city called Bayan Nur (巴彦淖尔). With no towns along the route, I stocked up on snacks from a shop opposite my hotel in Wulate before I left. Most shops in China don’t open until 10am, but the owner of this small supermarket was sleeping in a bed behind the counter and got up to open the shop when she saw me peering through the window.
Leaving the town under overcast skies the flat brown landscape gave me a bleak outlook. Freight trains hauled past slowly to my right, and the muddy Yellow River came into view on the left.
I was cheered up though when I caught up with another cyclist who was heading the same direction. Mr Tao, as he introduced himself, was a retired local forestry expert who was cycling out to spend the day at his ‘holiday villa’ located on a section of the Yellow River about 20 kilometres out of town. He had a high end mountain bike, was wearing all the usual lycra gear and was playing Chinese music on a loudspeaker that he switched off so he could chat to me.
After the usual questions about where I was from and me explaining about my Yellow River trip, we moved on to discussing our mutual experiences of early retirement, having grown up children and visiting different parts of China. He told me that his son had graduated from university in Hangzhou and was doing well in business there and had invited his father to come and live in the nice house he had bought there. But Mr Tao said he preferred life in Inner Mongolia.
He liked nature and the quiet life of his riverside villa, where he could cultivate plants in his garden and do some fishing. He could not bear the humid heat of Zhejiang and preferred the mild summers of Wulate: even the winters were not too bad, he claimed, with the below zero temperatures tempered by sunny and dry days. We parted at a crossroads, where he insisted on me accepting a bag of sweets for the road and warning me to give a wide berth to the trucks on the road further south.
The main hazard on the road ahead, however, was not vehicles - of which there were few - but sheepdogs. The wide plains had a thin covering of grass and scrub that were host to small flocks of sheep and goats. Some of these were tended by shepherds, who used alsatians to help herd their sheep - I had always wondered why this breed was called German Shepherds in Australia. I can’t speak for their herding abilities, but the alsatians I encountered certainly lived up to their reputation for being aggressively territorial and ‘bitey’ dogs. I was pursued by one for almost a kilometre after I made the mistake of stopping on the road to take a photo of the sheep moving across the landscape. This was the first time I had used the e-bike ‘sport’ mode and I was glad the motor had no inbuilt speed limiter because I got up to 40 km/h in fleeing from the pursuing hound.
The chase added to the unease that I continued to feel while cycling across this featureless plain with seemingly endless horizons, broken only by a few small trees. This was highlighted when after a couple of hours I saw a dot in the distance, which when I got nearer looked like a stone tower sitting in the middle of nowhere on top of a pyramid of clay. When the road turned to run past it, I saw that it was a rectangular plinth of solid rock about ten metres high, on top of which was planted a large metal sphere. A small sign described it as a monument to mark the northernmost point of the Yellow River. From upstream of here my route along the river would gradually turn southward, I had reached the top of the Ordos Loop.
Aside from a few small huts for the sheep herders, I saw very little sign of any human culture along this part of the river. The road ran along a raised embankment above wetlands with a few patches of dry ploughed clay. Some water channels ran in straight lines for long distances, and there were occasional trees. It seemed barely able to support any population, but another roadside sign I stopped at further on declared that it marked the location of the ancient Han dynasty city of Xitu (西土城). A military garrison at a crossroads for traders, Xitu had a circumference of 12 kilometres and had been a transit point for salt, soda and liquorice centre, the sign informed me. Populated by Mongol people, Xitu had lasted until the Tang dynasty, when it was devastated by flooding of the Yellow River. Now the only remaining sign was a few stumps of mud that had once been the two metre high city wall.
I paused at Xitu to eat some of my crackers for lunch in the shelter of a few trees. The sun had come out and as I continued the landscape became greener and more trees were evident amid the waterlogged ground. There were more irrigation channels emanating from the river and on the map these showed up like a network of capillaries, feeding water into the desert to the north.
This was one of the key fronts in China’s decades-long war against desertification. In a region with negligible rainfall all year round, the irrigation canals had been extended into the arid Gobi areas to the north of the Yellow River and the water used to help create a protective ‘sand-control shelterbelt’ of grassland and even forests almost 500 kilometres in length.
After a couple more hours I arrived at a collection of buildings that included a roadside shop which had a couple of tables arrayed out front under its canopy. In the arid desolate setting it reminded me of the Mojave Desert gas station portrayed in the Terminator 2 movie. I stopped for a bowl of instant noodles, but didn’t need a battery charge as my map showed I was only 20 kilometres from Bayannur.
An hour later I was cycling down the busy avenue in the downtown area of a large modern city. With its strips of malls, fast food outlets and car parks baking under the sun, Bayannur felt like a midwest US town plonked down on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And after finding myself in the lobby of another corporate chain hotel, I once again made the abrupt transition from cycling in the wilderness to relaxing on crisp white bedsheets.
I didn’t make myself too comfortable, because I had to prepare myself for one of the longest and most challenging days I would face on the road the next day: crossing 150 kilometres of the Tengger desert.
From Bayannur the highway ran south along the course of the Yellow River. To the west there was nothing but desert and wilderness for more than 2600 kilometres: first the 600 kilometres emptiness of the Tengger desert, then arid rocks and plains of the Qaidam basin, followed by Xinjiang’s vast Talamakan desert that stretches most of the way to the border with the central Asian stans.
About 40 kilometres to the south from Bayannur was a small town called Dengkou (磴口) where the desert really began. Based on the good progress I had made on the bike in recent days across the flat plains from Togtoh, I believed it was worth trying to continue a further 100 kilometres south along the desert road to reach the ‘oasis’ town of Wuhai (乌海).
I stocked up on water and the next morning I set off early through marshy plains that were much like those of the previous day. By the time I arrived at the river crossing point at Dengkou, 60 kilometres later, the surrounding terrain had become a dusty beige carpet where plants and trees struggled to take hold. A Mongol-domed concrete building guarded the entrance to the bridge that went over massive sluice gates. The river here was brownish green and no longer silted. On the opposite bank I pulled over to an outdoor restaurant where the wonders let me charge up my batteries while they grilled rows of river fish over large grills.
My bike drew curious glances from a group of diners nearby, from which a young couple came over to say hello. They spoke halting English with an oddly familiar accent, and told me they had studied for a year at Huddersfield University near my hometown of Leeds. They were from Bayannur and said this was the first time they’d met a foreigner and had a chance to practice their English since they came back to China. As a parting gift they insisted that I accept a bag of yellow persimmons - a local fruit - and also some flat bread.
Already weighted down, this added to the burden of the four extra litres of water that I had bought before heading out onto the desert road. The next 100 kilometres would be familiar to anyone who has travelled through the Australian Outback and particularly those who have been on the Eyre Highway across Nullarbor Plain. The road was dead straight, mostly level with a few slight undulations, and the surrounding terrain was treeless scrub. Unlike the outback, the Tengger desert highway had some areas with electricity pylons and a section where a train line ran in parallel.
This desert road did not have the huge road trains seen on Australia’s outback highways but it did have its fair share of heavy trucks roaring past at regular intervals. I felt a fair degree of trepidation as I left the last outpost of Dengkou behind me and set off towards the distant horizon, thinking this would be the worst place for the bike to get a puncture or mechanical problem.
And of course, that is exactly what happened. About 20 kilometres down the road I sensed the bike was becoming unstable and there was something wrong with the rear wheel. I looked down to see the tyre was half deflated. A slow puncture. Without knowing how long it had been like that, I pulled my mini-pump out from the recesses of my pannier and started trying to inflate the tyre, in the hope that it might hold up for the remainder of the distance to Wuhai. No such luck. The tyre became completely flat within a minute of setting off again, no doubt with the heavy load I was carrying adding additional pressure on the puncture. I had no alternative to do a roadside repair.
With a slight air of nervousness and suppressed panic, I pulled the bike off the road onto a path of gravel and started the laborious process of taking off all the bags and removing the batteries so that I could turn it upside down.
I removed the rear wheel, careful not to lose the little springs and pins that held it in, then used the tyre levers I’d brought to get the gravel tyre off the hub. One removed, I inspected the tyre to see what had caused the puncture, and found a tiny sliver of metal wire protruding through the rubber. Using my mini multitool pliers to extract it, I replaced the inner tube and struggled to get the tyre back in place onto the hub again. I was thankful that I’d brought a spare inner tube because it would have been impossible in that waterless environment to find any puncture.
The moment of truth: it took a lot of pumping and sweat with the minipump to get the tyre reinflated to some kind of firmness, and I crossed my oil-stained fingers that it would hold. Before I could reattach the wheel, a passing car pulled over and the young driver looked out at my upturned bike, asking if I needed any help. I thanked him and said I’d already fixed my tyre. He reached inside and pulled out a couple of bottles of water that he insisted I take. I remembered that line from the Afrika Korps officer to his British counterpart in the film Ice Cold in Alex: ‘together we face the common enemy - the desert!’
Within half an hour I had loaded up the bike again and set off warily along the road, this time keeping away from the shoulder where I presumed the metal debris from a tyre belt had come from. The new innertube held and carried me along the desert road for another two hours until I reached some farmsteads and roadside workshops that marked the furthest encroachment of human habitation into the desert. Not long after this, I suffered a second flat on the rear tyre and had to repeat the whole repair process. I was a very weary and relieved rider when I finally hauled into Wuhai.
Wuhai was an oasis in the true sense of the word because it centred around a massive lake that had been created from the Yellow River by a water conservation scheme completed in 2013. Now it looked like a natural waterway, lined by trees and reed marshes, and with parklands and cycle paths around the perimeter. In the middle the lake was spanned by a two kilometre-long bridge, and behind the lake was a ridge of mountains with a massive bust of Genghis Khan installed on the highest peak, as if surveying his domain below.
After my desert drama, I emulated the characters who survived the Sahara in Ice Cold in Alex by treating myself to an ice cold beer in the bar of the Century Yuan Hotel. Worth waiting for.
For me, Wuhai would be the last town in Inner Mongolia before moving into Ningxia, but for many Chinese it would be their first and perhaps only stop in the region. With its new lake and water conservancy project the town was trying to rebrand itself from a remote mining town into an ecological tourism hub. It could be reached from Lanzhou in six hours by motorway and train, and had a new airport into which visitors could fly from around the country to experience a taste of the desert without having to go the long distance to Xinjiang.
Wuhai was also trying to make its mark with another novel industry: viticulture. The waters of the new lake irrigated recently established vineyards, such as the 7000 hectares planted by two brothers surnamed Han who named their desert estate ‘Chateau Hansen’. In line with Wuhai’s ‘ecological’ ethos they specialise in organic wines and the Wuhai vineyards are now reported to producing 2 million litres of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot a year, with most of it for domestic consumption. In their marketing blurb they say the dry, clean air of Wuhai along with the long hours of sunshine and sandy soil provide ideal conditions for growing a unique variety of grapes.
Wuhai now had several ‘wine estates’, a visit to which had become a fixture on the tourist itineraries along with a trip out to see the sand dunes and
I looked for a bottle of the local plonk in the local supermarket but was only able to find a bottle with a price tag of 120 yuan, so opted for another beer instead.
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