The third and final stage of my Yellow River cycling trip began badly when I departed Lanzhou in a torrent of swearing and with a non-working phone. My destination was the major reservoir of Liujia Gorge (Liujiaxia), some 80 kilometres away, on what should have been a gentle reintroduction to being on the road. But after just four days out of the saddle, I seemed to have difficulty getting back into the groove of cycling.
The reason for my swearing was the hazardous ‘near-miss’ driving I experienced on the streets on the way out of Lanzhou. Being a long and narrow city, the traffic all seemed to be funnelled down the highway I was using to get out of town to the west. For the first hour I was shunted between one set of traffic lights and the next, with the passing scooters, cars and trucks all seeming to be within millimetres of side-swiping me. After the third or fourth ‘f—-!’ I decided it would be prudent to pause, calm down and try and take it one block at a time. Rather than follow this level but lethally busy beside the river I had the option of taking a more direct but hillier route across some mountains to Liujiaxia.
To add to my frustration, my Gaode navigation app was not working because the phone appeared to have no signal. It was only when I turned off the main highway and headed uphill on to quieter roads that I realised that I’d switched my phone’s mobile data off while in Hong Kong and had forgotten to turn it back on again.
By mid-morning I was pedalling steadily upwards into a pleasant landscape of sharp hills covered with green scrub. I was getting used to the different feel of the new narrower tyres and the saddle, and the increased weight I was carrying from the addition of a tent and sleeping bag to my panniers. The camping gear was a late addition that I’d added in case I was unable to find any accommodation in the more remote parts of the Yellow River on the Tibetan highlands.
After I passed through a long tunnel the road inclined downhill, eventually returning me to the Yellow River at a small town called Yongjing (永靖). It had a mundane urban feel to it, like an outer suburb of the big city despite being set at the head of the massive lake of Liujiaxia reservoir. Its proximity to Lanzhou meant that Yongjing was geared up for day visits and weekend sightseers, with dinosaur-themed funparks along the waterfront and ‘resorts’ offering barbecue sites and fish restaurants.
I made the mistake of booking a ‘cheap’ hotel option in the centre of town without seeing it in person. When I arrived the bored manageress struggled out of a chair to reluctantly work through the complicated check-in registration webpage for foreigners, then showed me up to a windowless room in what seemed like a residential apartment block. No bikes allowed in the hotel, she told me as she returned to watching videos on her phone. So as I took it out of the door, I glanced enviously over at the nearby Fumen Hotel which looked very pleasant and would have cost only an extra 40 yuan a night. Too late, my room was non-refundable.
Rather than sit around in the gloomy hotel room I got back on the bike and rode around a couple of kilometres around a bend in the river to see the site of the Liujiaxia dam.
The dam was among the first to be built on the Yellow River, with construction started in the 1950s. However work was paused when the problems of silting became obvious with the Sanmenxia dam downstream in Henan. The Liujiaxia dam was eventually finished in the late 1960s, with further delays due to the Cultural Revolution. The problem of silting up was addressed by the addition of a ‘sand flushing hole’ to the bottom of the dam wall. The dam now serves to prevent the flooding of the Lanzhou area that often occurred downstream after the spring thaws.
For me, the dam was not the main attraction of Liujiaxia, and I was more interested in seeing if I could get to the Buddhist statue caves of Bingling Temple (炳灵寺), at the head of the reservoir. Similar in style to the Buddhist statues at the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang, the hundreds of Bingling Buddhist statues and murals were hewn out of cliffs and in natural caves over a long period starting in the fifth century. Since the flooding of the valley, the caves and cliffs can only be accessed by boat, and even then only at certain times of year when the water level is high enough.
Unfortunately, when I inquired at the tourism centre, I was told that only a number of smaller boats were going to the caves and no tickets were available until later in the afternoon. Some touts outside the ticket office tried to sell me on the idea of driving to the Bingling site, but I told them I would be cycling past there anyway.
I returned back to my hotel room to study the maps for the road ahead.
To follow the Yellow River upstream from Gansu towards the Tibetan plateau I would need to pass through a series of deep valleys populated predominantly by Muslim minorities such as the Salar (撒拉族) and Bao’an (保安族) people. Unlike the Hui Muslims I had seen so far, these groups were quite distinct from the Han Chinese and had unusual and varied origins.
The Salars, for example, were a Turkic people whose Muslim ancestors were said to have migrated from the Samarkand region. When they settled in the Qinghai-Gansu border area they intermingled and intermarried with Tibetans from whom they adopted many characteristics, including Tibetan loanwords in their language. In the Ming dynasty period the Salar were granted a large amount of local autonomy and were often recruited as soldiers into government service.
Similarly, the Bao’an Muslims also had a reputation for military service and were descended from Mongol soldiers who had been brought to Qinghai by Kublai Khan and his successors in the Yuan dynasty that ruled China in the 15th century. The Mongol ancestors of the Bao’an practised Tibetan Buddhism, and some remained Buddhist after the Bao’an were converted to Islam in the 18th century.
These Muslim groups now lived along the Yellow River in valleys that lay on the western side of the Liujia Gorge. There was no road through the gorge, so the only way to get there was for me to head over the hills.
Setting off early in the morning, the first 60 kilometres of my journey was up a steady incline along a road that skirted the northern side of Liujiaxia reservoir. It went through cultivated farmland and eventually reached a plateau where I had a sweeping view down across the reservoir. It was here that I had my first close-up encounter with an agricultural drone. Measuring more than a metre in width, the machine was buzzing up and down rows of apple trees spraying them with pesticide from a 100 litre tank. The operator told me it cost 40,000 yuan (US$5000) and could spray a field in a couple of hours whereas it would take two or three workers a whole day to do the same job.
I stopped for lunch at a farming village close to the road entrance to Bingling Temple. I was thinking of doing a detour to see the statues, but the restaurant owner told me it was a long and steep switchback track that would add almost 40 kilometres on to my journey. Having already used up half my battery reserves, I decided to press on towards the next valley. The restaurant owner warned me that the road down into the valley was in a poor state of repair, and that many of the highways in the valley had only just been reopened after a massive earthquake in December 2023 had blocked them. The 6.2 scale earthquake had caused widespread landslides and collapsed many buildings, killing more than 150 people, he told me.
In fact, the turnoff down into the valley could hardly be called a road: much of it was a dirt track and what remained of the original concrete surface was cracked and corrugated. My new tyres might have been puncture proof but they were narrower and more rigid than the gravel tyres they replaced, and were not suited for this kind of road. I bumped and rattled down the road, which in some parts was so bad I chose to dismount and walk it through the worst sections. I began to worry that I had taken the wrong road.
Far below me I could just see the Yellow River running in a steep sided valley, and as I turned around a corner, a monastery perched atop a narrow ridge came into view. This was the Jingjue Wofo Temple (静觉卧佛寺), one of the first signs of Tibetan Buddhism I would see on the road towards Qinghai.
As I descended down into the long ridges of eroded brown loess hills the road condition improved slightly and I was soon level with the temple buildings, now looking up at the dizzying ridge line rather than down upon it.
My bike survived the descent and by late afternoon I had emerged beyond the monastery onto something that resembled a normal road, running alongside the river. I was blessedly level, and I was able to use the last few bars of battery power to pedal westwards for about 20 kilometres towards a small town called Dahejia (大河家).
It was a distinctly Muslim town of little more than two streets where the road from the Jijishan valley emerges at the red cliffs of the Yellow River. Many of the men wore traditional libai mao (礼拜帽, prayer cap) and the women donned the gaitou (盖头) head cover similar to a hijab. I managed to check into one of the few hotels in town and found that even Dahejia had the usual basement supermarket in its shopping mall - but this one did not sell alcohol. I’d been meaning to cut back on the post-cycling beers anyway.
While it was not a tourist town, the main street did feature several shops selling a wide variety of traditional Bao’an knives, daggers and even swords. They were renowned as swordsmiths and the shops featured photographs and testimonies of their wares being displayed to visiting dignitaries.
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