I foolishly thought the ride over the mountains of Kanbula would be my last big day of ascents on the bike. The next day’s trip from Guide to the Longyangxia reservoir didn’t look so bad on the map, but would actually make the Kanbula section look like a walk in the park.
My destination was one of China’s largest and most important hydropower projects - the Longyang Gorge dam and solar farm. Built in 1987, the Longyang dam was not as large as the Three Gorges project, but its 178 metre dam wall held back 27 billion square metres of water, with the reservoir covering an area of more than 380 square kilometres in Qinghai. The dam project had displaced thousands of local Tibetan herders and farmers but also created new industries in solar power and fish farming.
In more recent times Longyangxia had become a symbol of China’s move into renewable energy. The hills surrounding the reservoir were covered by four million solar panels, covering an area of more than 27 square kilometres, and visible from space. The solar farm generated 850 MW in electricity, said to be enough to power 200,000 households. And in a unique arrangement, the solar power supply was set up to feed into the national grid in coordination with the power from the dam, which eliminated the ‘peaks and troughs’ of the solar supply alone.
The combined solar and hydropower electricity supply from Longyangxia of 1.5 billion kilowatt hours per year was said to be equivalent to saving around half a million tons of coal per year.
The dam was situated at the end of the 40 kilometre long Longyang gorge, which as I had discovered with the other gorges along the Yellow River, was inaccessible by road. I would have to ride around it. My map app showed that the most direct route from Guide to Longyangxia ran up into the hills around the northern edge of the reservoir.
It was a pleasant sunny morning when I rode down the main street of Guide and turned downhill to a bridge over the Yellow River. I was now on a plateau, with a wall of loess cliffs running parallel to the river on the opposite bank. The first stage of the journey took me 20 kilometres along a quiet riverside road through farming land in the lee of the loess cliffs. I was soon feeling hungry despite having had breakfast, and stopped at the village of Laxiwa (拉西瓦) when I saw a woman selling ‘home made noodles’ from a stall by the roadside. However what she served up on the flimsy table was a bowl of ‘liangpi’ (凉皮), a Shaanxi specialty of cold wheat noodles with a dash of chilli oil and green vegetables. Not being able to stomach it, I diplomatically asked her to put it in a container for me to take away.
The road turned away from the river at the Laxiwa dam and headed up into the hills. It was a shallow gradient highway running through a wide valley flanked by brown hills. Despite the moderate incline, I really struggled to make headway even in the easiest gear - I could only assume it was the high altitude that made the pedalling so difficult. Higher up the valley I passed through villages of Tibetan homestead farms and a couple of small Tibetan Buddhist temples. After a couple of hours I was out into a wilderness of open grassland hills. At the head of the valley I could see the road snaking away to the left and up to a pass at the top of the ridge. Already tired, I upped the battery power assistance and pedalled upwards towards the prayer flags fluttering at the pass. Knowing that I had to cover 100 kilometres over the hills this day, I was again struggling with ‘range anxiety’ while trying to balance the need for pedal assistance against the need to conserve battery reserves for later in the day.
On reaching the prayer flags I found they marked a false summit. What looked like the top of the ‘ridge’ from below was just the first of a number of stages in the uphill road journey that continued around corners to reveal yet another ‘summit’ ahead. The most disheartening was a final narrow passage between two hills that led me out into a more open grassland plateau. There were a few cars passing me on this road and I followed their course as they continued to ascend along a series of long zig zags high up into the hills in the distance until they were too small to be seen. I almost gave up at this point. I had an overwhelming feeling of fatigue and listlessness that I should have recognised as symptoms of altitude sickness: I was now at almost 4000 metres.
I was constantly thirsty and had used up much of my water supply as well as draining most of the bike battery to get to this point. I ran the calculations through my head on the distance travelled to try to estimate where the ‘point of no return’ would be. I told myself there was still the possibility that I could return to Guide and try to take a longer but more level route to get around the massive circumference of the Longyangxia reservoir. As an alternative, I eyed the occasional vans and pickup trucks that were coming up the road, and wondered if I could hitch a lift and get them to carry my bike on the back towards Longyangxia. In the end, I reluctantly got back on the bike and resumed my weak and slow progress up the road.
I was rewarded after about 40 minutes by an easing of the gradient, and a new view of the road turning westward and running across open grassland on which sheep and cows were grazing. About a kilometre away I could see a cluster of Tibetan marquee tents on the grass beside the road, with a few cars and motorbikes parked around them. When I reached them there was nobody around - but the white tent had a sign saying ‘restaurant’ on it. I peered inside the deserted interior to see a table and chairs arranged around a simple stove that was still warm.
As I returned to my bike parked on the road, a couple of young Tibetan guys drove up on a tractor and waved a greeting. “Do you want to eat?” they asked. I certainly did.
Back in the tent they handed me a food menu with photos offering noodles and roubing (肉饼) - meat pies. Yes please! They busied themselves putting some dried peat blocks on the stove and gave me a glass of tea to drink while preparing the dumplings. All of a sudden I felt renewed and confident I could get to Longyangxia after all. The two young guys even allowed me to plug my bike charger into their solar powered electricity outlet.
When they arrived, the dumplings tasted like one of the best meals I had ever eaten. The Tibetan guys told me they were from a nearby village and were up here to manage the sheep and cows, and the restaurant was a side business catering to the increasing number of tourists on ‘self drive’ tours going to Longyangxia. They reassured me that the road from here onwards was ‘mostly’ level or downhill.
I set off across the grassland in a much better frame of mind and with two bars added to the battery charge. I managed without pedal assistance for a while because the road was level and then began a long and gradual descent as the road headed back in the direction of the Yellow River. I passed more Tibetan tents and further down cycled through a small settlement where I was waved at by three young Tibetan women who were dressed up in smart fashionable attire as if about to go out into town for the evening. It was another 40 kilometres of road to Longyangxia across the undulating grassland before the road plunged down into a huge dried-out river bed.
I thought it would be downhill all the way but there was one final ascent under a line of crags until I reached a turning point high above the Longyangxia gorge. Another triangle of prayer flags fluttered in the wind at the point where I stopped to survey the majestic views over the gorge and beyond.
The road beyond took me down into the small settlement of Longyangxia. Constructed in the 1990s to service the dam and associated power projects, it was too small to call a town. It was now looking to tourism as a new economy, and there were several places advertising ‘salmon’ (三文鱼) from the reservoir. Diners sitting at tables along the outdoor terraces of these restaurants gave Longyangxia the atmosphere of a Mediterranean holiday village. Unfortunately for me I was turned away from the ‘Holiday Hotel’ because they did not accept foreigners and had to search out a slightly more expensive place further down the road.
After a simple dinner of wonton soup, I went out to see the dam. It had now become part of the tourist drawcard for Longyangxia and there was even a cafe up the hill that had been put there specifically so visitors could get the perfect location photo for their social media pages. The wide expanse of the reservoir was on a scale much greater than the one I had seen at Liujiaxia, but it looked plain and artificial. The surrounding hills were barren and there were no roads or settlements along the shoreline, only distant outlines of solar panels.
There was a tourist motor cruiser that did trips on the reservoir, but the only other thing I could see on the water were some circular frames for salmon farms. The clear waters of the lake were said to be a perfect environment that produced a very unique and edible type of fish, but a diner in one of the town’s restaurants later told me that the fish bred in the lake were actually rainbow trout rather than salmon. Longyangxia had become one of the main sources of ‘salmon’ in China, he said, but the local product was actually freshwater trout and quite different from sea salmon.
Back at the hotel, I had to face up to the decision I would soon have to make on which route to take beyond this point. Longyangxia was another pivot in the course of the Yellow River. The flooding of the surrounding area to create a 60 kilometre-long reservoir concealed a change in direction of the river, which turned back on itself in a long V-shaped loop over Qingdao’s Amdo Tibetan grasslands.
If I was to continue upriver I would have to turn south and then east from here and go back in the direction of Sichuan, where the river had its ‘first bend’. But I was now entering the upper reaches of the Yellow River where the river ran through sparsely populated grasslands. The few roads in the area ran across the river’s path, not alongside it, and there were sometimes only small towns separated by 100-200 kilometres of wilderness.
After Longyangxia I had the option of taking a road around the north of the reservoir from a town called Gonghe (共和) in Hainan county (海南藏族自治州). A turnoff from this main highway went south towards the territory of the Golok Tibetans. The only town that was even close to the Yellow River was one called Xinghai (兴海). I decided to aim for there, and would ask for more information once I got to Gonghe the next day.
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