I deserved a day off after the huge distance I covered coming down from Qinghai. I didn’t give myself that, but the next best thing was an ‘easy’ 60 kilometre day around the Liujiaxia reservoir to Linxia (临夏), the Hui Muslim town described as ‘Little Mecca’ because of its numerous mosques.
It was a wonderful sunny day as I crossed the Qijia (祈家) bridge that took me over a gorge of the Yellow River to the south shore of the reservoir. I didn’t need to wait until Linxia to see mosques as there was a very ornate one in Qijia as soon as I crossed the bridge. The road followed the shoreline for a few kilometres and I noted that the water level was quite low - presumably still awaiting the late spring releases of water from the numerous dams I had seen upriver.
Further on I approached something I had long dreaded: a long road tunnel. I bypassed a line of cars and trucks waiting at the entrance for the oncoming traffic to get through. A construction worker with a red flag allowed me to pass, and I was able to ride on the cordoned-off side of the road where maintenance crews were working in dark and noisy conditions to resurface the highway. I had always feared being overcome by carbon monoxide in a long road tunnel, but these guys were working in the middle of a one kilometre tunnel without so much as a mask, let alone fans or breathing apparatus. Nevertheless I was still glad to escape the fug and the thunderous roar of trucks to emerge back into the sunshine.
Beyond the exit of the tunnel a suspension bridge spanned an inlet of the reservoir and offered a panoramic view over the two kilometre wide expanse of water and the dramatic red sandstone rock formations along the shore.
Turning south into a wide bay, the road passed a ferry jetty where tourist boats made a stop on their way between the dam and the Bingling statues. I continued on south, passing a few Muslim restaurants and wondering whether China’s ‘Little Mecca’ might be a sensitive region that was out of bounds for foreigners. Or might it be a strictly Muslim enclave that followed sharia law?
When researching the route I’d learned that in 2010 the imams in neighbouring Guanghe (广河) prefecture had organised local residents to lobby local restaurants and shops not to sell alcohol and to avoid any pork-based foodstuffs. Feelings ran high and there were even photos of men confiscating crates of beer and making a show of smashing them in the street.
Conversely, another branch of local Muslims known as the Dongxiang (东乡) once had a reputation for being heavily involved in the illicit drug trade in heroin. In the early 2000s the Gansu authorities launched a “strike hard” campaign in Dongxiang Autonomous County to crack down on gangs who were trafficking opium from Yunnan and Burma and also growing poppies locally in the areas west of Linxia centred around Sanjiaji.
So when I rolled into Linxia I was reassured to find it was a pleasant and progressive city of modern high-rise apartments and landscaped lakes: Some people were wearing Islamic headdress but most of the younger population had adopted the secular smart-casual attire of office workers everywhere. Linxia was more Canberra than Mecca.
Since it was Friday and it was my custom to welcome the weekend with a beer, I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Linxia had a few craft beer bars. On the northern fringe of the city centre was a series of pedestrianised shopping streets, part of which had presumably been designed as a food district. There were bars and restaurants, and I found myself at the Derenberg brewery trying to decide whether to splash out on a bottle of Oak Barrel matured ale or a Milk Stout.
Linxia would be the final stop in the Muslim areas of the Yellow River and also in the region of loess landscape. The south of Gansu was very different from the rest of the province and its name in Chinese Gannan was synonymous with Tibetan culture and the grasslands around famous monasteries such as Labrang.
My final evening in Linxia was therefore spent enjoying a bowl of the spicy chicken dapanji, which was a Hui specialty. It was so popular in the region that there was even a franchise restaurant chain which sold only dapanji and variations of it.
In the Gannan region my next main goal was to get to the monastery town of Langmusi (郎木寺), about 260 kilometres south, from where I would be able to take a side road to the Yellow River. With my daily cycling range of around 100 kilometres, the route would take me through two Tibetan towns, Hezuo (合作) and Luqu (碌).
There was a major highway running around the mountains to Hezuo, but for some reason my navigation app was telling me to take a minor road that went up into the hills. I found out why when I entered the river valley south of Linxia: tunnels. The road snaked around green wooded hills, following the course of a turbulent river.
The terrain was quite different from the arid sandstone I had become used to, but it was a welcome to return to the Tibetan landscape that I had visited so many times in the last few decades. I saw signposts for the road to Labrang (Xiahe, 夏河) monastery and then encountered my first tunnel: the sign said no bikes or tractors. I paused to consider my options - there was no alternative route over the hills, and since it was only a 200 metre tunnel, I waited for a lull in the traffic and pedalled through. It was to be the first of four such tunnels, all prohibiting bikes. I made it through each one when the traffic was light.
The road made a gradual ascent into beautiful hills but the scenery was marred by construction work underway along the left side. Concrete pylons were being erected and tunnels were being bored into the mountain side. It looked like a new rail line - and a sign I saw later in the day described it as the ‘Xi-Cheng High Speed Rail Link’ that would connect Xining and Chengdu directly and reduce travel times from 10 hours to just four by avoiding the need to travel via Xi’an.
Building a railway line across the Aba Tibetan steppe into southern Gansu was a remarkably ambitious engineering challenge. Most of the line would be at an altitude of over 3000 metres and would require 158 bridges and 66 tunnels to negotiate the mountains and marshlands of this part of the Tibet-Qinghai highlands. Perhaps the project was motivated by a sense of destiny among the leaders of China’s Communist Party, for this was the place where the Party’s future had been forged during the Long March.
In 1937, the ‘great snowy mountains’ and grasslands of northern Sichuan and southern Gansu had proved to be the most arduous part of the Red Army’s push north towards Shaanxi.
In Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow wrote in of it:
“In the grasslands there was no human habitation for ten days. Almost perpetual rain falls over this swampland, and it is possible to cross its centre only by a maze of narrow footholds known to the native mountaineers who led the Reds. More animals were lost, and more men. Many foundered in the weird sea of wet grass and dropped from sight into the depth of the swamp, beyond reach of their comrades.
“There was no firewood; they were obliged to eat their green wheat and vegetables raw. There were even no trees for shelter, and the lightly equipped Reds carried no tents. At night they huddled under bushes tied together, which gave but scant protection against the rain.”
When completed, the new Sichuan-Gansu railway would enable ordinary Chinese citizens to travel in comfort at 250 km/hour across a landscape where once the Party founders had struggled for weeks in arduous and sometimes fatal conditions.
Perhaps the rail project will be used by the Chinese government as a symbol of a new technological Long March, just as the original trek through the region had been used in propaganda to show the Party setting an example for the rest of the nation.
As the writer Sun Shuyun said in her book The Long March:
“The message has been drilled into us so that we can accomplish any goal set before us by the party because nothing compares in difficulty with what they did. Decades after the historical one, we have been spurred on to ever more Long Marches – to industrialise China, to feed the largest population in the world, to catch up with the West, to reform the socialist economy, to send men into space, to engage with the 21st century.”
Beyond the tunnels and the turnoff to the Dangzhou grasslands (当周草原), I had to contend with one more high pass before the descent into Hezuo. It was just before the pass that I saw my first foreign cyclist of the whole trip. A young western woman sped past on a bike in the opposite direction as I struggled up the hill, and it happened so quickly that I didn’t even have a chance to react, let alone stop and chat. I can only guess that she was on her way to nearby Labrang.
Hezuo was a small town most famous for being the location of the unique Milarepa pavilion (安多合作米拉日巴佛阁). This broad nine-storey edifice held a special place in Tibetan Buddhist culture, with each floor having a richly-decorated temple dedicated to one of the Tibetan deities. I stopped off on the way into Hezuo to take a look and it was indeed unique and magnificent - but after climbing up the stairs to each of the temples I discovered that photography was strictly forbidden.
The tower looked newly renovated and was contained within a walled square of prayer wheels next to Hezuo’s main monastery, Tso Gompa, which also looked like it had undergone a recent makeover.
The town of Hezuo itself was an anonymous grid of modern buildings. After parking up my bike at the hotel I went for a walk in search of something to eat. Two young Tibetan women saw me looking a bit lost and asked me what I was looking for.
“You won’t find any good restaurants around here,” they laughed. “Come with us, we’ll show you where to get something.”
Their down-to-earth and irreverent attitude reminded me of the way people in Yorkshire spoke - not afraid to offer a bit of unsolicited advice to strangers. They led me to a street and recommended a fancy Tibetan restaurant.
“This is where all the Beijing and Shanghai people come to ‘da ka’ (打卡, take social media images) and ‘zhi bo’ (直播, live streaming) for Douyin, ” they said.
When I said I wasn’t interested in Tiktok and preferred a Sichuan restaurant, the girls shrugged and wished me a good trip. “Welcome to Hezuo,” they called out as they departed.
The next day’s cycling brought me a taste of Long March-like arduous struggle as I pedalled to a small town on the steppe called Luqu. It started off well enough as I crossed a pass into a pleasant grassy valley of farms and small temples. The local Tibetans were hawking strawberries and honey at stalls by a road junction. I stopped to take a photo of an old Tibetan monk as he meandered up an embankment from the river. When he saw me he waved and greeted me with ‘tashi delay’.
In response to the usual questions I told him about where I had come from and where I was going. After giving me the thumbs up, he pulled out a 20 yuan banknote from his bag and asked for a donation. When I said I carried no cash, he pulled out a laminated WeChat Pay QR Code. I had to laugh, and swiped his code to donate 20 yuan. If I thought I might acquire some merit from this act of benevolence, it certainly wasn't with the weather gods.
As I started pedalling up towards another pass, the heavens opened and I quickly got soaked, despite my rain cape. I was now up at around 4000 metres and was also feeling the lethargy of altitude sickness and with cold and wet fingers and toes too. It was a thoroughly miserable ride to Luqu and a dangerous one too as I sometimes had to steer the bike into the centre of the road to avoid the puddles and rivers of water along the side of the road.
The rain did not let up all the way to Luqu, by which time I was desperate to find shelter and change out of my sodden clothes. On arrival in the one-street town, my wet hands fumbled to make any impression on the phone touchscreen while I sheltered in a doorway and I booked the nearest hotel. I should have read the description because to my disappointment, this turned out to be a sleazy internet cafe that had some basic rooms above it. I could not face going back out into the rain and just accepted my fate. I wheeled my bike through the computer hall where Tibetan youths smoked and lounged around gaming screens and pool tables.
With nothing to do, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the room trying to dry my shoes with a hair dryer. I felt a bit better after a cup of tea, using one of the last of my Yorkshire Tea bags - I would need to get to my goal before they ran out! Perusing my map I was glad to see that I was now only a day’s journey away from Langmusi, from where there were side roads to the Yellow River at Maqu and Tangke (唐克). The latter was further away, but was the site of the river’s ‘First Bend’. There was no road along the river for the 80 kilometres or so between the two places, so I decided to go directly to Tangke.
If my rainswept road to Luqu was a reminder of the difficulties of the Long March, the next day’s ride to Langmusi was literally moving forward into the sunlit uplands of Sichuan. Starting out at an altitude of 3200 metres, I cycled up into the grassy hills above Luqu, where flocks of sheep amble up the misty slopes.
By mid morning the mist had lifted and I was on a busy highway across the grassland plateau, once again following the messy construction of the high speed rail line. I passed a junction with a road heading towards the Yellow River at Maqu County, but I didn’t take it: there was no way to get from Maqu to the first bend of the river.
Staying on the main highway, the truck traffic kept me on my toes, and it was augmented by increasing numbers of coaches and cars with plates from distant provinces. I played a game of trying to match the Chinese characters on the plate to the home province. As well as the expected Gansu 甘 and Sichuan 川 I was seeing plates from Yunnan 云, Guangdong 粤 and even distant provinces such as Zhejiang 浙.
I was entering the tourist zone. At the highland lake of Gahai (尕海) I saw my first Tibetan holiday campsite: at a junction there were a couple of new buildings and some Tibetan marquee-style tents with strings of prayer flags and a row of A-frame pitch-roofed cabins behind them. It offered horse riding and all-terrain vehicles (沙滩车 - literally ‘beach buggy’) for hire, and a bored Tibetan youth was stood by the roadside waving a sign advertising Tibetan barbecue and hotpot. They didn’t have many customers but the owners didn’t seem to be short of money either: the owners had a BYD electric car and another Tibetan youth drove out from the reception in a Lexus.
This local tourism-related venture was the template for scores of similar such businesses I would see over the next few days around Langmusi and the headwaters of the Yellow River, all offering horse rides, glamping and local cuisine.
The next remote settlement on the plateau was Gongba (贡巴), which boasted a large new visitor centre topped with a sign proclaiming it was a “National AAAA-Level Tourist Attraction”. For about a kilometre the highway was lined with restaurants offering local cuisine and Sichuan dishes. The carpark was busy with coaches, cars and even a couple of campervans. It had food and gift stalls and a coffee van with a sign that said “Latte brings Long Life and Wealth".
Gongba was also an example of the Chinese policy of settling Tibetan grassland nomads into permanent housing. At the far end of ‘town’ was a long line of about 20 identical new houses built in a vaguely Tibetan style with red tiled roofs. The area around it had been landscaped with walkways, ‘sitting out area’ with pavilions and a playground.
Pedalling on into the grassland, I noted that it was now extensively fenced, with herds of yaks and sheep grazing around small homesteads and tents. The Tibetan herders here rode small horses, and at one point I was riding alongside one of them as he herded his flock of about 100 goats across the highway. What a contrast to see Chinese tourists in their electric vehicles having to stop and wait for a herder sitting in the saddle wearing a traditional chuba and cowboy hat, with his face protected from the sun by a scarf.
For the rest of the day as I pedalled over the plateau I enjoyed sunny weather, giving me a real world experience of the Windows XP wallpaper image of bucolic green hills, blue skies and white clouds. I also had a trio of hawks circling overhead.
Reaching the Gansu-Sichuan border, the highway continued on towards Ruo’ergai (若尔盖,Zoige), but I took a turnoff that descended into the monastery town of Langmusi.
Set in a wooded valley surrounded by rocky peaks, it was easy to see why Langmusi had become such a popular tourist destination. The town had two major Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that straddled the border: the Serti Gompa on the northern side of the river was in Gansu while the Kirti Gompa was in Sichuan. They were centres for Gelugpa ‘Yellow Hat’ Buddhism and the main temple buildings had been extensively renovated with gilded roofs and colourful thanka murals.
When I arrived, there were a lot of monks on the street and also a lot of tourists. Langmusi’s main street could have been transplanted from Dali or Yangshuo. It had been rebuilt in a generic ‘rustic Tibetan’ style with wooden shopfronts, a cobbled road and lots of signposts. The street was lined with restaurants, bars, coffee shops, convenience stores, guesthouses and gift shops.
My initial choice of hotel was near the entrance of the Kirti monastery which looked nice in its online photos, but in reality was a soulless shell. Despite having few customers, the man at the reception desk had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude and did not disguise his reluctance to let me see the rooms on offer. He quoted a price that was 100 yuan more than the online price, after which I walked away to try some of the other hotels in town. It took me four attempts to find somewhere half decent that would accept me - and even this guesthouse room lacked basic amenities such as towels.
After parking my bike, I went next door to a Muslim-run restaurant where they had menus in English and I ordered the ‘yak burger’. It was actually just a large ‘rou jia mou’ (肉夹馍) meat bun and I vowed to stick to Chinese dishes in future.
I had a wander around the streets of Langmusi and saw the monasteries from a distance but did not go inside the temple buildings. I felt uneasy about being part of the mass tourism phenomenon in Langmusi, and did not want to join the crowds of tourists posing for photos in front of statues or talking into their phones on selfie sticks as they livestreamed their experience. I knew I was being hypocritical and snobbish, but I’d seen many other Tibetan Buddhist temples during my travels that I felt I could miss these two.
Tibetan writers such as Woeser have described how the tourism industry is undermining their traditional cultural and religious practices. Sacred places undergo ‘Disneyfied’ development and are marketed as ‘magical kingdoms’ to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors. While these tourists may be respectful and have a genuine interest in Tibetan Buddhism, the sheer numbers and the facilities needed to cater for them can overwhelm communities and sideline genuine pilgrims.
Most of the shops in Langmusi may have been aimed at tourists but the supermarket still catered for the everyday needs of the Tibetan community: it had a special section for household items such as yak butter tea mixers and golden bowls to hold candles that burned butter oil. The clothing section was given over to chubas, pangden striped aprons and the cheap straw sun bonnets favoured by many older Tibetan women. On my way back to the hotel I heard the sound of a sports whistle blowing and peeped through a gateway into a yard where young monks in their maroon robes were playing a serious game of basketball.
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