In Xi’an I heeded the tenet of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and adopted a ‘non-action’ policy of going with the flow. I did the tourist stuff and met the first foreigners I had seen so far on this trip. They were Russians, staying the hotel I’d chosen near the gateway of the Terracotta Warriors (兵马俑, Bing Ma Yong) on the outskirts of Xi’an. We didn’t talk.
I was suitably impressed by the Terracotta Warriors when I saw them the next morning. I had been one of the first in line before the gates opened at 8.30am, and yet I still only managed a few minutes of unobstructed views of the warriors in the massive hanger-like building before the walkways were crammed with crowds of visitors.
Similarly there were crowds of tourists at Huashan, where I took a cable car up to the summit on a rainy morning. The scenery was breathtaking and I rediscovered my fear of heights when I bottled out of taking some of the walkways leading to lookouts with steep drops on both sides. After an hour of weaving and shuffling with the crowds around the summit area and its restaurants and shops, I took the cable car back down, keeping my eyes closed most of the way.
I ‘did’ the other Xi’an sites such as the Drum Tower, City Wall and the very commercialised Muslim Quarter, where the beggars proffered laminated WeChat QR codes to solicit donations. I ate Biang Biang noodles and jianbing pancakes and the city’s famous Yangrou Paomo (羊肉泡) - crumbled bread in mutton soup.
As in Luoyang, I visited a museum to try to see the Jingjiao Stele (景教碑) which recorded the presence of Nestorian Christians in the old Chinese capital, which was then known as Chang’an, in the eight century. At the Beilin museum there was a reproduction of a stele entitled the “Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin”. The stone was erected in the year 781 with an inscription composed by a Christian named Adam who was likely from the Church of the East located around modern Iraq or Iran. I found it fascinating to note that the Emperor had noted and approved of a Christian community in China at the same time that Christianity was still just taking a foothold in England.
As with the Jewish community in nearby Kaifeng, the rulers of ancient China seemed to have a ‘live and let live’ approach to foreign religions and settlers being in the country, so long as they accepted the authority of the Middle Kingdom’s government.
I saw a few of the modern day foreign visitors to Xi’an in the bar and cafe at the youth hostel where I stayed near to the Drum Tower. I didn’t actually speak to any of the ‘laowai’ at the hostel, because like most travellers these days they were staring intently at their phones and avoiding eye contact. I did get some attention from the hostel staff, who were intrigued by my folding e-bike and full of praise (你很棒! ‘Ni hen bang!’) for my progress so far.
After a day trawling around Xi’an’s many bike shops, I found an e-bike that seemed to suit my needs for the road ahead. The Giant Tour E+ 200 e-bike had dual batteries, with a claimed range of 200 kilometres. It had pannier racks as standard, butterfly handlebars to provide multiple grip choices, ‘fat’ gravel tyres, disc brakes, lights, mudguards, and a SelleRoyal design Italian saddle. Even better, there was a choice of models, and I selected a step-through frame version, for ease of getting on and off. After a test ride up and down the street I handed over 8000 yuan for the Giant.
After packing up the Dahon to send it back to Guilin, I used the rest of my brief stopover in Xi’an to plan the next stage of my bike trip. While I had already plotted a vague course along the Yellow River from Xi’an to Baotou (包头) using Google Earth, I now broke it down into daily sections, knowing from experience that I could achieve 80-100km a day with an e-bike on level ground. The Gaode map app provided suggestions of A to B cycling routes for each daily sector, and a separate tab in the app showed me the locations of hotels en route.
I could find no reports online from any other cyclists or travellers who had done the Yellow River route from Shanxi to Inner Mongolia, but it seemed feasible. The main feature of this 800 kilometre stage would be the start of the loess terrain. From the flat plain of the eastern China river basin I would suddenly enter a new landscape of low mountains that stretched from a place called Dragon’s Gate (龙门, Longmen) all the way up to the inner Mongolia border.
The Yellow River was hemmed into a canyon by the Longmen mountains, and the map showed there was some kind of road along the river for much of this section. However, there appeared to be some remote sections north of a feature called the Hukou waterfalls (壶口瀑布) where the steep sides of the river canyon forced the road to move away from the riverbank and divert over the nearby hills for 50 kilometres or more before regaining the river.
The only way to know for sure was to go there, and this meant backtracking to Huashan and the corner where the Yellow River makes its dramatic 90 degree turn.
No comments:
Post a Comment