The ride north from Longmen into the Yellow River canyon towards Hukou waterfall was spectacular. I started the ride with some trepidation because some Chinese cyclists I met on the road told me there were no places to get food or water along this 70-kilometre stretch of the river. Leaving the ugly industry of Longmen behind me, I stayed on the Shanxi (east) side of the river, which the cyclists had told me was preferable to the road on the western (Shaanxi) side because it had less traffic, and especially fewer trucks.
Departing industrial Longmen, I emerged from a short tunnel to be greeted by a beautiful scene: the river canyon extending northwards for many kilometres, and even better - the road had a cycle lane. The road was labelled as the ‘Yellow River Number One Scenic Highway’ (黄河一号旅游公路) and it was marked with the same blue, yellow, and red stripes as I’d seen further south.
After passing a ‘stone forest’ of rock pinnacles, I followed the road cut into the side of a steep cliff. The river here was narrow and the water green and clear, with occasional sandbars. As I pedalled further north, the terrain became wilder and more remote, with the road bridging several deep gullies extending down to the water. The dry reddish-brown sandstone rock and sparse scrub vegetation reminded me of the landscapes around Pittwater, north of Sydney.
Amazingly, there was almost no traffic, and I had the road almost to myself. This was just as well because the constantly changing scenery had me stopping to take photos every few minutes. It was a sunny day, and I enjoyed the ups and downs of the road as it skirted high cliffs, then descended to sandy beaches alongside the river. The road was an engineering marvel of bridges and cuttings through the cliffs and appeared newly constructed.
Apart from a few signboards erected by the local Jixian (吉县) government promoting the scenic road, there were no facilities for the next 60 kilometres. Then I reached a bridge that brought more traffic onto the road, funnelled from a major east-west highway. For the last 10 kilometres or so into Hukou Falls, the gorge widened and the road was lined with restaurants offering river fish and other dishes, until I reached the small town that served as the tourist centre for the waterfall.
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| Route map: Longmen to Hukou Falls (click on image to enlarge) |
It was a hot day as I checked into a guesthouse and dumped my bags in the room. With the lighter unloaded bike, I went to explore the road ahead, to see the falls and investigate if it was possible to continue further north by bike. My maps suggested that the riverside highway ended about 10 kilometres north of the Hukou falls, with a minor road looping back to the county town of Jiaxian.
When the road reached the entrance to the Hukou waterfall scenic area, it was blocked by a barrier, with admission only allowed on foot. I locked up my bike in the shade of some trees and bought a ticket. The waterfalls were another three kilometres further north, and I had to join scores of other visitors and take a shuttle bus to be dropped off at another car park near the falls. It seemed that no private vehicles - or bicycles - could proceed further north alongside the Yellow River from this point.
At Hukou, the green waters of the river are pressed through a narrow channel formed by horizontal slabs of sandy-coloured rock. In some sections, the waters flowed over the flat rock in several different streams, but at the main point of the falls, the waters of the river surged through a single deep channel that churned up the water into a powerful white torrent. It was hard to imagine that this was the same river that I had seen flowing slowly across a kilometre or more width just a day before.
The Chinese name for the falls means kettle spout, to describe the bottleneck effect of the river water pouring out after being forced through the gap just a few metres wide.
While not as high or as famous as other waterfalls in China such as Huanguoshuo Falls in Guizhou, the Hukou Falls still attract a lot of visitors and hype. They also attract individuals who want to make a name for themselves with stunts such as riding over the falls in a raft, jumping over by motorbike or performing acrobatics on a high wire above the falls.
The public viewing area allowed you to walk out onto the rock slabs to within a few metres of the edge of the main fall, where the river dropped several metres into the rock channel. The spray from the falls created a mist that moistened the rocks for hundreds of metres around, and provided a welcome bit of cooling during the hot part of the middle of the day.
The falls really were an impressive sight, and it was possible to get an even more dramatic view of them from an underground chamber entered via some rather slippery steps. On the Shanxi side of the falls, there were scores of visitors posing for photos by the barriers and stumbling among the nearby rock slabs. There were a few locals offering souvenir photo opportunities with dressed-up donkeys they had brought down as props. I felt sorry for these poor animals that looked like they were suffering under the heat of the sun.
After seeing the Shanxi side of the Hukou waterfalls, I took the shuttle bus back to the entrance gate and crossed a bridge over to the Shaanxi side to view the falls from the opposite direction. There were more extensive tourist facilities on this side of the river, including shops, restaurants, and even a theatre in a complex built on top of the rock slabs. The views were even better because it was possible to walk down the length of the falls and the subsequent water channel for almost a kilometre.
After the exhilaration of seeing the mighty falls, I returned to the hotel and sought shelter from the hot sun to ponder my next challenge: how to proceed further north without a road along the river. I had two options: on the Shaanxi side, the road turned westward towards the old Red Army base of Yan’an, some 150 kilometres away hidden deep in the loess hills.
From there, it would be possible to head north towards Inner Mongolia via the desert terrain of Yulin (榆林) and Ordos (鄂尔多斯), as described by my predecessor Bill Porter, who followed this route by bus in 1991. This would mean being away from the Yellow River for much of its next 500 kilometres, cycling instead through the arid hills and gullies of the loess plateau.
A second option would be to stay on the eastern side and try rejoin the river where the next major road ran alongside it, some 150 kilometres further north at a place named Wubu (吴堡). This would also mean taking a road away from the river through the remote hills of the western Shanxi hinterland, and I would miss Qiankun Bay (乾坤湾), a massive "S"-shaped bend in the river north of Hekou. But I decided to go ‘inland’ to the east to see some of the towns that lay further north in this rarely visited loess country along the Yellow River.
In the event, it took me three gruelling days to reach Wubu from Hukou, pedalling through dull rural landscapes along minor roads that were busy with coal trucks. The weather turned grey and overcast, which matched my mood of gloom as I encountered a series of mishaps that almost led me to abandon my journey on this part of the river.
From Hukou falls I had first to backtrack eight kilometres south down the river to reach a major road junction, from where I faced a long, steep climb up an arid gorge to get out of the river valley onto the hilly Shanxi plateau. Here I had a big scare. After pedalling through the small town of Jixian, I suddenly realised with horror that my phone was missing from its handlebar holder, where I clamped it to follow the map app.
I turned around and cycled back towards the town, desperately looking around the roadside in search of the phone that I assumed had fallen off. Its loss immediately made me realise how the phone had become my lifeline for travelling because it held all the apps I used for navigation, payments and booking hotels and tickets, not to mention all my photos and videos.
To my profound relief, I got my phone back thanks to the kindness of a crew of road construction workers who had picked it up and kept it for me. They waved and yelled at me when I returned to Jixian, holding up my phone, and telling me it had fallen off when I had bumped over the potholes they were fixing. Thank goodness for the honesty of the ordinary Chinese ‘laobaixing’!
I continued on towards my goal of a town called Xixian (隰县), which was a strenuous 120 kilometres from Hukou. The hilly terrain and twisting roads drained my bike battery, and I felt harassed by the constant flow of big red-brown trucks, which in some places meant I had to pull over and let them pass because there was no shoulder on the side of the road to ride on. The clay soil landscape was one of orchards, terraces of corn, and clusters of beehives.
By mid-afternoon, when I rode into the small town of Daning (大宁), my batteries were almost finished. Not too keen on staying in this drab and obscure place for the night, I found an apartment block that had an electric vehicle recharging station in its car park. After an hour when I had three bars of battery power, I set off on the last stretch to Xixian.
I was now definitely off the beaten track, at least in terms of tourism. There was little to see or do in this part of the world except visit monuments to the martyrs of Zhu De’s Eight Route Army in the 1930s or the “Yellow Soil Plateau Folk Cultural Village”.
By the time I arrived in Xixian, it seemed like a great cosmopolitan metropolis. Feeling a bit isolated and lonely, I splurged an extra 100 yuan and checked into the best hotel in town to try to boost my morale. The immaculately attired staff of the ‘Ritz Luxury’ hotel (Meihao Lizhi, 美豪丽致酒店) did a creditable job in welcoming this shabby cyclist into their pristine pastel-coloured lobby. Ignoring my scuffed jacket and oil-stained trousers, they handed over my room card along with a complimentary box of preserved pears (‘our local speciality’) and even insisted on carrying my panniers to my room and wheeling the mud-splattered bike from the street into a corner of the lobby for safekeeping.
After I’d rinsed off the road grime on my face (leaving dark marks across the pure white hotel towels), I went out to explore the eating opportunities in Xixian. Like many towns and cities in this part of the world, it had a food street where locals sat at outdoor tables to enjoy hot pot and barbecued skewers of meat, seafood, and vegetables. Amazingly, for this obscure little town, I found a craft beer shop next to my chosen restaurant and found myself discussing the relative merits of peanut butter stout over melon IPA with the owner.
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| Route map: Hukou Falls to Xixian (click on image to enlarge) |
Torrential rain the next morning prevented me from making any progress towards Wubu and the Yellow River. I should have heeded the dark clouds when I set off from the Xixian hotel at 8 am and heard the distant rumble of thunder as I passed an abandoned swimming pool on the outskirts of town. I had only cycled about three kilometres along the highway north when the first big drops of rain started hitting the ground.
I sought shelter under a railway bridge as lightning flashed and the rain came down in torrents. The wind picked up and soon I was getting soaked by the near-horizontal rain. The only nearby shelter was under the corrugated iron roof of a large shed that served as a grain store. I wheeled my bike inside as the storm increased in intensity until it became a grey-out and rain hit the ground like bullets. The owner of the shed beckoned me into his primitive living room, where his wife insisted I join them for a second breakfast of noodle soup.
“You’re crazy trying to get to Wubu on a day like this,” the man told me. “The weather forecast says it's going to rain all day. Stay here! Have a rest!” he insisted. Soaked to the skin after just a few minutes’ exposure to the elements, I had to agree. I returned to the 4-star comfort of the ‘Ritz’ hotel and spent the rest of the morning drying out all my rain-drenched kit.
The rain eased off in the afternoon and I took a ride out to the local Buddhist monastery of Xiao Xitian (小西天). Perched on top of a narrow razorback pinnacle, this small temple looked like something from a fantasy tale. This was correct in a way, because the Xiao Xitian temple features as a setting in one of China’s most popular online role-playing games, Black Myth Wukong, based on the monkey tales of the Journey from the West.
The temple was actually a nunnery, built during the Ming Dynasty. Its real name was Qianfo'an (千佛庵), or the Temple of One Thousand Buddhas. It is called this because the walls and ceiling of its main hall are decorated with a wealth of intricately carved coloured flowers, snakes, pagodas and deer, amid which sit thousands of gold-lacquered Buddhist figurines and statues depicting flying apsaras,and mythical creatures. It all makes up a 3D display said to represent a Buddhist Pure Land. The temple is reached by a steep set of steps leading up to a series of small courtyards, each of which contains a Buddha shrine overseen by monks in saffron robes with a low background chant of ‘Namo Amituofu’.
I thanked the divine intervention of a rainstorm that had brought me to see this place.
After my sojourn through the hinterland of Shanxi, I was eager to get back to the Yellow River. Getting there required another day of cycling up and down the loess hills and into cave house country. Rather than take the truck-busy main highway in the direction of Wubu, I opted for a back road route that went over the highlands.
The initial ascent from Xixian required a lot of pedalling, and the subsequent maze of small roads through orchards were difficult to navigate, requiring me to constantly stop and check the map. Relying on the app, I followed an empty road that became more remote and primitive until I was eventually pedalling on an unpaved mud track through a desolate landscape of clay mounds. For the first time on this trip I felt lost and worried. Just as I was beginning to think about turning back, the mud track reached a tarmac road again which descended to the small town of Shilou (石楼).
I stopped for a welcome bowl of wontons in this small town and enjoyed following the downhill road alongside a small river for an hour. The road then again turned off up into the loess hills, through which I pedalled for the rest of the morning without seeing anywhere to stop. Sometimes the road followed the course of a railway line, which had the advantage of tunnels through the hillsides.
It wasn’t till after 1 pm that I rolled into a scruffy collection of houses and workshops that made up the remote village of Zhangjiagetai (张家圪台村) in Liulin county (柳林县). It didn’t at first appear to have a restaurant, but I eventually found an unmarked door that led into a kitchen with a couple of tables and chairs. The only thing on the menu was the chewy and oily pancakes known as laobing (烙餠), which the lady owner chopped up into pieces for me to wash down with some soup.
Wary of getting lost again on small roads in the desolate hill country, I opted at the next junction to take a longer route and follow a more substantial-looking major road that took me towards Wubu.
On the descent through the loess hills, there were more wind turbines and arrays of solar panels. The eroded slopes also contained numerous examples of cave dwellings in various stages of neglect. Some of the tunnel entrance-like brick archways on the slopes looked to be abandoned and collapsing; others were being used for farm storage. But a few were obviously being maintained as living places, with wooden frame housefronts and window frames.
Some of the dwellings seemed to be half house and half cave, with regular walls and roofs built as projections from the hillside. Further down the valley, I came across an elaborate white ‘mansion’ that combined more than ten archway cave rooms with more traditional Chinese walled courtyards and gatehouses. As I stopped to take some photos, one of the inhabitants emerged, and I tried to chat with him. I couldn't understand much of this thick rural accent, but he allowed me to peek in behind the curtain of his cave home.
The single room was like a small tunnel of whitewashed brick with an arched roof. Inside, he had a bed, wood-burning cooking stove, wardrobe, desk, and a chest of drawers, and the modern amenities of a TV and refrigerator. A large water barrel was presumably either the water supply or washing facility.
There were several more such cave homes on the road down into Liulin town, which took me through numerous tunnels. But many cave homes appeared to be unused, and I could see why when the outskirts of the town materialised as a series of newly built gated communities of low-rise apartment blocks.
A final uphill pedal over a wooded hill brought me into view of the Yellow River below some cliffs: once again a muddy brown colour, with the high rises of the town of Wubu across a concrete bridge.
There were no 4-star hotels in Wubu, which was little more than a single street of shops running alongside the river. I did find a basic hotel that would let me stay on the waterfront, where the manageress had a refreshingly direct and mocking manner when she heard of my plan to cycle up the Yellow River.
“But why? What is there to see and do?” she asked, incredulously.
Well, Wubu had the partially-restored ruins of an ancient stone city standing on a hill just north of town, overlooking the river. Its origins of this walled fortress town are lost in the mists of time, but it had been a strategic control point on the river for centuries. The walls still have marks from shells fired by the Japanese artillery, who bombarded Wubu from across the river during the war.
Thankfully, like every other town, Wubu had the usual well-stocked supermarket located in the basement of its shopping mall, where I was able to get my supplies of yoghurt, milk, and a couple of German beers. After dinner, I was so exhausted I dozed off sitting in the armchair of my hotel room, waking with a start at 2.30 am and wondering where the hell I was.
It was good to be back on the river, because the cycling was for the most part easy on level roads and with little traffic. The next day passed in a relaxed blur of sunny weather, pedalling along the rediscovered ‘Yellow River Number One Tourist Road’ which ran along the eastern bank of the river. I’m not sure where the road had gone between Hukou and Wubu.
This stretch of the river was for the most part sparsely inhabited, with just the occasional village or a pagoda visible on a distant hilltop. The cliffs were lower, the river wider, and with many sandbanks, and there were occasional glimpses into dry river gullies and steep-sided canyons running down from the Shanxi hillside. At one point, there was a ‘stone forest’ of rounded stone hills that formed a massive natural amphitheatre around a flat expanse of grassland in the middle of which stood a single tree.
I saw no other tourists on this ‘Tourist Road’ until I arrived mid-morning at Qikou (碛口), a traditional port on the river that owed its existence and prosperity to the Hukou Falls. Merchant boats bringing oil, salt, furs, and herbs along the Yellow River from upstream provinces could not safely navigate the dangerous rapids downriver at Hukou, so they offloaded at Qikou, where the merchandise was taken by camel train to northern city markets.
Qikou lost its relevance as a port when motor roads became the main form of transport. Now the restored traditional buildings along the waterfront had cafes and restaurants and the camel drivers were catering to tourists rather than merchants for their business.
Just north of the tourist village, I paused at a place called Gaojiata (高家塔) where there was some kind of folk music and dance performance going on. A casual group of men and women gathered in a car park had small drums hung round their necks which they played vigorously while dancing to the accompaniment of pipes, with an audience of a few local people.
The music was unusual and the chaotic, shifting rhythms sounded un-Chinese, more like a crazy Scottish reel dance. The drumming beat got faster and faster, and the jigs and leaps of the performers became more physically dynamic, until they reached a crescendo and suddenly tailed off. They would then change key to start off slowly on another tune that would again gradually build up in tempo and erratic rhythm.
This looked like a raw version of the traditional Ansai drum dancing, whose odd rhythms and movements were said to have been adopted by the folk of the loess plateau to bring a bit of joy and physical freedom from the drudgery and backbreaking work of farming the bleak loess plateau.
Across the road, a couple of people-carrier vans were parked up next to a memorial plinth. I walked over to see a group of men dressed in the unofficial uniform of ‘leaders’: white shirt, black trousers, and black collarless jacket. They were paying an official visit to a monument that marked the spot where Mao Zedong had stepped ashore after he crossed the Yellow River in March 1948.
He was leading the Communist Party’s historic move back from Shaanxi into the eastern side of China after more than a decade in the relative isolation of the Yan’an hills.
The monument’s propaganda diorama portrayed Mao’s crossing of the Yellow River as an epic, epoch-defining moment, with a relief sculpture of him standing on the bow of a boat pushing through the waves of the Yellow River, looking resolutely ahead.
The inscription on the monument explained that by the second year of the ‘war of liberation’, the Red Army had advanced to the point that the Party leadership were able to shift their headquarters from Yan’an to the city of Shijiazhuang in Hebei.
“After arriving in Shanxi on the east shore of the Yellow River, Chairman Mao disembarked and looked back at the vast land on the opposite side and said affectionately: “Northern Shaanxi is a good place!”
“At this point, Mao Zedong ended 13 arduous seasons of revolutionary work in Northern Shaanxi …. This smooth eastward crossing is not only a turning point in the Chinese revolution, but also a new starting point in Chinese history,” it read.
The group of modern-day leaders looked me up and down with suspicion until they realised I could speak Chinese. When I told them of my cycling trip along the river, they gave me pats on the shoulder and condescending nods as if I was a minion who’d won an official Party award for patriotic work.
One of them, who seemed to be the ‘big potato’ in this group of ‘ganbu’ officials made a pronouncement that seemed directed more at his colleagues than at me:
“It’s good to see foreigners coming here to learn about China. You can see many more aspects of China’s deep history and culture by travelling along the Yellow River. I wish more of our young people would follow this example!”
As a group they got back into their minivans, though the youngest among them lingered behind to grab a selfie with me and add me as a WeChat contact. “Pay attention to safety on the road. Have a good trip!” he told me.
After a few more hours of pedalling through increasingly arid hills beside the river, I arrived at the town of Jiaxian (佳县), perched dramatically on top of hills on the Shaanxi side of the river. Crossing the bridge, I could see no obvious route for the road up what appeared to be an almost vertical cliff face ahead of me. It was only on reaching the western side that I saw there was a small road going back down the river for a kilometre before taking a zig-zag route up a gully.
Like its downstream counterpart of Wubu from the day before, Jiaxian did not offer much in the way of hotels or restaurants. It was a small backwater town with little reason for visiting or for drivers to stop while passing through. The small Yellow River Culture Museum had the usual displays of ancient pots and bowls, and a skeleton of a dinosaur. There were dioramas and 3D models of how the town had looked in ancient times, showing traders with camels bringing in goods from the nearby desert areas in the northwest. There were models of the flat-bottomed boats that were once rowed or hauled up by ropes when the river here was a key transport link.
As the owner of an inflatable kayak, I was interested to see a display showing a traditional Chinese ‘inflatable’ raft used on the Yellow River. These comprised a wooden frame supported by several flotation bags made from goat hides that had been sewn up and inflated with air.
These 羊皮筏子 (yángpí fázi) rafts were used as transport craft on the Yellow River river in Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Shanxi and beyond. They were still in use until the 1980s, but now the only ones to be seen are those used as tourist rides. Other than inflatable rafts, there were very few boats to be seen on the Yellow River, because it is a shallow river and therefore unsuitable for all but the most flat-bottomed of craft.
It was these rafts like these that may have inspired the common phrase for bragging, 吹牛皮 (chuī niúpí), literally ‘blow a cow skin’. Some rafts used larger cow hides instead of goat hides. Because of their size, blowing one up by mouth would have been an enormous task, so the term came to be used to describe anyone making an obviously exaggerated claim.
As was to happen several times on this trip, there was no one in attendance at the Jiaxian guesthouse when I arrived. I rang the number left on a note on the locked door, and to my relief the manageress arrived after ten minutes to open the door and check me in. She then departed, and I didn’t see anyone around all evening. The door was locked the next morning when I tried to check out, and I had to drag my bags and bike out of the fire exit and down some stairs to get on the road again.
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| Route map: Wubu to Jiaxian (click on image to enlarge) |
With a level road along the river, sunny weather and good cycling conditions, I set myself the ambitious goal of covering more than 130 kilometres the next day. The long distance goal was necessary because I could not see any place with hotels to stay along the river before the town of Fugu (府谷). The only hotels marked on my map were a 20-kilometre detour away from the river to a place called Xingxian (兴县).
I set off into the unknown, trying to preserve my battery power by only using the pedal assist where necessary. The morning’s ride was a pleasant one, with the surrounding hills and cliffs becoming lower and more arid, and the river wider and slower. It was a sunny day, and after getting a red wind-burned face each day, my habit had become to pull my scarf up to completely cover my face.
I’d brought four litres of water, but the growing heat of the day meant that I had used much of this up by the time I arrived at the 80-kilometre mark at midday. The landscape had changed to become a series of almost desert-like low rocky outcrops; many of the nearby hills had been subject to reforestation programs, covered in line after line of green saplings.
There was no town or village when I arrived at the road turnoff for Xingxian, and I had to make a decision whether to divert and find a hotel 20 kilometres away from the river or continue for another 50 kilometres to Fugu. I decided on the latter. Fortunately, I soon came across a roadside shack that advertised itself as a supermarket. As is the custom in China, the lady owner provided me with some boiling water to add to the instant noodles that I bought. She also let me use her power socket to add a bit more charge to my batteries.
The last section of river road to Fugu looked do-able, but I was soon to find that the road down from Xingxian delivered a steady stream of heavy trucks heading north. This section became a nightmare because the small road had no shoulder on many sections and I was hemmed in by a crash barrier. The only safe option was to pull over when I saw trucks coming up behind me. Most of them kept a reasonable distance away from me, but occasionally I would get one that would brush within centimetres of my shoulder. It was a highly risky, nerve-wracking, white-knuckle ride for the next 40 kilometres towards Fugu.
I was tired, dirty and in a bad mood from the day’s long and hazardous bike ride, and it took all my patience and Chinese language skills to summon up a polite argument pleading to stay at the hotel. I claimed that the Public Security Bureau had advised me to stay at the hotel (not true) and pointed out that the hotel’s online booking page said nothing about not accepting foreigners.
I continued my gentle but insistent pestering of the reception staff, emphasising that the hotel already had my money, until eventually I wore them down. Triumphantly clutching my hard-won room card I hauled my heavy bags towards the lift, only to be summoned back by senior manageress who had a severe and cold attitude. She handed me her mobile phone and told me it was the local police on the line. I heard a man’s voice telling me tersely that local regulations forbade foreigners at all hotels in town except for an expensive one down by the river. He repeated the name and rang off, brooking no argument.
Accepting defeat, I got the reception staff to cancel my booking and arrange a refund. They did at least call the other hotel and make a new booking there for me. I wearily put the unwieldy panniers back on the bike and cycled about a kilometre down through the town centre to the alternative hotel where they accepted me without question. It had been a long day.
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| Route map: Jiaxian to Fugu (click on image to enlarge) |
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