At Fugu I had to choose whether to stay on an uncertain route along the meandering river or take a direct road across country to Baotou, Inner Mongolia, the final destination of the second stage of my trip.
As with the Yellow River around Hukou Falls, there didn’t seem to be a road running along the riverside in a steep canyon section along the Shanxi-Inner Mongolia border called Laoniu Wan (老牛湾, Old Ox Bay). I did find some news articles online, however, saying that Laoniu Wan had recently been developed as a new sightseeing destination, and that it had become the start/end point of the ‘Yellow River Number One Tourism Road’ that I had been following on and off since Longmen.
I was certainly glad to leave Fugu and hoped to put the bad experiences of trucks and unwelcoming hotels behind me. I crossed the bridge back to the eastern side of the river to find the ‘Tourist Road’ but immediately changed my mind when I saw the long lines of trucks heading along it heading out of town to the north. Switching back to the western side of the river, I found myself on a blissfully quiet and empty road that would lead north into a flatter and more open landscape.
I was approaching the border of Inner Mongolia. Imperceptibly the riverside scenery changed from grey rocky cliffs into a more desert-like landscape of reddish layered mounds surmounted with flat-topped buttes, like the Monument Valley, Arizona backdrops to cowboy westerns. At a curve in the river, one of the larger buttresses was emblazoned with the Chinese characters 黄河龙湾 for Yellow River Dragon Bay.
There was no border marker and the first sign that I had crossed from Shanxi into Inner Mongolia was seeing a public toilet decorated with a Mongol-style blue and white dome. Putting an ethnic decoration on a lavatory seemed unusual given the cultural and political sensitivities around Mongolian nationalism in the area. In 2015 a group of British and South African tourists were arrested in nearby Ordos and deported on ‘terrorism’ charges after they watched a video about Genghis Khan in their hotel.
The local authorities were certainly planning on promoting Mongol-themed tourism: round the next corner there was a collection of yurt-style white huts in a holiday park setting. The road ahead was lined with recently built car parks, visitor centres and a parade of traditional-styled shopfronts.
This scenic area ended abruptly when I arrived at the town of Jungar Banner (准格尔旗, Zhunge Qi). The term ‘banner’ (flag) is used in Inner Mongolia to describe a county-level administrative region. It is borrowed from the Manchu practice of assigning banners to areas controlled by different bands of their cavalry, whose troops became known as ‘bannermen’. When the Manchus ruled China in the Qing dynasty the ‘banner’ designation was extended to the northern border areas they controlled that are now Inner Mongolia.
The modern day Jungar Banner was a shabby town dedicated to servicing an endless procession of noisy trucks that left a trail of black coal dust down the main street. Its hotels that had looked enticing on the maps, were bleak places that shared concrete parking lots with auto workshops and tyre repair stalls. I pedalled through towards the bridge: I had to cross the river here because Laoniu Wan was on the eastern side and there were no further river crossings to the north in an area the road signs designated “Yellow River Grand Canyon”.
I thankfully left the trucks behind on the other side of the river as I turned north and headed up a long ascent back into canyon country. Once again I was suffering from ‘range anxiety’ as my electric battery power did not seem sufficient to take me up the hills for the next 40 kilometres.
After a couple of failed attempts to find shops in deserted villages, I eventually found one at the top of a hill, where the owner provided me with boiled water for instant noodles and I sat chatting with him for an hour while my batteries got a charge. He was an old soldier who had served in the PLA in Yunnan during the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
“I was in an engineer team and we were shocked by how backward the villages were in Vietnam,” he told me.
“They were mountain peasants still living in basic conditions like old China, without machines or electricity. But they were very tough - they had resisted the French, the Japanese and the Americans,” he told me.
“When we arrived all the young people ran away and only the old people and children were left in the village. But at night the local militia returned to attack us. We lost some good comrades. I was glad to return to China!”
The shopkeeper had a lively sense of curiosity and asked me a lot of questions about my e-bike and my trip along the Yellow River. When I had added three power bars on the batteries, he saw me off with advice on how to find a newly-built scenic route to Laoniu Wan. This proved to be the final section of the ‘Yellow River Number One Tourist Road’ and it was an amazing bit of infrastructure. The brand new road had a separate cycle lane and took me high above the river canyon, twisting around the hills and across new bridges that spanned the inlets and gorges, with specially built viewing points looking over holiday resorts on the river’s edge below.
The road gradually ascended and towards the end of the long day of pedalling I began to tire, even with the e-bike’s battery assistance. I was tempted to stop at a new holiday lodge about 20 kilometres short of Laoniu Wan, but persevered as the road turned inland up the ridge of empty hills.
It was almost dusk when I found the turnoff for Laoniu Wan, and made the steep descent towards the river. I was worried because there were only a handful of cheap hotels marked in a village by the water’s edge, with no alternative options if they refused to accept me like the previous night’s hotel in Fugu. When I finally freewheeled into the centre of the village the problem was more that there was nobody there. I sought out the hotel I had pre-booked and found it to be just a line of newly-built cabins in a car park that was still being levelled by an excavator. There was nobody in the dark and locked ‘reception’ building, but a note on the door gave a phone number, which I called. Thankfully, it was answered by a woman with a clear Chinese accent, who said she would come over to open up for me.
Ten minutes later she arrived in a car with her father. She explained that she was not local but from Taiyuan in Shanxi, and the hotel was their new investment development. I was one of the first customers and got the choice of the cabins that still smelled of new paint and recently cut wood. She assigned a local village woman to cook me up some dinner and then departed, wishing me a pleasant stay.
The canyon scenery around Laoniu Wan was spectacular and I had hoped to spend a day there resting and exploring the trails around the bays. The next morning I strolled down a trail to a jetty where motor launches were supposed to take visitors across a short stretch of river to the other side of a bay where there were shops, a ‘visitor centre’ and the terminus of a road that came from the Inner Mongolian city of Togtoh (托克托), some 80 kilometres away.
However the staff informed me that the boat service was not running for the next few days for some unspecified reason. The only option to go north was to take the long road back up into the hills and go around the bay - a route that would add more than 20 kilometres to the journey.
In retrospect I should have accepted the hard boiled eggs and steamed bread buns offered to me for breakfast by the old lady who acted as caretaker for the hotel cabins. I would need the energy for the strenuous pedalling over the hills to get out of Laoniu Wan.
I sweated back up the road I had descended the previous evening and rejoined the ‘highway’ that offered a confusing array of signposted backroad options to get around the forested slopes of the bay. I took the one suggested by my Gaode app and pedalled for an hour up to the crest of a hill where there were remains of an old fort. A sign said this was the site where a section of the Great Wall met the Yellow River. There had once been a chain of forts and beacons along this stretch of the river, forming part of the barrier against incursions from the Mongolian steppe.
The canyon now proved to be a major barrier to my getting on to the plains of Inner Mongolia. The cycling route suggested by the Gaode app sent me off down rough trails crossing small gorges and then up the steep inclines on the other side. I was relieved to eventually get on to a major new highway, only to find that Gaode was soon sending me off another small trail up into the hills. This almost broke me as it took me high over the summit of a rounded mountain with an old fort on top, where the road deteriorated into a dirt track.
Frustratingly, I could see the new highway far below, skirting the mountain and heading towards the north. In hindsight it seems that Gaode had chosen the most direct route regardless of the road condition, and unfortunately I now was committed to a labyrinth of minor rural roads that led me up and down across the country for the rest of the morning. At one point I began to panic when the roads marked on the map failed to tally with those on the ground, and one much hoped for ‘major road’ simply did not exist. I seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, to the east, when my destination was to the north.
Eventually I chose to ignore the map and set off down a farm track that looked like it might lead to a power station a few kilometres down in the valley. Thankfully, it eventually brought me back on to a busy highway, and for once I was glad to be among trucks. This road took me back close to the Yellow River, where the map showed there was a riverside route going all the way through to Togtoh.
After another stop at a local shop for noodles and a battery charge I found myself riding on a quiet road along a beautiful stretch of the Yellow River. The red soil banks of the river were heavily eroded and the placid water was again the characteristic muddy brown. The pleasant solitary pedalling lasted until I reached a town called Dalu (大路), where the road merged with another highway and I was back among the truck traffic again.
Branching off from the river northwards and heading in the direction of Togtoh, the road entered a region of fertile farming plain, empty except for clusters of trees. It could almost have been part of eastern or central Europe. The signs were now bilingual in Chinese and Mongolian script, which looked like it ran vertically.
A motorway intersection had signs pointing to Hohot, the capital of Inner Mongolia now only some 100 kilometres away but I stayed on the road towards Togtoh. Arriving on what I thought were the outskirts of the sprawling city, I passed an enormous castle-style hotel building painted yellow and white, set in extensive landscaped grounds. It had an ornate Trump-like gatehouse that announced it as the Chateau Riwo (瑞沃酒庄, phonetic for ‘river’) Hotel. The place was completely deserted and according to the official blurb it was a winery and hospitality project built at a cost of 1000 million yuan in 2018, just before the onset of the pandemic.
The chateau stood next to another monstrosity, the Togtoh Power Station, which is reported to be the largest coal-fired power plant in the world. Emitting 30 million tons of CO2 a year, the 20-year-old power station fuelled by locally mined coal sends its electricity along the grid to keep the lights on in Beijing.
The map said I was now in Togtoh but there was nothing there. It was a sprawling city that took another 15 kilometres of pedalling through scrub-covered wasteland and occasional villages before I arrived in the city centre. Unlike other Chinese cities, Togtoh’s suburbs consisted of clusters of squat whitewashed detached houses with red tile roofs. The downtown area was a grid of long, broad avenues and squares, lined with large concreate buildings, like a blueprint for Pyongyang. Inner Mongolia certainly did not lack space. My hotel was one of the anonymous concrete blocks in the centre of Togtoh, and I checked in with a sense of accomplishment that I had made it to Inner Mongolia.
The broad expanse and emptiness of Togtoh’s streets meant that walking was not an option when I came to find something to eat for dinner. I took to my bike again and cycled about a kilometre before I found signs of commercial activity at a shopping mall. Too weary to search for Mongolian food, I opted for a simple and cheap beef and rice ‘gaifan’ (bento) at a Muslim restaurant.
Later while shopping at the basement supermarket I looked around at the customers to see how much Mongolian character there was in Togtoh. The answer was very little. Apart from being of a larger and taller build, the people around me looked and dressed little differently to those elsewhere in China, and they spoke standard Mandarin. Not surprising given that less than 10% of the 200,000 population of the city were ethnic Mongol.
I was pleased but not surprised to find a wide range of delicious yoghurt and milk products in the supermarket: Inner Mongolia was well known for its Mengniu (蒙牛, Mongolian Dairy) brands. There was also a good variety of beers and wines - the locals liked a drink. Back at the hotel, the receptionist urged me to bring my bike inside and park it in the lobby. The local lads liked to drink around the doorway at night and might ‘take it for a ride’, she advised me.
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| Route map: Fugu to Laoniu Wan (click on image to enlarge) |
第12章 老牛湾途中的老兵
在府谷，我不得不做出选择：是继续沿着蜿蜒河流走一条不确定的路线，还是直接前往内蒙古包头——我这段旅程第二阶段的最终目的地。就像壶口瀑布附近的黄河一样，在山西与内蒙古交界处一个叫老牛湾的陡峭峡谷地段，河岸边似乎也没有道路可循。
不过，我确实在网上找到一些新闻报道，说老牛湾最近被开发成了新的观光景点，并成为了"黄河一号旅游公路"的起点/终点站——从龙门开始，我就时断时续地沿着这条公路骑行。
离开府谷让我如释重负，希望能把那些卡车和冷漠旅馆的不愉快经历抛在脑后。我过桥回到河东岸寻找"旅游公路"，但当我看到一长列卡车正沿着这条路向北驶出城镇时，立即改变了主意。转回河西岸后，我发现自己踏上了一条令人愉悦的宁静空路，这条路将向北延伸至更平坦开阔的地带。
我正接近内蒙古边界。河岸景色不知不觉地从灰色的岩石峭壁变成了更似沙漠的景观：红色层叠的土丘上耸立着平顶孤峰，就像亚利桑那州纪念碑谷那些西部片里的背景。在一个河湾处，一座较大的岩壁上赫然题写着"黄河龙湾"四个汉字。
这里没有边界标志，我发现自己从山西进入内蒙古的第一个迹象，是看到一座装饰着蒙古风格蓝白圆顶的公共厕所。考虑到该地区围绕蒙古民族主义的文化和政治敏感性，在厕所上添加民族装饰显得很不寻常。2015年，一群英国和南非游客在附近的鄂尔多斯因在酒店观看成吉思汗的视频而被捕，并以"恐怖主义"罪名被驱逐出境。
当地政府显然在计划推广蒙古主题旅游：在下一个拐角处，度假园区里出现了一组蒙古包式的白色小屋。前方的道路两旁排列着新建的停车场、游客中心，以及一连串传统风格的店铺。
当我到达准格尔旗时，这种景区氛围突然结束了。"旗"是内蒙古用来描述县级行政区的术语，它借鉴了满族人用不同旗号划分骑兵控制区域的惯例，这些部队后来被称为"旗人"。当满族人在清朝统治中国时，"旗"的称谓被扩展到他们控制的北部边境地区，也就是现在的内蒙古。
现代的准格尔旗是一个破败的小镇，专门为那些在主街上留下黑色煤灰痕迹的嘈杂卡车车队服务。那些在地图上看起来很诱人的旅馆，实际上是与汽车修理店和轮胎修理摊共用混凝土停车场的简陋场所。我蹬着车向桥梁驶去：我必须在这里过河，因为老牛湾在河东岸，而在路标所示的"黄河大峡谷"区域以北再没有过河通道了。
谢天谢地，当我转向北方开始漫长的上坡路重新进入峡谷地带时，终于把那些卡车甩在了河的另一边。我又一次陷入了"续航焦虑"，因为我的电动车电池电量似乎不足以支撑接下来40公里的山路。
在荒废的村庄里几次寻找商店未果后，我终于在一座山顶找到了一家。店主给我提供了泡面的开水，在电池充电时，我和他坐着聊了一个小时。
他是一位老兵，曾在1979年中国入侵越南期间随解放军驻扎在云南。
“我当时在一个工兵队，越南村庄的落后程度令我们震惊，”他告诉我。
“他们是山区农民，生活条件仍然像旧中国一样简陋，没有机器，也没有电。但他们非常坚强——他们抵抗过法国人、日本人和美国人的侵略，”他告诉我。
“我们到达时，所有年轻人都逃走了，村里只剩下老人和孩子。但到了晚上，当地民兵又回来袭击我们。我们失去了一些好战友。我很高兴回到中国！”
店主好奇心旺盛，对我的电动自行车和黄河之旅追问不休。当电池充入三格电量后，他热心地指点我如何找到通往老牛湾的新建景观道路。这段被证实是"黄河一号旅游公路"终点的工程堪称奇迹——崭新的道路设有独立自行车道，蜿蜒于峡谷高处，跨越多座新建桥梁，沿途特设观景台可俯瞰下方河畔度假区。
随着道路持续爬升，即便有电力辅助，经历整日骑行的我仍渐感疲惫。距老牛湾20公里处的新度假屋几欲令我驻足，但最终坚持驶入荒岭脊线。暮色将至时找到岔路，陡降至河畔的我忧心忡忡：水边村落仅标注着几家廉价旅馆，若重蹈府谷拒客覆辙将无处可去。
进村后发现更大的问题是空无一人。预定的旅馆实为停车场内一排新建木屋，尚在平整中的工地里漆黑的前台贴着联系电话。庆幸的是，接电话的山西口音女子爽快前来开门。这位太原投资者解释这是新开发项目，散发着油漆味的木屋任我挑选，还安排村妇为我烹制晚餐。
老牛湾壮丽的峡谷风光本值得终日探索。次日晨间踱步至码头，却被告知渡船停运数日，北上唯余绕行山路——这意味着多骑20公里。此刻我本该接受看店老妇提供的茶叶蛋与馒头，毕竟翻越山岭需要体力。
重爬昨夜下坡路回到主道后，高德地图指引的"捷径"将我引入噩梦：穿越沟壑的崎岖小径、陡坡、山顶古长城遗址，最终沦为土路。眼睁睁看着山下新公路向北延伸却不得其入，导航执意带我辗转于乡间迷宫，甚至误入地图不存在的"主干道"。向东偏航的恐慌中，我最终赌注般冲下通往电站的农道，终得重返卡车轰鸣的公路。
沿河静谧骑行的惬意终止于大路镇。转向托克托的肥沃平原上，中蒙双语路标提示着地域特色。途经耗资十亿却门可罗雀的"瑞沃酒庄"城堡酒店，与其比邻的托克托电厂形成荒诞对比——这座全球最大燃煤电厂每年输送3000万吨二氧化碳，点亮着北京的夜空。
托克托的"城市漫游"实为15公里荒野穿行。区别于典型中国城市，这里散布着红顶白墙的矮平房，市中心仿若平壤蓝图的放大版。超市里蒙族特色的稀缺（当地蒙古族不足10%）与丰富的蒙牛乳制品构成有趣反差。当酒店前台提醒"本地青年醉酒后可能借车"时，我笑着将爱车停进了大堂。
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