At Fugu I had to choose whether to stay on an uncertain route along the meandering river or take a direct road 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 the 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’ 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 and might ‘take it for a ride’, she advised me.
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| Route map: Fugu to Laoniu Wan |
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