I was now firmly in northern China, almost on the same latitude as Beijing. Fugu was a historic town that had been a military and trading outpost since ancient times, standing at a strategic three way intersection: it marked the geographical limit of arable land of Shanxi to the east, while to the west was the loess plateau of Shaanxi and to the north were the grassland steppe of inner Mongolia.
This was the section of the Yellow River that acted as an adjunct to the Great Wall as a defensive barrier. A stretch of the wall ran alongside the eastern bank of the river north of Fugu, where the wall then ‘jumped’ over the river to continue in Shaanxi.
From here, I had to choose whether to continue along my uncertain route along the meandering river or take a more direct road to Baotou, Inner Mongolia, the final destination of the second stage of my trip.
As with the area above Hukou Falls, my map suggested there was no road running along the bank of the Yellow River in a steep canyon section along the Shanxi-Inner Mongolia border called Laoniu Wan (老牛湾, Old Ox Bay).
There were some recent news articles, however, saying that Laoniu Wan had been developed as a new sightseeing destination, and 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 coal 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 western movies. 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). I learned that 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 I cycled through was a shabby town where the main business seemed to be services for the procession of noisy trucks that left a trail of black coal dust down the main street. Its hotels that had appeared attractive destinations on my online maps were in reality bleak places that shared concrete parking lots with automotive workshops and tyre puncture repair sheds. I pedalled through towards the bridge where I had to cross the river here because Laoniu Wan was on the eastern side. 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 look like it would be enough 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 the charger added three power bars to 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 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 needed my brakes on the steep descent towards the river. I was worried that the local hotels would refuse to accept me like the previous night’s one in Fugu. And when I finally freewheeled into the village, I found the hotel that I’d booked was closed and nobody was there.
Fortunately there was a phone number that I dialled and the manageress arrived after ten minutes. She explained that she was not local but from Taiyuan in Shanxi, and the hotel was their family’s 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 a long road back up into the hills and go around the bay— a route that would add more than 20 kilometres to my journey.
If I’d known in advance how difficult the next day’s bike ride would be, I would not have refused the hard-boiled eggs and steamed bread buns offered to me for breakfast by the old lady who acted as caretaker for the hotel. 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 map app and pedalled for an hour up to the crest of a hill where there were remains of an old fort. Laoniu Wan was the site where the Great Wall met the Yellow River. The river had been used by the Ming dynasty rulers in conjunction with the wall as a ‘moat’ as part of a multi-layer defence system to help defend against intrusions from the north and west.
The defence system also included a chain of forts and beacon stations along this stretch of the river, which along with the massive canyon formed a formidable barrier against raids and invasions from the horse-mounted nomadic warriors of the Mongolian steppe.
The Yellow River canyon now proved to be a major barrier to me getting onto the plains of Inner Mongolia. The cycling route suggested by my app sent me off down rough dirt road trails that twisted up and down small gullies and across long stretches of hillside . I could see a major new highway nearby, but my map app guided me away from it, up another small trail up into the hills. This almost broke me as it took me on a tough ride high over the summit of a rounded mountain with an old fort on top, where the road deteriorated into a dirt track.
I was to spend the rest of the morning struggling on a labyrinth of minor rural roads that led me up and down across the sparsely-populated highlands. Often I sensed I was 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 thankfully, eventually brought me back onto a busy highway. For once, I was glad to be among truck traffic. 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 surrounded by beautiful scenery 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.
Then the landscape changed to that of the Mongolian steppe. Branching off from the river northwards and heading in the direction of Togtoh, the road entered a region of fertile green farming plain that was 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 Hohhot, 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 chateau-style hotel building painted in fancy yellow and white designs and set in extensive landscaped grounds. This opulent Inner Mongolian Mar-a-Lago place looked deserted, and according to a sign on the ornate gatehouse it was the Chateau Riwo (瑞沃酒庄, phonetic for ‘river’) Hotel, It was a winery and hospitality project built at a cost of 1000 million yuan in 2018, just before the onset of the Covid pandemic.
Not far from the empty chateau stood another monstrosity, the Togtoh Power Station. Said to the the world's largest coal-fired power plant, it was a massive complex of cooling towers, chimneys and boiler houses, it had been built here to take advanathe of the huge reserves of locally mined coal, sends its electricity along the grid to keep the lights on in Beijing.
The downtown area was a grid of long, broad avenues and squares, lined with large concrete buildings. 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 city's 200,000 population was 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 (click on image to enlarge) |
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