Chapter 13. Pedalling the Hetao plain to Baotou

 What a difference a day makes. After sweating over the hills from Shanxi, the next day’s ride to Baotou was a clear run of 130 kilometres across a wide, flat plain. I first had to navigate my way through the maze of villages that made up the outskirts of Togtoh. In some of these places, the houses were emblazoned with the Chinese character 福 (‘Fu’, fortune), which denoted it was a Han Chinese settlement.

After a few wrong turns I found myself on a long straight road running along the banks of a canal. Another sunny morning and the spring mood was enhanced by a chorus of bird song, including a  pair of cuckoos that flitted along the telephone lines above the road.

I was soon back alongside the Yellow River, which at this point was a wide expanse of brown silty water against a featureless flat background. 

A sign announced that this bend in the river marked its change in direction at the top of the loop the river makes into Inner Mongolia. The sign called it the ‘几 (ji) Loop’, because this Chinese character is a good representation of the rectangular shape of the Yellow River’s course.

The river had eight curves and twists en route to Baotou but the road ran for long straight sections along a raised embankment. The surrounding landscape was a mix of marshland, bare crop terraces and a few untidy villages of wooden shacks. There were few vehicles on the road except for the odd tractor, and even few people. The wetlands were a haven for birds: herons, hoopoe, hovering kestrels and a few different species of duck.

With little wind resistance and an open road, I got into a pedalling rhythm that became almost hypnotic as the hours went by. I was able to cycle in top gear averaging about 25km/h, and to pass the time I counted down the kilometre distance markers numbers: 476, 430, 400, 376. My idle brain started to calculate the time it took me to cover one kilometre (two minutes) and even the number of pedal turns per minute (80).

In this way I made steady progress towards Baotou. A ridge of low mountains materialised on the hazy horizon to the north, part of the Yinshan (阴山) range that stands as a southern barrier to the encroachment of the Gobi desert.

Merging with the motorway from Togtoh, I was abruptly plunged back into a stream of truck traffic on a long road that eventually took me into the centre of Baotou. It was more like a regular Chinese city than Togtoh and had large blocks of wooded parklands and lakes near the centre. 

As a reward for completing the first half of ‘Stage 2’ of my Yellow River into Inner Mongolia,  I’d booked myself into a ‘boutique hotel’. When I parked it outside the pretentious lobby, the fussy owners took one look at my dirty bike and told me to leave it in an outside storage room. When I’d settled in and had something to eat I calculated that I’d now covered 2250 kilometres since setting out from the coast of Shandong. I was half way along the river, and I was going to take a short break.

Togtoh to Baotou

In Baotou I was now on the northernmost section of the Yellow River, the top of the ‘Ordos Loop’ that encircles the Ordos desert and which would eventually take me back south again into the heart of central China at Gansu, via Ningxia province. It was a good time to take a couple of days off to take stock and do a bit of housekeeping and admin.

After bringing me 1000 kilometres from Xi’an, the Giant e-bike was due for a bit of maintenance. I took it to a local Giant bike shop, where the friendly owners gave the bike a service free of charge, which they told me was part of the Giant retailer network’s warranty deal for new bikes. They tightened everything up, lubed the chain and fixed the front pannier bracket where one of the bolts had sheared off. I also got a cushion cover for the saddle, which was still proving uncomfortable for me when I was riding for up to seven hours a day.

I also needed a bit of personal maintenance after two weeks on the road. Getting my clothes washed at a local laundry removed some of the ingrained muck, but the jacket was still looking scuffed and faded. I took myself off to a local hair salon where the couple who ran it gave me a trim after some heavy shampooing and scalp massage. The female hairdresser had the same cheeky and inquisitive attitude and similar line of patter as the hairstylists I had once frequented in Leeds. 

Instead of the usual questions about where you were going for your holidays or which bars you were going out to at the weekend, she wanted to know where I was from, where I had been (both in China and beyond), whether I was married, how many kids, what I liked to do … and since she got me to add her as a contact on WeChat, she would have made a great undercover agent for the Public Security Bureau.

For a city hemmed in by the Gobi and Ordos deserts, Baotou was a very ‘green’ city. I enjoyed wandering round its parks and the southern wetlands along the Yellow River. But Baotou had a reputation for being anything but green, at least according to western media reports. The city and surrounding region has come into the spotlight as the major source of China’s rare earth metals. With China now restricting the supply of these minerals that are a key component of magnets used in the production of electric vehicles, journalists in Europe and the US have been highlighting the environmental damage caused by their mining.

According to The Guardian, toxic waste from the production of rare earths was being dumped in tailing ponds at a mine about 150 kilometres north of the city. The toxic chemicals were then said to be leaking into the groundwater and entering the Yellow River near Baotou. The toxic waste was said by environmentalists to be causing cancer and neurological problems among people in Baotou, and when the Guardian’s China correspondent visited the area near Baotou recently she reported that the clean up efforts appeared to have stalled.

For my second day off I left my bike in the storeroom at the hotel and took a train to the region’s capital of Hohhot, only two hours away. A Chinese friend Remann gave a guided tour of his hometown, visiting the Dazhou Tibetan Buddhist monastery (大召寺) and the unusual Five Pagoda Temple (五塔寺, Wuta Si). He introduced me to the local dish of shaomai (烧卖) mutton fried dumplings. 

We didn’t have time to visit the grasslands beyond the Yinshan mountain range to the north, but we got some idea of what it would be like on a visit to the local horse racecourse at the foot of the mountains. No races on midweek, but it was novel to see a track within China, where gambling was banned.

Distance between towns would be the major challenge during the second half of my ride around the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River. Whereas up until now there had been places to stop every 50-100 kilometres, the empty deserts and steppe of the Hetao Plain of Inner Mongolia meant there were some sections of the highway where people and settlements were few and far between. My intended route went in an anticlockwise direction from the north, following the only road that runs through the Tengger desert along the fertile corridor of land around the Yellow River.

The first step was to get from Baotou to a small town to the west whose name Wulate Qianqi (乌拉特前旗) translated into English as “Urad Front Banner”. The road ran between the ridge of the Yinshan mountain range to the north and the Yellow River to the south. The distance was just over 100 kilometres, which seemed possible, but when planning the route with Google Earth I was troubled to see what looked like an airbase in the middle of nowhere, right next to the road. Would this be a restricted military zone?

Maybe it was this that explained the niggling sense of unease that I felt as I departed from Baotou on a sunny morning. A coal-fuelled power station that loomed up on the edge of town had its cooling towers painted a cheerful sky blue with a slogan wishing me a happy journey and please come back to Baotou again.

Once out into the open countryside the cycling was pleasant along the flat highway - this was not yet the desert, but a green landscape of crop fields under the shelter of the mountain range. 

I saw my first traditional Mongolian stone cairn - known as an ‘ovoo’ - by the roadside. Built from small rocks, the structure consisted of three concentric circles of decreasing size and was festooned with red, white yellow and blue prayer flags similar to the Tibetan ‘lungta’ ones, and surmounted with a spiked metal pole. I later saw a smaller ovoo made of solid whitewashed rock, on which was placed a bust of Genghis Khan and various size bowls and Buddhist figurines. I would see nothing of the Yellow River all day, as it ran a few kilometres to the south across the wide flat plain.

After lunch of xiaolongbao dumplings in a roadside village called Baiyanhua, I resumed my journey cautiously, pedalling towards the location of the airbase. I pulled up my scarf to conceal my western face as I approached the place that my map showed to have a long runway running just a kilometre south parallel to the road. But when I reached the spot there was absolutely no sign that there was an airfield nearby. Perhaps it was an intentional move to maintain a low profile, but I sighed with relief as I passed by without incident, continuing towards Wulate Qianqi.

There wasn’t much to the town that consisted of little more than two blocks of shops centred around a shopping mall. I picked a hotel at random from the list suggested by Gaode and was welcomed by a somewhat surprised young manageress at the reception, who told me she had never dealt with a foreigner before. She assumed that I was a birdwatcher and had come to see the prime local attraction, the lake of Ulansuhai Nur.

Known in Chinese as Wuliangsu Hai (乌梁素海) this 35 kilometre stretch of water on the edge of the Tengger desert was promoted as a prime example of China’s recent efforts to turn green. According to an article in China Daily, the lake had once been known as the ‘jewel in the desert’ and renowned for its fish and birdlife, but by the 1990s it had become a mosquito-ridden swamp polluted with sewage, fertiliser runoff from surrounding farmland and chemical waste from factories.

“The water was a black and stinking mass that local people avoided as much as possible.” an article stated.

The lake’s turnaround came after a visit made by Xi Jinping shortly after he became president in 2012. He called for a cleanup of the lake as part of his personal focus on ‘improving ecological civilisation’ in China. 

At Xi’s behest, Ulansu Lake became the subject of a generously funded pilot program for conservation, with local authorities ordered to promote “conservation of soil and water, protection of biodiversity and control of agricultural pollution”.

To see the results, I rode my bike for 10 kilometres along the side of a canal leading out of town, to the new ‘Wuliangsu Ecological Area’.  The road ended at some irrigation control gates, beyond which lay the lake, although the waters were obscured by vast swathes of reedbeds around its edges. The water certainly looked clean and there were plenty of ducks, swans and herons. The large number of locals fishing at the bridge over the irrigation gate bridge suggested that fish must have also have returned to the lake.

According to the signs at the visitor centre, there were now 264 species of birds and 22 species of fish and it was again suitable for swimming and boating.   Would take their word for it. After my 100 kilometre ride that day I was too knackered to continue around the lake, and turned back to get some dinner.

Baotou to Wulate Qianqi