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.
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| Togtoh to Baotou (click on image to enlarge) |
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.
From Baotou I was about to embark on Stage 3, to Lanzhou. 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.
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| Stage 3 (click on image to enlarge) |
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.
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| Baotou to Wulate Qianqi (click on image to enlarge) |
第13章·骑行河套平原至包头
一日之隔，天壤之别。昨日还在山西群山中挥汗如雨，今日前往包头的130公里路程却是一马平川。我首先得在托克托郊外的村落迷宫中寻路，某些汉人聚居的屋舍门楣上还贴着"福"字。
几经绕错后，终于驶上沿渠而行的笔直长路。春光明媚的清晨，电线杆上翻飞的两只杜鹃加入鸟鸣合唱团。很快我又见黄河，此刻它只是单调平野上浑浊的棕色水带。
一块路牌宣告此处是黄河"几字弯"的转折点——这个汉字完美勾勒出河流在内蒙古的矩形走向。前往包头的河道虽蜿蜒八转，但堤坝公路始终笔直延伸。沿途湿地、荒田与杂乱木屋村交错，唯见鹭鸟、戴胜、猎隼与野鸭栖息，人车罕至。
无风无阻的公路上，我陷入催眠般的骑行节奏。最高档位保持25公里时速，数着公里桩消磨时光：476、430、400、376...闲极无聊竟计算起单公里耗时（2分钟）乃至每分钟蹬踏次数（80次）。北面阴山山脉的轮廓在雾霭中渐显，这道屏障正抵御着戈壁沙漠南侵。
汇入托克托方向的高速后，卡车洪流将我裹挟着冲入包头市中心。与托克托不同，这座规整的中国城市拥有成片的森林公园与城中湖泊。为庆祝完成"第二阶段"前半程，我预订了精品酒店。可当我把车停在浮华大堂前，挑剔的店主一见泥泘的车身就责令停去储物间。安顿后统计：自山东出发已行2250公里，恰是全程之半，该稍作休整了。
此刻我正位于黄河最北端的"鄂尔多斯弯"，这个环绕毛乌素沙漠的大回环，将经宁夏引我重返甘肃的中原腹地。是时候休整两日了：捷安特电动车经西安千里跋涉需要保养。当地专卖店免费提供了新车保修服务——紧固零件、润滑链条、修复前货架断裂螺栓，还加了坐垫套缓解长途不适。
两周风尘仆仆，个人护理也不能少。洗衣店勉强去除衣物污渍，但外套已磨损褪色。理发店里，老板娘边洗剪吹边盘问："从哪来？去过哪些中外城市？婚否？子女？爱好？..."其八卦精神与我当年在利兹常去的理发店如出一辙。当她要求加微信时，简直像公安局发展的线人。
这座被戈壁与鄂尔多斯沙漠包围的城市竟绿意盎然。我悠游于公园与黄河南岸湿地，享受难得的闲适。
但至少西方媒体的报道是这样的，包头一直以来都以环保著称。作为中国稀土金属的主要产地，该市及其周边地区备受关注。稀土是电动汽车生产所用磁铁的关键成分，随着中国目前限制稀土金属的供应，欧美记者一直在关注稀土开采对环境造成的破坏。
据《卫报》报道，稀土生产产生的有毒废物被倾倒在距包头市以北约150公里的一个矿场的尾矿池中。据说这些有毒化学物质随后泄漏到地下水中，最终流入包头附近的黄河。环保人士称，这些有毒废物导致包头居民患上癌症和神经系统疾病。《卫报》驻中国记者最近访问了包头附近地区，她报道称，清理工作似乎陷入了停滞。
休整的第二天，我将自行车留在酒店储物间，乘坐两小时火车前往自治区首府呼和浩特。中国朋友雷曼带我游览了他的家乡：我们参观了大召寺藏传佛教寺院和风格独特的五塔寺，他还请我品尝了当地特色羊肉烧麦。虽未能前往阴山以北的草原，但山脚下的赛马场让我们领略了些许草原风情——平日没有赛事，但在禁赌的中国能看到赛马场已属新鲜。
从包头出发，我将开启第三阶段前往兰州的旅程。环绕黄河"几字弯"的后半程，城镇间距将成为主要挑战。与此前每50-100公里就有歇脚处不同，内蒙古河套平原的荒漠与草原意味着某些路段人烟罕至。我的计划路线沿黄河灌溉形成的肥沃走廊逆时针北上，穿越腾格里沙漠的唯一公路。
首站是从包头前往乌拉特前旗。这条介于阴山与黄河之间的公路全程约100公里，看似可行，但用谷歌地球规划路线时，我发现道路旁竟有一座孤零零的军用机场——这会是军事禁区吗？或许正是这个发现，让我在晴朗早晨离开包头时隐隐不安。城郊燃煤电厂的冷却塔被漆成明快的天蓝色，上面写着"旅途愉快 欢迎再来包头"的标语。
驶入开阔乡野后，平坦公路上的骑行令人愉悦——这里尚未进入沙漠，山脉庇护下的农田绿意盎然。路边出现首座蒙古族传统敖包：三层同心圆石堆系满红白黄蓝经幡，顶端竖着金属尖杆。后来还见到刷白的小型敖包，上面摆放着成吉思汗半身像和各种尺寸的碗盏与佛教造像。整日骑行都未见黄河踪影，它其实在南面数公里外的平原上静静流淌。
在白彦花村吃完小笼包午餐，我谨慎地向机场位置进发。当地图显示跑道即将平行公路出现时，我拉起围巾遮住西方面孔。但抵达预定坐标后，周边竟毫无机场痕迹——或许是为保持低调的伪装？平安通过后长舒一口气，继续向乌拉特前旗进发。
这座小镇几乎只有商场为中心的两条商业街。我随机选择高德推荐的一家酒店，前台年轻女经理见到外国人略显惊讶，说我是她接待的首位外宾。她误以为我是来观鸟的游客，专程探访本地招牌景点乌梁素海。
这片位于腾格里沙漠边缘的35公里水域，被宣传为中国绿色转型的典范。《中国日报》记载它曾是"沙漠明珠"，以丰富鱼鸟资源闻名，但90年代因污水、农田化肥和工厂废料污染沦为蚊虫滋生的沼泽，"黑臭水体令当地居民避之不及"。
转机出现在2012年新任领导人考察后，将湖泊治理纳入"生态文明建设"重点。在最高指示下，乌梁素海成为资金充裕的生态试点，当地政府被要求推进"水土保持、生物多样性保护和农业污染防控"。
为验证治理成效，我沿出城运河骑行10公里来到"乌梁素海生态区"。道路尽头的水闸后方，芦苇丛掩映着湖面。水体确实清澈，可见野鸭、天鹅和鹭鸟成群，闸桥上有不少垂钓者，说明鱼类已然回归。游客中心标牌显示现有264种鸟类和22种鱼类，已恢复游泳划船功能。但当日骑行百公里后筋疲力尽，我选择相信宣传折返用餐——毕竟，生态修复的奇迹需要更多时间验证。
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