I faced an even greater distance to cycle - 130 kilometres - on the next day’s ride across the plain to a city called Bayan Nur (巴彦淖尔). With no towns along the route, I stocked up on snacks from a shop opposite my hotel in Wulate before I left. Departing early, I found that most shops aren’t open at 8am, but the owner of one small supermarket was sleeping in a bed behind the counter and got up to open the shop when she saw me peering through the window.
Leaving the town under overcast skies, the flat brown landscape put me in a depressed mood. Freight trains hauled past slowly to my right, and the muddy Yellow River came into view on the left.
I was cheered up though when I caught up with another cyclist on the road who was heading in the same direction.
Mr Tao, as he introduced himself, was a retired local forestry expert who was cycling out to spend the day at his ‘holiday villa’ located on a section of the Yellow River about 20 kilometres out of town. He had a good quality mountain bike, was wearing all the usual lycra cycling gear, and was playing Chinese music on a loudspeaker that he switched off so he could chat to me.
After the usual questions about where I was from and me explaining about my Yellow River trip, we moved on to discussing our mutual experiences of early retirement, having grown up children, and visiting different parts of China. He told me that his son had graduated from university in Hangzhou and was doing well in business there and had invited his father to come and live in the nice house he had bought there. But Mr Tao said he preferred life in Inner Mongolia.
He liked nature and the quiet life of his riverside villa, where he could cultivate plants in his garden and do some fishing. He could not bear the humid heat of Zhejiang and preferred the mild summers of Wulate: even the winters were not too bad, he claimed, with the below-zero temperatures tempered by sunny and dry days. We parted at a crossroads, where he insisted on me accepting a bag of sweets for the road and warning me to give a wide berth to the trucks on the road further south.
The main hazard on the road ahead, however, was not vehicles— of which there were few— but sheep herding dogs. The wide plains had a thin covering of grass and scrub that were host to small flocks of sheep and goats. Some of these were tended by farmers, who used big brown dogs to help herd their sheep — I had always wondered why this breed was called German Shepherd in Australia.
I can’t speak for their herding abilities, but the German Shepherds I encountered certainly lived up to their reputation for being aggressively territorial and ‘bitey’ dogs. I was chased by one for almost a kilometre after I made the mistake of stopping on the road to take a photo of the sheep moving across the landscape. I was glad I had an e-bike because my speedometer showed I got up to 40 kilometres/h when fleeing from the pursuing hound.
The chase added to the unease I continued to feel while cycling across this vast featureless plain that had seemingly endless horizons broken only by a few small trees. I had developed a psychological sense of insignificance in this immense, featureless landscape. This was highlighted near Wuyuan when I saw a dot on the distant horizon, which when I got nearer to it started to look like a stone tower sitting on top of a pyramid of clay in the middle of nowhere.
When the road turned to run past it, I saw that the ‘stone’ was a rectangular plinth of solid rock about ten metres high, on top of which was planted a large metal sphere. A small sign announced it as a monument to mark the northernmost point of the Yellow River. I had reached the top of the Ordos Loop. From here onwards my route along the river would gradually turn southward.
Aside from a few small huts for the sheep herders, I saw very little sign of any human culture along this part of the river. The road ran along a raised embankment above wetlands with a few patches of dry ploughed clay. Some water channels ran in straight lines for long distances, and there were occasional trees.
It seemed barely able to support any population, but another roadside sign I stopped at further on declared that it marked the location of the ancient Han dynasty city of Xitu (西土城). A military garrison at a crossroads for traders, Xitu had once been a significant town, acting as a transit point for salt, soda, and liquorice. Populated by Mongol people, Xitu had lasted until the Tang dynasty, when it was devastated by flooding from the shifting course of the Yellow River. Now the only remaining sign of Xitu in this lonely place was a few stumps of mud that had once been the two-metre-high city wall.
I paused at Xitu to eat some of my crackers for lunch in the shelter of a few trees. The sun had come out, and as I continued, the landscape became greener, and more trees were evident amid the waterlogged ground. There were more irrigation channels emanating from the river, and on the map, these showed up like a network of capillaries, feeding water into the desert to the north.
This was one of the key fronts in China’s decades-long war against desertification. In a region with negligible rainfall all year round, the irrigation canals had been extended into the arid Gobi areas to the north of the Yellow River, and the water used to help create a protective ‘sand-control shelterbelt’ of grassland and even forests almost 500 kilometres in length.
After a couple more hours, I arrived at a collection of buildings that included a roadside shop which had a couple of tables arrayed out front under its canopy. In the arid, desolate setting, it reminded me of the Mojave Desert gas station portrayed in the Terminator 2 movie. I stopped for a bowl of instant noodles, but didn’t need a battery charge as my map showed I was only 20 kilometres from Bayannur.
An hour later, I was out of the empty plain and found myself cycling down the busy avenue in the downtown area of a large modern city. With its strips of malls, fast food outlets, and car parks baking under the sun, Bayannur felt like a Midwest US town plonked down on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And after finding myself in the lobby of another corporate chain hotel, I once again made the abrupt transition from cycling in the wilderness to relaxing on crisp white bedsheets.
I didn’t make myself too comfortable because I had to prepare myself for one of the longest and most challenging days I would face on the road the next day: crossing 150 kilometres of the Tengger desert. The name Tengger comes from the Mongolian word for ‘wide blue sky’, and refers to the place where a seemingly endless desert meets an equally endless sky.
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| Wulate Qianqi to Bayannur (click on image to enlarge) |
From Bayannur, the highway ran south along the course of the Yellow River. To the west, there was nothing but desert and wilderness for more than 2600 kilometres: first the 600 kilometres emptiness of the Tengger desert, then arid rocks and plains of the Qaidam basin, followed by Xinjiang’s vast Talamakan desert that stretches most of the way to the border with the central Asian ‘-stan’ states.
About 40 kilometres to the south from Bayannur was a small town called Dengkou (磴口) where the desert really began. Based on the good progress I had made on the bike in recent days across the flat plains from Togtoh, I believed it was worth trying to continue a further 100 kilometres south along the desert road to reach the ‘oasis’ town of Wuhai (乌海).
I stocked up on water in Bayannur and the next morning I set off early through marshy plains that were much like those of the previous day. By the time I arrived at the river crossing point at Dengkou, 60 kilometres later, the surrounding terrain had become a dusty beige carpet where plants and trees struggled to take hold. A Mongol-style domed concrete building guarded the entrance to the bridge that went over massive sluice gates.
The river here was brownish-green and no longer silted. On the opposite bank I pulled over to an outdoor restaurant where the owners let me charge up my batteries while they grilled rows of river-caught fish over large barbecue grills.
My bike drew curious glances from a group of diners nearby, from whom a young couple came over to say hello. They spoke halting English with an oddly familiar accent, and told me they had studied for a year at Huddersfield University near my hometown of Leeds. They were from Bayannur and said this was the first time they’d met a foreigner and had a chance to practice their English since they came back to China. As a parting gift they insisted that I accept a bag of yellow persimmons - a local fruit - and also some flatbread.
Already weighted down, this added to the burden of the four extra litres of water that I had bought before heading out onto the desert road. The next 100 kilometres would be familiar to anyone who has travelled through the Australian Outback and particularly those who have been on the Eyre Highway across Nullarbor Plain. The road was dead straight, mostly level with a few slight undulations, and the surrounding terrain was treeless scrub. Unlike the outback, the Tengger desert highway had some areas with electricity pylons and a section where a train line ran in parallel.
This desert road did not have the huge ‘road train’ transport trailer-trucks seen on Australia’s outback highways but it did have its fair share of heavy trucks roaring past at regular intervals. I felt a fair degree of trepidation as I left the last outpost of Dengkou behind me and set off towards the distant horizon, thinking this would be the worst place for the bike to get a puncture or mechanical problem.
And of course, that is exactly what happened. About 20 kilometres down the road I sensed the bike was wobbling and looked down to see the rear tyre was half deflated.
With a sense of suppressed panic at being stranded in this remote desert, I pulled the bike off the road onto a path of gravel and started the laborious process of taking off the bags and batteries so that I could turn it upside down and remove the rear wheel. Protruding from the flat tyre I found a tiny sliver of metal wire that probably came from a bit of shredded steel belt of a truck tyre. I was thankful I’d brought a spare inner tube.
Before I could reattach the repaired wheel, a passing car pulled over and the young driver looked out at my upturned bike, asking if I needed any help. When I declined his kind offer, he insisted that I accept a couple of bottles of water. This brought to mind the war film Ice Cold in Alex in which British and German adversaries had to unite to survive after getting lost in the Sahara. In particular I remembered the final line of the German officer: ‘I salute you. Together we faced the common enemy - the desert!’
Within half an hour I had loaded up the bike again and set off nervously along the desert road, hoping and praying that the repaired tyre would not let me down again. It held and carried me along the remote road for another two hours until I reached some farmsteads and roadside workshops that marked the furthest encroachment of human habitation into the desert. Not long after this, I suffered a second puncture on the rear tyre and had to repeat the whole repair process. I was a very weary and relieved rider when I finally hauled into Wuhai.
Wuhai was an oasis in the true sense of the word because it centred around a massive lake that had been created from the Yellow River by a water conservation scheme completed in 2013. Now it looked like a natural waterway, lined by trees and reed marshes, and with parklands and cycle paths around the perimeter. In the middle, the lake was spanned by a two-kilometre-long bridge, and behind the lake was a ridge of mountains with a massive bust of Genghis Khan installed on the highest peak, as if surveying his domain below.
After my desert drama, I again emulated the characters who survived the Sahara in Ice Cold in Alex. Like them, I treated myself to a cold beer in the bar of a nice hotel. As the film characters said: “Worth waiting for.”
For me, Wuhai would be the last town in Inner Mongolia before moving into Ningxia, but for many tourists it would be their first and perhaps only stop in the region. With its new lake and water conservancy project, the town was trying to rebrand itself from a remote mining town into an ecological tourism hub. It could be reached from Lanzhou in six hours by motorway and train, and had a new airport into which visitors could fly from around the country to experience a taste of the desert without having to go the long distance to Xinjiang.
Wuhai was also trying to make its mark with another novel industry: viticulture. The waters of the new lake irrigated recently established vineyards, such as the 7000 hectares planted by two brothers surnamed Han who named their desert estate ‘Chateau Hansen’. In line with Wuhai’s ‘ecological’ ethos, they specialise in organic wines, and the Wuhai vineyards are now reported to producing 2 million litres of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot a year, with most of it for domestic consumption. In their marketing blurb, they say the dry, clean air of Wuhai, along with the long hours of sunshine and sandy soil, provide ideal conditions for growing a unique variety of grapes.
Wuhai now had several ‘wine estates’, a visit to which had become a fixture on the tourist itineraries along with a trip out to see the sand dunes.
I searched for a bottle of the local plonk in the local supermarket but was only able to find a bottle with a price tag of 120 yuan, so opted for another beer instead.
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| Bayannur to Wuhai (click on image to enlarge) |
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