Lanzhou marked the end of the third stage of my Yellow River trip - the completion of the ‘几-shaped curve’ through Inner Mongolia. As with Xi’an, I would take a break and make a few changes to the bike and my kit. I would also have to renew my 90-day visa, which was nearing its expiry date.
When I arrived on my bike at the bridge across the Yellow River in the centre of the city, I paused to take a few photos at what seemed like the glamorous skyline. Lanzhou was an unusual city in that it was squeezed along the river, hemmed in by hills, making it a long, narrow city that stretched for 40 kilometres east to west, but was only a few kilometres north to south. I’d visited ten years previously when I’d found it to be a rather drab and austere place, and I wondered how it might have changed in the meantime. The answer to that question came when I took to the streets the next day to trawl the bike shops of Lanzhou for some new gear.
Like many other cities in China, Lanzhou had undergone a makeover, and the centre was now a pedestrianised zone of high-end retail outlets and glass skyscrapers. It seemed a lot more bustling and affluent than I remembered. The city had a substantial Hui Muslim population, but I was also surprised to see young women sporting tattoos, and even a couple of flamboyant transgender individuals strolling the streets.
I didn’t find the bike accessories I was looking for, but I did find the perfect Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles at a Muslim-run restaurant called Mogouyuan (磨沟沿). This busy establishment provided a whole tray full of ingredients beyond the usual clear soup and some chilli oil with coriander. You had to stand in line and the servers provided plates of beef slices with options such as hard boiled eggs, cucumber, spring onion, green beans and garlic.
A flying visit to Hong Kong would be the easiest way to renew my visa - but what to do with my bike? In the afternoon I cleaned up the bike in the yard of the hotel and took it across town to leave with a local guy who had been recommended to me via my WeChat China hiking chat group. Yan worked as a consultant on programmes to reduce carbon emissions in industry, but his real passion was in botany and following in the footsteps of the early plant hunters in Gansu. After storing my bike in the shed beneath his apartment complex, we adjourned to a riverside park where we drank flowery tea and cracked melon seeds and chatted about trips we had done and would like to do.
Yan had written a book on western plant hunters such as William Purdom, who had spent three years roaming north west China in the early 20th century evading Tibetan horsemen and Chinese bandits while collecting new species of peonies, rhododendrons and primulas. Yan had revisited the places described by Purdom and documented the places and plant life as they looked in modern times. As we chatted enthusiastically about our various adventures in the remote parts of China, he invited me to continue the conversation over dinner with some friends.
The venue was the Ma Laoliu (马老六) Halal Restaurant, which served up two other Lanzhou specialities: a large bowl of soup containing soft boiled mutton, and large glass beakers of San Pao Tai (三泡台, Three Brew Tea), a fruit and nut combination that contained wolfberries, walnuts, longan and dried fruits in addition to green tea sweetened with rock sugar.
Yan introduced his two older colleagues as Simon and Old Wang. Between them they spoke in rapid and strongly-accented Gansu dialect, so I could not understand much of what was being said around the table. I heard enough to know that Yan was telling them about my current bike trip and the previous trips I had made to Sichuan and Yunnan, to which they nodded and asked me what I thought of the places I’d visited so far. I told them about how easy I’d found the cycling in China and my surprise that more people did not visit areas such as the canyons of the Yellow River.
“It’s good to see foreigners coming here to see the real China,” said Old Wang.
He wished me a successful trip and lamented that most Chinese were too busy to do such an extended tour
“You are lucky to have so much time to spend visiting the Yellow River,” he told me.
“In China we still have too much ‘neijuan’ (内卷, involution) pressure because we have too many people and not enough resources. Everyone must fight to survive, starting from kindergarten.”
His colleague Simon nodded in agreement and noted that the fiercely competitive ‘gaokao’ (高考) high school exams were being held that week. I’d seen some streets around schools being blocked off by police and security guards to prevent students being disturbed while taking the exams - and the gathering of anxious parents around the school gates.
Old Wang held up his phone and said: “The pressure doesn’t stop after school or finding a job and buying a house. Even a leader like me must work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I can’t switch the phone off after work. I always have to answer it,” he said.
I therefore felt a bit awkward when I told them that I would be taking a few days off from my bike trip to go to Hong Kong and renew my visa. But they wished me a pleasant trip and told me I had some great places to look forward to visiting in Gansu when I resumed my journey along the Yellow River from Lanzhou.
After dinner, they insisted on taking me on a walk along the river to see Lanzhou’s first modern bridge, which had been built by the Germans in 1909. The ‘iron bridge’ consisting of five steel arches had been the first permanent bridge to span the Yellow River in Gansu, replacing the previous pontoon bridges that were swept away by floods. Renamed the Zhongshan Bridge in the 1920s, it served as the city’s major traffic crossing point until supplemented by larger road bridges from the 1980s onwards. It was now closed to road traffic and was lit up by red lanterns and a changing array of coloured lights as crowds of sightseers strolled across.
This stretch of the riverside through downtown Lanzhou was a blaze of illuminated buildings, dominated by the dazzling spectacle of the white pagoda (白塔, Baita) on the hill opposite. Across the square on the southern side of the river, the high rises of Lanzhou’s commercial district had their own displays of constantly changing coloured lights and illuminated signs spelling out “I Love Lanzhou” in Chinese characters (我爱兰州).
The ten hour high-speed train ride from Lanzhou to Guangzhou the next day allowed me some time for planning the next stage of the cycle trip up the Yellow River. I had already sketched out a basic outline of a route that would take me past the major reservoir of Liujiaxia (刘家峡) and through another uniquely Muslim area on the Gansu border, before entering Qinghai province and moving steadily up through the hills to the ethnic Tibetan plateau areas around another massive reservoir at LongYang Gorge (龙羊峡).
From there I would explore ways to try to follow another great loop in the river through the grasslands and mountains of Qinghai. This was an area for which there were no records or reports from previous travellers to follow. The author of Yellow River Odyssey, Bill Porter, had skipped the river loop area beyond Longyang Gorge and hired a jeep to go directly to Maduo, the town closest to the source of the river.
On this train journey I entertained the notion that I might be the first foreigner to visit and report on some parts of the upper reaches of the Yellow River. The Chinese who had walked or cycled the entire length of the river had not published any detailed accounts of their routes or experiences. I had a ‘false alarm’ when I asked an AI app (DeepSeek) if any foreigners had travelled the entire length of the Yellow River.
The app told me that a British adventurer called Rob Lillwall had travelled the entire length of the Yellow River in 2004 as part of a multi-year global trek he had made from Mongolia to Hong Kong. The app gave me tantalising details of this trip, even mentioning sections of the river in Qinghai where Lillwall had encounters with wolves, or had to flee from police. To find out more, I went on Amazon to buy his book cited as the source of these tales. That’s when I discovered that the AI app had been ‘hallucinating’ and had simply invented a completely false story: the book showed that Lillwall had crossed the Yellow River on his journey but had not travelled along it for the entire length. Beware AI!
After a night in a cheap hotel in Guangzhou, I took the direct train to Hong Kong’s Kowloon West station. It was my first time travelling into Hong Kong by train, and a novelty in that the Chinese exit procedures were done after I disembarked the train in Hong Kong. The former colony was a series of culture shocks and peculiarities, starting with the heat and humidity on the busy streets as I was forced to walk to Jordan MTR station to connect to trains that run to Hong Kong island.
Hong Kong had many such quirks and anachronisms: I had to re-learn how to use cash for payments because global WeChat did not work in Hong Kong, and also remember to speak English rather than Mandarin. I had forgotten that my electronic devices could not be charged up without an adapter to fit Hong Kong’s British-style plug sockets. Hong Kong was also still firmly in the era of the internal combustion engine, although at least upside to this was the absence of the annoying e-scooter food delivery drivers.
I dropped my bags off at a Causeway Bay hotel and spent the weekend indulging in a few British treats: a BLT sandwich from Marks and Spencers, a pint of Old Speckled Hen Ale at the Globe pub and stocking up on Yorkshire Tea Bags. I was glad to see that Hong Kong still had the ‘fast food’ Cafe de Coral branches that specialise in cheap local hybrid meals such as milk tea and chicken curry. For old times sake I rode on a tram and took the ferry across to Tsim Sha Tsui. Most importantly, I also took a ride out on the MTR to bike shops in obscure corners of Kowloon, where they stocked items that were hard to find in China such as Schwalbe tyres.
Two days was enough of Hong Kong. It was exhausting on so many levels, not least the ‘time is money’ mentality and the focus on shopping being the city’s raison d’etre.
Back in Lanzhou, I had a new-found appreciation of its mild sunny weather and the ability to walk the streets without bumping into people. I reclaimed my bike and spent a morning making a few changes. I replaced the standard Giant Crosscut gravel tyres with puncture-resistant Marathon Plus ones. I added a better wing mirror to help me see those trucks approaching from behind, and I replaced the uncomfortable foam saddle with a Brooks leather one. On Tuesday morning I was ready for Stage 4.
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| Stage 4 planned (red) and actual (blue) routes |
第十七章·兰州签证行
兰州标志着黄河之旅第二阶段的终结——完成了穿越内蒙古的"几字弯"征程。如同在西安时那样，我决定休整几日：既要检修装备，还需续签即将到期的90天签证。
当骑行至市中心黄河铁桥时，我停下拍摄这座狭长城市的摩登天际线——东西绵延40公里、南北仅宽数公里的兰州，十年前在我记忆中还是座灰暗严肃的工业城。次日穿行于自行车店铺林立的街头，答案已然揭晓：与其他中国城市一样，兰州经历了华丽蜕变，中心商圈成了步行街与玻璃幕墙大厦的天下。头戴白帽的回族市民与纹身少女、甚至几位张扬的跨性别者和谐共处，构成鲜活的市井图景。
虽未觅得心仪配件，却在磨沟沿清真餐馆尝到最地道的兰州牛肉面。排队领取的托盘里，清汤辣油之外还配有牛肉片、茶叶蛋、黄瓜等十余种配料。
为续签签证，我决定飞赴香港——但自行车如何安置？通过微信登山群推荐，结识了从事工业减排咨询的植物爱好者严先生。他把我的爱车存放在小区车棚后，我们来到黄河畔的公园，就着三泡台茶与瓜子，畅谈他追寻20世纪初西方植物猎人足迹的经历。他撰写的著作记载了普鲁东等人在甘肃采集牡丹、杜鹃的传奇，并对比了这些区域古今植被变迁。
当晚在马老六清真餐厅的饭局上，严先生两位同事浓重的甘肃方言让我似懂非懂，但老王的感慨却清晰可辨："中国人从幼儿园就开始'内卷'，哪有闲情像你这样漫游黄河？"听闻我将暂停旅程赴港续签时，他们非但未露讥讽，反祝我旅途顺遂，并强调甘肃段还有更多精彩等我探索。
餐后众人执意带我夜游1909年德国建造的"天下黄河第一桥"。这座曾名"中山桥"的五拱钢桥现已禁止机动车通行，成为灯笼与霓虹装点的步行地标。对岸白塔山与南岸商业区"我爱兰州"的灯光秀交相辉映，勾勒出金城的繁华轮廓。
次日乘坐十小时高铁赴广州途中，我开始规划下阶段行程：将途经刘家峡水库、甘肃穆斯林聚居区，最终抵达青海龙羊峡水库周边的藏区高原。这段鲜有外国人涉足的流域，连《黄河之旅》作者比尔·波特都选择绕行。AI工具曾谎称有英国探险家完成全程，购书核实方知受骗——警惕人工智能的"幻觉"！
在广州廉价旅馆过夜后，我首次乘高铁直达香港西九龙站。这座前殖民地的文化冲击从出站便开始了：湿热街头必须现金支付、英式插座需转换器、满街燃油车不见电动车踪影……在铜锣湾酒店安顿后，我像回归英伦般享用玛莎百货的三明治、酒吧里的Old Speckled Hen 啤酒，并囤积约克郡茶包。最重要的任务是在九龙偏僻车行淘到中国难觅的 Schwalbe 防刺轮胎。
仅两天香港之行已令我精疲力竭。重返兰州时，干燥晴朗的天气、从容不迫的街巷节奏都显得弥足珍贵。取回自行车后，我换上专业防刺胎、加装后视镜、升级布鲁克斯皮革座垫。周二清晨，整装待发的我已准备好开启第四阶段征程。
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