The final stage of my Yellow River cycling trip began badly when I departed Lanzhou in a torrent of swearing and with a non-working phone. My destination was the major reservoir of Liujia Gorge (Liujiaxia), some 80 kilometres away, on what should have been a gentle reintroduction to being on the road. But after just four days out of the saddle, I seemed to have difficulty getting back into the groove of cycling.
The reason for my swearing was the hazardous ‘near-miss’ driving I experienced on the streets on the way out of Lanzhou. Being a long and narrow city, the traffic all seemed to be funnelled down the highway I was using to get out of town to the west. For the first hour I was shunted between one set of traffic lights and the next, with the passing scooters, cars and trucks all seeming to be within millimetres of side-swiping me. After the third or fourth ‘f—-!’ I decided it would be prudent to pause, calm down and try and take it one block at a time. Rather than follow this level but lethally busy beside the river I had the option of taking a more direct but hillier route across some mountains to Liujiaxia.
To add to my frustration, my Gaode navigation app was not working because the phone appeared to have no signal. It was only when I turned off the main highway and headed uphill on to quieter roads that I realised that I’d switched my phone’s mobile data off while in Hong Kong and had forgotten to turn it back on again.
By mid-morning I was pedalling steadily upwards into a pleasant landscape of sharp hills covered with green scrub. I was getting used to the different feel of the new narrower tyres and the saddle, and the increased weight I was carrying from the addition of a tent and sleeping bag to my panniers. The camping gear was a late addition that I’d added in case I was unable to find any accommodation in the more remote parts of the Yellow River on the Tibetan highlands.
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| Route map of Lanzhou to Liujiaxia (click on image to enlarge) |
After I passed through a long tunnel the road inclined downhill, eventually returning me to the Yellow River at a small town called Yongjing (永靖). It had a mundane urban feel to it, like an outer suburb of the big city despite being set at the head of the massive lake of Liujiaxia reservoir. Its proximity to Lanzhou meant that Yongjing was geared up for day visits and weekend sightseers, with dinosaur-themed funparks along the waterfront and ‘resorts’ offering barbecue sites and fish restaurants.
I made the mistake of booking a ‘cheap’ hotel option in the centre of town without seeing it in person. When I arrived the bored manageress struggled out of a chair to reluctantly work through the complicated check-in registration webpage for foreigners, then showed me up to a windowless room in what seemed like a residential apartment block. No bikes allowed in the hotel, she told me as she returned to watching videos on her phone. So as I took it out of the door, I glanced enviously over at the nearby Fumen Hotel which looked very pleasant and would have cost only an extra 40 yuan a night. Too late, my room was non-refundable.
Rather than sit around in the gloomy hotel room I got back on the bike and rode around a couple of kilometres around a bend in the river to see the site of the Liujiaxia dam.
The dam was among the first to be built on the Yellow River, with construction started in the 1950s. However work was paused when the problems of silting became obvious with the Sanmenxia dam downstream in Henan. The Liujiaxia dam was eventually finished in the late 1960s, with further delays due to the Cultural Revolution. The problem of silting up was addressed by the addition of a ‘sand flushing hole’ to the bottom of the dam wall. The dam now serves to prevent the flooding of the Lanzhou area that often occurred downstream after the spring thaws.
For me, the dam was not the main attraction of Liujiaxia, and I was more interested in seeing if I could get to the Buddhist statue caves of Bingling Temple (炳灵寺), at the head of the reservoir. Similar in style to the Buddhist statues at the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang, the hundreds of Bingling Buddhist statues and murals were hewn out of cliffs and in natural caves over a long period starting in the fifth century. Since the flooding of the valley, the caves and cliffs can only be accessed by boat, and even then only at certain times of year when the water level is high enough.
Unfortunately, when I inquired at the tourism centre, I was told that only a number of smaller boats were going to the caves and no tickets were available until later in the afternoon. Some touts outside the ticket office tried to sell me on the idea of driving to the Bingling site, but I told them I would be cycling past there anyway.
I returned back to my hotel room to study the maps for the road ahead.
To follow the Yellow River upstream from Gansu towards the Tibetan plateau I would need to pass through a series of deep valleys populated predominantly by Muslim minorities such as the Salar (撒拉族) and Bao’an (保安族) people. Unlike the Hui Muslims I had seen so far, these groups were quite distinct from the Han Chinese and had unusual and varied origins.
The Salars, for example, were a Turkic people whose Muslim ancestors were said to have migrated from the Samarkand region. When they settled in the Qinghai-Gansu border area they intermingled and intermarried with Tibetans from whom they adopted many characteristics, including Tibetan loanwords in their language. In the Ming dynasty period the Salar were granted a large amount of local autonomy and were often recruited as soldiers into government service.
Similarly, the Bao’an Muslims also had a reputation for military service and were descended from Mongol soldiers who had been brought to Qinghai by Kublai Khan and his successors in the Yuan dynasty that ruled China in the 15th century. The Mongol ancestors of the Bao’an practised Tibetan Buddhism, and some remained Buddhist after the Bao’an were converted to Islam in the 18th century.
These Muslim groups now lived along the Yellow River in valleys that lay on the western side of the Liujia Gorge. There was no road through the gorge, so the only way to get there was for me to head over the hills.
Setting off early in the morning, the first 60 kilometres of my journey was up a steady incline along a road that skirted the northern side of Liujiaxia reservoir. It went through cultivated farmland and eventually reached a plateau where I had a sweeping view down across the reservoir. It was here that I had my first close-up encounter with an agricultural drone. Measuring more than a metre in width, the machine was buzzing up and down rows of apple trees spraying them with pesticide from a 100 litre tank. The operator told me it cost 40,000 yuan (US$5000) and could spray a field in a couple of hours whereas it would take two or three workers a whole day to do the same job.
I stopped for lunch at a farming village close to the road entrance to Bingling Temple. I was thinking of doing a detour to see the statues, but the restaurant owner told me it was a long and steep switchback track that would add almost 40 kilometres on to my journey. Having already used up half my battery reserves, I decided to press on towards the next valley. The restaurant owner warned me that the road down into the valley was in a poor state of repair, and that many of the highways in the valley had only just been reopened after a massive earthquake in December 2023 had blocked them. The 6.2 scale earthquake had caused widespread landslides and collapsed many buildings, killing more than 150 people, he told me.
In fact, the turnoff down into the valley could hardly be called a road: much of it was a dirt track and what remained of the original concrete surface was cracked and corrugated. My new tyres might have been puncture proof but they were narrower and more rigid than the gravel tyres they replaced, and were not suited for this kind of road. I bumped and rattled down the road, which in some parts was so bad I chose to dismount and walk it through the worst sections. I began to worry that I had taken the wrong road.
Far below me I could just see the Yellow River running in a steep sided valley, and as I turned around a corner, a monastery perched atop a narrow ridge came into view. This was the Jingjue Wofo Temple (静觉卧佛寺), one of the first signs of Tibetan Buddhism I would see on the road towards Qinghai.
As I descended down into the long ridges of eroded brown loess hills the road condition improved slightly and I was soon level with the temple buildings, now looking up at the dizzying ridge line rather than down upon it.
My bike survived the descent and by late afternoon I had emerged beyond the monastery onto something that resembled a normal road, running alongside the river. I was blessedly level, and I was able to use the last few bars of battery power to pedal westwards for about 20 kilometres towards a small town called Dahejia (大河家).
It was a distinctly Muslim town of little more than two streets where the road from the Jishishan valley emerges at the red cliffs of the Yellow River. Many of the men wore traditional libai mao (礼拜帽, prayer cap) and the women donned the gaitou (盖头) head cover similar to a hijab. I managed to check into one of the few hotels in town and found that even Dahejia had the usual basement supermarket in its shopping mall - but this one did not sell alcohol. I’d been meaning to cut back on the post-cycling beers anyway.
While it was not a tourist town, the main street did feature several shops selling a wide variety of traditional Bao’an knives, daggers and even swords. They were renowned as swordsmiths and the shops featured photographs and testimonies of their wares being displayed to visiting dignitaries.
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| Liujiaxia to Dahejia (click on image to enlarge) |
第18章 邂逅积石山的蒙古穆斯林刀匠
我的黄河骑行之旅的第三站，也是最后一站，开局并不顺利。离开兰州时，我破口大骂，手机也坏了。
我的目的地是刘家峡水库，大约80公里外，这本该是一次轻松的骑行体验。然而，仅仅四天没骑车之后，我似乎很难重新适应骑行的节奏。我破口大骂的原因是离开兰州时，在街道上经历了危险的“险些相撞”驾驶。
兰州是一座狭长的城市，车流仿佛都汇聚到了我正要西行出城的高速公路上。头一个小时，我被一个又一个的红绿灯夹着，过往的摩托车、汽车和卡车似乎都差点儿擦到我。在三四声“操！”之后，我决定还是停下来冷静一下，试着一个街区一个街区地走下去比较稳妥。
与其沿着这条地势平坦但车水马龙的河边骑行，我可以选择一条更直接、但坡度更大的路线，翻过几座山去刘家峡。更让我沮丧的是，我的高德导航突然失灵了，因为手机似乎没有信号。直到我离开主干道，沿着山坡往上走，走到一些比较僻静的小路时，我才意识到我在香港的时候关闭了手机的移动数据，却忘了重新打开。
上午十点左右，我稳稳地骑上去，驶入一片宜人的景色：陡峭的山坡上长满了绿色的灌木丛。我开始适应新的窄胎和车座带来的不同感觉，以及驮包里增加了帐篷和睡袋带来的额外负重。露营装备是我后来才添置的，以防在西藏高原黄河边更偏远的地方找不到住处。
穿过一条长长的隧道后，道路向下倾斜，最终我回到了黄河边一个名叫永靖的小镇。它给人一种平凡的都市感觉，尽管位于刘家峡水库的源头，却像是一个大城市的郊区。永靖靠近兰州，这意味着它非常适合一日游和周末观光，滨水区有恐龙主题的游乐园，还有提供烧烤和鱼餐厅的“度假村”。
我犯了一个错误，没亲自去看看就预订了市中心一家“便宜”的酒店。到达后，百无聊赖的女经理挣扎着从椅子上站起来，不情愿地浏览着复杂的外国人入住登记网页，然后带我去了一间看起来像是住宅楼的没有窗户的房间。她一边说着，一边回去继续用手机看视频。于是，我走出门外，羡慕地瞥了一眼附近的富门大酒店，它看起来非常舒适，每晚只需多花40元。太晚了，我的房费不予退还。
我没有待在阴暗的酒店房间里，而是骑上自行车，绕着河湾骑行了几公里，去看看刘家峡大坝的所在地。
这座大坝是黄河上最早修建的大坝之一，始建于20世纪50年代。然而，由于下游河南三门峡大坝的淤积问题日益凸显，工程被迫暂停。刘家峡大坝最终于20世纪60年代末竣工，但由于“文化大革命”的缘故，工程进一步推迟。为了解决淤积问题，人们在坝体底部加装了一个“冲砂孔”。如今，这座大坝的作用是防止兰州地区春季解冻后经常发生的洪水泛滥。
对我来说，大坝并非刘家峡的主要景点，我更感兴趣的是看看能否前往水库源头炳灵寺的佛像洞窟。炳灵寺的数百尊佛像和壁画与洛阳龙门石窟的佛像风格相似，都是从公元五世纪开始，经过漫长的时间在悬崖峭壁和天然洞穴中开凿而成。自从山谷被洪水淹没后，这些洞穴和悬崖只能乘船前往，而且即使在一年中的特定时间，水位也必须足够高。
遗憾的是，当我向旅游中心询问时，他们告诉我只有一些小型船只可以前往洞窟，而且要到下午晚些时候才有票。售票处外面有几个兜售者试图说服我开车去炳灵寺，但我告诉他们我无论如何都会骑车经过那里。
我回到酒店房间，研究前面的路线图。
要从甘肃沿黄河逆流而上前往青藏高原，我需要穿越一系列深谷，这些山谷主要居住着撒拉族和保安族等穆斯林少数民族。与我迄今为止见过的回族穆斯林不同，这些群体与汉族截然不同，他们的起源也各不相同。
例如，撒拉族是一个突厥民族，据说他们的穆斯林祖先是从撒马尔罕地区迁徙而来。当他们在青甘边境地区定居后，与藏族人通婚融合，并吸收了许多藏族人的特征，包括藏语中的借词。在明朝时期，撒拉族被赋予了高度的地方自治权，并经常被征召入伍，为政府效力。
同样，保安族穆斯林也以军事素养而闻名，他们的祖先是15世纪元朝忽必烈汗及其继承者带到青海的蒙古士兵。保安族的蒙古祖先信奉藏传佛教，有些人在18世纪皈依伊斯兰教后仍然信奉佛教。
这些穆斯林群体如今居住在黄河沿岸刘家峡西侧的河谷中。由于峡谷中没有公路，所以我只能翻山越岭才能到达那里。
清晨出发，我沿着刘家峡水库北侧的道路，沿着一条缓坡向上行驶了60公里。路途穿过耕地，最终到达一片高原，在那里我可以一览水库的全景。正是在这里，我第一次近距离接触了农用无人机。这台机器宽度超过一米，在成排的苹果树上嗡嗡地来回穿梭，用一个100升的药箱喷洒农药。操作员告诉我，它几个小时就能喷洒完一片田地，而同样的工作，两三个工人得花一整天才能完成。
我在炳灵寺入口附近的一个农村停下来吃午饭。我本来想绕道去看佛像，但餐馆老板告诉我，这是一条又长又陡的急转弯，会让我的行程增加近40公里。我已经用掉了一半的电池电量，于是决定继续前往下一个山谷。餐馆老板警告我，通往山谷的道路状况很差，山谷里的许多公路在2023年12月的一场大地震后才刚刚重新开放。他告诉我，那场6.2级的地震引发了大面积的山体滑坡，许多建筑物倒塌，造成150多人死亡。
事实上，通往山谷的岔路很难称之为路：大部分都是土路，原本的水泥路面残存的部分也开裂起伏。我的新轮胎或许防扎，但比之前换的碎石胎更窄更硬，并不适合这种路况。我一路颠簸，颠簸得厉害，有些路段路况极差，我甚至选择下车步行穿过最难走的路段。我开始担心自己是不是走错了路。
在我脚下很远的地方，我隐约能看到黄河在陡峭的山谷中流淌。拐过一个弯，一座坐落在狭窄山脊上的寺庙映入眼帘。这就是静觉卧佛寺，这是我在前往青海的路上看到的藏传佛教最早的标志之一。
当我沿着被侵蚀的棕色黄土丘陵蜿蜒而下时，路况略有好转，很快我就与寺庙建筑齐平，现在我仰望的是令人眩晕的山脊，而不是俯视它。
我的自行车顺利下山，傍晚时分，我驶出寺庙，来到一条类似普通道路的路边，沿着河边行驶。幸运的是，我的车路况良好，我能够用最后几格电池电量向西骑行大约20公里，朝着一个名叫大河家的小镇前进。
这是一个典型的穆斯林小镇，只有两条街道，从积石山 谷通往这里的路与黄河的红色悬崖相接。许多男人戴着传统的礼拜帽（礼拜帽），女人则戴上类似头巾的盖头（盖头）。我设法入住了镇上为数不多的几家酒店之一，发现就连大河家购物中心里也设有常见的地下超市——但这家却不卖酒。反正我本来就打算少喝点骑行后的啤酒。
虽然这里并非旅游小镇，但主街上确实有几家店铺，出售各种各样的保安传统刀具、匕首，甚至还有剑。这些店铺以铸剑闻名，店里还展示了他们向来访贵宾展示其产品的照片和证言。
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