Mother River: Introduction

I wouldn’t call myself a ‘cyclist’, even though I’ve been cycle touring in China for many years. I just use a bike because it’s convenient, cheap, and fun. 

For my first China cycling trip in 2017, I took my Brompton folding bike down the remote Nujiang in Yunnan. My logic was that a road running alongside a river going downstream would be generally level, and going downhill overall. 

The reality proved to be a little different, with quite a lot of ups and downs, but I had a great time for two weeks cycling from the mountains of the Yunnan-Tibetan border near Bingzhongluo (丙中洛), to the sub-tropical forests and warmer climes of Liuku (六库), not far from the border with Burma’s Kachin state. 

Encouraged by this, I returned to Yunnan with the Brompton a couple of years later to ride from Kunming down the Red River (红河, Honghe) to the border with Vietnam at Hekou (河口).

During the COVID-19 pandemic I turned 60, and I lost a couple of old friends to complications of the virus. This brought on a sudden awareness of my own mortality and that I wouldn’t be able to continue hiking up mountains or pedalling down rivers in China for ever. I decided to take early retirement at the age of 62 from my job as a medical editor in Sydney, and embark on a longer trip to see more of China. 

When pondering which rivers to explore on a cycling tour, I again thought about southwest China and the three major rivers that run in parallel for a few hundred kilometres: the Yangtze, Mekong and Nu (Salween). It didn’t take me long to reject each of these in turn, because I had already explored parts of them, or in the case of the Yangtze because much of the route would be boring, running through urbanised and industrialised central China.

My thoughts shifted to the Yellow River. I knew little about it because it was in northern China, which I had seldom visited. I knew that it rose in Tibetan highlands and flowed through the loess plateau regions of Gansu and Ningxia, with a northward loop into the deserts and grasslands of Inner Mongolia. I was vaguely aware that the lower reaches of the river ran through the north China plain, and were considered to be the cradle of Chinese civilisation, hence the name ‘Mother River’. I also knew that the Yellow River had important links with the Silk Road to Central Asia and had been a key to the spread of Buddhism and Islam in China. 

I assumed the Yellow River would have been well travelled by foreigners and would have been the subject of many books and travel journalism pieces. And yet when I went looking for information, I found remarkably little, at least in English. There were articles about specific parts of the Yellow River, but not much about travelling the entirety of the river from its source in the Tibetan grasslands to its sea outlet at the Gulf of Bohai in Shandong (山东) province. 

The only Yellow River travel book I found was one by an American scholar of Chinese culture, Bill Porter, who described a road journey he made in 1991. His book, Yellow River Odyssey, focused on visits to temples and cultural sites such as Taishan, reflecting his interest in classical Chinese figures such as Mencius and Lao Tzu. Porter had travelled by car, bus and train at a time when China’s transport and tourism infrastructure were still relatively undeveloped by current standards. His descriptions of decrepit hotels and uncomfortable long bus trips reminded me of my own experiences of travelling in Yunnan in the 1990s.

In terms of walking or cycling the river, I could only find Chinese language sources about people who had travelled the length of the Yellow River.  In May 1982 a geological researcher Yang Liankang (杨联康) was reported to have completed a one-year source to sea hike along the Yellow River. More recently, China media articles from 2020 reported on a young man called Fu Xiaofeng (扶小风) who completed a ‘pilgrimage’ by walking the entire length of the river from sea to source in one year. The articles described some sections of his epic walk, but they did not provide details or maps of his exact route.

Similarly, I found a news story about a retired 65-year-old man from Ningxia called Wang Laisheng (王来生) who had cycled 6,538 kilometres along the river in 2022, from source to sea in 97 days: but again, the article gave no details of the route he followed on his ride. 

As I looked with closer attention at the maps of the Yellow River’s course, I became intrigued as to how anyone could possibly walk or cycle alongside the river for its entire course. There were some parts of the river that appeared to pass through inaccessible canyons or deserts, with no roads or nearby inhabited areas. The only way to cover these sections of the river, I guessed, would be to bypass them by travelling on the nearest public highway or tracks running parallel to the river at some distance away.

One of these inaccessible sections of the river was in Qinghai near a place I had visited a decade earlier. The Tibetan monastery town of Radja (拉加, Lajia) is located on alpine grassland in Golok territory near the mountain of Amnye Machen. It lies along an unusual 1000-kilometre backward loop that the Yellow River makes soon after it rises around the lakes of Gyaring Tso (扎陵湖, Zhaling Hu) and Ngoring Tso (鄂陵湖, Eling Hu). 

After flowing about 500 kilometres eastward from its source, the river takes a sudden 180 degree turn at a place known as the First Bend of the Yellow River, situated at around 3500 metres altitude in the marshy grasslands of the Qinghai-Sichuan border. After this major reversal in direction, the river flows to the north-west for a further 400 kilometres through a sparsely populated highland region. 

It is here that the river passes through a 100-kilometre steep-sided canyon, alongside which there are no roads and few signs of human settlements. It seemed the only way to follow this part of the Yellow River would be by boat, but the river flowing through the canyon is fast, turbulent ‘white water’. 

My research showed me that about 30 years ago, a Chinese team attempted to paddle down this section of the Yellow River on inflatable rafts, but their boats sank and seven of them drowned. More recently, an adventurer who calls himself 'Semit'  - Shen Mite (闪米特) - tackled the canyon solo on a packraft and survived, but only just. 

From this canyon the river eventually emerges into the loess landscapes around Longyangxia (龙羊峡) reservoir, where it again changes course at its second major bend, turning eastward and flowing towards Lanzhou (兰州) in Gansu province, losing a lot of altitude en route.

My map suggested there were two other difficult-to-access sections of the Yellow River, further downriver along the 1500-kilometre northward ‘Ordos’ loop that the river makes into Inner Mongolia. The first was in the section north of Baiyin (白银) in Gansu, where the river emerges from the loess plateau into the edges of the Tengger desert. Again, I could see no cycleable road near the river for about 100 kilometres until it reaches the town of Zhongwei (中卫) to the north.  

And further along on the eastern arm of this ‘Ordos’ loop into Inner Mongolia there was another section where the river passes through another canyon, this time along the border between Shaanxi (陕西) and Shanxi (山西) provinces. This was adjacent to Yan’an (延安), an area chosen for its remoteness to set up a revolutionary base at the end point of the Long March of the 1930s. There were few towns along this part of the river, and the map showed that some stretches had no road, with the main highway veering inland into the hills for up to 30 kilometres. How would walkers and cyclists follow the Yellow River at these points?

Another one of the fundamental questions I had to consider when planning my Yellow River cycling trip was which way to ‘do’ the river: travelling downstream from the source of the river near the town of Maduo (玛多) in Qinghai, or setting off upstream from the sea outlet in Shandong? 

At first glance, the ‘downstream’ option seemed more attractive because it would be an overall ‘downhill’ journey from the 4000 metres altitude of Maduo to literally sea level. But when I started to consider other factors such as the seasons of weather and the remote locality of the Yellow River source, I decided to go with the ‘upstream’ direction of travel option. 

This choice was partly because it’s not actually possible to start cycling from the ultimate source of the Yellow River, which is a small stream located in the foothills of the Bayan Har Mountains at about 4800 metres altitude on the Tibetan plateau. While there is a dirt road that runs from Maduo town for about 70 kilometres towards the source of the river, the highest point in the hills could only be reached on foot or horseback across marshy grass terrain. 

Even if this were feasible, recent articles by Chinese visitors to the area noted that the Maduo authorities have declared the entire area around the river source to be off-limits to all tourists, to avoid environmental damage to the fragile ecosystem.

Maduo town would therefore be the closest place accessible by bike to the source of the Yellow River. In my online research Maduo appeared to be a small truck stop on the highway between Xining and Yushu (玉树). Located at around 4,300 metres, it looked to be an inhospitable place for much of the year with cold weather and freezing winds that extended from September to June. 

The brief summer sees temperatures rise somewhat but this coincides with the onset of monsoonal rains. My planned mid-April start to cycling the river would not be a good time to be travelling to Maduo. In addition to this, the first few hundred kilometres of the Yellow River below Maduo flow through remote Tibetan grassland wilderness that has no major highways. 

Using Google Earth, I was able to trace the route of a road track from Maduo along the river, passing occasional small settlements at places such as Huanghe (黄河乡) and Darlag (达日, Dari). The few images available showed a bleak grassland plateau lightly populated by Golok Tibetan yak herders, dotted with a few monasteries. 

Starting a Yellow River cycle trip at the source would also mean being ‘thrown in at the deep end’, and facing the most difficult section from Day 1. Setting out downstream from Qinghai I would have to contend with cold weather, high altitude, and the lack of facilities in a very remote location. I would rather save that for the end of the trip when I had built up some experience of long-distance cycle touring. 

The other obvious problem would be how to get to such a remote ‘start point’ with a bicycle. The nearest city is the provincial capital of Xining, around 500 kilometres away. How would I get my bike to Xining? And even if I could take it by train, it would require at least a week of cycling to get from Xining to Maduo before I could even start following the Yellow River.

I therefore decided to start my Yellow River journey at the sea.

A glance at the map showed me that the Yellow River enters the Bohai Sea on the coast of Shandong province, at an obscure spot somewhere between the cities of Tianjin (天津) and Qingdao (青岛). The nearest city is Dongying (东营), a place I’d never heard of, and which itself was around 70 kilometres from the coast. Nevertheless, I was sure this would be more ‘do-able’, and set out on the next stage of planning for how to get to the start point and how to structure my cycling journey.

With more than 5000 kilometres of river to follow, it seemed sensible to break down the trip into more manageable sections. I soon came up with three distinct stages, based on the lower, middle and upper parts of the river, each with distinct topography, history and populations.

The first stage of the lower river would take me across the northern coastal plain provinces of Shandong and Henan, from Dongying through cities that formed the historical cradle of Han Chinese culture: Kaifeng (开封), Zhengzhou (郑州) and Luoyang (洛阳). I also planned to make detours away from the river to visit places of historical significance such as Qufu (曲阜), the home of Confucius, and sacred mountains such as Taishan (泰山), Songshan (嵩山, with its Shaolin temple) and Huashan (华山). The end of this first section would be in Xi’an, which while not on the river, was a place I had always wanted to visit.

Stage 1 (click on image to enlarge)

The second stage - the middle river - would take me up the long northward ‘Ordos’ loop of the Yellow River into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, through a river canyon that marks the boundary between Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. The initial goal would be to reach Baotou (包头) and maybe take a side trip to the provincial capital of Hohhot (呼和浩特).

Stage 2 (click on image to enlarge)

The second half of this section would take me back down south on the Ordos Loop from Inner Mongolia along the fertile ‘Hetao Plain’ (河套) of river territory beside the Tengger desert (腾格里沙漠) and into the loess plateau country and Hui Muslim communities of Ningxia (宁夏) and Gansu (甘肃), culminating in the ancient river city of Lanzhou.

Stage 3 (click on image to enlarge)

The third and final stage would be the most challenging, taking me up to the high elevations of the Qinghai plateau and navigating remote sections of the Yellow River around the major lakes and reservoirs such as Longyangxia until I reached the headwaters in the ethnic Tibetan highlands. This section would also mean negotiating the long loop of the river through remote wilderness areas, much of it without any roads or towns en route.

Stage 4: Original planned route in red vs actual route in blue (click on image to enlarge)

With each section being roughly 1000 kilometres in length, and if I were riding 50-80 kilometres of cycling a day, I estimated it would take me about three weeks per stage, including rest days. I planned to be staying in hotels or hostels along the way, based on my experience from recent cycling trips in China of being able to find and book hotels easily and cheaply using the WeChat app.

On my previous shorter bike trips in China I’d used folding bikes: either a Brompton with 16-inch wheels, or a Dahon Jetstream with 20-inch wheels. These had performed well on the roads and proved capable of carrying luggage loads of around 15 kilos. But the trips had been brief, for no more than two weeks, and had been on mostly level roads in the relatively mild climate of south-western China. When I looked at the 5,000-kilometre route along the Yellow River going up and down hills for weeks on end and into remote areas such as Inner Mongolia, I quickly realised I would need a bike with a bit more power. I decided on an e-bike.

When I told friends that I was planning to use an e-bike for touring in China, some jokingly suggested this would be ‘cheating’. I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t envisage my Yellow River trip as a physical challenge or endurance test that must be done on a pedal bike. The purpose of my bike tour was to see and experience the Yellow River up close, and enjoy it in a leisurely way. I wanted to take advantage of the slow pace of cycling and the opportunities this provides to meet people through random encounters on the road: something that doesn’t happen when you’re in a car or bus. 

At the age of 62 and with some arthritis in my right foot, using an e-bike seemed like a good way to maintain mobility while retaining the advantages of a regular bike. An e-bike would give me the freedom to detour off the main road, to stop easily to take photos or chat to people, and also to explore smaller paths and alleys in towns and villages that would be inaccessible to cars. 

However, while electric scooters are now everywhere in China, pedal assist e-bikes are uncommon. Local friends told me that people preferred the cheap and simple electric scooters (‘diandong che’ 电动车,) with a throttle rather than bother with pedalling. 

Fortunately, when I arrived in China I was able to find a suitable folding e-bike for sale at a Dahon shop in Shenzhen. The Dahon Unio E20 was similar to the manual Dahon pedal bike I had been riding for a few years, and I was able to arrange for it to be delivered to Dongying, the city in Shandong closest to my starting point at the Yellow River estuary.

That was about the extent of my planning, and in March 2025, I set out on my trip. After staying with my wife’s family in Guilin for a few days, I took the train to Qingdao, in Shandong province.