Onionland through desert to donkeyland

SEPTEMBER 19, 2007: In Zhangye, or "Arm Extension of China", (according to answers.com), on the Silk Road. Photos

Our arrival here on Wednesday prompted the usual stares and a couple of hours later, a warm welcome from a very friendly, very crazy old man, followed by a warning that we were "not safe". I couldn't really understand anything he said, except the "not safe" part. I think he might have expected us to be done in quite quickly, as he insisted on many rather emotional farewells. Including hugs (my hand on my wallet, of course). Anyways...

Zhangye's a pretty famous place and has some cool tourist shit, like the 34m-long sleeping Buddha and a pagoda dating back to the 5th century (made of wood so not exactly a 5th century pagoda).




Have ridden about 350km, starting with the onion-basket of China. Everywhere, onions - in fields, on trucks, on peasants' backs, outside towns in stacks the size of small warehouses. Met some guys who'd driven 1000+km from Anhui Province just to buy onions. While we managed to pass through without entering the onion economy, fields of hemp plants proved irresistable, and we bought a sturdy plant from a farmer for about AU$1.50 (he wanted to give it to us free). But i'm not confident of its ability to get us high (it's still drying): it appears these plants, pungent as they are, are grown to produce seeds, rather than buds.




Later that day we rolled into Yinda ("Achieve Silver"), a tiny place much smaller than some places not even marked on my map. We were told on 2 separate occasions there was nowhere to stay. Nowhere, it turned out, except this spectacular chalet thing in the middle of a willow-ringed lake, which we got to stay in for just under AU$7.


But the following day's 'hotel' in Sandui ("Three Lumps") fitted the bill, i think, rather better: past the government palace blaring patriotic messages, past a couple of disused factories to what seemed to be an ex-warehouse converted to a prison. No mattresses on the beds, concrete floor, one high barred window per room, and no toilet, except through the rubbly backyard, patrolled by vicious, chained dogs, that evidently used to be part of the disused factories. The toilet itself was a standard short-drop (if you don't understand, short-drop, it's similar - but different in one obvious way - to an outback 'long-drop'). It was in here that the famous pioneer "guce" discovered and named 'Twin Peaks' shit-mountain range:


We got the fuck out early, and before long were rewarded with the surreal confluence of green fields and the Gobi Desert. We bathed in a lake that would have looked like a perfect African lake scene were it not for the imposing Afghani mountains on the opposite shore. I ran up a nearby hill and saw first green plains leading to snow-capped mountains, turned 90 degrees to see the craggy desert-mountains leading down to the lake, another 90 degrees and i was staring into Death Valley, and, finally after another turn, a pockmarked plateau on the same level as me - or alternatively, dozens of wide, perfectly flat-topped mountains, each with exactly the same height. Turn 45 degrees and repeat the above to see abrupt borders between the 4 scenes. Absolutely unreal.


Then it got real. After an hour of looking up and down, we couldn't find the road to take us into (hopefully through) the desert. After a few vain attempts at getting directions from passing motorists, we admitted to ourselves that the road we were looking for didn't exist, crossed the highway and flagged down a truck to take us to the nearest city, Jinta ("Gold Tower").

"The people seem extra curious," Boxxy commented, "like they've never seen a foreigner". A full explanation was not far away. In an internet bar we were menaced by an ADD 6-year-old, first with a toy gun (with which he shot me about 17 times, power-drunkenly cackling), then with a knife, a real knife which he came pretty damn close to our heads with. Eventually the attack was called off by his father, but, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, thanks to the kid's patriotism authorities were alerted to the presence of potentially 'dangerous' elements, i.e. us. Within 5 minutes there were two "Foreign Affairs" policemen demanding our passports. They proceeded to inform us we had to leave that night for Jiuquan ("Booze Spring") City - where we'd spent the last 3 days riding from. Our unexpected detour had taken us into an area of China closed to foreigners. These areas are hard to tell because there are no signs informing as such, and, even more insanely, there exists no list of closed areas. That's because the whole country's technically "closed", it's just that 90+% of regions have been declared special "open" areas.

I called Bill, the Mongolian Millionaire school owner and he sweet-talked them but they apparently wouldnt budge. But after some more explaining we convinced them we weren't the spies the knife-wielding Gestapo child had branded us and they let us stay...provided we moved from our 'budget' accommodation to a hotel that was licensed to take foreigners. The reason for that is completely unknown to me because if the cops were following protocol they should have fined us and the owner of the un-foreigner-licensed hotel. But instead they were jovially laughing and joking with the hotel owner, and helped us move our shit - hell, one of them even drove a load of it in his own car - without even as much as a bribe involved. It made no sense at all, but why do people come to China anyway, other than to become confused?



The following day, after another skeleton discovery (standard - i was just taking a piss on some wasteland and there was a bright white cracked skull; i even debated calling the police officers from the previous night to inform them i'd found a murder victim but a motorcyclist i hailed down seemed nonplussed and told me the place was a former graveyard...so still the skellies lie among the plastic bags, bits of metal, rubble etc.) and a change of tyre that turned us into autograph-signing outlaw celebrities, we set out into the desert. By lunch time 2 hours later, we'd only travelled about 10km into some evil mountains. Sitting in the sun, making such slow progress, it crossed my mind we might even run out of water. The desert and its mountains had shaken my confidence. The only proper thing to do, therefore, was to run to the top of the nearest mountain and shit on it. Aside from the obviously satisfactory revenge, this revealed that we didn't have far to go, and the rest was downhill all the way to the ghostly village of Shiquan ("Rock Spring").

Our welcome to the place consisted of being knocked off our bikes by a willy-willy that came out of nowhere. Shiquan has the appearance of a ghost town with factories left running on auto-pilot like Willy Wonka's. On one side of the road it's an outright ghost town but, perversely, the abandoned rammed earth peasant homes sit opposite a row of three sulphur-belching abominations. Add the desert summer's heat, and you'd surely have one of the closest approximations to hell on earth. About 1/2 a kilometre in, four kids standing in front of a closed shack-store were the first signs of actual humans we had seen. They were ultra helpful, pointing us down the road to the shack that sold cold drinks and watermelons. Population, locals told me when we finally found them (as you can probably imagine, they in fact found us), actually numbers around 1000 but most people live inside the factories, even those born here many years ago. I guess that's because if you don't, you live across the road from a cloud of noxious smoke that the wrong gust of wind will blow through your door. Actually, on the way out we stopped to take photos and copped a direct hit. Here's the cloud coming towards us, just like a bushfire night in Perth:


Camped in the desert sand dunes. The following day, unbelievably, it rained almost all day. We were stuck in the tent until 2pm, then rode out of the desert and into farmland focussed principally on donkey production. (Have you ever seen or imagined a field full of donkeys? I hadn't.) This proved a problem as we ended up looking at the sand dunes in the distance and willing them to come closer for camping purposes. Eventually, after a Trevor Hendy-like effort pushing the bikes through sand, got to a spot as the sun set, on top of a dune on the edge of the desert.


The road to Zhangye was paved with hundreds, probably thousands of patches of glass. At first, i couldn't understand it - i thought maybe some Chinese group of seven 'Cunts' went on cruises up and down the road, smashing bottles for fun. Or, alternatively, one guy commuting along the same road every morning and evening, and every morning and evening consuming the same glass-bottled product and tossing it out the window. Either way it was lame. But, in due course, a roadside warning sign indicated the wretched shards were the remnants of myriad "horror smashes". It wasn't hard to believe, either. The recklessness of Chinese drivers really has no limit. We witnessed several really close calls - cars overtaking long trucks on the wrong side of the road, approaching a bend and swerving through a razor-thin time-window to avoid another oncoming vehicle (usually a truck). Chinese drivers also never wear seatbelts: in places like Beijing and Changchun where the police are starting to enforce, the drivers actually go to the extra effort of appearing to be wearing the seatbelt while avoiding plugging it in (this usually involves some difficult knot-tying or seat-shifting). Their reason? Unanimously: "it's not comfortable".

As for the wall, we had some crazy scenes early on where the wall decays irregularly, and it seems the wall can still serve a purpose: in the place below it appeared the wall had been used as one side of a reservoir. But since then it's been just a few mounds of dirt that used to be watchtowers. What i can't believe is that they actually manned the entire wall during the Ming Dynasty with something like 5 million soldiers. Fucking unbelievable.