Losing the plot in Yinchuan

OCTOBER 25, 2007: Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, home of hospitals that look like casinos, and home of Chinese Islam, is a happy facilitator of days on end of debauched pig-eating and alcohol swilling.Photos

The place has an all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink pizza/pasta/Chinese/fried chicken/beer/anything-else-you-can-name-that-is-unhealthy-and-Western restaurant. Oh how the locals love it. It's like Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat in the mid 90s, only with beer, fried chicken and chips included. We met some Indian medical students who've been studying here for a year. One of them, Asi, summarised rather aptly the situation of the Hui Muslims here in the Hui Muslim Self-Governing Region: "They're very quiet, keep to themselves," he said. Here you must imagine a thick, barely decipherable Indian accent. "In my country, Muslims are veddy dangerous, setting off bombs and things. But here, the government can . . ." cocks his hand in shape of a pistol, "shoot."

Last night was an unexpected blinder of baijiu, whisky and beer in the tiny, unclean restaurant next to our tiny, unclean hotel. Drinking from metal bowls was surely the highlight.


For anyone interested in the visual side, i have been running a bit of an experiment with the $3 op shop camera i've loved for so long. The thing has now deteriorated to such an extent that it leaks sunlight. So i've had it on the front of my bike, exposed to the sun and ready to take impromptu photos from on the bike. Some of the results have been quite interesting:



Click here if you care to see more of Ole Trusty's handiwork.

And there are NEW PRODUCTS! yes NEW PRODUCTS!! on offer right here, everything from 'Tumor Hospital' adverts to the worst logo in the history of advertising. Rush in now to grab your free belly laugh at the expense of China and its obsession with your language.

We managed to avoid morale-sapping tourism for the first four days, but yesterday we caved. I really don't like going to tourist sites, no matter how interesting or historical they might be. Seriously, seeing some great historical place whilst keeping to a path that someone else has set for you and which everyone else who goes there treads, it saps my will to live. I'm not saying tourist spots shouldn't exist - plenty of people seem to like them. But really, what can't you find out about a famous tourist site that's not on the internet? Being in almost any designated tourist spot, unless it's spectacular scenery, genuinely saps my will to live. I'll leave it at that.

The lack of appeal of tourism caused me to teeter on the brink of addiction to the English-language TV propaganda channel run by the immaculately-named 'CCTV'. It usually maintains an air of 'BBC impartiality' by limiting itself to the trivial and superficial. Their reports resemble, in Boxxy's words, those of Totally Wild or Behind the News. But the day the Dalai Lama was awarded the congressional medal, it lapsed into hilariously brazen propaganda. There was none of the usual childish, cliched camerawork and earnest explanations of the bleeding obvious. In fact, the report contained no pictures or explanations at all. Instead? A three-minute Powerpoint slideshow containing nothing but blocks of text from the Chinese government's official response condemning the Dalai Lama, narrated by an expressionless, anonymous voiceover. It must have been hard for the newsreader to keep a straight face as she introduced the follow-up – "The Tibet Autonomous Region's leader today announced strong development in all areas. . .", which concluded with the reporter stating, "Tibet has always been an inaliable part of China. Mr Chocog [or something, the 'leader'] says the Dalai Lama should . . .", just seconds after a voiceover had stated, "Tibet has been a part of China since the 13th century."

Yinchuan has also been the site of two rather hilarious comic scenes involving a wild-eyed male bicycle tourist. The first was simply a harrowing haircut.

It was supposed to be a day of complete individual freedom – open ended, perhaps involving long stints in guitar shops, reading news, taking photos. I should add here the background that a lightning strike the previous day had turned my hair a dark brown colour, a lightning strike prompted and encouraged by a certain Boxx Head sick of being stared at, slack-jawed, everywhere she went on account of walking alongside a foreign man with 'yellow' hair sprouting from his head.

So the newly crowd-colour-headed foreigner entered the hairdresser's and requested a regulation snip-snip, his first for 7 months. The hairdresser snipped ok. It looked a bit shit, mainly due to her obsession with plastering his hair across to one side in the style of a Lego man, so he asked someone to pass him his dictionary and looked up the Chinese for 'neat'. "It's okay but i don't want it so neat," he said. Vexed looks all round - from the hairdresser and her troupe of fashionista cronies occasionally assisting but mainly just watching. The foreigner repeated, "I don't like neat." Thinking his dictionary was being unreliable again, he looked up 'messy' and relayed that. The fashionistas evidently saw this as some kind of opening or invitation and began piling pressure on him to undertake a service they called 'burning' or 'scorching' or some similar meaning. He told them he didn't want any special styling services, that he wanted only to not to have neat hair. The fashionista juggernaut slipped a gear: among the dozens of explanations and pieces of advice spoken in a very pure hairdressing dialect, the foreigner only understood one: "You'll feel very good." The insecurities apparent in the fashionistas' meticulous hairstyles (the owner of the store himself gelled his hair twice while the foreigner sat there) began to infect the foreigner. For a good 20-25 minutes there was utter confusion; foreigner in the chair with freshly cut and plastered brown Lego man hair, not understanding a word as the fashionistas took turns in gabbling instructions in Hairdresserese while the hairdresser stood back with scissors in hand. The only way out, it seemed to the foreigner, was to accept this 'scorching'. Which, it turned out, involved sitting in the chair with his hair in rollers for nearly an hour and a half. Yes, rollers, and a heat halo above his berollered head. Overall, the process took the best part of three hours, the foreigner sitting in the chair in front of a mirror the entire time. This alone was enough to permanently damage his psyche, but as the rollers came out and the hairdresser spruced up his new hairstyle it became apparent to him that the result was a ridiculous cross between a Marge Simpson beehive and a fluffy Jew-fro. A broken foreigner walked from the shop.

My next hilarious humiliation came on a street corner with a Xinjiang cake seller. I'd seen them quite a few times in cities – just trying to sell off pieces from massive metre-long fruit and nut loaves. The previous day i'd walked past him and told him i wanted to try the product and would come back. I duly came back the next day, to the same street corner and had almost given up looking for him when he came out from an alleyway, pushing his cart. I greeted him and told him i'd come back to buy. I signalled for him to cut me off a conveniently protruding end piece. He looked a little taken aback and offered me half what i'd suggested but i told him the end piece would be fine. It didn't look like too much. What i didn't count on, never having consumed before, was how heavy the thing was. At the going rate of 50RMB a kilo, it turned out to be a 65RMB chunk. And i only had 36RMB in my wallet. So i asked him to cut it in half. No, he told me in terrible Chinese (he wasn't much better than me - Uighurs have their own, Turkic language and many can't speak Chinese), if he cuts it in half, no-one will buy the the other half. "Oh shit. Hmmm. What can we do? I don't have enough money." A sizeable crowd had gathered and had now enclosed us. Boxxy was so embarrassed she simply stepped back and melted into the onlookers. Rattled by the shame and annoyed by the crowd members' stupid, bovine movements and expressions, i told the seller, "Ok, solution: i'll give you sell" (that's the Chinese expression), "We'll stand here together until i sell it." I addressed the crowd: "You all want to buy, do you?" i said, picking up the chunk, and walked around the ring of befuddled imbeciles, waving the unwanted chunk in their faces yelling, "Buy buy buy! Good eat! Special price . . . good eat!" Jaws remained slack. "Why are you standing here?" i shouted. "You're here to buy! Buy buy buy, special price! 30 yuan!". At this point a police officer pushed through the crowd. I greeted him and asked him, "What are they looking at? None of them want to buy!" He looked at me incredulously, turned away and joined the crowd. Finally, i knew the only thing that would get rid of them – start taking pictures. This only partially succeeded. Eventually the seller, himself clearly embarrassed, took one chunk away, put it on the board, and said he would eat it. I paid him what i had for the bigger chunk and we made a break for it. Glory be.


We hadn't seen the Great Wall for about 2 weeks until we took a taxi out to see it yesterday. The taxi driver, though he'd been to Beijing, had never seen the wall despite its being only a 15 minute drive from his home.




It wasn't that we hadn't been trying though. Two days after leaving Zhongwei we camped in a desert that consisted solely of sand and vicious prickle bushes (which, in turn, consisted solely of extremely sharp prickles, which i only discovered when i tried to ride my bike on them and punctured both tyres in 10 places). That night was full of explosions in the not-too-distant distance – big ones. Their cause remained a mystery, but only until the morning. We continued riding towards the Wall for a few kilometres, but just as we were mounting the hill that should have given us our first glimpse, a green military 4WD sped past on a nearby track, honking wildly. The passenger got out and yelled at us to stop. I approached him and after a quick interrogation and investigation of our cameras, were were told to kindly vacate the desert because the army wanted to explode more bombs.




That afternoon we reached a restaurant – a concrete block shrouded in the smoke of multiple aluminium refineries. I stuck my head through the door. An man in his 50s sporting a sour expression stood inside. I inquired as to whether this 'restaurant' could cook us some food, and, without answering, he turned and gave me the iciest look imaginable, a "what in fuck's name are you doing here?". I said, "Fried rice, add vegetables and egg, can do?" Suddenly he burst out laughing, evidently amused by the simple fact i said "Fried rice, add vegetables and egg, can do?" He turned out to be the hippest, strangest old man we've met. He took us out the back to his storeroom to select our own dilapidated vegetables from their rat-eaten boxes, and soon insisted on us staying the night to share baijiu and aluminium fumes with him. Demanding we take photos of him, dressing up and endlessly primping his combover in the mirror in preparation for them and demanding i do the same, yet refusing any thoughts of a photo of him cooking; chuckling heartily practically every time I opened my mouth; insisting Boxxy take cold medicine despite her protestations that she had no such affliction – yes, this was a strange one.


As we continued the next morning the scenery became more and more dire. By the time we reached the Yellow River, it was exactly how i imagine 19th century Europe: small towns and villages (not big cities – small towns and villages becoming big cities) with factories clamouring for prime riverfront space with assured waste-pipe access, spewing forth yellow plumes that cloak the air; the echoey clanking of heavy iron bouncing down factory-walled streets; families living in tiny homes next door to factories; chains of putrid, green billabongs in the bottom of ditches; and the self-made millionaires exiting the factory gates in the most fashionable, ostentatious transport available.


We've ridden through endless cornfields (and were back among them before long). The choice faced by peasants in an industrial revolution is between the fields and the filth. And we know that most of them end up choosing the filth for the opportunities that it represents. But, as so often is the case, the direr the scenery got, the friendlier the people seemed to become. These guys, who live in their tiny shop next to a foul river, were the friendliest people we've met.



Still, peasants can in fact reap some benefits from the abovementioned ostentatious vehicles without leaving the land. The above is apparently done for the purpose of threshing by running over by passing cars. Someone should perhaps remind me to limit my consumption of local grain products.

Gansu's parting shot - Ningxia's Songyuan City

OCTOBER 13, 2006: “You know you’ve really succeeded in brainwashing the kids when you've got them all drawing pictures of burgers and chips”– Boxx Head. Yes, we're quite at home here in Zhongwei, Ningxia's best attempt at a Songyuan City. Photos Gansu, Ningxia

The first two nights out of Wuwei we ended up with nowhere to stay and the first night ended up in some farmer's cornfield pitching the tent after dark.

The second night we camped on some wasteland next to the railway, waking up with the passing of each kilometre-long train and getting the fear when our phones kept chirping with missed calls from mystery numbers. "They're ascertaining our location," i thought, clutching my telescopic police baton close and planning how i might attack from inside the tent with hacking motions at kneecap level (writing off the tent of course).

After 3 days of tranquil boredom (another Boxxism: "The word 'tranquil' really isn't a very tranquil sounding word after you say it a few times") and annoying uphill slopes we were awakened from our bicycle-mounted slumber when a motorcyclist took a corner way too fast and went literally flying off a steep embankment. It happened a few metres behind us - i heard the screeching noise as he lost control and looked over my shoulder to see him hanging in mid-air. A cop car was right behind him at the time and had been honking at him to get out of the way. Well, he did as he was told alright. But the cops' reaction was gobsmacking: they skidded to a halt, turned around and sped from the scene. The rider was at the bottom of the hill, apparently unconscious (no helmet of course). I went down, dreading the prospect of trying to revive a bloodied corpse. But somehow he didn't have a scratch on him - the worst injury was to his business jacket - and after a couple of minutes he came to. I still can't believe the cops' reaction. Not only that, when i tried to flag down a car for help, waving and jumping up and down like an enraged mankey who'd had his banana snatched from his hand, the cars either accelerated past or slowed down to allow the occupants to gawk. The logical end-point of capitalism?

The following day was the hardest we've had. People in the land of the bicycle actually have no idea at all about riding a bicycle up a hill. "A bit up-and-down but not too steep," was the 'hotel' guy's assessment of our route before we left. Bullshit! "Ride straight up into the fucken clouds," would have been more accurate. And up we rode, into the poorest China we've seen.




No motorbikes or 3-wheelers to be seen. Just reckless, reckless highway users. I've mentioned it before, but the recklessness of Chinese drivers really can't be overstated. Try this: mountain village on a steep, misty slope, a large truck is blocking the right side of the road on a right-hand bend after losing its huge load of wheat sacks (probably from some unsuccessful reckless manouevre). 20-25 men are loading the sacks back onto the truck. The road is cutting through the hill and so has walls of rock on either side. The truck is between these walls and is blocking the downhill side of the road. And down the hill comes a convoy of huge, shiny 4WDs doing, at a conservative estimate, 100-120km/h. And how do they deal with this, this unbelievably perfect recipe for a blood and viscera chowder river flowing down the hill? Hazard lights on, hold the horn down and blindly swerve around the truck onto the wrong side of the road. The omission of "hit the brakes" from the above is intentional. The irony is the most reckless roadhogs usually are these convoys carrying so-called VIPs.


Or this: About a kilometre up the hill the cloud has really closed in. Here comes a silver VW - that is, a cloud-coloured VW - no lights on, can't see more than 40m ahead, screaming down the hill on a road with broken down trucks at regular intervals, causing cars to cross onto the wrong side at regular intervals. There truly are no rules. This was proved when we saw a bus tailgating a police car, horn blaring angrily. Mouth-to-mouth with a bloody corpse at this stage looks inevitable.

After finally reaching the top of the mountain, we were understandably ready for a well-earned, relaxing downhill cruise. Shattered. The downhill proved, literally, more difficult than the uphill. Two point eight degrees Centigrade had been no problem riding up the steep slope. But on the downslope, add icy rain, 30km/h of wind chill and no physical activity at all for over an hour...the result was two shivering, drenched wretches clinging vainly to bicycles with nothing but ice blocks for hands and feet. I was actually delighted when i finally glimpsed an uphill stretch ahead, simply from the prospect of getting to pedal. Not only that, the downhill slope was so steep that our previous hard work getting to the top was basically wasted on wearing out our brake pads.


We ended up in a leaky, freezing 'hotel' run by a Uyghur (Xinjiang Muslim) bloke from the Kazakhstan border and his very young Han wife. Despite the fact their only other customers were Xinjiang truckers (Xinjiang is the vast expanse of central Asia to the north of Tibet which China took over in the early '50s and which was populated by Turkic [i.e. completely un-Chinese] people), they didn't want us to pay.

The following day, Gansu was conquered, and we entered the "Ningxia Hui Muslim Minority Group Self-governing Region". But not before another alarming reminder of the reality of spilt guts on these roads, luckily this time the guts belonged to 2 sheep. Again, around the accident scene the driving became even more reckless:


You might imagine the homeland of Chinese Islam as relatively exotic but it's very much like the rest of China, and dominated by Hans (Chinese majority, more than 90% of the 1.3 billion). The Hui Muslims are only 20-30% of Ningxia's population, and the 'self-government' is as token as all the rest. Our first destination inside Ningxia, Gantang ('Pleasant Embankment') was, according to my mother and her 1970s atlas, the "next big city". I wasn't expecting too much, but i was expecting more than one road (the highway) and a bunch of boarded-up shops. The 'hotel' was run by an old con artist of a woman. First she showed us to the room, a standard 10RMB a night prison-cell: concrete floors, 2 stained beds with no mattresses and no other furniture for the simple reason the room was too small. She wanted 40RMB (the price of a decent room in a city) but i told her she was dreaming and quickly bludgeoned the price down to 20RMB ($3.30) - still too expensive for such a shithole. Clearly embarrassed at having been called out trying to rip the foreigners off, she walked away complaining that i didn't understand Chinese. Round 1 to me.

But revenge was not far away. Feeling sorry for her and her town, we decided to order food from her. We ordered veges and fried rice and an egg, a decent cheap meal. Later, we tried to pay. Fatal mistake, paying later - she demanded 12RMB (tooooooooooooo dollars!) for the 3RMB bowl of rice. I groaned, defeated. Round 2 to her. I asked where the toilet was. She pointed out the door. "The petrol station next door," she smiled. Victory to the old hag by knockout.


The following morning we continued along the highway towards 'Defend China' city (Zhongwei). The day turned out the be the most epic of the trip, with 4 major changes of scene. Starting with a sizeable stretch of steep ups and downs as the highway continued along the edge of some rather large mountains. Riding uphill and downhill in short stretches is theoretically better than riding uphill but in practice they're just about the same - riding up and down, you spend so long climbing the uphill bits and the downhill bits fly by so quickly, it's just like riding up one long steep hill, except that once in a while you teleport forward a few hundred metres. And there's no long downhill at the end because you're no higher than when you started. Most cutting of all was the train line that followed us the entire way, utilising an almost-perfectly flat route about half a kilometre to our left.

Finally the road fell to the flats - sand dunes on the left and towering, sparse mountains on the right. After about 20km, we found ourselves on the edge of the plateau, about to descend to the the Yellow River through craggy red rock passes. But no sooner had we reached the bottom, we were once again walking the bikes up a long, straight incline. This one, however was worth it: at the top the road rounded a bend and there it was spread out below us, the 4,000km snake known in Chinese history simply as "River", the giver and taker of Chinese life, "Mother River of China", or "China's Sorrow". Most striking is the way it simply obliterates not only humans (as and when it pleases), but the mighty Gobi desert. Thousands of kilometres of endless dunes and steppes, a near-sheer 200m sand cliff, then "thanks desert, thanks for coming."


Obviously the altitude affected my head. I needed bringing down and Boxxy eventually managed to convince me to continue on - we were only about 15km from the next city and a desperately needed shower.


As we got within about 10km of the city, the narrow, cliff-hugging and insanely busy 'highway' suddenly became a practically empty, 10-lane Adventure World Speed Slide. I really don't know where the excess cars went. And then there we were, seemingly back in Songyuan. That's really about the only way to describe Zhongwei. It only became a city less than 4 years ago. It's a city that hasn't grown into it's boots. Aside from the ridiculously under-used roads, its malls are eerily quiet; about 1 in 10 spaces are occupied by closed-down bars and high-end clothes shops. Judging by the tooth-capped newness of the buildings, these business couldn't have lasted more than 6 months. There's a strange preponderance of bars, and no apparent market for them. Unsurprisingly, in the town square a giant Chairman Mao statue watches approvingly over the forced hypercapitalism.

Prison road and associated rear-end difficulties

OCTOBER 5, 2007: Has your arse ever been so sore it hurt to fart? We actually never intended to take the prison road. But once you're on it, you can't get off. Photos

Here in Wuwei, relatively big and beautiful city. Our arses are sore. We’ve ridden 170km in the last 3 days, but that's not the reason. The reason is the non-existent road between Changning (“Flourishing & tranquil”) and the Hongyashan Shuiku (“Red Precipice Reservoir”), proudly the biggest desert reservoir in all Asia.

Yes, the road that did exist had everything required for morale-sapping posterior pain . . . including immaculately maintained barbed wire fences along its entire length.


Ok, a week or so ago we finally got out of Shandan, a sad, boring little town, once Boxxy got over her cold. The women around these parts dress like banditos, and not for religious reasons:


The first day we struggled against a whipping south-westerly wind (we were duly heading south-west) and ended up camping early. Thankfully, the Great Wall of China was able to protect us, being in the most spectacularly good condition we'd seen so far. Considering it's made of rammed earth, is over 600 years old and has been subjected to the kind of winds we were that day, it inspired awe. The mercy that's been granted it has been, according to a restaurant customer in another place, at the hands of the handful of shepherds that roam these lands. They've cut slits in the wall to bring their sheep through and have even made little rooms in the wall to shelter themselves from the wind – but have not destroyed it like the overwhelming populations of other parts. I'm backing evolutionary eye-slantage reduction within a few hundred years.






I still can't believe in the Ming Dynasty they actually guarded the whole of it.

It went from bad to worse in the morning. Despite finding red bull at a roadside service station, we were nonetheless thrown unceremoniously onto the first of the ‘prison roads’. Ten rows of barbed wire on either side . . . I consulted my map . . . literally, a 3,000 km–long prison (that's 60,000km of barbed wire). Once you're on, you can't get off. The locals have, over the years, found the need to break their way into the prison so there were, periodically but not often, ways for humans to get out. But in our case the bikes played the role of prison wardens: the crash barriers on either side were astonishingly continuous – no chance of lifting a product-laden bicycle over those 2.5 feet (and down the embankment). We could technically check out but our bikes ensured we could never leave.

We quit the day in a tiny village after 20km of severe uphill dregs.

But in all seriousness, to put that into context, these highways go right through the middle of villages – great, you might think, increased business for all (would anyone actually think that?), but the reality in Fengcheng (‘Plentiful Wall’) is that there are two petrol stations, state-owned petrol stations at that, one for each direction of the highway, and both are closed down. In Fengcheng and most other places it touches, the highway cuts the village in two. The locals have to choose between 1-4km detours to use the bridge, or abandoning motorbikes, bikes, cars etc to clamber over the 1m-high guards. Thankfully, it seems, the highway planners, perhaps out of compassion, have, in the villages, replaced the barbed wire with 6-ft high green pool fencing, which the villagers can easily make into gates by removing a few bolts.

We reached Yongchang (‘Forever Flourishing’) after a torturous day and found that the place was arrogant enough to be expensive despite being only a small county centre. So we rode down the hill the following day to the local city, Jinchang ('Gold Flourishing'), where we stayed in a half-completed hotel because no fully-completed one would give us a room with a shower for under 100RMB. Alright if you have calculator open I agree it sounds stingy but it's the principle, wrong? Our next camp, due to being told the road I wanted to take didn’t exist, was a tiny backwater called Changning (like I said, 'Flourishing & Tranquil'). Here the complete dearth of proper accommodation proved rewarding: an old man, 88 years old, with a spare room for travelleres proved to be the hotel. Stone floors and no furniture except beds was no barrier to the watermelon/freshly harvested sunflower seed party that ensued in our room.


Yes, with the October national holiday the whole family was in, including the drunk cop from the next town, who couldn't stop talking about how he had met Wen Jiabao (Chinese Premier [ie. Vice president]), the whole time ordering his English-teacher brother-in-law to translate his ramblings for us.


After grave and earnest warnings that it would rain – Chinese people seem to issue this warning no matter what degree of cloud matter is in the sky – we set out for Wuwei. And discovered quickly that the terrible road we were warned about was indeed terrible. Then, as though to rub salt into our raw butt-cracks, as we entered the desert there re-emerged the prison road. As if we were about to run off into the desert and vandalise shit. Which I did, at least, make an attempt at doing, running up the dunes at top pace.


Here's something slightly interesting that we've learned: rural China as we've seen it (i.e. the relatively poor Northeast, and Gansu, supposedly China's 5th poorest province or something) is not as poor as it's made out to be. Sure, the outback doesn't have the get-rich-quick slimeballs in Audis that the cities do. But many, if not most, families now have their own gated compound, and/or motorbikes/3-wheelers/tractors. Practically all have mobile phones. All have electricity.

Still, no-one has sewage, water or rubbish collection. In rural Gansu, the toilet's everywhere. Accordingly, you're as liable to step in human shit as you are to step in dog shit at Brian Burke Reserve.

You're even more likely to step in chillies.