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.