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.