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.

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.

Stuck in the desert

SEPTEMBER 10, 2007: Stuck in Jiayuguan waiting for bikes to arrive. Photos

Some pictures from the surrounding desert/rebuilt wall areas:




The end of the Great Wall is brilliant. No-one pumped it up as being spectacular or anything - we were expecting a broken-up mound of dirt and a token sign. Instead, after we arrived we were directed down some stairs into the ground and suddenly we were standing on a glass-floored balcony 100m above a river looking out over this grand canyon of China. It was really the opposite of the average tourist experience, where everything you hear about a place before you see it leads to emptiness if not disappointment.




This is Jiayuguan, a massive 14th century fort - the gate into China on the Silk Road.




It's the last gate in the great wall. It's a well-known tourist specimen with an amazing story/myth. You might have heard about it (i hadn't, i'm ashamed to admit). The one where the 14th century (Ming) engineer was instructed to specify precisely the materials that would be needed to build the fort, and after it was finished there remained only one brick. The brick is on the ledge in the picture below: