Beijing, Lanzhou, and the Ride into the Amdo Highlands

Martin and I saddled up on August 9 and headed out of town for the south and Tibet. There was an outdoor store, and Martin spied some sunglasses he liked, and next door was an optician, and 30 minutes later, they had ground glass for his prescription. How about that for efficiency?

The way out took us past the larger part of Lanzhou, which is a city (like almost all other Chinese cities) of extremely wide boulevards, grand parks and monuments to the state, high rise apartment blocks done in pink, shopping malls, banks, and a life insurance building every couple of blocks (if you are looking for an investment opportunity, China Life seems to be a growing business: I have seem the logo - two cupped hands holding the world - on at least one building in every place that one can call a town in China). The southern part of the city, where the Hui majority appear to live and go about their business, has several mosques, which are an interesting style: very Chinese, almost pagoda-like, but with a high spire or minaret with a (usually golden) crescent moon and some arabic script (usually the passage from the azan: "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet") above the entrance. Although there were many mosques, they didn't seem very well attended - then again, it wasn't Friday evening, either. I never actually heard the call to prayer during my stay in Lanzhou, even with all the skullcaps around.

The outskirts of the city were dirty and congested, full of metalworks, welding shops, trucks in various states of repair, narrow crowded and potholed streets, and swarms of bees. Straight away, a climb started to the south, and we rose up out of the Yellow River valley past an arid landscape that was essentially desert, with dust from the Gobi hanging in the air and temperatures in the mid thirties (90s Farenheit). There are no suburbs around Lanzhou - the city simply ends and the desert begins. China is putting a dramatic amount of effort into planting something - anything - in the ground to halt the deserts around Lanzhou, as well as to curb the erosion that comes with summer rains, and the accompanying flooding and landslides that are a real problem downstream. 

We rose over 900 meters to a pass out of the Yellow River watershed, past terraced fields of wheat and soybean, past herds of sheep being driven up the hills by old men and young boys, and past more bees. These became quite agressive, and as we were climbing on bicycle, we had no respite. Martin began swatting at several that were too close to him for comfort, and they attacked him, stinging him as they flew underneath his glasses next to his eyes. I pulled out a stinger later that was about an inch from his right eye. This encouraged a faster pace, since the hope was that the bees were less prevalent at a higher elevation. On bicycle we had to climb an extra 300m, since the main road traffic passed through a toll tunnel at 2000m. At the top I waited, watching peasants thresh grain and separate grain from chaff in the time-honored tradition of tossing it up in the air by the pitchforkfull and letting the wind carry away the dry dusty chaff. This was done right in the middle of the road, with the crushing action of the occasional vehicle an actual assistance in the process. A woman would sweep the mass into a large pile, and then everyone would join in, tossing the stalks into the air with wooden forks and paddles. I had a go for kicks, and they seemed to be pretty amused by my efforts. Its fun for a minute, but its definitely work when its for days, weeks, and months.

Martin pulled up shortly thereafter, and we dropped back down the other side of the pass into another river system, nearly as low as the Yellow River valley. More of the same landscape: terraced hillsides, badly eroded hillsides and sculpted river beds. Traffic was light as we traveled south- and west-ward, toward another range of hills which stood between us and Route 213, our quick route to the south and the Tibetan border. A storm blew up, and lightning fired and thunder echoed off of the canyon walls, the stream beds looking muddy and angry as we climbed to our first campsite, after a meal at a Hui restaurant in a small town before the climb.

That night, I got to give my new tent a workout, as rain fell. The quarry below us didn't stop work all night, and in the morning, just after relating to Martin stories of my run-ins with dynamite in China, an explosion below sent rocks into the sky, and a few rained down very near us. An old shepherd named Ma watched us patiently as we ate breakfast and broke camp. He pointed out a shortcut that he would be using to go up the hills, but we preferred the easy 5% climb that Chinese mountain roads are graded to, and in about 20 minutes, we caught up to him, smiling at us as we rode up to a high ridge well above the surrounding countryside. The road managed to stay up along this ridge for most of the day, sometimes only 20 or 30m wide, and steep drops down along terraced fields the whole way. A lunch in a dusty town, and then we were down several hundred meters to the main road, route 213.

This road continued alongside the river for a few hundred km, heading south, and eventually crossing into what was properly Tibet (although still part of the Chinese province of Gansu). Literally, round a corner, and everything became green, and the mountains rose on all sides. A white stupa marked the border, along with prayer flags and Tibetan script.

The valley carried up past mixed villages of Tibetans and Hui, with the Hui always running the preferred restaurants: while Hui food is not haute cuisine, Tibetan food is usually quite unappetizing. The next few days took us past cultivated valleys and over rolling hills, gradually gaining in elevation until we were consistently above 3000m (almost 10,000 feet). The landscape opened up, revealing wide grasslands with sheep and yaks grazing and Tibetan nomad tents part of the scenery. One day, we camped in a small valley in the rain, and a friendly Tibetan speaking excellent English offered us a place to stay, and though we were tired, the next morning we agreed to meet for breakfast and some conversation. His family lived at the top of a low pass, and he invited us in, eatimg jomdo rice (a sweet rice with some local tuber mixed in with yak butter and sugar piled on top), tsampa (the mixture of yak butter tea and roasted barley flour that is the Tibetan staple), and a few other sweets. We talked about the state of things in his area, about the changes that have taken place over the last 10 years, the Cultural Revolution, and his place in his region. He said that he wanted to do something for his area, but that there was not much work, other than sheep and yak herding. What good would his degree be in that case? I asked about Chinese inmigration in the area, and what people thought of it. Of course they grumble, he said, but there isn't much to be done. The Chinese government has imposed property lines on the nomads, meaning that the way of life is essentially ended, and they have become more accurately small-scale ranchers, each family or group of families with a fixed piece of land to graze their herds on. Fences have become a constant feature of the landscape here, even in the seemingly wide open grasslands, and now disputes are settled in Chinese courts, rather than through traditional means of arbitration (usually some elder men from the area meeting and discussing solutions to various issues). He said that the political hierarchy always placed a Han Chinese on top, even in Tibetan "autonomous"  regions, and that most of the good jobs go to the Han. The government was also, rather avidly, encouraging the Tibetan nomads to settle, to leave their feudal and backwards ways behind, and to live in towns (a time honored method of social control). Sounded a lot like the programs in the US to settle and civilize the indigenous population over the course of more than 200 ugly years. I mentioned this to him, and he said Yes, that this was apparent to him and to other Tibetans. There was a lot of anger on the part of young Tibetans, but there was no outlet for it: he was concerned that it consumed them, rather than giving them an impetus to develop themselves within the framework of their existing condition. He said that most Tibetans were very poor, and few speak or read Chinese, and the quality of the education given them was very unsatisfactory, not preparing them for any possibility of cultural preservation or development along lines that they themselves might choose.

There was more conversation, and there was lots to think about, and we left in a light rain, thanking him for his hospitality and frank discussion. The road carried down to another truck stop, and after a 20km wrong turn, we found our small dirt road, cutting across a river system to the west and the Qinghai border. A beautiful sparsely populated valley, and the rain let up for a warm sunny afternoon of rolling along a bumpy road with no traffic whatsoever, and a few nomad's tents. Dogs, unfortunately, go hand in hand with nomads, and numerous times we had to pick up rocks and in some cases even throw them at the dogs to keep them at bay.

At the Qinghai border, the road improved dramatically, and it was an easy ride along the sealed road to the west, through more green grasslands, a feature of Tibet you never see in the southeast coming from Yunnan, or in the central and western parts of the region, which are essentially high altitude desert. We rolled into a town populated by a mix of Mongolians, Tibetans, and Hui: apparently the Mongolians had migrated there quite a long time before, and were essentially culturally Tibetan, but the language and script were in evidence there. The town itself resembled so many other towns in the region: built from scratch, 90% under construction, with tacky shopfronts, muddy side lanes, and concrete block 2 room houses to confine the resettled nomads in. I was surprised to see broken glass laid on top of the walls, as if theft were a problem in the area now. Imposing this new settled way of life on a traditional people seemed to create severe social frictions, with drunkenness and pollution, and the odd phenomenon of being in a modern enough looking town, with yaks and sheep grazing the middle island of the ambitious broad main street, the parks, and the monuments.

From here it was more westward wandering, through rain to one depressing town after the other, cold damp and muddy, with idle people wandering through the middle of the street, dogs and sheep darting in front of the bicycles. In 14 days of cycling, probably 10 had rain, and half the nights were wet: apparently the rainy season is not over, even this far north, in August.    

We dropped a long way down to the Yellow River, next to a medium sized Tibetan monastery (Lajugang Monastery), where several friendly monks accosted us, we took some pictures, and two old monks asked me for eye drops. The only sign in english in the whole complex was one emphatically stating "No Woman in Monastry" (sic). The adjacent Chinese town was across the river on the west shore, and here there was a heavy police presence. I was a little nervous as I passed under the barrier (having had to dodge these in eastern Tibet in 1999), but the police didn't much seem to care about us being there, and we stopped in at a restaurant right next to the checkpoint.

After a good tofu dinner, we climbed up out of the valley about 400m to a pass at 3415m and found a campsite near dark, with a great view of the surrounding hills. The night was cold, and finally clear, and the stars revealed themselves to me for the first time since I had been on the road.

The next morning, waiting for the sun to melt the frost, Martin discovered that his rear rim was cracked, and we assessed the situation, thinking that the only way to get something that would last into western Tibet was to have material shipped to him. We didn't know how big Yushu was, and whether mail would be timely there, and whether, indeed, the cracked rim (or a cheap Chinese replacement) would make it the 660km there (since we had no idea of the roads between here and there). We took it slowly, up a valley to the first 4000m pass at 4085m, and babied the bike down to the main district town 60km away. It seemed to be a day for a picnic, since all the Tibetans seemed to be gathering and throwing small parties in the grasslands. Near the town, we passed an extraordinary sight: a line of more than 100 Tibetan men, all in their finest, racing their motorcycles and revving their engines for some sort of festival or banner event. We both emptied our rolls of film taking pictures of all these men, a sort of Tibetan Hell's Angels, racing past us, wearing everything from the traditional Tibetan outfit of a heavy robe tied off of one shoulder, to fake North Face jackets, to leather jackets with metal studs and forearm tatoos.

In the town we found a wangba (internet cafe), with which Martin was able to communicate with a friend in Beijing who is a bicycle fanatic who could probably extricate him from his predicament. After looking about the town, we decided that it wasn't worth it for him to try to build a new wheel, or use a Chinese one (incompatible with his index shifters, anyway - another reason to use friction shifters: I use some nice old Suntour XTC shifters myself, which work fine with 9 speed cassettes, or 5 speed if you need in a pinch, and any kind of derailleur). We checked into the foreigner hotel ("The Snow Mountain Hotel for Foreign Guests"), and I just ate snacks and read, while Martin squared away his business regarding the bicycle. In the end, he got a bus to Xining the next morning, where he would pick up the new wheels, and bus back to Yushu to meet me in a few days.

The next morning, after seeing Martin off, I shopped for a bit of food and got ready for what I was expecting to be an easy ride to Yushu of five days. What waited for me on the other end of town was a dirt road that climbed to a low pass at 3950m, and then deteriorating conditions past a People's Liberation Army base 33km down the road, and a long climb up an empty valley to a high pass at 4605m, which had badly washed out road at the top, and a steep last 5km. The other side wasn't much better coming down, and I bounced my way across streams that were occasionally knee deep. There were snow flurries at the top of the pass, and a thunderstorm to the west which was approaching, and by the time I had covered the 120km I had wanted to cover that day, I was exhausted. I just set up my tent, crawled in, and collapsed.

The next morning, I stopped in at an abandoned road workers' compound, populated by Tibetan squatters (this is normal), who offered me momos (some sort of dumpling thing), and tea, and a place to warm up. The inside was all peeling plaster, posters of a lama, and christmas lights strung around the room. There was a mid-sized solar power project in a fenced area next door, and I asked if it provided power for the area. Primarily it was for the derelict-looking clinic that was adjacent to the road workers' compound, which had a locked gate and dogs inside.

The road, which I had assumed would be a good sealed road from here to the main route 214 south to Yushu was instead a dirt corrugated road, good for trucks, a solid roadbed, but a pain for a bicycle, since the corrugations shook my whole body for the 90km it was to the main road. Up a slow pass to 4515m to a lunch that I didn't eat on accound of the broken lighter I had that couldn't light my stove, and then down through a short but cold and windy snowstorm. Once again, the town at the main junction was a large housing project, with concrete boxes arranged in a grid, half occupied, with depressed looking nomads pushing sheep around in the small mud and grass lanes between the houses. I asked if I could look in, and although there were high-voltage transmission lines nearby, none of the units had power, and everyone still burnt yak dung for heat.

The main road was of good, solid, and new construction, and I carried on up to a pass at 4350m in the sun. I dropped down the other side, and not wishing to go too much farther, camped after 120km. A dark storm was approaching from the south, so I pitched my tent quickly and dove in, just as I heard the first patter of rain. It rained heavily all night, and the wind was considerable (30km +), but I was hopeful it would let up. In the morning, 10 hours later, it was still blowing hard, and when I looked outside, I realized that it hadn't been rain but snow battering the tent: snow had drifted to almost 25cm, and I had to dig my way out of my tent on August 18. This I was not really, expecting, and I waited another two hours, hoping for the wind at least to let up. It didn't, and after covering about 100 pages of "The Brothers Karamazov", I decided to just get up and down from the pass. I cycled in quite heavy snow and subfreezing temps with a wind to my side for about 50km, down to a truckstop town next to the upper Yellow River. I stopped in for some noodles at a Hui establishment, and as I was getting ready to leave, two foreigners walked in, looking a bit tired and dazed. They were with a Canadian NGO, heading for Madu in the Qinghai interior NW of Yushu. There was a third, who was suffering from AMS, and I asked how quickly they had come up (the truckstop was at 4100m): they had been in Beijing 36 hours before. I told them that they really shouldn't go any higher, and for the sick woman's sake they probably ought to get down, although down meant either 3 hours backtracking, or pressing ahead as quickly as possible to Yushu, which was several hundred meters lower. Their Tibetan guide spoke excellent english, had a brother in Oakland, and offered me some granola bars from Canada (a welcome addition to my diet of lamian noodles and stale dry Chinese cookies). I suggested that they not go any further, but Tibetans are a bit cavalier about AMS, since they generally don't need to worry about going up to 4500m. Sure enough, 45 minutes later, I saw them drive by, honking and waving, on the way to the Bayan Har Shankou, the highest pass in the area.

The rest of the day was intermittent snow, sleet, and rain, but the evening cleared nicely, and I found a good campsite next to a river. The temperature at night got down to about -5C (20s Fahrenheit), so I waited in the sun for an hour to thaw my rock solid rain fly. The ride up to the Bayan Har Shankou was easy, a good road and a gentle grade, the final climb being only 3km to the summit, which my altimeter pegged at 4690m and which the Chinese sign rusting in the mud to the side said 4824m (so let's split the difference and call it 4750m). A ride to Tianshuihe, down the pass about 70km, should have been easy, but about 30km down, the road became a construction zone, which didn't let up the rest of the way to Yushu (160km +). Tianshuihe was a cold mudpit, and I ate next to a stove for an hour, warming up before heading back out into the incessant rain that was so much a part of my ride thusfar.

A last pass was at 4300m the next day, and then the long bumpy and incredibly muddy ride down the valley past Xiwu to the Yangtze River crossing at 3490m. The Yangtze, even this far from the ocean, is a considerable waterway, large, muddy and fast flowing. The sun came out, and the final 30km to Yushu was a pleasant roll of an afternoon, minus the construction and mud nearly all the way to the city. I met a Canadian english teacher on a motorcycle who was on his summer break, riding in a big circle from Baotou, in Inner Mongolia (where he worked), south to Chengdu in Sichuan, and then west across the Tibetan Autonomous Region Border, and then back up to Baotou via Xining. The good news: he had no problems with the PSB (foreigner police, who have a penchant for hassling foreigners in sensitive areas). The bad news: nonstop rain, landslides, and poor roads along the route I am travelling next.

Yushu itself felt like a real city when I first approached, afflicted with the same endless construction that is found in almost every town of any size in China. It is a local trading center, and there is a very large monastery just to the south, built of millions of mani stones piled up into walls, which draws a considerable number of pilgrims. It is also a one-street town, just like almost every other provincial town I've seen: tall, high, new buildings, but no back streets - everything is on display when you come into town. There is even a traffic light here...the sights and sounds assault you on all sides, after the quiet of rural Tibet: competing stereos flooding the street with Chinese techno, hip-hop, and Tibetan devotional music. The place stinks in the sun, when the piles of garbage heat up, and the one street in town is remarkably difficult to cross with traffic taking whatever side of the street is convenient at the moment.

Looking for an internet cafe wasn't hard, although using it was another matter: internet gaming has really caught on in China, and you can rarely find a spot among 60 computers during the afternoon. Rural kids whiling away the boring hours in their provincial towns, or so it would seem. It only costs about 25 cents an hour to use the computer, so even locals can reasonably afford some time playing games. I couldn't check mail to see how my rendezvous with Martin was going to happen, so I decided to just get a hotel and wash up after 5 muddy cold days on the road. Everyone in Yushu will direct you to the Yushu Hotel, which is a rather posh affair for this area, with rates from $20. No thanks, I said, and looked around for a cheaper alternative, which I found not far away. This place was about $3 a night, no shower, but a public bath run by a Muslim couple down the road did the trick for me. The reception didn't even ask my name or for a passport, which means that it is certainly not an authorized hotel for foreigners, but at $17 a night difference, I don't mind...The staff are friendly, and while going over my bike yesterday, I had a whole crew of helpers, knocking dirt off the frame, cleaning the chain, and so on - including a police officer (although he was "jincha" - regular police - and not "gong an" - foreigner police). They all took turns on the bike, and it was smiles all around. I had cracked my rear rack from all the heavy rattling on the poor roads (already! but this rack had already been through a lot, including a year on tour before, also on poor roads), but one young guy took me to the row of welders just around the corner, and, free of charge, they hit it with a 7018 stick and fixed it up, solid as new (although not as pretty, and no nice black powder coat anymore).

The hotel has a karaoke bar attached to it, and when the power is on in the city (power cuts are common, as I have seen from my own experience), the karaoke bars are the place to be, wailing miserably into the middle of the night. Even the dogs sound better than some of these guys.

Martin took a bus about 3/4 of the way from Xining, wanting to cycle up the Bayan Har Shankou (I could have warned him, but got to the internet a day too late), so I thought he would be longer, but apparently his ride was rough. He offboarded at Madoi, about 300km north of Yushu, cycled for about 30km, found himself really winded and unacclimatized after almost a week in Xining (elevation 2200m), and grabbed a minibus (initial price 500Y - about $60, final price 50Y - about $6) for Yushu. It sounds like he had a harder time of it than I did: squashed into a small Chinese minibus, which blew not one but two tires along the trip, and then the driver called on a cell-phone for a replacement from Yushu. After two hours of waiting, the driver got nervous and drove on a flat tire, only to watch the replacement car pass them by since they had moved...Finally the wheel was on at 12 midnight in a cold driving rain, and the driver drove like a madman the rest of the 160km on the bad road I had cycled a day before, bouncing Martin violently for another 3 hours before arriving in Yushu at 3am. They dropped him off at the Yushu Hotel, but it was closed, so he settled for a track stop room for 10Y.