Around China in 100 Days

[Roadrunner]

Sounds like such a pain in the ass to travel that region as a foreigner (on a budget). Thanks for all the useful info, when i finally make it out there i'm definitely bringing a tent. It looks like there's no shortage of flat sandy places.

I particularly like the international youth hostel that doesn't take foreigners!

If I were to do this again, I would definitely take a tent. It would make sleeping a lot less of a hassle in the picky towns, and if you get stuck up in the mountains in the cold and dark with nowhere to stay it would be so much better to pitch a tent than frantically looking around for signs of human habitation (which happens to us in a couple of days)

[Roadrunner]

If your coming into Xinjiang with little info on were to stay or relying on chinese people telling you which hotel yeah your going to have trouble finding a good cheap place to stay.I don't have any problems finding some where to stay.

I should have picked your brain about finding accommodation in Xinjiang when we started to have problems there. We found that really it's a China-wide issue for foreigners wanting to stay at the cheaper places. Some parts are harder than others and I can understand why it was hard for us in Xinjiang given that its a sensitive region.

Throughout China, there seemed to be some cities/towns/villages that applied the rule, and some that didn't and we could never really predict which places would be hard on the issue. It was a bit like a box of chocolates.

[Roadrunner]

Charklik – Day 81

The next morning Lulu and I had a big talk. We agreed to put the previous night behind us. “Why we annoy each other so much?” we asked ourselves. We made a promise to each other sort our issues out, the issues that really didn’t mean a lot in the whole scheme of things, but seem to blow themselves out of proportion somehow. We figured that lot of it was down to personality clashes, differences in traveling style and fatigue, but most of all it was miscommunication. I resolved to pay more attention to what she had to say and she said that she would have more patience.

We had a well needed rest day inside and did some writing, reading and sorting out photos and videos, recuperating for what might be a hard week on the roads of Qinghai.

[Roadrunner]

Charklik to Huatugou – Day 82 - 29th May 2011

We got an unusually early start the next day. It was a long way until the next town, Huatugou (花土沟, 370 kms away). Some truck drivers that we met at dinner the pervious night said that the road is good, but it’s all uphill. Apparently they use RMB1500 worth of fuel to climb up to the Tibetan plateau, and RMB500 to get down . They also told us that there would be nothing in the way of settlements in between here and Huatugou, and the mountain roads could get twisty, which could slow us down. I my mind I had a picture of the Tian Shan crossing, an exciting but possibly laborious crossing.



Driving along the last sliver of Xinjiang road, we slowly increased altitude and mountains rose through the distant haze. We passed a Chinese motorcycle group going in the opposite direction. I would have liked to stop and talk, but they showed no sign of stopping.



The roads were top notch and it was a surprisingly smooth, easy ascent to the plateau up through 3000 metres.







The air was clearer and cooler than the Tarim Basin over 1500 metres below. Wide flat plains stretched off into the distance to meet the snow capped mountain ranges to the south towards Tibet.

At the Qinghai/Xinjiang border town we had Sichuan food for lunch/dinner. It was the first town in almost 300 kilometres.



We got to Huatugou and saw lines of trucks turning off the main road onto the road leading to the town. Our hypothesis about why we found it hard to find places later in the day was because the truck drivers took all the available places at the remoter towns, so we needed to hurry to make sure we find a place to stay. But we were too late and had to spend the next hour or two trying to find a place to stay. In the end, we found a nice enough place on the outskirts of town.

[Roadrunner]

Huatugou to Wutumeiren – Day 83 - 30th May 2011

Lulu was feeling a bit sick in the morning. It might have been altitude sickness, but as we were just below 3000 metres, it wasn’t so likely. She would get progressively worse as the day wore on.

Not far out of Huatugou, we passed a bunch of oilfields, and remembered that I had read somewhere that Qinghai, particularly in the Qaidam Basin, is quite an important source petrochemical resources.



I was unsure about our route. Should we continue along the G315, which is longer? Should we take the S263 provincial road which was a more direct route, but just a thin line on the map and possibly an under-maintained road with loads of potholes? We had just got into Qinghai and weren’t sure about the state of the roads in general, which didn’t help. Each province seemed to have a certain level of commitment to the maintenance of their roads, so a provincial road in Shandong might be pool table material compared to a provincial road in Anhui. On top of that we didn’t know if there are any petrol stations or places to stay on the road. Nothing was marked on the GPS or the paper map. We decided to take the 263 anyway.





The GPS pointed us to a petrol station close to the intersection of 315 and the provincial road. We needed to fill up before heading out on the deserted road. This petrol station was one of two buildings that USED to sell petrol. They were abandoned.

So we drove down the road to nearest village to ask the manager of the sole restaurant about the roads. They told us that the road is okay, but there are no places to stay until Golmud, and weren’t sure about petrol stations. Even though they only had #90 grade petrol, I asked for enough to fill up my tank. It turned out to be twice as expensive as at the pump! Lulu decided against filling up and wanted to take her chances on the provincial road. She didn’t want to spend extra money on what might be low-quality petrol. She was feeling worse for wear and rather unhappy with the current circumstances. I suggested that we find a place to stay at the village, even though I wanted to keep going after only 100kms. She waved the suggestion off and we kept going.



We found a petrol station 100 kms down the road. I was kicking myself for taking the expensive stuff and set about tightening my chain while Lulu got petrol. She really wanted to stop for the day, after about 200kms driving. I was against the idea, but if we could find a place to stay at the buildings beside the petrol station, then I couldn’t argue with her.



We found a trucker’s dorm, which was one room and 8 beds. The price was right and Lulu wanted to stop, but I was concerned about my things (mostly for the photos and video we had taken) sleeping in a room where people could come and go freely. Another lively discussion (argument) and we were back on the road.



Instead of the passive/aggressive attitude we had to each other whenever we had a problem, this time we actually had a discussion on one of our road breaks. After Charklik, we continued to sort out why we get on each other’s nerves so much, rather than blaming the other person for the problems.

On the flat, windswept plain, more flat than in Xinjiang, any buildings are noticeable from miles away. 70 kilometres downroad from the petrol station the next clump of buildings that rose out of the wasteland had a restaurant and a free room. The family that owned it were Hui, ethnically Chinese but followed Islam. The Chinese government have designated the Hui as one of its 56 ethnic minorities, which I think is a bit strange given that the only difference between Han Chinese and Hui Chinese seems to be their religious beliefs.





The curious daughter of the owner came to say hello to the strange looking people who just drove in from a faraway land. She wasn’t shy at all and we showed her some of our photos and the GPS while she hung around until she got bored.

[Roadrunner]

Wutumeiren to Golmud – Day 84 - 31st May 2011

We continued on along the S263, knowing that we had an easy 200 kms ahead to Golmud. Lulu was feeling much better and we started the day well. The first tourist sign in a couple of days popped up at the turnoff to a Populus Diversifolia Forest Scenic Spot. I had no idea what Populus Diversifolia was, but it seems to be a tree that grows in very dry areas and can grow with salty soils. We would have gone inside to check it out, but the swarms of hungry mosquitoes, drawn to us within minutes by the sound of our bikes, had us driving in the other direction in no time.



The arid wasteland slowly gave way to trees and fields as we drew nearer to Golmud, crossing bridges over streams. And with the greenery came more traffic, particularly noticeable were the motorcycles, the last of which we had seen 200 kilometres before the border of Qinghai.

We had no problem finding a place to stay, and were settled in soon after getting to town, the second night without a shower available. Our place was beside a building that looked like a Buddhist temple being converted into a mosque (or the other way around?).



We visited the internet cafe to check emails and check out what had been happening in the big wide world since we had last visited the world wide web. We were out of touch, but I think that’s a part of the reason why I do this. It gives me a chance to get lost, and to view the world through my own eyes and not a screen.

I was also thinking about our route and whether we should go to Xining and then to Yushu up the G214 from there, or take a shortcut from Xiangride straight through to the G214 and save a couple of days. There was also the possibility of taking the G109 towards Teebet to Budongquan and then turning off towards Yushu the S308 country road, but I wrote that off as likely being a bad road that could hold us up (On the way to Kunming, Pat took that road on his before we met up and he said the road was a bit bumpy, but fine to ride). On the Qinghai pages of my ‘Road Atlas of China’ it shows a county road that’s a continuous thin red line from Xiangride to Maduo, but it showed up on googlemaps and my preloaded GPS map as either two roads that come close to meeting up, or one road that has a big chunk missing from the middle. I put the descrepancy down to my outdated GPS map and google not having accurate information to roads in China. I would rely on my Chinese paper map instead. If any source of information should be correct, it should be the map of China made in China. When we got to Xiangride, we would ask about the condition of the road, but I already had my heart set on it.

[Roadrunner]

Golmud to Xiangride – Day 85 - June 1st, 2011

We snooped around Golmud looking for a cash machine. We needed a cash top up as neither of us had made a withdrawal since Kashgar and we were looking at a couple of days before getting to Yushu, the next place we could get money out.



Golmud’s a nice place, with tree lined streets and a relaxed atmosphere, not dissimilar to the oasis towns we drove through in Xinjiang. It’s the third largest city on the Tibetan Plateau (after Xining and Lhasa) with around 200,000 people and is well known as a major stop on the Tibetan Railway.



The cash machine worked for me, but Lulu’s account had 1000 rmb deducted but no money. The teller wouldn’t solve the problem there and then, and we weren’t going to wait for days for them to sort it out, so we would just have to make do with what I had until we got to Yushu.

Through Golmud and onto the G109, and soon the landscape was desolate as that we saw from the road driving into Golmud. The partly constructed power pylons continued to follow the road, as they had for the past couple of days, as sign of China’s increasing power demand. At least three major hydroelectric dams have started operating in Qinghai in the past 5 years.



I was really keen to get off the long, straight roads and impersonal scenery and into the mountain range that had accompanied us for the past couple of days; the Barhan Buda Shan, a sub-range of the Kunlun shan.



Later in the afternoon a big angry cloud ominously reached over the mountain ranges towards the road. It looked more aggressive and broad than the spring squall that we had to stop for in Xinjiang on our way to Kashgar, and I hoped that it would behave itself. Luckily we passed it without much trouble. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross the ranges in the middle of that storm.

We passed 300 kms and a river came up to meet us as the roads became more curvaceous, and again we were driving through a lush valley, the grain fields fed by small canals from the river. A mosque stood majestically in the centre of one of these fields. We were coming into Xiangride, a small town and our stop for the night.



We filled up the bikes and started looking for a bed to sleep on. We got kicked out of one place after unpacking the bikes, but just went across the road to a more expensive bingguan. There was a price for rooms with a shower and rooms without. I really needed a shower because I hadn’t had one since Charklik but Lulu didn’t want to pay the extra money (it was about 20rmb extra, 10 kuai each) so I paid the difference between the two types of rooms, as well as my half of the room bill.

Lulu wasn’t hungry, so I left for dinner by myself. As I left I told her I would be disappointed if she used the shower.

As had been the case in almost all the towns since we entered Xinjiang, Muslim eateries and Han Chinese eateries were each as prevalent, the latter offering beer with your dinner.

I got back to the guest house and Lulu wouldn’t talk to me which, again, annoyed me much more than it should have. By now she knew what ways to get up my nose if she wanted me to pay for something, and being ignored was one of them. I was still fuming as I got into my bed and turned off the light, but was just about to drift off to sleep when there was a knock on the door. “Bloody hell!!! Who could that be??!” And I knew it could only mean problems at this time of night. It was the police. They wanted my passport because the receptionist hadn’t photocopied my passport as we registered. I dozily got it out of my bag and gave it to them and said “Baibai” and they left. Suddenly I was struck by panic. “That was a really damn stupid thing to do Jeremy!! Giving your passport to some dude in a uniform, just because he’s dude in uniform. He could be anybody, and even if he is a legitimate police officer, I still might not see my passport again.” I had read enough traveler’s horror stories to know the possibilities. I put on my shoes and ran down the stairs after them, got in their police mini-van and drove to the station at the other end of town. They made copies of my passport, asked me some questions about what I was doing in their town, and asked me if I was going to Teebet. I said “No no no, foreigners can’t go to Teebet” which seemed to satisfy them. I had heard that there had been some ethnic unrest recently, and there was a rumor that it was closed to all foreigners, even those with the right permits and traveling with a tour group. This might have been why they were on alert for any foreigners in the area who might look like they’re trying to sneak across the border. They were just doing their job and were very courteous and considerate which was fine. I just wished that they had done it earlier.

[Roadrunner]

Xiangride to Gouli – Day 86 - June 2nd, 2011

Lulu had few words for me in the morning. I decided to let her be.

We had some repairs done for Lulu’s bike at the local repair shop, and a chain link removed from my chain to tighten it. I mentioned to Lulu that her chain needed tightening, but she just ignored me. We asked the guys what the road to Maduo was like. They said it wasn’t good. “Not many people use that road, but motorcycles go through sometimes”. A phrase we had heard on the G217 in the Tian Shan.

I figured that by taking this shortcut through the mountains to the G214 we would be saving about 400 kilometres and at least one day’s driving. If we could get through quickly we may even save enough time to visit Mount Amnye Machen, Tibetan Buddhism’s second most holy mountain. I thought we could get through in less than two days.

This is what my paper map looked like.



We followed the Xianjiajiang river into the mountains on gravel roads, past a couple of small settlements and a motorcycle or two.

We met a Dutch guy riding from Laos to Amsterdam on a mountain bike coming the other way. It had taken him three days to get through from the G214. He had gotten lost on the bad roads. It had snowed the previous night but luckily found a herder family to stay with. He also had a tent and supplies in the bags tied to the back of his bike, so he was well prepared and I was amazed at his gumption. I figured that I should really shut up about fatigue when this guy is riding through +4000 metre altitude, over gravel mountain roads, on his own steam. The stuff legends are made of.




Lulu started to talk to me not long after that, and soon we were back to working as a team. Apparently she was pissed off that I would deny her a shower, even though it was available. She suggested that I take her resilience for granted, and that I should act more supportively, rather than treating her as an equal. I didn’t agree that I should carry her along, but I would help her where possible, as I felt I had been.

Coming up to the only marked intersection on the road, we weren’t too sure about the way. The GPS gave us a general idea which way to go and luckily, it turned out to be correct.



We were encountering a noticeable amount of diverse wildlife in this remote valley. For five minutes we watched a Bearded Vulture circling over the valley. The Bearded Vulture is Eurasia’s biggest raptor, generally regarded as sacred in Tibet as it doesn’t kill it’s prey. Vultures and other birds of prey are an important part of Tibetan Buddhist sky burial rituals. We remembered the ubiquitous small pika from our Tian Shan crossing. Tibetan Gazelle sprinted across the road at any sign of untoward movements. They have seen a precipitous decline in number in the past decade due to human activity encroaching on their habitat. We also started to see herds of yaks for the first time.







The road we were on still had road markers, but didn’t mark the name of the road, only the distance to the end of the road (which was back at Xiangride). We stopped at the first occupied house we saw in 25 kilometres to ask if we were going in the right direction. A Teebetan guy with pink hair told us that we had gone past the turnoff a couple of kilometres back. He also said that if he wanted to get to Maduo, he would leave in the morning and get there late afternoon, and he offered us a place to stay for the night. Naively, we turned his offer down as we thought it would be fine and wanted to keep going. He mentioned that there were a couple of herder families in the area, the easiest to find would be the one after we crossed a river.


We doubled back and I saw how we could have missed the fork. The only thing that distinguished the route from the surrounding rocks was that it was slightly raised and cage vehicles had flattened two barely perceptible tracks. It was rough gravel and the going was tough, but the scenery was stunning.



It started to rain as we got to the river. It was bigger and swifter than the ones we had come across in Xinjiang, but not deep enough to cause a problem. It certainly got my blood pumping as I drove both our bikes over.



Darkness crept up from the shadows cast by the looming mountains and soon it was too dark to pick out the gravel track in the river beds that we were crossing, and it was getting cold too. We needed to find a place to stay quickly. In the deep twilight I saw a blue tent on the flats near the river and tried to figure out a way down from the shelf above the river flats. The guys from the tent must have seen our headlights as we skidded around in the soft mud trying to find a way down in the darkness. They greeted us and Lulu asked if we could stay for a night. “Of course”, they replied “You need to go back up near the road and drive down to the tents that way”. “But”, they warned, “It’s very slippery”. Lulu asked one of the guys to drive her bike down and he climbed up, was on the bike and down the track in no time. I found it a little harder however, unable to control the bike on a slippery, >30 degree incline. I fell over in the mud about five or six times before I got to the bottom of the 25 metre long gradient, myself and the bike covered in mud.

The tent was large, (maybe five metres by five metres) and made from heavy cloth, presumably of animal hide. It was warm, had a dirt floor and a stove sitting in the middle, with a chimney reaching up through the roof. It was definitely homely. We were freezing and wet and after we put all of our dripping luggage in the corner we spent a long time warming up beside the stove, with help from the tea, tasmpa and fried bread. Qinghai is sometimes known as Eastern Teebet, and I could really feel the Teebet now, having experienced the harshness of the conditions, sitting in this tent with these tough but very generous people.





We had driven just under 130 kilometres in 11 and a half hours and we were very tired and were grateful when it was suggested that we go to sleep. I couldn’t be bothered getting out of my now-dry motorcycle gear, and it would keep me warm under the thick warm blankets anyway.

[Roadrunner]

Gouli to Gouli – Day 87 - June 3rd, 2011

We had an early morning start. It seemed as though they had a big day ahead of them. The whole family was up and about doing this and that. Just as we were about to leave, one of the guys jumped on the big white yak that had been tethered next to the tents and rode off towards a low white building on the other side of the river. So awesome!







We asked them how far it was to Maduo. Only 80 kms?. Great! That shouldn’t be too hard to do. After all, we did 130 kms yesterday on pretty bad roads. I was a little concerned at my petrol level though. I was well on my way to empty after yesterday’s drive. The altitude was killing my fuel consumption. No worries though. We’ll be right. It’s only 80 kilometres.

We thanked them profusely. Without them, we could have gotten ourselves into a very messy situation. We didn’t realise then how lucky we really were to find them just before darkness covered every sign of them. I tried paying them 50 kuai for their trouble, but they refused to take it. Genuine hospitality.
We set out to continue on our intrepid journey into the wilderness. The gravel roads turned to dirt roads which disappeared into dry riverbeds and we had to pick our way through them, trying to spot the twin streaks of flattened stones to make sure we hadn’t lost our way.







We came up to an iced-over lake. It took us more than an hour to drive less than 20 kilometres up until that point. The tracks led up to the ice, but I wasn’t courageous, or stupid, enough to even try walking across it, let alone drive a bike across. Lulu waited while I tried to find a way around the ice, but I got seriously bogged down. I told myself that this can’t be the way, and we started looking for the road the locals use. (In the photo below, if you look to the right where the ice thins out and the moraine is exposed, you will see part of the track that we would take on the following day).

We found another track, heading west (we wanted to head south) which looked well used. A real feeling of trepidation got into my bones. We were in the wilderness, with nothing but our bikes and our brains to get us to civilisation. These bikes were designed for street-riding，and everything was stock; no special modifications because we didn’t have the time before leaving to sort anything special out.





Using the compass on the GPS as a guide for direction, we drove up the adjacent valley, maybe 5 kms up until the rising ridges surrounded us on three sides, and melting permafrost made the ground swampy and the way up to the pass impossible, blocking our way forward. Frustration replaced my feeling of trepidation, knowing that I had wasted a good portion of whatever petrol I had left. Dropping the bike several times didn’t help either.



After backtracking almost to the valley mouth, I finally ran out. I saved what I had in my petrol bottle for Lulu’s bike so we could make sure that we had some way of getting help if we needed it. I pushed my bike to the riverbank, underneath a hill to try to keep it away from eyes that could see opportunity in an abandoned bike. I poured the rest of our pitiful petrol supply into the tank and put my tank bag on Lulu’s bike (with my valuables inside). I was off to buy some petrol from the guys we stayed with the night before.

Lulu suggested that she stay behind. She was quite happy to sit there, look after the bike and the bags, and read while I went and got the petrol. I agreed, but as I drove away a plague of scenarios filled my head. What if there’s a snowstorm while I’m away? What if the bike broke down? What if I get to the tent and they don’t have petrol? I wouldn’t have enough to get back and collect her and she would be left out here for God knows how long. After 10 minutes of driving I turned around. I didn’t give a toss about whether or not the luggage and bikes could be stolen. If something happened to her, I wouldn’t forgive myself; sticking together in that situation was by far the best choice to make.

At least two of my what-if scenarios would become reality.

As we drove back the sky darkened and it began to rain. The rain turned to hail as I tried to keep the front tyre straight on the increasingly slippery tracks, which now had a thin coating of mud on them. The visibility was poor through my droplet covered glasses and I failed to see a pothole. The bike was yanked out from underneath me as the front tyre skidded down the side of the hole, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Lulu thrown far clear of the bike. Dazed and bruised, but not broken, I got up to check if she was OK while the ice continued to rain down. She needed a couple of seconds and she was up too, and not a peep of complaint. Once again I was amazed at her resilience. She just got back on the bike and we were ready to go after less than five minutes. Lucky again! The conditions ordered a more leisurely pace, even though I wanted to get out of the freezing cold as soon as possible and back to the tent.

The blast of hail lasted for another 10 minutes before it eased off and we had a much easier ride, but I was soaked and freezing. By the time we crested the last low pass before our friends’ valley, I was shattered.
The herders had moved the blue tent up to the ledge above the river flats and had about 40 yaks tied to posts there. However, our main interest was warmth, and they invited us in to warm ourselves by the stove.







We asked them if they had any spare petrol. They said they had none. Only what was in their bikes, to be used to herd the yaks. We were desperate and we offered to pay the youngest son, who was 20 (but acted a lot older) to take us to Maduo. We didn’t want to leave the bike and our bags out there all night. He reluctantly agreed, even though it was snowing by now, and we got on his bike with a blue, 8 litre can and we made our way up the slippery pass. It was tough going to get just 1 kilometre, but at the top it was easier. We drove off the main track and stopped outside a couple of tents similar to the ones our friends lived in. They invited us in, members of the family we stayed with. Inside were a collection of Tibetan herders, a friendly old lady spinning a prayer wheel, a pet lamb staggering around and a steaming pot of tea on the stove while the snow got worse and worse. They didn’t have any petrol to spare and I thanked them for the tea. It was far too cold outside, even for my friend who was wrapped up tight in yak-hide, and we both knew there was no getting to Maduo. We made our way back to the valley.

Just before dusk, the snow stopped and our mate suggested we go find his brother-in-law down the valley. I jumped at the idea, knowing that we were stuck here until we found some petrol. He hopped on the back of my bike and we were off.

After a couple of kilometres down the main track, he pointed me up a dry riverbed up a narrow gully. A couple of dogs howled a hollow welcome at the ridgeline as we climbed up the road and we soon found ourselves at the bottom of a bowl shaped depression. The snowcapped peaks shrouded in mist in the background added to the breathtaking, twilit scene. The family we had come to visit was herding their sheep around the edge of the bowl. In the twilight, my friend called out to the dark shadows looking down at us next to their tent, with a white jeep parked alongside. We were soon up draining the tank into five small discarded Pepsi bottles. I thanked them profusely, confident that the heaven-sent life fluid, the stuff I had generally taken for granted up until that day, could get Lulu’s bike to the next petrol stop.

We returned to another night in the tent. I had driven 94 kilometres in over 12 hours. I slept soundly, confident we could make it to Maduo just on Lulu’s bike if we needed to. There we could get petrol and drive back to rescue my bike.

[Maux]

I'm enjoying this RR more and more. I haven't commented but I've been keeping up with it since you started. Quite an amazing trek! As others have said, I really appreciate the frankness of it.
Also you have convinced me to buy a backpacking tent. If I ever manage to go on a substantial trip I think it will come in handy!