Black and Blue in Taihang Shan 太行山

[milton]

Located to the south of China's Inner-Mongolia Plateau is the world's largest loess plateau 黄土高原, formed by accumulation of wind-blown silt and clay. Loess is homogeneous, porous, friable, pale yellow or buff and forms the most breathtaking landscape:



Three of us JH600 riders made a trip on the Qingming 清明 week to the mountainous area of this loess plateau known as Taihang Shan 太行山, with Motokai and me set out from Shanghai on 2 black bikes, joined on the second day by Barry on a slower but equally handsome blue Jialing from Beijing. For the Shanghai gang the “value index” may be a bit low, costing 4 days for getting there and back with only 3 days for the fun stuff. However, that is the cost of living in the warm and sandstorm free beautiful Shanghai. The plan was to ride to Taihang Shan 太行山 and spend a few days there and later perhaps meet with Felix somewhere close to Xi’an for the second half of the trip. For Shanghai gang we would train our bikes back to Shanghai from either Xi’an or Zhengzhou 郑州.

Three JH600s in front of a Jialing dealership just before entering Wangmangling 王莽岭, the owner of which had never seen our kind of Jialings before:




The highlights of the trip are:
1. Loess plateau
2. Taihang Shan 太行山 and hand-dug “hanging tunnels” 挂壁公路
3. Longmen grottos 龙门石窟







The weather couldn’t have been better, with only a couple of hours of rain on the first day arriving at Xuzhou 徐州 and the rest of the trip warm and dry.