Up and Out of Xinjiang: The Road to Golmud

The road out of Rouqiang passed through oasis farmland, peopled by a mix of Hui, Han, and Uighurs. Bicycled traffic, heavy at first, decreased, and I was on my own 10km down the road. The pavement ended soon after, and again it was desert. Work had begun on continuing the sealed road towards the east, but hadn't gotten very far at this point. I came across a solitary Uighur worker, shoveling sand into a trailer bed. It seemed ludicrous to shovel sand to take anywhere in a place with nothing but sand, but there he was, standing alone, doing his job 20km from anywhere. We smiled at each other: I probably looked just as ridiculous.

The road was stony and sandy, and progress was slow all day. Just before camping, about 60km from Rouqiang, a truck nearly ran me off the road staring at me, then stopped behind me. I wondered what they could want. A woman called out to me, and jogged over to where I stood. What did she want? Nothing, only to give me a large bag of apples, oranges, a couple of bottles of water. Having done that, she just smiled and ran back to the truck. I camped right there, figuring it was an auspicious place.

The next day I began to climb after crossing a mostly frozen river. The climb was slow and sandy, and I spent several hours winding up into the mountains that I knew were leading me out of the Taklimakan basin and back up to the fringes of the Tibetan plateau. Traffic was almost nil. The road had washed out in many places, forcing crossings of unstable ice, and at one point, my foot broke through the ice and plunged my left leg in up to mid calf. I cursed and pulled it out, and in so doing slipped on the ice and dropped the other foot into the water. Again I cursed and pulled this foot out, this time plunging my left foot in again and dropping my bicycle. I groaned and just took my time, carefully removing my foot and pulling the bike from the stream. I forded the stream a few meters away and then sat down to wring out my socks and think to myself that at least the temperature was above freezing.

A place on indicated on the map turned out to be nothing but a home for 2 ravenous dogs, who charged out, hackles raised, and I had to throw stones for several minutes as I slowly walked up the canyon. The road started to climb up higher and higher, and by darkness I had climbed over 1600m, to an elevation of 3000m, and no end in sight.

The night was cold, down to -18C, and the morning started out windy - a headwind, unfortunately. A couple of trucks hauling sheep passed me by, and the climb began in earnest. The snow level was about 3500m, and the road became slippery. A final series of switchbacks came into view, and I could see the pass several km up the last hill.

A Land Cruiser drove be with a westerner in the front, and stopped around the next switchback. The man and a Chinese partner stood taking photos of me as I approached. We stood in the snow and talked for a while. It turned out he was an American biologist, working in China with the government and the nature reserve system to make assessments of the resources in the parks and do various field assays of wildlife. His particular area was in the Arjin Shan, the range which I was now crossing, and one that butted up against the northeastern corner of the Changtang reserve. I told him I had recently crossed the northwestern corner of the Changtang reserve: we talked briefly about what I had seen, and about protection of the area. He said the EU had recently given China $60 million to manage its parks and preserves, and that the laws on the books were strong, but as I had seen, there was no enforcement capacity. I mentioned the signs of poachers or prospectors far into the reserve, and he said that since the Kunlun had been more or less mined out (I had heard sporadic dynamiting from the mountains as I left Rouqiang, and Li Long had said there were still some hardy prospectors pushing well up into the mountains in search of gold and jade), miners were now pushing into the Changtang itself. He gave me a business card, and I told him I would send him whatever data I had on wildlife sightings when I could.

The pass top was just shy of 4000m, and the snow on the road, which had been made icy by passing trucks made cycling impossible, and walking with a loaded bike difficult. The view was great: a snow dusted desert badlands, with mountain peaks rising up well over 4000m to the southwest. I spent most of the afternoon trying to get down below the snow level, and succeeded just short of sundown. I passed a truck winching a 4WD out of a ravine, and the workers, seeing my approach, greeted me with water and naan. The generousity of the Chinese was beginning to weigh on me, since I had no real way to repay their kindness, other than a smile and a compliment. I found a Uighur road workers' camp close to dark, and they said there was a restaurant 8km further on, although I was welcome to spend the night with them. I declined, feeling like I was overdrawn on kindness to strangers, and pedalled on into the evening. Darkness fell before I could cover the 8km, and I camped just shy of whatever sort of restaurant there was.

The wind picked up at night, and the morning dawned windy and cold. I took my time, waiting for the sun to heat the tent, and then when I was packed, I decided to inflate my tire a bit, which had a very slow leak. The pump, which Martin had left me since my original pump broke in the Changtang, snapped off the lever used to create a seal for inflation. I cursed again and again, and started walking down the road.

The restaurant was not part of a village, it was a forlorn building a long way from anywhere. Three people lived there, all from Chongqing in Sichuan province. It was a very lonely existence, and I doubted many people called at this station. A dog charged out, but its front wrist had a nasty compound fracture exposing splinters of bone through the skin. A man followed the dog and called the dog off. I asked what had happened.

"The stupid thing charged a truck, and got run over," he said. "Come in, come in, get warm."

I sat in a warm room, by a stove fired by brushwood from the sides of the stream running down from the mountains, and fixed the pump with bailing wire (which, by the way, the touring cyclist should never be without). I had a huge bowl of noodles with fried egg for about a dollar, filled up with water, and thought to myself, "This is it, for 250km." It was still 100km to Mangnai Zhen, where I hoped to get resupplied.

The road was poor that afternoon, running through a valley, crossing a low rise, and then traversing a very large plain which opened out far to the north: the road hugged the mountains to the south and headed east. Again, all day there were only 4 or 5 vehicles, Land Cruisers speeding someone important from Qinghai to Xinjiang or in the reverse: heavy truck traffic used the road farther to the north, which avoided the pass I had just climbed (about 3000m vertical climb from Rouqiang to the top). The next morning a frozen lake and wetlands came into view in the low part of the depression, and I had lunch near a group of camels. There was a short climb through a canyon and another washed out section of road, and then a cloud of dust that I assumed signalled Mangnai Zhen.

The dust was from the Qinghai-Xinjiang border, a large cement works and gravel rock quarry, a place called Shimingkuan-Qinghai. The place defined "dumphole": fine chalky dust settled on everything, workers wandered in and out of the cloud, dogs rummaged through trash, trucks with smashed out windshields rumbled by. I asked a man if there was a restaurant around, and he referred me down the road a couple of km.

A restaurant at a junction provided the venue for my long-awaited contact with modern China. Several workers were staying at the place, which doubled as an SRO of sorts, one of whom had a smart phone with a Chinese to English language dictionary. We talked about my trip, the news, whatever, and I sat warm in the place, watching a young woman wash her very long hair expertly in a small plastic washbasin without so much as splashing water on the floor. The woman who ran the place was a rugged Hui, who was bringing in shovelfuls of coal into the place when I entered. There was a shop with a few items; I bought what I could, and headed off, told that the road became paved two km farther on, and that a real town was about 60km away.

The sealed road was wonderful; I didn't miss the all-day bumping of the desert roads I had been on for two weeks. I sped along for an hour, making 20km, and camped. Unfortunately the next day, the wind blew as a strong headwind, and the next 40km to Huatugou were a struggle to cover by lunchtime.

Huatugou was a town which had so far missed the facelift happening all over China, a collection of empty buildings with broken windows and oil containers. The population was mostly Hui, and I looked for the first restaurant to get lamian. I found the flapping green flag, and was ushered in by a friendly-looking Hui in his skullcap.

I sat down and ordered lamian - vegetarian, since I felt it was time to get back to myself (Xinjiang had not been a good place for a vegetarian). A older fellow with a long beard asked me where I was from, and once they found out I spoke Chinese, it was a long succession of questions and answers in both directions. The family was from eastern Qinghai, near the Gansu provincial border, and had been here for about a year. Same story, here to make a few bucks, and hopefully go back home. This place, I was told, sucked. From what I had seen, I couldn't disagree. The noodles came, and then I followed up with a request for huajia (steamed bread in a sort of flower (hua) shape). Everything was good, I took photos with them, and asked how much. Nothing, they declared, you are our guest. I said, Well, yes, but this is a restaurant. They wouldn't take money, and on top of that, they insisted on my carrying another 4 steamed buns with me. Again and again, the kindness never seemed to stop for the lone traveller on the back roads of China...

The wind had changed direction and increased to a steady 20kph. Dust blew across the streets, men clutched at their skullcaps, everyone sqinted their eyes, and I pulled into a shop to buy a few things before heading to the short-cut road on the map to Golmud.

I made over 100km that day, with the strong wind blowing me past a large oil field, derricks moving slowly up and down in rows in the sand. Large storage tanks occupied a plain to the south. The road remained sealed all afternoon, and I camped in the sand off to the side of a road which saw a couple of trucks every hour.

The next day a climb took me to a low pass, and then a long fast descent to the junction with the road to Golmud. A tin shack stood at the corner, with a Hui sign, so I figured it was a restaurant.

"Zhe shi fanguan ma?" I asked.

"Dui, shi fanguan"

Having confirmed that I could eat something here, I went in. A handsome Hui couple ran the place, which had two rooms. I sat on a chair about 2 feet from their bed, where a toddler of 18 months wormed around. "Restaurant", in this case, meant instant noodles. I wasn't excited about this, but that was what there was, so I ate them. The couple were from western Gansu, and had been trying to make a living here in this completely out of the way place for 6 months. I thought this was a brave idea, to try to make it serving instant noodles to sporadic truck traffic. It seemed unfeasible, but I wished them luck, bought a soda for the road and headed off.

The road was sandy, with no blacktop. I wound down to a dried out wetland, to a place on the map I had hoped would have a shop. No, no, it was just a water tank (the Chinese character for water, shui, I know, but the other character in the place name might have informed me that there really was nothing else there...). I pedalled on, past a few Kazakh yurts, remnants of a group of rebel Kazakhs who had been pursued into the area, the Qaidam Basin, by the PLA in the 1950s. The road climbed a low pass, and I camped, frustrated again at my unpreparedness: I had been ready for an easy ride to Golmud on a paved road with a shop more or less every day.

As it turned out, the sand road to Golmud had almost nothing on it. Places marked on the map were pumping stations for the pipeline running from the oilfields of Huatugou to the refineries of Golmud. The second night, I stopped a truck to ask for water, which was completely unavailable in this sand desert wasteland. He gave me about 250ml, and I asked if there was a place with people anytime soon. He said there was something in 10km. In 10km, at sunset, there was a pumping station. Outside was a tarpaper shack with piles of scrap wood, which I assumed was a restaurant of some kind. It turned out to be the quarters of a hardy handful of road workers, who offered me a bed to sleep in and dinner and breakfast. The following day I found a lone restaurant in an area of chest high grasses.

I pushed open the door and found a curious scene: a Kazakh, a Han, a Zhuang (from southern China's Guangxi province) and three Mongolians, one clutching his head and moaning. It turned out this guy had really tied one on the night before, drinking two liters of whisky, and was badly hungover. He staggered to his feet to vomit just outside the door. The proprietor was a Han from Golmud, dressed in the blue cooks coat familiar to the traveller in China. I asked for noodle soup, which came a few minutes later. Several local Mongolian girls came in and began tormenting the hungover man. Outside, next to a yurt, two men tried to crank start a jeep which was cold from the night. The men asked if there were such things in the US: "Not for about 50 years" I said. "I've never seen anyone crankstart a truck or jeep in the US, and I'm 31."

After breakfast, well-fed and warm, I headed out, along a road which passed scattered Mongolian yurts in the grasses. The desert returned after about 20km, and near sunset I saw the tall smokestacks of another pumping station. A Land Cruiser pulled up and stopped, with four men getting out and saying hello. One was a Singaporean engineer who spoke that dialect of English one finds in Singapore and Malaysia, peppered with lots of "la"'s at the end of words or sentences. He said they wanted to invite me to stay at the station, and I accepted the offer, agreeing to meet them in about 20 minutes, since that was how far away it was.

The gate was open and I went in. I was expecting to lay on the floor in some concrete room in a corner of the facility. Instead, I was given a very nice room, with an attached hot shower, given a fantastically delicious dinner, and invited to play Chinese chess with several workers. It was a wonderful reception. I talked well into the night with the Singaporean about all manner of things: it seemed he was bohemian at heart, but lived in Singapore, where this wasn't really an option. The next morning, I was given several packages of instant noodles, a can of beef, and told to stop at the next pumping station if I made it there.

The road headed across sand dunes, and then into a long stretch of grass and low trees. A Mongolian yurt doubled as a restaurant, and I stopped and had noodles. The people there told me that they occasionally saw foreigners on bikes, a few per year, but not this late in the year. I said that december wasn't my preference, but things had just turned out this way. They laughed and said, Why not try January. No thanks.

A few km on I met a vagrant, completely filthy, blackened from dirt, with dreadlocks and dressed in rags. I gave him my can of beef and a package of cookies, and he tossed a 1Y note into my bag after I had repeatedly refused it. I thought to myself that this man was hardy and a little crazy to walk down this road, since there was a stretch of 300km of nothing, and then another 80km of nothing to Huatugou, and then again nothing. I wished him well, and pedalled on.

I reached Golmud the next day, a real city, full of Hui shops and restaurants, tall minarets, and lots of trucks coming and going from Lhasa. I found a cheap hotel, got a room, and went out for dinner. When I came back, I was informed I couldn't stay there, because I was a foreigner. Every once in a while this strikes the travelling cyclist in China: the local police require you to stay somewhere "nice", since you couldn't possibly want to stay in such dismal quarters as a two dollar room (it had been actually quite acceptable - clean sheets and everything). So the women flagged a cab, my bike was tied to the trunk, and a few minutes later I was walking into the lobby of the Golmud Hotel, feeling that I was about to be separated from a lot of money as the doorman opened the door and the bellhop took my bags.

The price was actually pretty reasonable - 100Y (about $12) for the night in a very nice room, with a strange shower stall with "romance lighting" options on a computer display. I washed my clothes in the tub, laid them out in the warm heated room to dry, watched Stuttgart play Bayern Munich in German soccer on the television, and drifted off to sleep, with the plan to get money and a visa extension the following morning.