I eventually made it the whole way across China! Xinjiang has been challenging but rewarding and this was exemplified in this final week on the way to the border. Some tough roads, but the views made up for it in the end.
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This morning I set out out towards Urumqi, and with about 200km to cover, I decided I would break it up into two days ride, 100km each day.
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Today I left behind the sand dunes and oasis of Dunhuang and headed back out into the desert. What laid ahead was one of the toughest days in the saddle yet.
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I left Danxia and was feeling pretty good, still enjoying the nice gradual descent from the Tibetan Plateau. I decided to try my longest day in the saddle yet, and aimed for Jiuquan which was about 210km away. The ride itself was fairly uneventful, with just desert and scrubland for most of the day and not much else interesting to look at.
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I headed out from my hotel in Lanzhou to check out a famous bridge—the first bridge to ever span the reaches of the Yellow River. The bridge was built in 1949 so there was a large display set up to celebrate the 70th anniversary. The bridge and surrounding area was absolutely buzzing with Chinese tourists and as I was taking it all in, I heard, “nice bike.”
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I left Tianshui early on and headed up into the beautifully landscaped terraces in the mountains of Gansu. As I gained elevation, it started to become much less humid, which made it a lot more comfortable to put the hours in the saddle. There were much fewer villages and towns along the road. I would only pass a little farm house or a truck stop every 20km or so.
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So that’s me just over a month into my journey. I started this week in Xi’an and set about trying to find a solution to the saddle sore problem that had plagued the first month of my trip. After that, I left Xi’an with no real plan or destination but to head west toward the next biggest city, which on the map was Tianshui.
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My slow pace this week allowed me to take in some more sights as I passed from one ancient city known for its giant carvings of buddha to another ancient city known for its subterranean army of clay warriors. Along the way I managed to get to the top of one of the five sacred mountains in China.
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Day one of the second week and I was battling an oppressively scorching 42-degree average temperature. My GPS—the Wahoo Element—that I was so happy with last week was not giving a good day today either. The route that it had planned for me led me down countless of dead ends.
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To sum it all up: I have been in China for a wee while now, and so many of the sights and sounds that I have seen on my first week have been quite familiar to me. Still, this week alone has just surprised me so much with how amazingly kind everyone I’ve met has been.
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