Hexi rain

Like a cold flame this ribbon is tied to a tree near the temple in Changye.











Hello again! Get to do more blogging in China than I thought I would. My lovely sister Roos helps me out with the pictures and through some proxy websites I get to add the text. It's a bit unwieldy from time to time - I cannot see the pictures, only the html code, and it's hard to move things around, which is why not everything might be chronologically correct - but it works.
So from Dunhuang I cycled in five days to Changye, a good 650 kilometres down the 312. Especially yesterday I had a good run, or ride: 215 kilometres without stretching it too much. It rained, and I wanted to reach the city because everything was wet, and I needed a hot shower. After the first 100K I could barely move my fingers. Cramp. Shifting gears had become a real effort for which I had to move my whole arm, and my hands would tingle with cold. I've noticed that the blood circulation in my hands isn't great, but at that moment, with a wind that seems to come straight from the Siberian tundra, it was the most awkward feeling.
It took me a few minutes to wriggle them into my gloves, and then 40 or so kilometres to warm them. And my feet.. Icy cold! When I got to Linze, the last stop, I bought a coke and some pastries. It's remarkable what a drink like this does to you. I felt down and slightly tired, within 5 kilometres my head cleared and my muscles revived.
Somewhere during the day I realised that I made more than 1 percent of the total distance of this entire trip, on just this one day. Strange idea, as I'm gone for over 14 months.

Anyway, that's just me musing about a ride; it all started in the Gobi in the northwest of Gansu. It was warm and I was prepared. I was about to set up camp after the first day of cycling when I bumped into these men, who invited me for a melon party.



The pose of the man in the upper left-hand corner is great I think. No tension in the shoulders, shirt loose after a day's work, but not dirty. Looked after, but not overdone. The salmon-coloured slice of lemon contrasts beautifully with the blue of the sky. The man didn't want to be photographed, but somehow he ended up with a beaming smile facing the sunlight. Wind in his hairs. Head wind for him was tail wind for me, which makes me smile, even in retrospect.
The man in the upper right-hand corner was silent and didn't eat melon. He was serious but soft-natured. To me he seemed at least. It's this thing with the Chinese, they have this peace of good people around them. Not looking for short cuts, or getting better at the expense of someone else. It might actually go all the way to the other end of the spectrum: a stoic attitude. As if they don't notice anything, or just don't care. "Yes I see you stranger and you move on a bike, but that won't rock my boat, I'll just continue my way on my tractor and go home and slurp down my noodle soup." Or: "You don't speak Chinese, then I don't see the point in coming over to you to have a look at your road map, I'll just raise my hand to you and sign you to bugger off."

But there's a middle way. Left and right under: they spoke Chinese and I answered in Chinese to say 'thank you' and 'hello' and we enjoyed melon and I could take pictures and speak softly in English and they wouldn't understand but smile politely and I smiled back at them.



That night I camped in the mountains, just after the toll gate that followed the melon stand. I had to cross a dry canal, a earthen wall and another ditch, after which a strip of no man's land followed. I saw some graves indicated by piles of stones and rectangular-shaped piles of sand. Then followed the hills, where I climbed up using the river bed. When I was done pitching the tent, I had still an hour before sunset. I found a seat in the rock overlooking the plain, where I read my book until the last rays of sunlight disappeared. It was a good moment.



Met with quite a few fellow cyclebeasts along the way. Upper left-hand corner, a Chinese farmer who made me realise that my panniers are really rather small compared to his load. The kid in the upper right-hand corner was sweet and started racing towards the first parking lot he encountered after he had overtaken me. There he stopped and when I caught up with him I made this picture. Then there's Florian Bailly, with his solar panels. Met him first in Kashgar from where he took the northern road along Turpan. He, like me, couldn't handle the whole of the Taklamakan Desert and took a train, which was an adventure in itself, as there wasn't a carriage for goods. He had to use the bit where passengers got on and off the train. Which meant he had to take out his trailer and cycle at every stop; a royal pain in the backside. But he made it to Changye and today we met accidentally and shared a lunch. This night I had a similar experience with another French cyclist over dinner. Funny how you can bump into people in a country with what, 1,4 billion people?
The guy racing round the drum tower is a local youth in a typical tracksuit that most school going children seem to wear. The picture shows a repetition: green taxis and blue tracksuits.



On one morning I had breakfast in a small town and the girl to the left was playing with her friend on the pavement where I had installed my stove to boil water for tea. They were running around me, looking, but too afraid to come close. If I would look up they'd burst out in laughter and run away. When concentrated on my breaky, they'd draw close and look at me with curiosity. Or this is what I made from what I saw from the corner of my eye.
Gansu, the province in which I've been cycling is one of China's poorest. It isn't all that bad though. There are good roads, a lot of new cars on the road (a shopping bag full of car brands that I'd never heard of), a lot of agriculture. I had imagined dry and barren land, but most of the land around the 312, the secondary road, and the G30, the motorway, is cultivated. Water flows down from the mountains and is directed through watercourses around the fields. People grow corn, flowers, peppers, tomatoes - of which the harvest was in full swing - and onions. The tomatoes I mostly saw in enormous quantities in trailers, and some here and there on the road in case they had fallen off. I tried some and those were great. It seemed though as if there is a surplus. The tomatoes are taking to factories where they are mashed into ketchup, and sometimes the sauce is run back onto the fields. A type of recycling I don't get.

It being harvest time again brings me back to the bit of my ride through Poland and West-Ukraine, and with a bit of imagination, the countrysides there and here resemble each other. The Chinese have a thoroughly different way of building houses but the land and methodology is the same. Like this it's probably everywhere where industrialised agriculture hasn't yet been introduced.



I met with a walker again! About a year ago I saw Masa, the Japanese walker who was on his way to Lisbon, and now I came across this Chinese guy, who didn't seem to be as organised as his Japanese counterpart, but who nevertheless is crossing his home country. An achievement, especially if you examine the makeshift trailer that he drags around.

Had a few punctures, and when I was repairing my tube and looked to the right, I saw this perspective. I liked it.



Where the sound of Pakistan is the monotonous humming of generators (as the electricity supply from the grid is very irregular), the sound of China is the noise of construction sides. You hear piles being driven into the ground. You hear power shovels accelerating, trucks pulling up.

On my way the lovely countryside made way for a grey strip of industry, that came with it's own grey sky. 'Yumen - old town' it said on the road sign. It stirred my imagination. I had to cycle up the hill, and when I got there it was heavy industry and Ktv. I stayed in a hotel where many of the workers lodge. Was a bit like a prison, with iron doors slamming shut between 10 and midnight. Television sets blaring out the noise of quizzes and other entertainment. I had to pay 5 extra Yuan to get a hot shower. There wasn't a communal bathroom, they had to open one of the more expensive rooms to make this happen.



The area of Gansu that I crossed has a beautiful name: Hexi, and it is shaped like a narrow passage, for which it is nick-named 'the neck of China'. The Hexi Corridor, as it is also called, was to China what the Khyber Pass was to the Subcontinent: the gateway to the west. From here the caravans entered imperial China, after a veeery long travel through deserts and mountains. Until here the Chinese built a wall to keep the hordes from the north out. The corridor is shaped by the Qilian Shan to the south, and the Mazong, meaning 'mane' from a horse, and Longshou, meaning 'dragon's head', to the north. In the middle you find the first 'beacon fire tower' in a bit of earthen wall.
All along the watchtower. Centuries ago soldiers stood guard and saw an impending, dry plain. If you would stand guard today, you'd see two railways on which freight trains pass frequently, the G30 motorway that connects the East to the West, the secondary road that leads to the Qilian, and they all cut through the wall. If you'd look just west you'd see a plot that's used to mix cement, and a bit further east a power plant, and beyond that Jiayuguan's industry. Just west there's the railway crossing that keeps the bars closed permanently.
It might have been the day, but there was smog everywhere.

But you can't stand guard nowadays, as below the first watchtower there's a sign that says: 'Clmbing Ban'.

Around Jiayuguan you can see bits of restored wall, the problem being that they built a wall around it and charge you 120 Yuan to enter. The other picture shows you 'old' and 'new', the wall in the back not that old, and the house in front not that new.



Objects like these broomsticks have a kind of beauty that I can't really explain.
So happy together, with a yellow thread wrapped around the purple.



Some images of the temple of the biggest indoor(!) sleeping Buddha of China. I mean, you might find bigger outdoor sleeping Buddhas, and they used to be outdoorsy type of people, so go figure. But this is the biggest indoor one. As so often I liked some details better.



The pond in Changye, and a detail of one of the columns that, no doubt, will be painted soon. There was a rather sorry exhibition of statues on display, among which an Eiffel Tower made of steel and cloth, of which the tip had knacked.



And then the food! For me China is paradise where it comes to food. All fresh, small bits (to save fuel) so that it is ready to serve fast. Deliciously spiced, full of carbs. Sometimes I can't help thinking that if I ever were to do something like this again, that I would take the train to Beijing straight away and skip all the headaches of the countries in between and enjoy the food.

To say good night (it's a quarter to three and the internet shop's still open and reasonably full with gamers), a sunset the other day. The air was heavy with rain and I hadn't seen the sun all day. Until the last 10 minutes before dusk.
The next day it rained, another habit of the corridor. Clouds that get in, hardly get out. They will be wrenched dry of every bit of rain that they hold, and so it could be that I made the colossal jump to Changye yesterday in Hexi rain.

The sunset before the splash was wonderful though: