October 16, 2014
The final push: Heading for Lanzhou train station...
I didn't want to cycle in the dark because of being on a steep mountain pass and so I waited until daybreak to continue. It was the morning of the 16th of October, and I was due to meet Dea at the train station in Lanzhou when her train arrived at midday on the 17th. I had a little over one day left and I still had 200 kilometres to ride, and I was still inching painfully slowly up the pass.
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Fortunately enough for me and my hopes of making it to my goal on time I then had 140 kilometres of continuous downhill. At first this was great, taking me down through tree-lined avenues that reminded me a little of the south of France. And it was autumn here and no mistake with the yellow leaves falling like snowdrops all around. I was reminded of the fun game that I'd invented the previous autumn in Europe that I called 'Catch the leaf.' The name really does explain the game quite well but just in case you can't work it out the object was to try and catch the leaves as they fell. This was much, much harder than you might think whilst on a moving bicycle, and in fact I could only remember catching one leaf in the whole of the previous season. But European bicycle paths were a much safer environment for this distracting game than Chinese roads, and so I resisted the urge to resume it here.
The road got worse and worse and worse the further that I went down. Now that I was in a fertile valley almost all of the land was turned over to agriculture and the road got busier and busier as I moved through it. I was once again back to that situation that I'd been in a few days previously, with all sorts of chaotic traffic all over the place. Foremost of these were the trucks that roared along giving way to nothing. The trucks were absolutely at the top of the food chain and merely beeped the horn if anything was in the way and good luck to you if you were brave enough not to dive out of the way.
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Double overtakes were quite common. Triple overtakes were rarer, but certainly I saw them once or twice. The pollution was also terrible. I had to put my sunglasses on just to be able to see through all of the dust that was in the air. The beeping was unending. It was absolutely horrible. And it got worse when I got to an area where it had rained, and the dirt shoulder became the wet and muddy shoulder. Because of this the pedestrians and things that had been on the dirt shoulder moved into the road to avoid the mud and the chaos went up another notch as everything swerved to avoid them and beeped twice as much. Personally I still preferred the mud shoulder but because I had no mudguards the mud sprayed up all over my bike and my bags and me. I became covered in mud and filth.
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There was nowhere to camp because everywhere was being used for agriculture, but I made it to the bottom of the descent and crossed the mighty Yellow River at dusk. Now I was on the edge of the city of Lanzhou and I managed to find an allotment in an industrial estate with some unused plots where I could pitch my tent for a few hours.
But I was back on the road at three in the morning as I thought it would be better to try and cycle into the city in the quiet of night. This turned out only to be half a good idea. The road was unbelievably bad, truly terrible, and there were inexplicably a large number of trucks on it. After 15 kilometres or so the road narrowed to a single lane in each direction and was just rutted mud and, unbelievably, had almost a constant flow of trucks in both directions. I couldn't possibly risk cycling it in the dark and so I sat and waited for morning.
With more light I made a dash through this dangerous section and thankfully the road soon improved and got wider as I got closer in to the city. Then a path started up alongside the river and I moved onto this. After all the trials on the road here, this was a brief period of absolute bliss.
I had to leave the river eventually though, and make a mad dash across town to the train station. The traffic was awful, the beeping now so frequent as to be completely meaningless. There was a narrow shoulder for bicycles, but seeing as how it was also being used by pedestrians and motorcycles coming the wrong way I would hardly call it an ideal place for cycling.
One way or another I made it to the train station and as I did so I felt a tremendous sense of achievement and relief. I was on time for my big date. 1400 kilometres of desert, a couple of mountain passes, detours to visit tourist sites as well, some terrible roads, encounters with the police, trucks on fire, angry toll-booth staff, human skulls, but after all that, here I was at Lanzhou train station, ready for my date with the most beautiful girl in the world.
I looked at my bike. It was so filthy, covered in mud. Then I looked at my trousers. They were also covered in mud and filth. I looked at my hands. They were black. I hadn't had a shower for 12 days. I'd been wearing the same clothes for 12 days too, day and night. Clothes that hadn't seen a washing machine for two months. I was exhausted from all the night riding. I had chaffed lips and burnt skin from the sun and the wind. My hair desperately needed cutting. My beard desperately needed trimming. I looked like a tramp. A filthy, dirty, mud-covered tramp. It was almost midday. I had a good feeling about this date.
16/10/14 - 147km
17/10/14 - 50km
Today's ride: 197 km (122 miles)
Total: 31,373 km (19,483 miles)
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