Bikepacking China's Jiangxi Mountains

Item #1 on Day 1, Item #2 a week later – nothing in between? Not sounding like the "Super Epic Totally Awesome Week-long Bikepacking Trip™" like some of my others. But moderately weird things happened. Things you'd say, "I guess it could happen", but also know none of your friends did it.

Enjoyment

Profile

288 mi (463 km)
⭧ 18.3k ft⭨ 17.7k ft

Difficulty

The Route

To Shangrao by train gets you in range of Wangxian Valley. It's hilly making the arc around but flattens out until Longhu Shan. Hills resume until following a river for a bit. Final stretch is a big climb. Roads are mostly two-laners with access to basic supplies. Limited hotels, coffee, bike shops.

Magical Fairy Tale Dream World

After just a couple of hours cycling from the train station, I’d checked off the first of my two-check-mark trip. A village that, as AI would say, “looked like something straight out of a fairy tale”. And what better way to describe an entire valley repurposed as an ancient village? From my time in China, I’ve seen a lot of throwbacks, but this place had flair. Aesthetics over accuracy. Draped canvas and hanging gourds just to not be outdone by Disney. A complex of buildings thrown up on the mountainside. These sorts of places command relatively insane prices because a “look at me, I’m in ancient clothes” is a standard feature on every girl’s feed.

The Abandoned Hotel

The sky had a haziness that only got worse inside Dragon Tiger Mountain. A fog made its balancing rocks and eroded edges all the stranger. That night, I found myself between towns and took a side road into the dark, hoping for a place to camp. Abandoned European villas found their way into my headlamp as I wheeled through the mud. Beyond them, a cathedral cut out a piece of the lavender sky. No. "I'm sleeping there tonight". Efforts made to keep people out had been undone by those before me, and soon I was standing in a concrete lobby asking what was next. I'd made it a challenge to get up into one of the spires, but all the long halls of empty concrete boxes were dead ends. At the end of one hall was a simple plywood door that made me feel less exposed for the night. In the morning, I came to another door, a proper one, paneled all around. It wouldn't have been weird if this were in, say, a hotel with people, but a fully furnished room in a random hall of a skeleton hotel is a bit strange.

The Abandoned Bat

The next night, I again found myself between towns and was at the mercy of the villages. A lady ended her conversation to walk me to a guesthouse I'd never find otherwise. A man in camo took me through his shop to a set of stairs to the rooms on the fourth floor. I picked the room with the fewest beds, three, adjacent to the only other room being used, for mahjong. I came back into the room to find a brown deadness that must have fallen when I shut the curtain. Getting a bit closer, the thing was moving! As it laid their shivering, looking at me (this one had really good eyesight), a pity overcame me. So I put it outside, in an upside-down paper cup, which in the bat community is known as a disposable cave. In the morning, the cup had fallen off the ledge, leaving me to wonder... My guess is he flew back into another room.

The Abandoned Drone

None of the tourists thought about walking away from a tourism route, but when I did, I was rewarded with a path through a bamboo forest. This local’s only route was finally the quiet alone time with the natural world; you just never get that over here. Still can’t believe I didn’t run into anyone during the 30 minutes following a trail, which ended at a lookout over a cliff. You’d think with the butt-shaped waterfall, the two shrines, and the stunning rock faces over the bamboo tops, there’d be someone. No, but what I did find was a drone someone had flown into the trees.

Oh Crap, A Mountain

There wasn't another way around. I'd have to take the tiny county road up and over the mountain. The expressway was off limits, but it left me to myself out here. I'd spent nearly the entire afternoon climbing, and was rewarded with a sunset of a sea of clouds - mainly the clouds which seemed to say, "You're an airplane, good job buddy".

On the other side of that mountain was the long-awaited Item #2. A ferry takes you across a river, and a short hike up comes to an archway letting you pass through a wall of rocks. On the other side is a red temple, perched on a rock face since the 12th century. It was probably never designed to accommodate hundreds of people at a time, but we just have to trust that engineers have already looked into that. There was something oddly familiar about it. Besides the Hanging Temple in Shanxi I'd seen in last year's "Super Epic Totally Awesome Week-long Bikepacking Trip", there's really nowhere else on earth like it. I'd been here before.