The October holidays in China always present a great opportunity to leave the bustling city of Shanghai on a – for Chinese perspective – longer trip.
Train tickets to Tibet – especially during Chinese holidays – are always quickly sold out. The sale starts between 4 and 6 weeks in advance and tickets in the soft-sleeper trains are usually sold within minutes. Our initial plan to take the train from Shanghai all the way to Tibet (48 hours) was doomed quickly. So we booked a flight to Xining – a popular starting point for the train journey to Tibet – in hope to get a train ticket from there. The circumstances lead us to Qinghai lake for an overnight stopover, having around 36 hours to spend. Lake Qinghai is on the agenda of many Silk Road trips of the popular foreigner travel agencies, so we decided to spend a night there.
How to?
We rented a car at the airport (with Ehi Car rental – extremely expensive due to the Chinese holidays, around 600RMB/day) and drove the 230km to the lake area. The drive from Xining (already at 2200m Above sea level) is picturesque with lots of mountains and plains.
The last 70km are driven on a single-lane road off the freeway. The road is so straight and the landscape so flat, it reminded me a lot of the Midwest of the US. The closer you get to the lake area, the more small houses with read signs you can see on the roadside. At closer look we saw that they all sell honey, made from the enormous rapeflower fields on the bed of the river.
The road and the river area is extremely desolate. There are only a few villages with houses – mostly small guesthouse and restaurants for tourists. This is a pretty humbling sight and reminds you that Qinghai province is one of the most sparsely populated provinces in China.
The lake is pretty massive and beautiful during this time of year with the blooming rapeflower on its shores. Reaching the lake, you are at an altitude of 3200m MSL.
What to do at the lake?
We came with the expectation of being able to walk along the lakeside for a few hours – but we were quickly disappointed.
The entire lake front is consumed by tourism and completely fenced off. Every few hundred meters there is a gate with some locals offering entrance for a fee (30-50 RMB per car). Mostly, you still can not get all the way to the lake but only get to shoot a couple of pictures with the lake and the rapeflowers in the background.
The only real activity that involves some physical exercise is a popular circumvention of the lake by bicycle. There are a few rental spots along the lake and we saw a lot of cyclists with larger bags cycling around the lake in 3-5 days covering around 350km. There are guesthouses and hotels every 30-50km so it’s pretty manageable apart from the altitude.
Accommodation
We booked our accommodation on trip.com (which is our standard go-to place to buy train tickets, flights and hotels, due to good cancelation policy and good English customer service that also helps with hotel bookings and checking if foreigners are allowed at the hotels). This was not as easy as we thought. There are few hotels available, so we booked one of the few ones with acceptable reviews and had the customer service check if the hotel would allow foreigners (very conveniently done through the chat function. Just type „hello agent“ and you get connected with an English speaking CS agent and you can ask them to call the hotel and ask). The hotel was called „Qinghai Lake Snow Farm B&B“. They confirmed, however, a few days before arrival, our friend who had booked separately from us got a message that his reservation was cancelled as the hotel would not accept foreigners. We didn’t get such a message but still decided to change bookings as we also heard from a case where the guests were send away when they arrived at night because the hotel didn’t accept foreigners all of a sudden.
We asked the customer service to find an alternative hotel that would accept foreigners and they responded with two choices in the same area. The price was very low (120 RMB for a room), there was only one review but we gave it a try and were positively surprised. The name of the hotel is 青海湖明涛酒店. There are a lot of construction sides in the area where small very simple hotels are being built and this one also didn’t seem to be very old. We arrived in the late afternoon, realized we were the only guests, checked in and left again to get a sunset view of the lake. When we returned the owner had already prepared our pre-ordered food.
Food
As with every rural area where we go in China, the food is mostly the same. Vegan options are mostly different vegetable dishes (shredded potatoes, different greens, etc.), mostly fried in and served with a lot of oil. In addition, you might be able to get a noodle soup and some tofu as your protein source – but make sure to tell them you don’t want meat if you order mapu tofu as this always comes with minced meat.
Breakfast options were also very limited. Some plain congee (slow-cooked white rice similar to porridge but with no nutritional value) and some plain Chinese bread – at least in this location. Fruits are very rare, as you will notice because the entire area is literally a high desert.
Tourist spot at the lake – Erlangjian Scenic Area – definite skip, tourist trap!
On the second day we went to the „AAAA“ tourist attraction – hoping to be able to access the lake at least in the classic Chinese way – with a plastic walkway painted in wooden style. However, far from that. We paid 90 RMB entrance fee into a small tourist village area with a few shops, a boardwalk to some lakecruise boats and a small access to the lake. The beautiful sand bed into the river could only be reached by cruise ship, with a return trip by a tourist bus. We were not allowed to cycle along the beautiful lakeside road with the bikes that we rented for that purpose. Hence, with 180 RMB per person less on our WeChat accounts, we left the place after about an hour and went to have lunch on the opposite side of the road – this time with a nice „pearl of barley“ dish which was a good alternative to the otherwise oily vegetables.
Panoramic view of the lake – drive uphill
On the way back we took a short detour into the mountains (can’t miss, there are few roads in this area) which was probably the best part of the trip. The road climbed quickly a few hundred meters and left us with a great view of the lake from above.
Qinghai lake is a very nice place to go if you want to go on a challenging short overnight bike tour (due to altitude). If you go there, hoping to spend some time walking along the lake, you will be disappointed. It is a very nice stop-over when going further to the salt lakes, though. When coming here just for a day, make sure to leave early as the ride is pretty long and it could be a bit strenuous to drive there and back (from Xining) in one day.
