6-Day Ningxia Photography: the Helan Mountain, the Tengger and Shapotou

Morning - arrival
Yinchuan sits on the flat plain between the Helan Mountains and the Yellow River, at about 1,100 metres, and it is the greenest city for a thousand kilometres in any direction. That is not a natural accident: the plain is irrigated by a canal system that was dug under the Han dynasty and has been maintained, on and off, for two thousand years. Your guide meets you at the airport or the railway station and drives you into the city.

The Ningxia Museum
The provincial museum is the right place to start, because it explains what you are about to look at. The collection runs from the Palaeolithic sites of Shuidonggou through the Tang and Song into the Western Xia - the Tangut kingdom that ruled here from 1038 until the Mongols extinguished it in 1227 - and out along the Silk Road. The Western Xia galleries hold Buddhist sutras, Tangut script, seals, ceramics and the stonework recovered from the imperial tombs, and there is a fine collection of the carved stone steles that the Tangut left behind. Admission is free and pre-booking is required; your guide handles it.

Lunch
Ningxia cooking is Hui cooking: lamb above all, noodles, and a restrained hand with chilli. Your guide orders hand-grabbed mutton, a bowl of lamb soup with pulled noodles, and a plate of the local cold vegetable dishes. A mild table is arranged alongside.

Afternoon - Haibao Pagoda
North of the old city, in a walled courtyard of its own, stands the Haibao Pagoda - a square brick tower of eleven storeys, about fifty-four metres tall, tapering slightly as it rises, with arched niches on each face and no eaves at all. Its present form is a Qing reconstruction of a much older building, traditionally dated to the fifth century, and it is one of the oldest structures standing in the city. The climb to the top platform is steep and narrow and gives you the whole of Yinchuan: the plain, the canals, the mountains closing the western horizon.

Evening
Dinner at a local restaurant. If you have the energy, the guide can walk you through the drum tower area afterwards, which is livelier after dark than it looks by day.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - Zhenbeibao
Zhenbeibao is two Ming-dynasty garrison towns, Ming City and Qing City, built of rammed earth on the old road north. By the twentieth century they were ruins, and in 1961 a writer called Zhang Xianliang, then living as a political prisoner nearby, noticed them. Twenty years later he turned them into a film set, and they became the location for a run of films that defined the Chinese art-house cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, including Red Sorghum and A Chinese Odyssey.

What you walk through now is a working set left standing: mud-brick lanes, gate towers, a reconstructed old Yinchuan street, props, and film crews shooting around you if you are lucky. It is unashamedly a tourist attraction and it is also genuinely strange - a fake town inside a ruined real one, in a landscape that looks like the surface of another planet.

Lunch
Lunch at a restaurant between the two sites, on the mountain road. The local speciality is lamb cooked in a clay pot with dried chillies; a mild version is ordered separately.

Afternoon - the Helan Mountain rock art
The Helan range runs north to south for two hundred kilometres and forms the western wall of the Yinchuan plain. In its eastern gullies, where water runs off the mountain after rain, there are thousands of carvings cut into the dark varnish of the rock face, made between roughly three thousand and ten thousand years ago by pastoralists and hunters working the foothills.

The images are mostly animals - deer, sheep, horses, camels, wolves, tigers - with human figures, hands, and a group of mask-like faces that are usually read as spirit or deity images; the largest of these, the so-called sun god, has become the emblem of the site. A boardwalk and a small museum run along the main gully, and the walk is easy. Your guide explains how the carvings were dated, and why the same motifs recur across the whole of northern Asia.

Evening
Return to Yinchuan for dinner. In September and early October the guide can stop at a foothill winery on the way back for the harvest.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the plain
The road from Yinchuan to Zhongwei runs south-west along the Yellow River, through the oldest irrigation district in China. This is the Ningxia plain: flat, bright green, cut into rectangles by canals and lined with poplars, with the desert held back on both sides. The canals are the reason the place exists. The Qin and Han both built here, the Tang expanded the system, and the Western Xia emperors irrigated the same fields.

There are two stops worth making on the way: the Bronze Gorge, where the river has cut a channel through the hills, and the Qingtongxia dam area. Your guide will judge the timing; the drive itself is only two and a half hours and there is no need to rush it.

Lunch
Lunch in Zhongwei, at a restaurant near the old town. Zhongwei is known across the province for its saozi noodles - hand-pulled noodles with a thick lamb and vegetable sauce - and for a local vinegar that is sharp enough to be used as a condiment on its own.

Afternoon - the Gaomiao
The Gaomiao is one of the strangest buildings in China and hardly anyone outside the province has heard of it. It began in the Ming dynasty as a small Buddhist shrine and grew, over three hundred years, into a single structure nearly thirty metres high in which Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist halls are stacked on top of each other, accessed by staircases that climb through the building in the dark. The plan is a compressed cross; the upper storeys are carried on a timber frame with almost no visible support; and the roofscape, seen from the courtyard, is a dense thicket of eaves, ridges and glazed figures.

You climb it. The staircases are narrow, the passages are low, and the whole thing creaks. From the top you look over the old town roofs to the Yellow River and, beyond it, the first line of dunes.

Evening
Dinner in Zhongwei. Overnight in the city, within reach of the desert for tomorrow.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Zhongwei, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the dune wall
Shapotou is a bend in the Yellow River where the Tengger desert, which runs north into Inner Mongolia, comes down to the water in a wall of dunes about a hundred metres high. The river here is wide, slow and green, running between sand on one side and the black rock of the gorge on the other. It is the single most photographed place in Ningxia and it earns it.

The morning is for the desert side. You climb the dune face - on foot, or by the sand escalator the site installed, or on a chairlift - and then the sand sledding runs come down the slope at a speed that is genuinely surprising. Camel trains work the ridge line above. All activities are optional and paid on the spot; your guide will tell you honestly which ones are worth the money.

The straw grids
The reason Shapotou is famous in China has nothing to do with tourism. In the 1950s the railway from Baotou to Lanzhou was being buried by the advancing dune field several times a year, and a group of engineers and local workers solved it with straw: one-metre squares of wheat or rice straw pressed into the sand in a checkerboard, which holds the surface still long enough for grass to establish. The technique, known as the straw checkerboard, was subsequently exported to desert-control projects across northern China and Africa. You can see the grids and the vegetation they carry on the flat ground behind the dunes, and the guide will show you how they are laid.

Lunch
Lunch at a restaurant in the scenic area. Yellow River carp is the local dish; the guide orders it steamed, with a lamb dish and vegetables alongside.

Afternoon - the river
The afternoon is on the water side: the sheepskin raft, which is eight or ten inflated goatskins lashed to a frame and steered by one man with a pole, is the traditional craft of this reach of the river and still works. The gorge walk above the river is quiet and gives you the whole bend. Those who want more adrenaline can take the zip line across the river; those who do not can sit under the trees.

Evening
Dinner and overnight in Zhongwei, or - if the group prefers - in one of the desert camps beyond the dunes, where the sky after dark is the point.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Zhongwei, twin share, with daily breakfast. A desert camp or desert hotel can be substituted on request.

Morning - off the road
The Tengger runs north from Zhongwei into Inner Mongolia and covers some thirty-six thousand square kilometres, which makes it the fourth-largest desert in China. It is not the empty sea of sand that the word suggests: the interior holds a chain of more than four hundred small lakes fed by groundwater, fringed with reed and grass, and it is these basins that the tracks run between.

You go in by four-wheel drive, and the driving is the experience: over the dune crests, down the slip faces, along the hard-packed corridors between them. The drivers work this ground daily and the vehicles are prepared for it. Stops are frequent, because the light changes and because there is no reason to hurry.

The lakes
The lakes come as a surprise. Some are fresh and clear, some are salt and rimmed with white; all of them carry birds and most carry a few camels. You stop at two or three of them across the day, walk the shore, and eat lunch in the shade of whatever is available.

Lunch
A packed lunch in the desert, or a simple meal at one of the lake-side guesthouses if the schedule allows. The guide carries water and shade for the group.

Afternoon and evening - the camp
You reach the camp in the late afternoon, in time to climb a dune and watch the sun go down across the sand. Dinner is at the camp - lamb, noodles, and whatever the camp kitchen is doing that day - and after it the lights go off. Zhongwei has one of the darkest skies in eastern China, and on a clear night the Milky Way is a band you can see the structure in. Your guide knows the constellations visible at this latitude and will point out what is up.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight in a desert camp or desert hotel in the Tengger, twin share. Camps here range from tented rooms with private bathrooms to simple yurts; the grade is confirmed at the time of booking.

Morning - at leisure
The morning is free. If the flight is late and the group wants one more thing, the old town and the Gaomiao are ten minutes away and easily fitted in before the transfer.

Transfer out
Zhongwei Shapotou Airport is small, nine kilometres from the centre, and serves a handful of domestic routes; allow twenty minutes and check in early, because the terminal is not built for volume. Zhongwei South railway station, on the Yinchuan-Lanzhou high-speed line, is twenty-five minutes from the centre, with trains to Yinchuan in about an hour and a half and to Lanzhou in about three.

Alternative - return to Yinchuan
If your onward flight leaves from Yinchuan Hedong, the drive back takes about two and a half hours and can be timed to your departure; the guide will build the morning around it, with a stop on the way if there is time.

Meals
Breakfast

Accommodation
No hotel night included - onward flight or train. A further night in Zhongwei can be added on request.