Lanzhou is the capital of Gansu Province and a massive city
that sprawls a great distance along the Yellow River between hills on both
sides . It’s said to be a center of the chemical industry and have appalling
pollution at some times of year, but it wasn’t very noticeable in June.

This was my second time in Lanzhou, the first being in 2006
when I did a Silk Road trip from London to Beijing with Dragoman. Lanzhou was
the first very big Chinese city we hit and seemed quite astounding for a
provincial capital of a poor interior province. If I had only seen it in
current state first! The changes to the city in the eight years between 2006
and 2014 are astounding, less so in the commercial center of the city than the
massive amount of high rise construction for many miles up and down the river.
I’ve seen differing population estimates for Lanzhou, but I’d be willing to
believe the higher ones of around 8 million after this visit.

Guidebooks describe Lanzhou in a negative way because of its
pollution and lack of significant sights to keep the tourist around, but I
quite enjoyed it on my second visit as well as my first, not least because of
the variety of the food. Chinese food really is incredible and that available
in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. is only a small part of the total world of
Chinese cuisines available in China.

On our first night we went to a hotpot restaurant, where the
raw food you ordered is brought to your table and diners cook it themselves in boiling
pots of broth set into special tables over a heat source . Here the pot in the
table could be split and we had two broths for cooking, a mild one and a spicy
hot Sichuan one flavored with dried chili peppers and Sichuan flower pepper. As
in many places in China off the main tourist circuit, we as foreigners became a
major attraction with the waitresses all wanting their pictures taken with us
on their smartphones.

On my next night in Lanzhou I dined alone at a northern
Tianjin-style restaurant on roast duck with all the fixings, steamed pork buns,
hot and sour soup, and a dish of shrimp, cooked cucumber, and candied walnuts
in a mild sauce. My third night involved a dinner visit to a night market where
hundreds of stalls offered up all kinds of weird and wonderful things, not all
recognizable. And for breakfast the specialties are spicy beef noodle soup and
steamed dumplings filled with barbecued pork. I’ll take that over scrambled
eggs any day!

Our three nights in Lanzhou were not all consecutive because
of the bureaucracy we had to attend to regarding splitting up our group visa
into individual visas at a police office in the city . Entering Tibet from Nepal
requires travel on a group visa, but individual visas are then required for
continued travel in China after the tour ends. This all involved filling out
forms and getting photographed, leaving our passports behind for several days
while we made a little loop detour to Xiahe and Bingling Si, and retrieving
them three days later. By the time we left to continue on to Pingliang I had
enough of Lanzhou.