Three Thousand Kilometers Before We Scatter: A Graduation Trip on the Qinghai–Gansu Loop

If you're going to write about the Qinghai–Gansu Grand Loop, you can't just write about the loop.

You have to write about graduation—about the kind of thing that hasn't ended yet but has already started to disappear. You have to write about June, when a group of people, right before going their separate ways, said: "Let's take a lap around the Northwest."

You have to write about the departure. Luggage thrown into the trunk, navigation loaded, and the car was already moving. Nobody solemnly announced that we were setting off—just like nobody ever solemnly announced the beginning of these four years.

The Loop

Seven days. Over three thousand kilometers.

For those unfamiliar with the route: the Grand Loop starts and ends in Xining, tracing an enormous circle around the Qaidam Basin and the Hexi Corridor—Qinghai Lake, the Chaka Salt Lake, Dachaidan, Dunhuang, Zhangye, and back over the Qilian Mountains. It is the greatest-hits album of the Chinese Northwest, and it does not skip a single track.

The wind off Qinghai Lake is salty. The salt flats of Chaka are a mirror, flipping the sky and everyone in it upside down. The Emerald Lake of Dachaidan is a blue that borders on unreasonable. The salt bridge of Qarhan, the dunes of Dunhuang, the Danxia landforms of Zhangye, the grasslands of Qilian—this road lays out all the stubbornness and all the vastness of the Northwest in front of you, and asks you to take it in one breath.

But scenery alone isn't enough.

That Night at Mars No. 1

You have to write about the night at Mars No. 1, the stretch of road through the Qaidam Basin that people named after another planet because the land out there genuinely doesn't look like this one.

We pulled the car into the no-man's land and turned off the lights.

The dark had no edges. The stars looked like they might fall. We stood in the middle of the highway—because out there, you can stand in the middle of a highway at night and be in absolutely no danger—and nobody said anything. Over our heads, the Milky Way was absurdly wide, wide to the point of being slightly rude, as if the universe was showing off.

Two thousand meters above sea level. The wind was a little cold. We stayed anyway.

There is a specific kind of silence that only exists when every person present has decided, independently, not to break it. We stood in that silence for a long time. Nobody reached for a phone first. I don't know what the others were thinking about. I was thinking that this sky had been here the whole time—over the campus, over the dorm, over every all-nighter—and we had simply never once looked up at it together.

Lunbu Xiaguo

You have to write about Lunbu Xiaguo.

Riding horses, moving slowly, a snow peak dead ahead—so close it looked fake, like a backdrop painted by someone who didn't know what "far away" means. The horse set the pace and the pace was unhurried, and for once nobody negotiated with it.

In that moment, everything was slow. Slow enough that you forgot where you had been rushing to. Forgot about graduation. Forgot the separate cities, the separate offers, the separate lives that were all scheduled to begin the moment this trip ended.

I don't know how long that ride lasted. That's the point of it. It was the only hour of the entire trip that had no next stop in it.

What "Fun" Doesn't Cover

After we came back, people asked: was it fun?

I said it was fun.

But it wasn't just fun. It was that long-missing feeling of having been treated with solemnity by something. Treated solemnly by the vastness. Treated solemnly by the silence. Treated solemnly by the people who set out with you.

The Weight of Four Words

The phrase "graduation trip" still feels heavy when I think about it now.

Not because of any ceremony—there was no ceremony, no caps thrown on the roadside, no speeches at the scenic overlooks. It's heavy because of what those seven days contained without anyone naming it: during that week, none of us had scattered yet. We were still crammed into the same car, arguing about music, sharing one charger, passing the same bag of snacks front to back. We still had a shared next stop.

Soon we won't. That's what graduation means, logistically speaking: the next stops diverge, permanently, and the car empties out one city at a time.

But for seven days in June, three thousand kilometers long, the loop closed perfectly—back where it started, nobody lost, everyone still aboard.

That was enough.

The Qinghai–Gansu Grand Loop (青甘大环线) typically runs 7 days from Xining through Qinghai Lake, Chaka, Dachaidan, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, Zhangye, and the Qilian Mountains. Best months: June to August. Bring a jacket even in summer—the plateau does not care what month it is.