Before recent bridge building the river effectively kept communities apart - indeed horsemen would dismount, encourage their animals into the water with the rider then holding the tail and be pulled across to the far bank! At Shapatou I experienced another way of crossing the flow - the traditional “yangpi fazi” or sheepskin rafts! At first it looked frail - a frame of thin wooden sticks laid across inflated sheepskin hides. The skins are prepared with the fleece turned inside out, it is then tightly sealed and coated with oil to increase waterproofing. For hundreds of kilometers along the river for many communities this was often their only feasible crossing. Indeed they also played a key role in the Silk Road - even into the 1950s many rafts were lashed together to carry freight 2000 kilometers from Lanzhou to Baotou in Inner Mongolia from where camel caravans and later a railway connected to Beijing. The largest rafts would be up to 600 skins and could carry 30 tons of cargo.

Today the users are tourists for modern infrastructure including bridge building has rendered most of this downriver traffic redundant. At Shapatou I “sailed” on one with 14 inflated skins. As the boatman gently guided this little vessel across the current, after some initial apprehensions, I lay back, listened to the sounds of the water and thought of scene when flotillas of these little rafts historically would crowd stretches of the river, such as where I was floating.