The road.
The Erhai's ring road was rebuilt for slow travel: smooth tarmac, dedicated bike lanes on the western shore, and 120 kilometres of lakeshore with the 4,000-metre Cangshan wall on one shoulder. The full circuit is a long day for strong legs and a two-day idyll for everyone else; the journeys cut it to its best sections with the ferry as a short-cut, because the point is the lake, not the odometer.
The wind.
The lake makes its own weather, and the wind is the day's narrator: mornings flat and glassy, afternoons blowing hard up the valley from the south. The local rule is ride with the wind — clockwise in the afternoon season, anticlockwise if you start at dawn — and the wind repays the courtesy with a tailwind for the last, tired hour. Fight it and the lake wins; it always wins.
The stops.
The ring's pleasures are the villages between the views: Xizhou's morning market and baba ovens, Zhoucheng's indigo, the Twin Corridor's mist, the fishing hamlets on the eastern shore where the lake goes suddenly wild and empty. Stop every hour, eat the cheese, drink the tea — the loop is a meal, and the pedalling is just the cutlery.
Keep reading
The lake circuits
The tie-dye village
Cycling quiet roads