(previous section) >>We left Yushu around noon, under partly cloudy skies. The way out was typical: dustblown streets, arcwelders, truck repair shops, and a succession of PetroChina gas stations.
The road led up to a long valley, past a hydroelectric dam and a river to the left. Several yaks wandered about on the road: there was nothing unusual about this. A large grey yak moved to the left side of the road as we rode up on the right margin, slowly and disinterestedly. A truck was approaching from the rear: that I could hear. The next few minutes were quite amazing.
The truck began to pass us on the left, as you would expect. Unfortunately, the yak was also on our left. The animal panicked, unsure of which way to move: the pair of strange cyclists seemed to prohibit a move to the right shoulder, but to the left there was only a drop to the river. The yak froze.
Meanwhile, the truck driver was distracted by what he must have regarded as an unusual sight - two westerners on bicycles laboring slowly up the road. He was moving at about 35kph when his attention was called to the yak frozen with indecision in the middle of the road, perhaps by one of the passengers in the cab. A wild attempt at breaking began about 3m before the yak, which resulted in a short skidding sound from the tires before the truck hit the yak dead on, travelling only slightly less than the original 35km per hour.
The yak buckled longitudinally, its head wrapping around the headlamp on the right side of the truck, and its startled large black eyes seeming to meet mine at the instant it was lifted off the ground. The yak bounced with some elasticity from the grill of the truck as it was thrown 2m up from the pavement and about 5m further up the road (sideways, from the yak's point of view). The animal landed, rolled, righted itself somehow, and ran crazed to the right side of the road (no longer scared of the two strange cyclists now staring in disbelief at the scene in front of them), charging up the grassy hillside.
The blue Dong Feng truck shuddered from the impact - this was a 700kg obstacle that it just hit. The truck was slowed considerably by its interaction with the yak, and careened violently to the left. At this point, the driver attempted to countersteer, realizing that his vehicle was heading straight for the edge of the road, beyond which was only river. The Chinese, when they decide to build a road, build them well, and usually they place large rectangular blocks along the sides of the road which are next to cliffs, or steep drops, or rivers. This road was no exception. The truck collided with one of these blocks, to my relief, slowing its travel river-wise considerably.
What I came to realize as I watched the action from my bicycle seat was that the blocks, while they look nice, are in no way anchored to the sides of the road, or down into the roadbed. This block, while substantial, was in no way as effective as a standard guardrail on a typical US or European roadway. The force of the truck hitting the block knocked it loose from its moorings, and sent it over the edge, a large slab of now useless concrete sliding into the river. The truck, once again shuddering from another direct hit, was lifted slightly into the air, the front wheels losing contact with the ground briefly. This was enough to negate any of the driver's efforts to avoid what now looked to be inevitable: a short drop down into the drink about 3m below and to the left.
The truck seemed to stop suspended above the river, leaning on its axles, but I imagine this was merely the slowing effect of the brain as it processes an accident. I noticed the nice new wooden Tibetan furniture the truck was hauling as cargo, stacked much too high, as is usual in China. Perhaps it was the high center of gravity, along with the inertia from the sudden veer to the left, or perhaps it would have happened regardless: in any event, the truck stopped, scraping its axles along the concrete edge of the road, and pitched over falling out of sight and without much sound.
I muttered a stunned expletive, and then lept from my bike, making for the left edge of the road. When the riverside came into view, I was greeted with a truck, laying on its side on thin margin of bank that I hadn't been able to see from the right side of the road. There was a loud hissing sound, and I could also here the river washing against the top of the truck. I dropped down to the bank to see what the damage had been: I was expecting something serious.
A girl raced out from the truck, from where I didn't have time to see. From the corner of my eye I could see blood, and I could see her squat by the river's edge, washing something or the other. My attention was, however, directed at the cab and what I hoped were its unhurt occupants.
The whole windshield was smashed out, glass pieces on the ground around the accident. A seat had been thrown up into its place, and I couldn't see anything. I pulled the seat from the windshield, and found three men crushed one on top of the other, while water coursed into the cab from the river. They were moaning, and I tried to communicate that I wanted to help: I offered my hand. Amazingly, they piled out one at a time, and dusted themselves off. The girl was still a few meters away, washing her bloody face.
A Land Cruiser, a minivan, and another Dong Feng truck stopped quickly, and several faces were staring down at me from the road 3m above. The men, stunned but seemingly mobile, clambered up onto the road, while the girl followed suit. I looked at her head: there was a large and growing contusion on the right temple. Noone seemed panicked, not the truck's former occupants, nor the onlookers that had gathered to stare. Everyone gained the road, and I followed last, perhaps more shocked by the fact that everyone just got up and walked away than by the accident itself.
When I got to the road, Martin was there, voicing disbelief. What stunned me was that noone offered any assistance, noone was running for the police (Yushu was still only 4km away), no one was asking if they were ok. The driver was preoccupied by his cargo, which was damaged from the fall, and which was being washed over by water. The second man was simply staring glumly at the truck, and the third man, some sort of relation to the girl, directed her down the road back toward Yushu. Again, noone offered them a ride, although there was plenty of room in the various vehicles which had by now gathered.
The crowd began to disperse fairly quickly, and soon Martin and I
found ourselves two of the handful of people left, wondering whether we
were useful as witnesses. But there were no police on hand, there were
no insurance reports to be filed, there were no ambulances or emergency
vehicles. Life went on. We decided to leave, heading on up the road,
and the last thing I saw was the man and the girl, no more than 10
years old, walking back down the road around the corner in the valley
that led to Yushu.
South to Nangcheng
After
the yak incident, we carried on southward, on a good sealed road, up a
long valley and through yet another cold driving rain, to a pass at
4350m. Martin was winded, having only arrived at this altitude two days
before, but he made it up and over. The back side of the pass was a
quick descent of 200m, and we stopped for a meal in a Tibetan mud brick
building at a road junction. The meal was instant noodles and hot water
at an inflated price, which I came to realize was about all you were
going to get in a Tibetan roadside restaurant (Chinese-run shops are a
different matter, but you generally only find Chinese residing in towns
- they regard the Tibetan hinterland in the same way as a Westerner
might regard Siberia). A young boy made fun of me, while an old monk,
presumeably a relation of his, laughed gently and pulled at the hair on
my arm and marveled at my shorts: "Leng buleng?" (literally "Cold not
cold?"). "Buleng". I lied - it was 8 degrees C (45F) and windy. There
were two women in the room as well, one of whom was remarkably
beautiful: Martin was the first to comment, but I had to agree...
The road dropped down a narrow gorge, past large formations of
granite and a churning river which lept over boulders in its course. We
passed several settlements and nomad camps, which meant we also were
chased by innumerable dogs, the wild looking kind with ragged tails and
hackles raised. There are two ways of dealing with these creatures:
attack back, yelling and kicking (my friend Janne's preferred method),
or to stop, pick up a rock, and threaten to throw it, all the while
walking slowly away from its turf (my preferred method). Of couse, all
the while the dogs are barking, a crowd of Tibetans gathers, smiling
and waving, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that their dogs want a
piece of us.
We camped in - what else - the rain, and the next day was a
continuation of the same, long valleys, short climbs over passes, and
dramatic gorges, sometimes granite, and sometimes tall rock walls red
from iron oxide in the soil (typical of much of China). We joined a
river, the upper reaches of the Mekong, and rolled into Nangcheng. At
first glance horribly disappointing, but then you rise over a hill, and
the rest of the town comes into view: a wide street, ambitious looking
construction projects, and white ceramic tile buildings housing shops
and restaurants. We stopped at one of these, and I feasted on mala
doufu (a stir fried tofu dish) while Martin asked for his traditional
egg and tomato dish. The women didn't have egg, so he settled for meat.
What came out for him was a plate of cold meat medallions, with some
garlic on top. I laughed heartily while he choked it down, enjoying my
huge plate of tofu. We stocked up at a shop in town, knowing that it
was a long way to the next town of any size, and headed out racing a
very dark storm front closing in from the northwest.
We camped about 15km out of town, leaving the Mekong, and climbing a
side valley, blanketed with barley fields and the sound of two-stroke
diesel tractors driving home cartloads of laborers and/or sheaves of
wheat. I spied a road leading up to a large chorten, and we decided
that it was enough out of the way to give us a night of undisturbed
sleep. We set up camp just as the wind came up, and we dove into our
tents as a huge thunderstorm passed overhead, with heavily gusting
winds, enormous arcs of lightning, and booming thunder that eventually
was blotted out by the intensely loud sound of rain smashing into my
rainfly driven by 40km winds. I looked nervously at the hilltop chorten
that we had so eagerly camped next to, and at the metal wires that
guyed the prayer flags now streaming and flapping wildly in the wind: I
suggested to Martin that perhaps we should abandon our tents and head
for lower ground. He didn't want to leave in the storm, so I sat,
tense, waiting out the rain and watching the bolts of lightning strike
the mountaintops only a kilometer away.
It turned out that Martin had misunderstood me, thinking that my
suggestion had been to take down the tents in the middle of the storm
and re-erect them further down. After the storm, as we breathed sighs
of relief, I asked him why he didn't want to leave the tents. He said
if he had understood me at the time, he would have beaten me out of the
tent and down to lower ground.
Sick...
I
fell asleep after the storm, slowly relaxing tense muscles. Two hours
later I woke up, feeling a little ill. Two hours later, nausea
building, I had to race out of the tent (I had left the door open for
just such a contingency) throwing up at the foot of the chorten.
Indelicate, I know, but in an emergency...At any rate, I was no longer
laughing at Martin's meagre fare in Nangcheng, and tofu is off the menu
for me for a long time coming.
We woke the next morning, I feeling weak, and Martin feeling a bit
sorry for me. I struggled to ride down the road, which ran out of
pavement a few kilometers to the south. We rounded a valley corner, and
left the agricultural land behind. A police barrier was drawn down
across the road, but noone seemed to care: in fact I went into a shop
next door and got a soda to get some energy to try to continue. I told
Martin I needed to rest and take it easy for a couple of hours, so we
stopped in a grassy field next to a stream. I fell asleep in the sun,
and awoke suddenly just in time to turn over and vomit again. Martin
responded "No, no, no more cycling today. We camp."
A Chinese road worker's camp was about half a kilometer up the
valley, and Martin went to ask about a bed to sleep in, which they very
generously offered to me. In the end, we didn't take them up on it,
since I didn't feel up to talking and making conversation in my state.
The next morning, however, they came to offer us breakfast, so we dined
in their neatly kept tent on xifan (rice porridge), pao cai (pickled
vegetables), and mantou (steamed buns). There were 16 men and 3 women
in the camp: the women were primarily responsible for cooking and
cleaning, while the men worked on the road. I asked if there were any
plans to pave the road in the near future, and they said no. They were
on 6 month contracts, earning 40Y ($5) a day, and then heading back to
Xining, where most of them were from: none of them were Tibetan.
Indeed, it is very rare to find skilled road workers that are Tibetan,
even in remote Tibetan areas. Han Chinese fill this role: I assume it
is a combination of Han favoritism and chauvinism combined with the
fact that most of the local male Tibetans are needed to herd yaks and
sheep, which is tiring work with long hours (sunup to sundown), and
therefore unavailable to work on the roads (and gain skills in that
area...).
To Riwoqe: Green Pine Valleys
After
my recovery, we headed south, up two passes through a stretch of road
that was a bit unsure even on the Chinese maps. We had been, to this
point, travelling
on Route 214,
which theoretically runs from Xining in
Qinghai to Riwoqe in Tibet, and continues south into the Tibetan
Autonomous Region. The problem is, there is a 100km stretch from near
the border south that was undefined on the map. We had also noticed
very little traffic heading south from Nangcheng. After the second
pass, we dropped down a gorge, crossed a river, and hit a barrier. We
were worried that this could be a police checkpoint, where we might be
fined and turned around. As it turned out, we rolled under the barrier,
police ran out from an adjacent building, shirttails untucked, and
yelled "hello" from the side of the road, as we looked back and
nervously waved. That was it: we were in Tibet. Gone, apparently, are
the days when the intrepid cyclist needed to cross checkpoints in the
middle of the night past growling unseen dogs. This was nearly an
official welcome.
The road to Riwoqe
was spectacular, diving through gorges, passing
nomads camped in high valleys, with enormous herds of yaks, yak
caravans moving whole
families down from
the summer pastures to lower
places along river valleys, following green valleys lush from the
(incessant) summer rains, pine laden hillsides, and Tibetan homesteads
built of wood, surrounded by wood and stone stockade fences, horses
roaming across the valley. There were no snow capped peaks, and the
rain was constant, but I nevertheless have to rate this stretch of
Tibet, from Yushu to Riwoqe, as probably the most scenic in all of my
Tibetan travels.
The road, however, was poor, and covered in mud, making for slow
going. We rode into the first Riwoqe (the Tibetan one) about 30km to
the north of the official, Chinese city, which was under construction,
but not of the Chinese variety. Instead, handsome stone Tibetan houses
were being built along the road, something I was very surprised by (the
Chinese have a knack for building very ugly provincial towns, with no
regard for aesthetic whatsoever. Perhaps this was a local Tibetan
initiative, but where did the funds come from? The answer, I believe,
lay in the fact that there is a large monastery complex in the town,
and perhaps this is a gentrification effort, making the place 
pretty
for tourists to come and stare at the outlandish Tibetans...or perhaps
I'm being too cynical. Previous experience bears this theory out
though, with certain Tibetan towns being sanitized and prepped for
tourism, particularly in the northwest of Yunnan province.
We stopped at a Chinese restaurant at the south end of town, and had
a large lunch of fried rice. The meal gave us what we needed, and 2
hours later, we were pulling into Chinese Riwoqe. The road intersects
the route to the west at the north end of town, so it was unnecessary
to go into the town, a notorious hotspot a few years ago for
foreigners. At my suggestion, we camped about 2km to the west,
resolving to go back into town in the morning for food and supplies.
Sick again...
That
night, Martin fell ill with food poisoning. I don't know how I managed
to escape, given that we had the same thing at the restaurant that
afternoon, but somehow I did. He woke weak and unrested, and we
struggled back into town in the cold morning. The town arose slowly,
but by 10am, shops were opening and I was able to find my shop with
doujiang and youtian. The place was unremarkable, looking like any
other Chinese city, excepting the goats and yaks munching on the grass
in the street medians. Martin was in no mood to eat, preferring to
subsist on soda and crackers. I was wary of the police, but they passed
us by several times, seemingly completely indifferent. We left town as
the clouds lifted, with only a large brickworks casting a pall over the
otherwise beautiful valley.
We climbed very slowly, and about 15km out of town, Martin had had
it. We looked for a campsite, riding through a brief downpour of hail
and rain, before settling on a grassy spot by the river. Our only
visitors that afternoon (we had chosen a well-concealed campsite to
avoid local interactions) were an old woman pilgrim, making her way to
the wooden monastery about a kilometer away, and an old yak herder, who
sat down in the vestibule of my tent and smiled a toothless smile,
saliva dribbling off the left corner of his mouth...touching, to be
sure. I curled up with The Brothers Karamazov, reading the most
didactic passages from it, "The Grand Inquisitor" and "From the Life of
Elder Zossima", such superb pieces of writing that I managed to forget
where I was until the dark forced me to light a candle to continue
reading...
The Road to Nagqu
After
the obligatory nighttime downpour, we climbed a pass to 4600m
(approximately 15,000 feet) where a group of Tibetan girls harassed me,
pulling at my tent poles, opening my bags, begging for money, and
finally throwing prayer papers in my face...A strange interaction, and
I was quite angry, but somehow it resolved itself peacefully and they
left with smiles on their faces. I wondered whether they would do the
same to Martin, who was an hour behind me, and indeed they did, almost
to the letter. It can be a real challenge sometimes, when you just want
to smile and keep to yourself, selectively choosing your interactions
with locals, but that isn't possible. Interactions are part of the
daily bread of the traveller, and they aren't always happy.
Nevertheless, I think that attitude has a huge part to play, and a
humble easygoing mindset will smooth almost (but not entirely)
everything.
We stopped that
evening in a mud-ridden dump for dinner. I inquired
as to a restaurant, but the guy running the place (a Han Chinese man
from Sichuan) said he was stepping out for a while, and that we should
wait. Of course, what this means is that you sit amongst a crowd of
children and grown men, poking and pulling at your bike, your bags,
your hairy arms, trying out their "hello"'s and "goodbye"'s, and so on.
Martin's patience had worn thin, on account of still being weak from
the previous day's illness, and it was not a moment too soon that the
man returned, cooking us up a big bowl each of yak meat noodle soup. I
managed to choke down a few pieces of yak, but mostly left it swimming
at the bottom of the bowl. The local drunk wandered in, and tried to
start a fight with nearly everyone, picking up a beer bottle at one
point, but he somehow never focused on us (which I was frankly
expecting), and his friends managed to hustle him out after 15 minutes.
Darkness was settling in, and the restauranty owner was insistent
that we stay across the street at a guesthouse. We were both skeptical,
but eventually the idea of a room to ourselves won us over and we
crossed the street to our nights lodgings.
This was a Tibetan house, and we dragged our luggage up a rickety
wooden ladder to the second floor, which was also dirt. There was no
light on, and we could barely see, stumbling on beer bottles (bad
sign). They settled us first in the room next to the ladder, and then
thought better of it and put us in a room farther on. The man rolled
out heavy blankets, and we slept on a raised platform that ran along
three of the walls of the room.
Or we tried to sleep. About an hour after we settled in, a light
went on in the next room (solar powered - it is very common to see
solar cells charging a truck battery by daylight to power a radio or
lights in the evening) and a few voices spoke in low tones. A rain
started, and as I was situated next to a glassless window, the rain
blew in on my face much of the night. The next room grew gradually
louder and louder, and eventually there was wrestling, beer, singing,
and drunken stumbles into our room. So much for a good nights' sleep.
The next morning, we got up, and I stepped over the half of a yak in
the middle of the room to get to the ladder. We had a noodle soup
breakfast across the street, and when the hungover guesthouse operator
got up, he asked us for 35Y each. This was an extraordinary amount of
money given what we had received in services. We bargained to 25Y
(about $3), and left him in disgust.
The rest of the morning was spent fighting deep mud to the county
seat of Dengqen. From here it was lots of up and down, descending
slightly less from each pass until eventually we were up on the
plateau, above 4000m.
On descending one pass, we came into a good-sized Tibetan village,
and stopped at the one Chinese restaurant in town. Immediately we were
surrounded by children (we later found that the school was next door).
They pressed in on us from all sides, barely allowing room to breathe,
and watching us after our food arrived. Martin was still not up to full
appetite yet, and he only wanted something small. I asked the
restaurateur for one normal and one small bowl of noodle soup. We
waited a while, watching children jostle each other for position next
to us, and watching the two groups of Tibetan men pretending to eat
(they were much more interested in watching us do nothing: Martin was
hanging his head and occassionally groaning), until the food came out.
I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the cook served us two of the
largest bowls of noodle soup I have ever seen - essentially two family
sized bowls. I began to giggle uncontrollably while Martin muttered "No
way, no way". I wolfed mine down, while Martin couldn't eat a bite. A
man ran out while I said I would make an attempt on Martin's soup, and
returned a while later with medicine for altitude sickness (this was
his educated guess as to what Martin was suffering from - not a bad
one, but not right). Every few minutes, the restaurant owner would
shout and hustle the kids and men out the door, but they were as
inexorable as the tide, and within 2 minutes had resumed their position
inside the room inches from our faces as I slurped noodles and Martin
shook his head in disbelief. It all ended well, with smiles all around,
minus the fact that they had played with Martin's gears, a common
occurance which eventually mangled part of his chain (only one of the
problems to beset Martin: his saddle rail and front rack both broke,
requiring an emergency welding job. Moral of the story: cycle with as
many steel components as you can in Tibet. Arcwelders are plentiful,
good bicycle shops nonexistent).
There was rain every day and night, until our final campsite, which
was a beauty: flat, grassy, next to a laughing stream, and noone
around. The night was clear and cold, slightly below freezing, but I
didn't grudge this: the stars, so long absent from my trip, came out in
full brightness, and Orion looked down on me for the first time in the
month I had been on the road.
The next morning the sun rose through the notch in the east end of
the valley we were camped in, and I cooked the last of my food while
the rays melted the frost off of my tent. We packed up, cycled up an
easy pass (but the highest so far, at 4705m) and rolled along a valley
past several roadside Tibetan tent restaurants (who gives them business
and how much business that is, I couldn't see, but it wasn't much), and
rolled down the final pass to Nagqu, the city I had been dreaming of
almost since Yushu. Stage One, Lanzhou to Nagqu, was finished.
After the yak incident, we carried on southward, on a good sealed road, up a long valley and through yet another cold driving rain, to a pass at 4350m. Martin was winded, having only arrived at this altitude two days before, but he made it up and over. The back side of the pass was a quick descent of 200m, and we stopped for a meal in a Tibetan mud brick building at a road junction. The meal was instant noodles and hot water at an inflated price, which I came to realize was about all you were going to get in a Tibetan roadside restaurant (Chinese-run shops are a different matter, but you generally only find Chinese residing in towns - they regard the Tibetan hinterland in the same way as a Westerner might regard Siberia). A young boy made fun of me, while an old monk, presumeably a relation of his, laughed gently and pulled at the hair on my arm and marveled at my shorts: "Leng buleng?" (literally "Cold not cold?"). "Buleng". I lied - it was 8 degrees C (45F) and windy. There were two women in the room as well, one of whom was remarkably beautiful: Martin was the first to comment, but I had to agree...
The road dropped down a narrow gorge, past large formations of granite and a churning river which lept over boulders in its course. We passed several settlements and nomad camps, which meant we also were chased by innumerable dogs, the wild looking kind with ragged tails and hackles raised. There are two ways of dealing with these creatures: attack back, yelling and kicking (my friend Janne's preferred method), or to stop, pick up a rock, and threaten to throw it, all the while walking slowly away from its turf (my preferred method). Of couse, all the while the dogs are barking, a crowd of Tibetans gathers, smiling and waving, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that their dogs want a piece of us.
We camped in - what else - the rain, and the next day was a continuation of the same, long valleys, short climbs over passes, and dramatic gorges, sometimes granite, and sometimes tall rock walls red from iron oxide in the soil (typical of much of China). We joined a river, the upper reaches of the Mekong, and rolled into Nangcheng. At first glance horribly disappointing, but then you rise over a hill, and the rest of the town comes into view: a wide street, ambitious looking construction projects, and white ceramic tile buildings housing shops and restaurants. We stopped at one of these, and I feasted on mala doufu (a stir fried tofu dish) while Martin asked for his traditional egg and tomato dish. The women didn't have egg, so he settled for meat. What came out for him was a plate of cold meat medallions, with some garlic on top. I laughed heartily while he choked it down, enjoying my huge plate of tofu. We stocked up at a shop in town, knowing that it was a long way to the next town of any size, and headed out racing a very dark storm front closing in from the northwest.
We camped about 15km out of town, leaving the Mekong, and climbing a side valley, blanketed with barley fields and the sound of two-stroke diesel tractors driving home cartloads of laborers and/or sheaves of wheat. I spied a road leading up to a large chorten, and we decided that it was enough out of the way to give us a night of undisturbed sleep. We set up camp just as the wind came up, and we dove into our tents as a huge thunderstorm passed overhead, with heavily gusting winds, enormous arcs of lightning, and booming thunder that eventually was blotted out by the intensely loud sound of rain smashing into my rainfly driven by 40km winds. I looked nervously at the hilltop chorten that we had so eagerly camped next to, and at the metal wires that guyed the prayer flags now streaming and flapping wildly in the wind: I suggested to Martin that perhaps we should abandon our tents and head for lower ground. He didn't want to leave in the storm, so I sat, tense, waiting out the rain and watching the bolts of lightning strike the mountaintops only a kilometer away.
It turned out that Martin had misunderstood me, thinking that my
suggestion had been to take down the tents in the middle of the storm
and re-erect them further down. After the storm, as we breathed sighs
of relief, I asked him why he didn't want to leave the tents. He said
if he had understood me at the time, he would have beaten me out of the
tent and down to lower ground.
Sick...
I
fell asleep after the storm, slowly relaxing tense muscles. Two hours
later I woke up, feeling a little ill. Two hours later, nausea
building, I had to race out of the tent (I had left the door open for
just such a contingency) throwing up at the foot of the chorten.
Indelicate, I know, but in an emergency...At any rate, I was no longer
laughing at Martin's meagre fare in Nangcheng, and tofu is off the menu
for me for a long time coming.
We woke the next morning, I feeling weak, and Martin feeling a bit
sorry for me. I struggled to ride down the road, which ran out of
pavement a few kilometers to the south. We rounded a valley corner, and
left the agricultural land behind. A police barrier was drawn down
across the road, but noone seemed to care: in fact I went into a shop
next door and got a soda to get some energy to try to continue. I told
Martin I needed to rest and take it easy for a couple of hours, so we
stopped in a grassy field next to a stream. I fell asleep in the sun,
and awoke suddenly just in time to turn over and vomit again. Martin
responded "No, no, no more cycling today. We camp."
A Chinese road worker's camp was about half a kilometer up the
valley, and Martin went to ask about a bed to sleep in, which they very
generously offered to me. In the end, we didn't take them up on it,
since I didn't feel up to talking and making conversation in my state.
The next morning, however, they came to offer us breakfast, so we dined
in their neatly kept tent on xifan (rice porridge), pao cai (pickled
vegetables), and mantou (steamed buns). There were 16 men and 3 women
in the camp: the women were primarily responsible for cooking and
cleaning, while the men worked on the road. I asked if there were any
plans to pave the road in the near future, and they said no. They were
on 6 month contracts, earning 40Y ($5) a day, and then heading back to
Xining, where most of them were from: none of them were Tibetan.
Indeed, it is very rare to find skilled road workers that are Tibetan,
even in remote Tibetan areas. Han Chinese fill this role: I assume it
is a combination of Han favoritism and chauvinism combined with the
fact that most of the local male Tibetans are needed to herd yaks and
sheep, which is tiring work with long hours (sunup to sundown), and
therefore unavailable to work on the roads (and gain skills in that
area...).
To Riwoqe: Green Pine Valleys
After
my recovery, we headed south, up two passes through a stretch of road
that was a bit unsure even on the Chinese maps. We had been, to this
point, travelling on Route 214,
which theoretically runs from Xining in
Qinghai to Riwoqe in Tibet, and continues south into the Tibetan
Autonomous Region. The problem is, there is a 100km stretch from near
the border south that was undefined on the map. We had also noticed
very little traffic heading south from Nangcheng. After the second
pass, we dropped down a gorge, crossed a river, and hit a barrier. We
were worried that this could be a police checkpoint, where we might be
fined and turned around. As it turned out, we rolled under the barrier,
police ran out from an adjacent building, shirttails untucked, and
yelled "hello" from the side of the road, as we looked back and
nervously waved. That was it: we were in Tibet. Gone, apparently, are
the days when the intrepid cyclist needed to cross checkpoints in the
middle of the night past growling unseen dogs. This was nearly an
official welcome.
The road to Riwoqe
was spectacular, diving through gorges, passing
nomads camped in high valleys, with enormous herds of yaks, yak
caravans moving whole families down from
the summer pastures to lower
places along river valleys, following green valleys lush from the
(incessant) summer rains, pine laden hillsides, and Tibetan homesteads
built of wood, surrounded by wood and stone stockade fences, horses
roaming across the valley. There were no snow capped peaks, and the
rain was constant, but I nevertheless have to rate this stretch of
Tibet, from Yushu to Riwoqe, as probably the most scenic in all of my
Tibetan travels.
The road, however, was poor, and covered in mud, making for slow
going. We rode into the first Riwoqe (the Tibetan one) about 30km to
the north of the official, Chinese city, which was under construction,
but not of the Chinese variety. Instead, handsome stone Tibetan houses
were being built along the road, something I was very surprised by (the
Chinese have a knack for building very ugly provincial towns, with no
regard for aesthetic whatsoever. Perhaps this was a local Tibetan
initiative, but where did the funds come from? The answer, I believe,
lay in the fact that there is a large monastery complex in the town,
and perhaps this is a gentrification effort, making the place pretty
for tourists to come and stare at the outlandish Tibetans...or perhaps
I'm being too cynical. Previous experience bears this theory out
though, with certain Tibetan towns being sanitized and prepped for
tourism, particularly in the northwest of Yunnan province.
We stopped at a Chinese restaurant at the south end of town, and had
a large lunch of fried rice. The meal gave us what we needed, and 2
hours later, we were pulling into Chinese Riwoqe. The road intersects
the route to the west at the north end of town, so it was unnecessary
to go into the town, a notorious hotspot a few years ago for
foreigners. At my suggestion, we camped about 2km to the west,
resolving to go back into town in the morning for food and supplies.
Sick again...
That
night, Martin fell ill with food poisoning. I don't know how I managed
to escape, given that we had the same thing at the restaurant that
afternoon, but somehow I did. He woke weak and unrested, and we
struggled back into town in the cold morning. The town arose slowly,
but by 10am, shops were opening and I was able to find my shop with
doujiang and youtian. The place was unremarkable, looking like any
other Chinese city, excepting the goats and yaks munching on the grass
in the street medians. Martin was in no mood to eat, preferring to
subsist on soda and crackers. I was wary of the police, but they passed
us by several times, seemingly completely indifferent. We left town as
the clouds lifted, with only a large brickworks casting a pall over the
otherwise beautiful valley.
We climbed very slowly, and about 15km out of town, Martin had had
it. We looked for a campsite, riding through a brief downpour of hail
and rain, before settling on a grassy spot by the river. Our only
visitors that afternoon (we had chosen a well-concealed campsite to
avoid local interactions) were an old woman pilgrim, making her way to
the wooden monastery about a kilometer away, and an old yak herder, who
sat down in the vestibule of my tent and smiled a toothless smile,
saliva dribbling off the left corner of his mouth...touching, to be
sure. I curled up with The Brothers Karamazov, reading the most
didactic passages from it, "The Grand Inquisitor" and "From the Life of
Elder Zossima", such superb pieces of writing that I managed to forget
where I was until the dark forced me to light a candle to continue
reading...
The Road to Nagqu
After
the obligatory nighttime downpour, we climbed a pass to 4600m
(approximately 15,000 feet) where a group of Tibetan girls harassed me,
pulling at my tent poles, opening my bags, begging for money, and
finally throwing prayer papers in my face...A strange interaction, and
I was quite angry, but somehow it resolved itself peacefully and they
left with smiles on their faces. I wondered whether they would do the
same to Martin, who was an hour behind me, and indeed they did, almost
to the letter. It can be a real challenge sometimes, when you just want
to smile and keep to yourself, selectively choosing your interactions
with locals, but that isn't possible. Interactions are part of the
daily bread of the traveller, and they aren't always happy.
Nevertheless, I think that attitude has a huge part to play, and a
humble easygoing mindset will smooth almost (but not entirely)
everything.
We stopped that
evening in a mud-ridden dump for dinner. I inquired
as to a restaurant, but the guy running the place (a Han Chinese man
from Sichuan) said he was stepping out for a while, and that we should
wait. Of course, what this means is that you sit amongst a crowd of
children and grown men, poking and pulling at your bike, your bags,
your hairy arms, trying out their "hello"'s and "goodbye"'s, and so on.
Martin's patience had worn thin, on account of still being weak from
the previous day's illness, and it was not a moment too soon that the
man returned, cooking us up a big bowl each of yak meat noodle soup. I
managed to choke down a few pieces of yak, but mostly left it swimming
at the bottom of the bowl. The local drunk wandered in, and tried to
start a fight with nearly everyone, picking up a beer bottle at one
point, but he somehow never focused on us (which I was frankly
expecting), and his friends managed to hustle him out after 15 minutes.
Darkness was settling in, and the restauranty owner was insistent
that we stay across the street at a guesthouse. We were both skeptical,
but eventually the idea of a room to ourselves won us over and we
crossed the street to our nights lodgings.
This was a Tibetan house, and we dragged our luggage up a rickety
wooden ladder to the second floor, which was also dirt. There was no
light on, and we could barely see, stumbling on beer bottles (bad
sign). They settled us first in the room next to the ladder, and then
thought better of it and put us in a room farther on. The man rolled
out heavy blankets, and we slept on a raised platform that ran along
three of the walls of the room.
Or we tried to sleep. About an hour after we settled in, a light
went on in the next room (solar powered - it is very common to see
solar cells charging a truck battery by daylight to power a radio or
lights in the evening) and a few voices spoke in low tones. A rain
started, and as I was situated next to a glassless window, the rain
blew in on my face much of the night. The next room grew gradually
louder and louder, and eventually there was wrestling, beer, singing,
and drunken stumbles into our room. So much for a good nights' sleep.
The next morning, we got up, and I stepped over the half of a yak in
the middle of the room to get to the ladder. We had a noodle soup
breakfast across the street, and when the hungover guesthouse operator
got up, he asked us for 35Y each. This was an extraordinary amount of
money given what we had received in services. We bargained to 25Y
(about $3), and left him in disgust.
The rest of the morning was spent fighting deep mud to the county
seat of Dengqen. From here it was lots of up and down, descending
slightly less from each pass until eventually we were up on the
plateau, above 4000m.
On descending one pass, we came into a good-sized Tibetan village,
and stopped at the one Chinese restaurant in town. Immediately we were
surrounded by children (we later found that the school was next door).
They pressed in on us from all sides, barely allowing room to breathe,
and watching us after our food arrived. Martin was still not up to full
appetite yet, and he only wanted something small. I asked the
restaurateur for one normal and one small bowl of noodle soup. We
waited a while, watching children jostle each other for position next
to us, and watching the two groups of Tibetan men pretending to eat
(they were much more interested in watching us do nothing: Martin was
hanging his head and occassionally groaning), until the food came out.
I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the cook served us two of the
largest bowls of noodle soup I have ever seen - essentially two family
sized bowls. I began to giggle uncontrollably while Martin muttered "No
way, no way". I wolfed mine down, while Martin couldn't eat a bite. A
man ran out while I said I would make an attempt on Martin's soup, and
returned a while later with medicine for altitude sickness (this was
his educated guess as to what Martin was suffering from - not a bad
one, but not right). Every few minutes, the restaurant owner would
shout and hustle the kids and men out the door, but they were as
inexorable as the tide, and within 2 minutes had resumed their position
inside the room inches from our faces as I slurped noodles and Martin
shook his head in disbelief. It all ended well, with smiles all around,
minus the fact that they had played with Martin's gears, a common
occurance which eventually mangled part of his chain (only one of the
problems to beset Martin: his saddle rail and front rack both broke,
requiring an emergency welding job. Moral of the story: cycle with as
many steel components as you can in Tibet. Arcwelders are plentiful,
good bicycle shops nonexistent).
There was rain every day and night, until our final campsite, which
was a beauty: flat, grassy, next to a laughing stream, and noone
around. The night was clear and cold, slightly below freezing, but I
didn't grudge this: the stars, so long absent from my trip, came out in
full brightness, and Orion looked down on me for the first time in the
month I had been on the road.
The next morning the sun rose through the notch in the east end of
the valley we were camped in, and I cooked the last of my food while
the rays melted the frost off of my tent. We packed up, cycled up an
easy pass (but the highest so far, at 4705m) and rolled along a valley
past several roadside Tibetan tent restaurants (who gives them business
and how much business that is, I couldn't see, but it wasn't much), and
rolled down the final pass to Nagqu, the city I had been dreaming of
almost since Yushu. Stage One, Lanzhou to Nagqu, was finished.
I fell asleep after the storm, slowly relaxing tense muscles. Two hours later I woke up, feeling a little ill. Two hours later, nausea building, I had to race out of the tent (I had left the door open for just such a contingency) throwing up at the foot of the chorten. Indelicate, I know, but in an emergency...At any rate, I was no longer laughing at Martin's meagre fare in Nangcheng, and tofu is off the menu for me for a long time coming.
We woke the next morning, I feeling weak, and Martin feeling a bit sorry for me. I struggled to ride down the road, which ran out of pavement a few kilometers to the south. We rounded a valley corner, and left the agricultural land behind. A police barrier was drawn down across the road, but noone seemed to care: in fact I went into a shop next door and got a soda to get some energy to try to continue. I told Martin I needed to rest and take it easy for a couple of hours, so we stopped in a grassy field next to a stream. I fell asleep in the sun, and awoke suddenly just in time to turn over and vomit again. Martin responded "No, no, no more cycling today. We camp."
A Chinese road worker's camp was about half a kilometer up the
valley, and Martin went to ask about a bed to sleep in, which they very
generously offered to me. In the end, we didn't take them up on it,
since I didn't feel up to talking and making conversation in my state.
The next morning, however, they came to offer us breakfast, so we dined
in their neatly kept tent on xifan (rice porridge), pao cai (pickled
vegetables), and mantou (steamed buns). There were 16 men and 3 women
in the camp: the women were primarily responsible for cooking and
cleaning, while the men worked on the road. I asked if there were any
plans to pave the road in the near future, and they said no. They were
on 6 month contracts, earning 40Y ($5) a day, and then heading back to
Xining, where most of them were from: none of them were Tibetan.
Indeed, it is very rare to find skilled road workers that are Tibetan,
even in remote Tibetan areas. Han Chinese fill this role: I assume it
is a combination of Han favoritism and chauvinism combined with the
fact that most of the local male Tibetans are needed to herd yaks and
sheep, which is tiring work with long hours (sunup to sundown), and
therefore unavailable to work on the roads (and gain skills in that
area...).
To Riwoqe: Green Pine Valleys
After
my recovery, we headed south, up two passes through a stretch of road
that was a bit unsure even on the Chinese maps. We had been, to this
point, travelling on Route 214,
which theoretically runs from Xining in
Qinghai to Riwoqe in Tibet, and continues south into the Tibetan
Autonomous Region. The problem is, there is a 100km stretch from near
the border south that was undefined on the map. We had also noticed
very little traffic heading south from Nangcheng. After the second
pass, we dropped down a gorge, crossed a river, and hit a barrier. We
were worried that this could be a police checkpoint, where we might be
fined and turned around. As it turned out, we rolled under the barrier,
police ran out from an adjacent building, shirttails untucked, and
yelled "hello" from the side of the road, as we looked back and
nervously waved. That was it: we were in Tibet. Gone, apparently, are
the days when the intrepid cyclist needed to cross checkpoints in the
middle of the night past growling unseen dogs. This was nearly an
official welcome.
The road to Riwoqe
was spectacular, diving through gorges, passing
nomads camped in high valleys, with enormous herds of yaks, yak
caravans moving whole families down from
the summer pastures to lower
places along river valleys, following green valleys lush from the
(incessant) summer rains, pine laden hillsides, and Tibetan homesteads
built of wood, surrounded by wood and stone stockade fences, horses
roaming across the valley. There were no snow capped peaks, and the
rain was constant, but I nevertheless have to rate this stretch of
Tibet, from Yushu to Riwoqe, as probably the most scenic in all of my
Tibetan travels.
The road, however, was poor, and covered in mud, making for slow
going. We rode into the first Riwoqe (the Tibetan one) about 30km to
the north of the official, Chinese city, which was under construction,
but not of the Chinese variety. Instead, handsome stone Tibetan houses
were being built along the road, something I was very surprised by (the
Chinese have a knack for building very ugly provincial towns, with no
regard for aesthetic whatsoever. Perhaps this was a local Tibetan
initiative, but where did the funds come from? The answer, I believe,
lay in the fact that there is a large monastery complex in the town,
and perhaps this is a gentrification effort, making the place pretty
for tourists to come and stare at the outlandish Tibetans...or perhaps
I'm being too cynical. Previous experience bears this theory out
though, with certain Tibetan towns being sanitized and prepped for
tourism, particularly in the northwest of Yunnan province.
We stopped at a Chinese restaurant at the south end of town, and had
a large lunch of fried rice. The meal gave us what we needed, and 2
hours later, we were pulling into Chinese Riwoqe. The road intersects
the route to the west at the north end of town, so it was unnecessary
to go into the town, a notorious hotspot a few years ago for
foreigners. At my suggestion, we camped about 2km to the west,
resolving to go back into town in the morning for food and supplies.
Sick again...
That
night, Martin fell ill with food poisoning. I don't know how I managed
to escape, given that we had the same thing at the restaurant that
afternoon, but somehow I did. He woke weak and unrested, and we
struggled back into town in the cold morning. The town arose slowly,
but by 10am, shops were opening and I was able to find my shop with
doujiang and youtian. The place was unremarkable, looking like any
other Chinese city, excepting the goats and yaks munching on the grass
in the street medians. Martin was in no mood to eat, preferring to
subsist on soda and crackers. I was wary of the police, but they passed
us by several times, seemingly completely indifferent. We left town as
the clouds lifted, with only a large brickworks casting a pall over the
otherwise beautiful valley.
We climbed very slowly, and about 15km out of town, Martin had had
it. We looked for a campsite, riding through a brief downpour of hail
and rain, before settling on a grassy spot by the river. Our only
visitors that afternoon (we had chosen a well-concealed campsite to
avoid local interactions) were an old woman pilgrim, making her way to
the wooden monastery about a kilometer away, and an old yak herder, who
sat down in the vestibule of my tent and smiled a toothless smile,
saliva dribbling off the left corner of his mouth...touching, to be
sure. I curled up with The Brothers Karamazov, reading the most
didactic passages from it, "The Grand Inquisitor" and "From the Life of
Elder Zossima", such superb pieces of writing that I managed to forget
where I was until the dark forced me to light a candle to continue
reading...
The Road to Nagqu
After
the obligatory nighttime downpour, we climbed a pass to 4600m
(approximately 15,000 feet) where a group of Tibetan girls harassed me,
pulling at my tent poles, opening my bags, begging for money, and
finally throwing prayer papers in my face...A strange interaction, and
I was quite angry, but somehow it resolved itself peacefully and they
left with smiles on their faces. I wondered whether they would do the
same to Martin, who was an hour behind me, and indeed they did, almost
to the letter. It can be a real challenge sometimes, when you just want
to smile and keep to yourself, selectively choosing your interactions
with locals, but that isn't possible. Interactions are part of the
daily bread of the traveller, and they aren't always happy.
Nevertheless, I think that attitude has a huge part to play, and a
humble easygoing mindset will smooth almost (but not entirely)
everything.
We stopped that
evening in a mud-ridden dump for dinner. I inquired
as to a restaurant, but the guy running the place (a Han Chinese man
from Sichuan) said he was stepping out for a while, and that we should
wait. Of course, what this means is that you sit amongst a crowd of
children and grown men, poking and pulling at your bike, your bags,
your hairy arms, trying out their "hello"'s and "goodbye"'s, and so on.
Martin's patience had worn thin, on account of still being weak from
the previous day's illness, and it was not a moment too soon that the
man returned, cooking us up a big bowl each of yak meat noodle soup. I
managed to choke down a few pieces of yak, but mostly left it swimming
at the bottom of the bowl. The local drunk wandered in, and tried to
start a fight with nearly everyone, picking up a beer bottle at one
point, but he somehow never focused on us (which I was frankly
expecting), and his friends managed to hustle him out after 15 minutes.
Darkness was settling in, and the restauranty owner was insistent
that we stay across the street at a guesthouse. We were both skeptical,
but eventually the idea of a room to ourselves won us over and we
crossed the street to our nights lodgings.
This was a Tibetan house, and we dragged our luggage up a rickety
wooden ladder to the second floor, which was also dirt. There was no
light on, and we could barely see, stumbling on beer bottles (bad
sign). They settled us first in the room next to the ladder, and then
thought better of it and put us in a room farther on. The man rolled
out heavy blankets, and we slept on a raised platform that ran along
three of the walls of the room.
Or we tried to sleep. About an hour after we settled in, a light
went on in the next room (solar powered - it is very common to see
solar cells charging a truck battery by daylight to power a radio or
lights in the evening) and a few voices spoke in low tones. A rain
started, and as I was situated next to a glassless window, the rain
blew in on my face much of the night. The next room grew gradually
louder and louder, and eventually there was wrestling, beer, singing,
and drunken stumbles into our room. So much for a good nights' sleep.
The next morning, we got up, and I stepped over the half of a yak in
the middle of the room to get to the ladder. We had a noodle soup
breakfast across the street, and when the hungover guesthouse operator
got up, he asked us for 35Y each. This was an extraordinary amount of
money given what we had received in services. We bargained to 25Y
(about $3), and left him in disgust.
The rest of the morning was spent fighting deep mud to the county
seat of Dengqen. From here it was lots of up and down, descending
slightly less from each pass until eventually we were up on the
plateau, above 4000m.
On descending one pass, we came into a good-sized Tibetan village,
and stopped at the one Chinese restaurant in town. Immediately we were
surrounded by children (we later found that the school was next door).
They pressed in on us from all sides, barely allowing room to breathe,
and watching us after our food arrived. Martin was still not up to full
appetite yet, and he only wanted something small. I asked the
restaurateur for one normal and one small bowl of noodle soup. We
waited a while, watching children jostle each other for position next
to us, and watching the two groups of Tibetan men pretending to eat
(they were much more interested in watching us do nothing: Martin was
hanging his head and occassionally groaning), until the food came out.
I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the cook served us two of the
largest bowls of noodle soup I have ever seen - essentially two family
sized bowls. I began to giggle uncontrollably while Martin muttered "No
way, no way". I wolfed mine down, while Martin couldn't eat a bite. A
man ran out while I said I would make an attempt on Martin's soup, and
returned a while later with medicine for altitude sickness (this was
his educated guess as to what Martin was suffering from - not a bad
one, but not right). Every few minutes, the restaurant owner would
shout and hustle the kids and men out the door, but they were as
inexorable as the tide, and within 2 minutes had resumed their position
inside the room inches from our faces as I slurped noodles and Martin
shook his head in disbelief. It all ended well, with smiles all around,
minus the fact that they had played with Martin's gears, a common
occurance which eventually mangled part of his chain (only one of the
problems to beset Martin: his saddle rail and front rack both broke,
requiring an emergency welding job. Moral of the story: cycle with as
many steel components as you can in Tibet. Arcwelders are plentiful,
good bicycle shops nonexistent).
There was rain every day and night, until our final campsite, which
was a beauty: flat, grassy, next to a laughing stream, and noone
around. The night was clear and cold, slightly below freezing, but I
didn't grudge this: the stars, so long absent from my trip, came out in
full brightness, and Orion looked down on me for the first time in the
month I had been on the road.
The next morning the sun rose through the notch in the east end of
the valley we were camped in, and I cooked the last of my food while
the rays melted the frost off of my tent. We packed up, cycled up an
easy pass (but the highest so far, at 4705m) and rolled along a valley
past several roadside Tibetan tent restaurants (who gives them business
and how much business that is, I couldn't see, but it wasn't much), and
rolled down the final pass to Nagqu, the city I had been dreaming of
almost since Yushu. Stage One, Lanzhou to Nagqu, was finished.
After
my recovery, we headed south, up two passes through a stretch of road
that was a bit unsure even on the Chinese maps. We had been, to this
point, travelling on Route 214,
which theoretically runs from Xining in
Qinghai to Riwoqe in Tibet, and continues south into the Tibetan
Autonomous Region. The problem is, there is a 100km stretch from near
the border south that was undefined on the map. We had also noticed
very little traffic heading south from Nangcheng. After the second
pass, we dropped down a gorge, crossed a river, and hit a barrier. We
were worried that this could be a police checkpoint, where we might be
fined and turned around. As it turned out, we rolled under the barrier,
police ran out from an adjacent building, shirttails untucked, and
yelled "hello" from the side of the road, as we looked back and
nervously waved. That was it: we were in Tibet. Gone, apparently, are
the days when the intrepid cyclist needed to cross checkpoints in the
middle of the night past growling unseen dogs. This was nearly an
official welcome.
The road to Riwoqe
was spectacular, diving through gorges, passing
nomads camped in high valleys, with enormous herds of yaks, yak
caravans moving whole families down from
the summer pastures to lower
places along river valleys, following green valleys lush from the
(incessant) summer rains, pine laden hillsides, and Tibetan homesteads
built of wood, surrounded by wood and stone stockade fences, horses
roaming across the valley. There were no snow capped peaks, and the
rain was constant, but I nevertheless have to rate this stretch of
Tibet, from Yushu to Riwoqe, as probably the most scenic in all of my
Tibetan travels.
The road, however, was poor, and covered in mud, making for slow
going. We rode into the first Riwoqe (the Tibetan one) about 30km to
the north of the official, Chinese city, which was under construction,
but not of the Chinese variety. Instead, handsome stone Tibetan houses
were being built along the road, something I was very surprised by (the
Chinese have a knack for building very ugly provincial towns, with no
regard for aesthetic whatsoever. Perhaps this was a local Tibetan
initiative, but where did the funds come from? The answer, I believe,
lay in the fact that there is a large monastery complex in the town,
and perhaps this is a gentrification effort, making the place pretty
for tourists to come and stare at the outlandish Tibetans...or perhaps
I'm being too cynical. Previous experience bears this theory out
though, with certain Tibetan towns being sanitized and prepped for
tourism, particularly in the northwest of Yunnan province.
We stopped at a Chinese restaurant at the south end of town, and had
a large lunch of fried rice. The meal gave us what we needed, and 2
hours later, we were pulling into Chinese Riwoqe. The road intersects
the route to the west at the north end of town, so it was unnecessary
to go into the town, a notorious hotspot a few years ago for
foreigners. At my suggestion, we camped about 2km to the west,
resolving to go back into town in the morning for food and supplies.
Sick again...
That
night, Martin fell ill with food poisoning. I don't know how I managed
to escape, given that we had the same thing at the restaurant that
afternoon, but somehow I did. He woke weak and unrested, and we
struggled back into town in the cold morning. The town arose slowly,
but by 10am, shops were opening and I was able to find my shop with
doujiang and youtian. The place was unremarkable, looking like any
other Chinese city, excepting the goats and yaks munching on the grass
in the street medians. Martin was in no mood to eat, preferring to
subsist on soda and crackers. I was wary of the police, but they passed
us by several times, seemingly completely indifferent. We left town as
the clouds lifted, with only a large brickworks casting a pall over the
otherwise beautiful valley.
We climbed very slowly, and about 15km out of town, Martin had had
it. We looked for a campsite, riding through a brief downpour of hail
and rain, before settling on a grassy spot by the river. Our only
visitors that afternoon (we had chosen a well-concealed campsite to
avoid local interactions) were an old woman pilgrim, making her way to
the wooden monastery about a kilometer away, and an old yak herder, who
sat down in the vestibule of my tent and smiled a toothless smile,
saliva dribbling off the left corner of his mouth...touching, to be
sure. I curled up with The Brothers Karamazov, reading the most
didactic passages from it, "The Grand Inquisitor" and "From the Life of
Elder Zossima", such superb pieces of writing that I managed to forget
where I was until the dark forced me to light a candle to continue
reading...
The Road to Nagqu
After
the obligatory nighttime downpour, we climbed a pass to 4600m
(approximately 15,000 feet) where a group of Tibetan girls harassed me,
pulling at my tent poles, opening my bags, begging for money, and
finally throwing prayer papers in my face...A strange interaction, and
I was quite angry, but somehow it resolved itself peacefully and they
left with smiles on their faces. I wondered whether they would do the
same to Martin, who was an hour behind me, and indeed they did, almost
to the letter. It can be a real challenge sometimes, when you just want
to smile and keep to yourself, selectively choosing your interactions
with locals, but that isn't possible. Interactions are part of the
daily bread of the traveller, and they aren't always happy.
Nevertheless, I think that attitude has a huge part to play, and a
humble easygoing mindset will smooth almost (but not entirely)
everything.
We stopped that
evening in a mud-ridden dump for dinner. I inquired
as to a restaurant, but the guy running the place (a Han Chinese man
from Sichuan) said he was stepping out for a while, and that we should
wait. Of course, what this means is that you sit amongst a crowd of
children and grown men, poking and pulling at your bike, your bags,
your hairy arms, trying out their "hello"'s and "goodbye"'s, and so on.
Martin's patience had worn thin, on account of still being weak from
the previous day's illness, and it was not a moment too soon that the
man returned, cooking us up a big bowl each of yak meat noodle soup. I
managed to choke down a few pieces of yak, but mostly left it swimming
at the bottom of the bowl. The local drunk wandered in, and tried to
start a fight with nearly everyone, picking up a beer bottle at one
point, but he somehow never focused on us (which I was frankly
expecting), and his friends managed to hustle him out after 15 minutes.
Darkness was settling in, and the restauranty owner was insistent
that we stay across the street at a guesthouse. We were both skeptical,
but eventually the idea of a room to ourselves won us over and we
crossed the street to our nights lodgings.
This was a Tibetan house, and we dragged our luggage up a rickety
wooden ladder to the second floor, which was also dirt. There was no
light on, and we could barely see, stumbling on beer bottles (bad
sign). They settled us first in the room next to the ladder, and then
thought better of it and put us in a room farther on. The man rolled
out heavy blankets, and we slept on a raised platform that ran along
three of the walls of the room.
Or we tried to sleep. About an hour after we settled in, a light
went on in the next room (solar powered - it is very common to see
solar cells charging a truck battery by daylight to power a radio or
lights in the evening) and a few voices spoke in low tones. A rain
started, and as I was situated next to a glassless window, the rain
blew in on my face much of the night. The next room grew gradually
louder and louder, and eventually there was wrestling, beer, singing,
and drunken stumbles into our room. So much for a good nights' sleep.
The next morning, we got up, and I stepped over the half of a yak in
the middle of the room to get to the ladder. We had a noodle soup
breakfast across the street, and when the hungover guesthouse operator
got up, he asked us for 35Y each. This was an extraordinary amount of
money given what we had received in services. We bargained to 25Y
(about $3), and left him in disgust.
The rest of the morning was spent fighting deep mud to the county
seat of Dengqen. From here it was lots of up and down, descending
slightly less from each pass until eventually we were up on the
plateau, above 4000m.
On descending one pass, we came into a good-sized Tibetan village,
and stopped at the one Chinese restaurant in town. Immediately we were
surrounded by children (we later found that the school was next door).
They pressed in on us from all sides, barely allowing room to breathe,
and watching us after our food arrived. Martin was still not up to full
appetite yet, and he only wanted something small. I asked the
restaurateur for one normal and one small bowl of noodle soup. We
waited a while, watching children jostle each other for position next
to us, and watching the two groups of Tibetan men pretending to eat
(they were much more interested in watching us do nothing: Martin was
hanging his head and occassionally groaning), until the food came out.
I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the cook served us two of the
largest bowls of noodle soup I have ever seen - essentially two family
sized bowls. I began to giggle uncontrollably while Martin muttered "No
way, no way". I wolfed mine down, while Martin couldn't eat a bite. A
man ran out while I said I would make an attempt on Martin's soup, and
returned a while later with medicine for altitude sickness (this was
his educated guess as to what Martin was suffering from - not a bad
one, but not right). Every few minutes, the restaurant owner would
shout and hustle the kids and men out the door, but they were as
inexorable as the tide, and within 2 minutes had resumed their position
inside the room inches from our faces as I slurped noodles and Martin
shook his head in disbelief. It all ended well, with smiles all around,
minus the fact that they had played with Martin's gears, a common
occurance which eventually mangled part of his chain (only one of the
problems to beset Martin: his saddle rail and front rack both broke,
requiring an emergency welding job. Moral of the story: cycle with as
many steel components as you can in Tibet. Arcwelders are plentiful,
good bicycle shops nonexistent).
There was rain every day and night, until our final campsite, which
was a beauty: flat, grassy, next to a laughing stream, and noone
around. The night was clear and cold, slightly below freezing, but I
didn't grudge this: the stars, so long absent from my trip, came out in
full brightness, and Orion looked down on me for the first time in the
month I had been on the road.
The next morning the sun rose through the notch in the east end of
the valley we were camped in, and I cooked the last of my food while
the rays melted the frost off of my tent. We packed up, cycled up an
easy pass (but the highest so far, at 4705m) and rolled along a valley
past several roadside Tibetan tent restaurants (who gives them business
and how much business that is, I couldn't see, but it wasn't much), and
rolled down the final pass to Nagqu, the city I had been dreaming of
almost since Yushu. Stage One, Lanzhou to Nagqu, was finished.
That night, Martin fell ill with food poisoning. I don't know how I managed to escape, given that we had the same thing at the restaurant that afternoon, but somehow I did. He woke weak and unrested, and we struggled back into town in the cold morning. The town arose slowly, but by 10am, shops were opening and I was able to find my shop with doujiang and youtian. The place was unremarkable, looking like any other Chinese city, excepting the goats and yaks munching on the grass in the street medians. Martin was in no mood to eat, preferring to subsist on soda and crackers. I was wary of the police, but they passed us by several times, seemingly completely indifferent. We left town as the clouds lifted, with only a large brickworks casting a pall over the otherwise beautiful valley.
We climbed very slowly, and about 15km out of town, Martin had had
it. We looked for a campsite, riding through a brief downpour of hail
and rain, before settling on a grassy spot by the river. Our only
visitors that afternoon (we had chosen a well-concealed campsite to
avoid local interactions) were an old woman pilgrim, making her way to
the wooden monastery about a kilometer away, and an old yak herder, who
sat down in the vestibule of my tent and smiled a toothless smile,
saliva dribbling off the left corner of his mouth...touching, to be
sure. I curled up with The Brothers Karamazov, reading the most
didactic passages from it, "The Grand Inquisitor" and "From the Life of
Elder Zossima", such superb pieces of writing that I managed to forget
where I was until the dark forced me to light a candle to continue
reading...
The Road to Nagqu
After
the obligatory nighttime downpour, we climbed a pass to 4600m
(approximately 15,000 feet) where a group of Tibetan girls harassed me,
pulling at my tent poles, opening my bags, begging for money, and
finally throwing prayer papers in my face...A strange interaction, and
I was quite angry, but somehow it resolved itself peacefully and they
left with smiles on their faces. I wondered whether they would do the
same to Martin, who was an hour behind me, and indeed they did, almost
to the letter. It can be a real challenge sometimes, when you just want
to smile and keep to yourself, selectively choosing your interactions
with locals, but that isn't possible. Interactions are part of the
daily bread of the traveller, and they aren't always happy.
Nevertheless, I think that attitude has a huge part to play, and a
humble easygoing mindset will smooth almost (but not entirely)
everything.
We stopped that
evening in a mud-ridden dump for dinner. I inquired
as to a restaurant, but the guy running the place (a Han Chinese man
from Sichuan) said he was stepping out for a while, and that we should
wait. Of course, what this means is that you sit amongst a crowd of
children and grown men, poking and pulling at your bike, your bags,
your hairy arms, trying out their "hello"'s and "goodbye"'s, and so on.
Martin's patience had worn thin, on account of still being weak from
the previous day's illness, and it was not a moment too soon that the
man returned, cooking us up a big bowl each of yak meat noodle soup. I
managed to choke down a few pieces of yak, but mostly left it swimming
at the bottom of the bowl. The local drunk wandered in, and tried to
start a fight with nearly everyone, picking up a beer bottle at one
point, but he somehow never focused on us (which I was frankly
expecting), and his friends managed to hustle him out after 15 minutes.
Darkness was settling in, and the restauranty owner was insistent
that we stay across the street at a guesthouse. We were both skeptical,
but eventually the idea of a room to ourselves won us over and we
crossed the street to our nights lodgings.
This was a Tibetan house, and we dragged our luggage up a rickety
wooden ladder to the second floor, which was also dirt. There was no
light on, and we could barely see, stumbling on beer bottles (bad
sign). They settled us first in the room next to the ladder, and then
thought better of it and put us in a room farther on. The man rolled
out heavy blankets, and we slept on a raised platform that ran along
three of the walls of the room.
Or we tried to sleep. About an hour after we settled in, a light
went on in the next room (solar powered - it is very common to see
solar cells charging a truck battery by daylight to power a radio or
lights in the evening) and a few voices spoke in low tones. A rain
started, and as I was situated next to a glassless window, the rain
blew in on my face much of the night. The next room grew gradually
louder and louder, and eventually there was wrestling, beer, singing,
and drunken stumbles into our room. So much for a good nights' sleep.
The next morning, we got up, and I stepped over the half of a yak in
the middle of the room to get to the ladder. We had a noodle soup
breakfast across the street, and when the hungover guesthouse operator
got up, he asked us for 35Y each. This was an extraordinary amount of
money given what we had received in services. We bargained to 25Y
(about $3), and left him in disgust.
The rest of the morning was spent fighting deep mud to the county
seat of Dengqen. From here it was lots of up and down, descending
slightly less from each pass until eventually we were up on the
plateau, above 4000m.
On descending one pass, we came into a good-sized Tibetan village,
and stopped at the one Chinese restaurant in town. Immediately we were
surrounded by children (we later found that the school was next door).
They pressed in on us from all sides, barely allowing room to breathe,
and watching us after our food arrived. Martin was still not up to full
appetite yet, and he only wanted something small. I asked the
restaurateur for one normal and one small bowl of noodle soup. We
waited a while, watching children jostle each other for position next
to us, and watching the two groups of Tibetan men pretending to eat
(they were much more interested in watching us do nothing: Martin was
hanging his head and occassionally groaning), until the food came out.
I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the cook served us two of the
largest bowls of noodle soup I have ever seen - essentially two family
sized bowls. I began to giggle uncontrollably while Martin muttered "No
way, no way". I wolfed mine down, while Martin couldn't eat a bite. A
man ran out while I said I would make an attempt on Martin's soup, and
returned a while later with medicine for altitude sickness (this was
his educated guess as to what Martin was suffering from - not a bad
one, but not right). Every few minutes, the restaurant owner would
shout and hustle the kids and men out the door, but they were as
inexorable as the tide, and within 2 minutes had resumed their position
inside the room inches from our faces as I slurped noodles and Martin
shook his head in disbelief. It all ended well, with smiles all around,
minus the fact that they had played with Martin's gears, a common
occurance which eventually mangled part of his chain (only one of the
problems to beset Martin: his saddle rail and front rack both broke,
requiring an emergency welding job. Moral of the story: cycle with as
many steel components as you can in Tibet. Arcwelders are plentiful,
good bicycle shops nonexistent).
There was rain every day and night, until our final campsite, which
was a beauty: flat, grassy, next to a laughing stream, and noone
around. The night was clear and cold, slightly below freezing, but I
didn't grudge this: the stars, so long absent from my trip, came out in
full brightness, and Orion looked down on me for the first time in the
month I had been on the road.
The next morning the sun rose through the notch in the east end of
the valley we were camped in, and I cooked the last of my food while
the rays melted the frost off of my tent. We packed up, cycled up an
easy pass (but the highest so far, at 4705m) and rolled along a valley
past several roadside Tibetan tent restaurants (who gives them business
and how much business that is, I couldn't see, but it wasn't much), and
rolled down the final pass to Nagqu, the city I had been dreaming of
almost since Yushu. Stage One, Lanzhou to Nagqu, was finished.
After the obligatory nighttime downpour, we climbed a pass to 4600m (approximately 15,000 feet) where a group of Tibetan girls harassed me, pulling at my tent poles, opening my bags, begging for money, and finally throwing prayer papers in my face...A strange interaction, and I was quite angry, but somehow it resolved itself peacefully and they left with smiles on their faces. I wondered whether they would do the same to Martin, who was an hour behind me, and indeed they did, almost to the letter. It can be a real challenge sometimes, when you just want to smile and keep to yourself, selectively choosing your interactions with locals, but that isn't possible. Interactions are part of the daily bread of the traveller, and they aren't always happy. Nevertheless, I think that attitude has a huge part to play, and a humble easygoing mindset will smooth almost (but not entirely) everything.
We stopped that
evening in a mud-ridden dump for dinner. I inquired
as to a restaurant, but the guy running the place (a Han Chinese man
from Sichuan) said he was stepping out for a while, and that we should
wait. Of course, what this means is that you sit amongst a crowd of
children and grown men, poking and pulling at your bike, your bags,
your hairy arms, trying out their "hello"'s and "goodbye"'s, and so on.
Martin's patience had worn thin, on account of still being weak from
the previous day's illness, and it was not a moment too soon that the
man returned, cooking us up a big bowl each of yak meat noodle soup. I
managed to choke down a few pieces of yak, but mostly left it swimming
at the bottom of the bowl. The local drunk wandered in, and tried to
start a fight with nearly everyone, picking up a beer bottle at one
point, but he somehow never focused on us (which I was frankly
expecting), and his friends managed to hustle him out after 15 minutes.
Darkness was settling in, and the restauranty owner was insistent that we stay across the street at a guesthouse. We were both skeptical, but eventually the idea of a room to ourselves won us over and we crossed the street to our nights lodgings.
This was a Tibetan house, and we dragged our luggage up a rickety wooden ladder to the second floor, which was also dirt. There was no light on, and we could barely see, stumbling on beer bottles (bad sign). They settled us first in the room next to the ladder, and then thought better of it and put us in a room farther on. The man rolled out heavy blankets, and we slept on a raised platform that ran along three of the walls of the room.
Or we tried to sleep. About an hour after we settled in, a light went on in the next room (solar powered - it is very common to see solar cells charging a truck battery by daylight to power a radio or lights in the evening) and a few voices spoke in low tones. A rain started, and as I was situated next to a glassless window, the rain blew in on my face much of the night. The next room grew gradually louder and louder, and eventually there was wrestling, beer, singing, and drunken stumbles into our room. So much for a good nights' sleep.
The next morning, we got up, and I stepped over the half of a yak in the middle of the room to get to the ladder. We had a noodle soup breakfast across the street, and when the hungover guesthouse operator got up, he asked us for 35Y each. This was an extraordinary amount of money given what we had received in services. We bargained to 25Y (about $3), and left him in disgust.
The rest of the morning was spent fighting deep mud to the county seat of Dengqen. From here it was lots of up and down, descending slightly less from each pass until eventually we were up on the plateau, above 4000m.
On descending one pass, we came into a good-sized Tibetan village,
and stopped at the one Chinese restaurant in town. Immediately we were
surrounded by children (we later found that the school was next door).
They pressed in on us from all sides, barely allowing room to breathe,
and watching us after our food arrived. Martin was still not up to full
appetite yet, and he only wanted something small. I asked the
restaurateur for one normal and one small bowl of noodle soup. We
waited a while, watching children jostle each other for position next
to us, and watching the two groups of Tibetan men pretending to eat
(they were much more interested in watching us do nothing: Martin was
hanging his head and occassionally groaning), until the food came out.
I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the cook served us two of the
largest bowls of noodle soup I have ever seen - essentially two family
sized bowls. I began to giggle uncontrollably while Martin muttered "No
way, no way". I wolfed mine down, while Martin couldn't eat a bite. A
man ran out while I said I would make an attempt on Martin's soup, and
returned a while later with medicine for altitude sickness (this was
his educated guess as to what Martin was suffering from - not a bad
one, but not right). Every few minutes, the restaurant owner would
shout and hustle the kids and men out the door, but they were as
inexorable as the tide, and within 2 minutes had resumed their position
inside the room inches from our faces as I slurped noodles and Martin
shook his head in disbelief. It all ended well, with smiles all around,
minus the fact that they had played with Martin's gears, a common
occurance which eventually mangled part of his chain (only one of the
problems to beset Martin: his saddle rail and front rack both broke,
requiring an emergency welding job. Moral of the story: cycle with as
many steel components as you can in Tibet. Arcwelders are plentiful,
good bicycle shops nonexistent).
There was rain every day and night, until our final campsite, which was a beauty: flat, grassy, next to a laughing stream, and noone around. The night was clear and cold, slightly below freezing, but I didn't grudge this: the stars, so long absent from my trip, came out in full brightness, and Orion looked down on me for the first time in the month I had been on the road.
The next morning the sun rose through the notch in the east end of the valley we were camped in, and I cooked the last of my food while the rays melted the frost off of my tent. We packed up, cycled up an easy pass (but the highest so far, at 4705m) and rolled along a valley past several roadside Tibetan tent restaurants (who gives them business and how much business that is, I couldn't see, but it wasn't much), and rolled down the final pass to Nagqu, the city I had been dreaming of almost since Yushu. Stage One, Lanzhou to Nagqu, was finished.