The Northern Route to Gertse

Nagqu: Bright Lights, Big City?

I had been waiting for Nagqu for quite a while, and it only took on bigger proportions after mine and Martin's illnesses. Martin had been here only 6 months ago, when he was riding across Tibet from north to south on the Golmud-Lhasa highway. At that time, he told me, it had been a little bit like paradise: a chance to get out of the cold (northern Tibet in January is a chilly place). It promised to be the biggest city I would see on the long three month route between Lanzhou and Hotan. Martin warned that it was not, actually a paradise, but it wasn't either. He was trying to tread the line between lifting my spirits and raising them too high, only to be smashed upon the ugly rocks of reality.

From a distance, it looked huge: mind you, this is one month after leaving anything of any size. I rolled down the hill into town in anticipation of a hot shower, good food, easy living. The first bad sign was the fact that the road remained unpaved all the way to the edge of the city, and when we finally made it onto the concrete road, it was covered with dirt, yaks were still wandering around, people were digging clay out of the ground and laying it along the roadside in largist bricks for drying. There was a derelict gas station with broken glass, some Tibetan squatters living in it and goats roaming the space between the pump islands. There were older half finished construction projects which looked to have ground to a halt, next to newer more ambitious developments. I thought to myself, Shit, this is what I've been waiting for? Martin, striking an upbeat tone, said simply, "Well, its ambitious". The wind blew grit in my face, along with exhaust and coal dust. This was shaping up to be a letdown.

Martin had stayed in a 200Y room last winter, in desperation for a heater. We were in no such similar straights (the wind was chilly, but the sun was out and it was in the 60s F), so we poked our heads into several hotels, looking for a room for a decent price. There was a concrete monstrousity on a main corner we passed by, overdone, called the "Grasslands Telecom Hotel" (so named because it was an adjunct facility of the large shining China Telecom office next door). I walked into the lobby, checked out the room rates, and turned around: the cheapest room was 180Y, and if you wanted the presidential suite, you would part with 3500Y (roughly $400) per night. This staggered me: who on earth would pay that kind of money to stay in Nagqu? Mind you, this is China, not New York. There was a full compliment of Land Cruisers in the courtyard, and several well-heeled visitors were making for the hotel restaurant as I walked past, grimy, in cut-off shorts, and sporting a two week beard. Hopefully I put them off from their meal.

We checked out several other places, and anything under 180Y had no shower. We came across a hotel with a simple room for 50Y (about $6), and I thought we could do better, so tired and cold we roamed the streets, not finding anything better. After another 45 minutes, I suggested we throw in the towel and go back to that place, which we did. They took us to the farthest room, up three flights of stairs. It was a typical experience: a red hallway carpet, threadbare with concrete tiles underneath shifting as you walked on it, exposed wiring, hanging lightbulbs, half of which were burned out, and a room with two beds, two chairs, a table, and a large TV. There was actually a bathroom en suite, but without running water (the hotel had none) it didn't do us much good. The woman left us in the room, after we parted with our money, and we collapsed on the beds, admiring the stained peeling wallpaper, the grotesque carpet, and the stink of a thousand cigarettes soaked into everything. We would have collapsed right there, but hunger motivated us back out the door, where we had a mediocre meal at a nearby restaurant.

The public shower, however, was a real treat, and it took me a good 45 minutes of soaking and scrubbing to feel satisfied (I washed my laundry at the same time, the one set of clothes I had been wearing continuously for 15 days since Yushu, through mud and sun). We found an internet place ("wangba" in Chinese), checked a bit of mail and read the news (mostly depressing, of course). We walked back in the dark, no street lights, few headlamps, and broken pavement with holes that would drop you straight down to the city sewage system, such as it was.

On returning to the hotel, we poured over maps, considering our next move (to the west, yes, but which way?), and flicking on the television, watching the Tibetan TV channel for amusement(which was, unsurprisingly, almost entirely in Mandarin Chinese. I watched a news program, full of proud politicos extolling the progress Tibet is undergoing, all of them Han Chinese. Not even a token nod to the Tibetans in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.)

The next morning, traffic and sun woke us up early; our room was situated two floors above the main street in town, the road between Golmud and Lhasa. We wandered outside, past a large crowd of Tibetans seemingly just soaking up the sun on the west sidewalk, past a crowd of Hui Muslims hawking sheepskins from bicycles (20Y gets you a full sheepskin, enough for your car seat, I suppose, if you are fortunate enough to have one), and past a man butchering a yak just outside a fashionable men's clothing store, blood pooling on the sidewalk and the ribs of the deceased yak protruding into the air a good long way. There were groups of goats nosing through the metal garbage bins which were completely full of the waste of a small city (when I passed the spot later in the day, someone had emptied it, and the goats had moved on to better pickings down the street). This was a big town, no doubt, but there were still stores selling rolls of yak dung for the stoves that must be in most people's homes. A large marketplace housed dealers selling rugs, silk traders, tailors ready to whip up something authentic and Tibetan for a song (although as a lao wai - "white person" - you might pay quite a bit more), and various cheap Chinese clothes, watches, stationery, and so on - the same junk you find in 99 cent stores in the US, only for 5 cents instead.

The day was spent eating, cleaning and tuning bikes in the hotel parking lot (a dirt space sandwiched between the hotel and a cinder block wall, with two washing machines spewing dirty water into the gravel), and, in Martin's case, searching for a bank unsuccessfully (this is really unbelievable: I have never seen a Chinese town, let alone city, without a Bank of China, but thats Nagqu for you).

Leaving Nagqu: The Shortcut to the Northern Route

We left Nagqu on September 10 after huddling in a small cafe eating grilled potato waiting out a brief windy snowsqall. The north-south road that Nagqu lies on is highway 109 ("Yo Ling Jiu" in colloquial Chinese), and the major supply line for goods and transport into and out of Lhasa, about 400km to the south. The wind blows famously out of the south, which is painful for travel to Lhasa, but which made our first half-day very easy since we were heading north.

Along the highway to just to the west is the railroad to Lhasa, starting in Golmud in Qinghai province more than 1000km to the north. The railroad was considered "unfeasible" by Swiss engineers, having to cross a 5100m pass and permafrost conditions, but the Chinese went ahead on their own, and a few years later, they have made incredible progress. The track has been graded to Lhasa this summer, and rails and ties were laid at least to Nagqu. This will more tightly integrate Lhasa and Tibet into the Chinese domain, and will likely speed Han inmigration, certainly a contentious issue but equally as certain to progress apace.

The road was busy, with lots of truck traffic carrying goods southbound, presumeably much of it construction-related. The trucks were not all Dong Feng, the usual make in Tibet: there were Mitsubishi, Nissan, Mercedes, and a few other domestic heavy truck manufacturers well represented.

The road atlas we had indicated that the turnoff for the shortcut to the northern route was 52km north of Nagqu. I raced ahead, enjoying the tailwind and the sun. Unfortunately, the turnoff was 40km from Nagqu, and I wasn't paying attention. Martin tried to catch me, but didn't manage to do so until he found me scratching my head at the 55km mark, wondering where the turnoff could be. "It was back there about 15km" he said. Typical Jeff. So it was turn around, and pedal back into the wind till dark, camping almost within sight of the turnoff.

The next day we turned off onto a dirt road, and had a quick breakfast at a restaurant tent at the junction. It was a Hui restaurant, and we munched on binze (flatbread), and I had short conversation with the men in the tent. They mentioned there had been a Japanese cyclist coming through here 5 days before. I relayed this to Martin. He was visibly upset: we were to be the first to cycle the shortcut. Was it possible? He prodded me to get as much information as I could from the men, but there wasn't much more. To Ali? Yes. Are you sure? Yes.

We left, passing under a train trestle before heading up a sandy hill. A view of a lake to the south opened up, and the road spread out into countless parallel tracks. This is common in the north of Tibet, where there is essentially no road maintenance: truckers and 4WD vehicles merely chose the easiest path for them at the time, which varies with rain, streams, sand, rutting of tracks, and so on. A storm approached just as we came into site of another Hui restaurant, and we ducked into the warm room as snow began to spit. We ate noodles ("la mian") and munched on sunflower seeds ("guatze") while the wind rattled the door, receiving thumbs up and wishes of "the wind at your back" when we told them we were headed to Ali, over 1400km away.

After lunch we wandered across a muddy plain, following whichever path seemed easiest (sometimes none of them were), and camped just after a flat pass at 4800m. There was a stream there, which froze overnight. It seemed a bit early for such low temperatures, but we were high up, and gaining the southern edge of the Chang Tang ("Northern Plateau" in Tibetan), one of the largest expanses of uninhabited wilderness in the world.

The next morning we cycled on, passing a river crossing in which we enlisted the aid (well, it was more or less unsolicited, but we took it) of a few Tibetan kids, carting bicycles and luggages across two rickety metal poles tied together passing for a footbridge. At the other side, a man approached and asked where we were going. After the usual brief conversation, he suggested to me that we give the kids cigarettes as a payment of sorts. The children were no more than 10, two of them perhaps 6. I had no smokes on me (not surprisingly, since I don't smoke), and probably wouldn't have given them out even if I did. Couldn't shake that impulse that it wasn't a good idea to encourage 6-year olds to smoke.

We climbed a short very sandy hill, and another lake came into view. The eastern Changtang is dotted with lakes, most of them saline, which collect water from the surrounding low mountains during the summer rainy season. Since the plateau is rimmed by mountains all around, the water has nowhere to go, and sits, evaporating, collecting minerals, getting more saline. The color of the lake was a spectacular bright blue, against a faintly green shore and brownish hillsides. The road progressed to the west, past a few bridge construction sites, streams which are easy to ford in September, but a month before would have been difficult in a truck and nearly impossible on foot or with a bicycle (which amount to the same thing in a deep stream). Another small collection of 3 buildings signalled another Hui restaurant, this one doing a brisk trade in lamian and ganben, two Muslim Chinese specialties involving elastic dough stretched and slapped into noodles. And of course, the requisite binze bread, dipped into the delicious greasy broth. I asked if they had encountered a Japanese cyclist recently, and they said no, that in fact they hadn't seen a cyclist in the two years that they had been set up here. This was some relief to Martin, but I continued to hallucinate bicycle tracks, and joked with him that the phantom Japanese was just ahead of us. "Still, you are certainly the first Dane to ride this road". This comment was greeted with a wry smile, and something disparaging about Denmark. I had to laugh at this.

We crossed a large river, flowing down from a freshwater lake 20km away into the salt lake we were circling around; at the bridge was another cluster of buildings, a couple of shops and two Hui restaurants. Regrettably, we had just eaten so we passed on, climbing toward another low pass in the distance.

The landscape grew drier the next day, although there were salt lakes to the south and a river running at a lower elevation a few km from the road. We camped by a lake at the braided delta from a mid-sized stream, and watched a perfect sunset light up the lake, migratory birds passing overhead, and a view to an ice-capped 7100m mountain nearly 150km to the south, one that would be clearly visible from the Golmud highway running to Lhasa from Nagqu.

The next day was more of the same, drying grasslands and saline lakes, a very sandy road that made progress slow. Signs of bridge construction stopped, and the route became just well-worn tracks in the sand. We lunched with some Tibetans, after poking our heads into a mud building hoping for a shop. Martin had a Chinese brand soda, while I asked for tsampa. Three girls, bundled up in scarves poured tea for me, then fetched the barley flour. It was greatly amusing to them, watching a white face try to make dough out of a bowl that I felt was overfull: I knocked flour all over the dirt floor, amidst giggles. A large crew of men came in from collecting grass from the riverbanks for hay for their livestock in the winter, and had a good long look at us. Martin was of particular interest, since he's a pretty tall guy, and they each stood up next to him, one guy nearly equalling him. Martin asked "Khampa?" (the tall Tibetans from the southeast, a warrior caste). They laughed, and had a play on words: another guy called him "Tsampa", the dough I was trying slowly to work into a ball.

Afterwards, we climbed another hill, and eventually came to a fork in the road, one branch leading up into the hills to the northwest, the other turning nearly south. We checked the map and took the road to the north. We climbed up a pass, and camped in a small gulley just down from the top with salt encrusted rock along the trickle of a stream.

The next day we woke and cycled along a flat plateau, catching site of 14 chiru, an endangered species of Tibetan antelope. This was an exciting event, to see these animals roaming this far south and east: they were being hunted to dangerously low levels for their wool, the finest in the world, which is still poached and smuggled into Indian Kashmir and made into pashmina scarves which sell, illegally, for more than $12,000 sometimes. It takes up to 6 chiu for each scarf. This was good business until the Chinese took the threat to the animals seriously, and imposed a death penalty (this is China after all) for poaching them (there are rangers in the region which have shoot-to-kill authorization for poachers: the poachers are more than willing to shoot back).

We struggled down a sandy watershed, passing no vehicles in 2 hours and wondering if we were on the right track, until an ancient Land Cruiser creeped along the road past us, overloaded and bottoming out at every bump (and there were innumerable bumps). We were reassured, and an hour or two later, we rejoined a road coming up from the south, buying some candy at a small mud shop with three Tibetan men milling about in the dusty area in front, goats nosing through the trash (accumulated instant noodle bowls, primarily). The road carried on, heavily rutted, across a completely barren salt flat, stark mountains rising to the east, and a large lake running out to the west.

We left the lake shore, climbed a hill, and came upon a truck stop in a very forlorn looking valley. I arrived a couple of minutes ahead of Martin. It was a place with a few rooms for overnight stays, and a restaurant of sorts. I looked in, finding an old woman, and a pudgy woman roughly my age. A very large poster of Mao, with yellow and red rays emanating from his head like sunlight, was behind her on the wall: it seemed odd, seeing this in Tibet, when it was presumeably not required. Mao doesn't even seem like a good way to curry favor with the Chinese authorities, since some years back he was officially declared "60% right", an admission of the disastrous result of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. She scowled at me, unmoved by my smile. I asked if there was something to eat in Chinese. She responded with some sort of disdainful gesture originating at the hip, waving me away. I was hungry and thirsty, and not a little tired, so I smiled, told myself I hadn't been clear, and tried again. Same response. Martin rolled up. She looked uneasily at us. I told him she didn't look like she liked our kind.

"What?"

"She's waving me away when I ask about water or food."

I tried again. Nothing. "Well, that's that. I hope there's something not to far along..."

Martin was not happy with this. He muttered invectives at her, and I smiled as sweetly as I could, saying "Thanks...thanks alot" in English as I swung the bike around and headed back to the road. "Bitch" was all Martin could say about her.

"Maybe she was just scared of us..." I suggested.

"Not likely."

"Well, I guess she'll get her karmic desserts."

"I hope so..."

We travelled on, across an increasingly dry landscape, over another low pass, around a hill, to a village, populated by Tibetans. We stopped in at a house to ask for water: the same Mao poster decorated the wall of the main room, twice, and a third poster lionized the three leaders Mao, Deng Xiaopeng, and Jiang Zhemin. Again, I couldn't fathom why these would be displayed prominently in a Tibetan home, but the residents didn't speak Chinese. Two teenage boys poured us butter tea and offered a few momos, a generic Tibetan term for dumplings eaten as snacks. I despaired of finding anything that evening, but just as sunset was approaching, a large canvas tent appeared, and sure enough it was another Hui restaurant. The owner was a tall smiling man in a skullcap, from Xining, and the room was full of truckers from Xining driving diesel tankers to Ali. I asked how long it took to make the run from Xining to Ali.

"Six days." That was in a truck. It would be a fair bit longer for us...

We had lamian and binze, sucking down sweetened green tea while a Jackie Chan movie with a roller derby race set in San Francisco played on the TV. We posed for pictures with the truckers outside, bought some snacks, and headed out to camp. As we camped, a Tibetan on a motorbike rode up, watched me pitch my tent on the flat plain next to a lake with ducks, asked me where I was from, and then handed me an apple. Simple as that. He smiled, shook my hand, and rode off into the night.

We checked the map: somehow we had joined the main northern route, heading straight west from Amdo, without realizing it. It was about 500km to Gerze from here, where we expected a hotel, some recovery, a shower - the modern conveniences.

Onward to Nyima

The "Northern Route" - the easy handle we gave to the road running nearly straight west 1400km from Amdo on the Golmud highway to Ali in the far west of the Tibetan Autonomous Region - is not really a road, at least to the junction at Dong Tso. It is more a trail of sorts, a collection of tracks made arbitrarily by truckers seeking the most direct route to Gerze and Ali, the two main towns along the way. There is no official maintenance, no sign that the Tibetan Department of Roads and Transportation (or whatever agency might be responsible for road construction and upkeep) has any role to play in its existence. This is not a major problem: the road skirts the southern edge of the Changtang, and is nearly completely flat, following a string of long (80km or more) valleys separated by low passes, slowly climbing higher, to an average altitude somewhere around 4600m. The place is surprisingly well populated by chiu, and by another relatively common sight, the Tibetan wild ass, called kiangs. Pikas dart from holes constantly, standing watch like prairie dogs, warning the others in the warren of holes and burrows before running off a few meters further away. Vultures and birds of prey sit on rocks as you approach, until they suddenly spread their wings and lift off slowly into the vast skies. There was a fair amount of traffic (meaning perhaps one or two trucks per hour), generally fuel trucks hauling diesel for the construction sites out to the west in Ali, a Chinese boomtown near the Indian Kashmir border. These sent up huge plumes of dust visible from more than 10km away, giving us some idea of the route the road followed. More than once we saw trucks mired in mud or deep sand, drivers scratching their heads, getting out the shovels that they all travel with, trying to dig out. All the trucks travelled in pairs, or perhaps convoys of 3 or 4, with cables to pull each other out of tough spots: if you get stuck or break down here, you will be waiting for a long time while your partner goes for help, perhaps 2 days away. Snapped cables and burnt truck tires were apparent every so often, or coils of wire, left over steel belting from the tires after the rubber was gone.

The way is marked with Hui restaurants, separated by 70 to 100km of nothing, catering to the truckers, who are nearly exclusively Chinese Muslims from Qinghai province, driving from Xining or Golmud. Our second day on the road, we crossed the only significant river the whole length of the road, and stopped a few km out to eat cookies. A diesel tanker truck with Hui drivers stopped and sat down to have a talk. These were great guys, easy to talk with, getting a bunch of plasters for me after seeing a cut on my palm from a fall earlier that morning. They were from Golmud, making the run to Gerze and back. I asked how long it took.

"Six days round trip."

"And then you rest in Golmud?"

"For one day, then it's back out on the road."

"All year long?"

"All year long."

One day's rest a week, driving a miserable sandy road where you were sure to get stuck every once in a while, rain or shine, through the bitter cold winters. "How much do you make?"

"Around 30Y a day" - that is somewhat less than $4. Good money in China, but it didn't sound like much. "And you?"

Always that question, and never easy to answer. Do you tell the truth? Even a minimum wage job in the US sounds like an incredible sum of money in China, and a network engineer's salary is unfathomable. I settled on something like a first-year teacher's salary. "About $3000 a month."

They did the math. That came out to 25,000Y a month. They began exclaiming excitedly. "Yeah, but the US is expensive." This sounds lame, saying this and then knowing that you can travel here for a long time, while they can't save enough for a washing machine, or something similar folks in the US often take as a complete neccessity: a private car, perhaps. I explained how much a meal is, a hotel is, and so on. They sort of got the picture, but still figured out that you can save a comparatively huge amount of money even on a relatively low salary in the US.

No matter, we were friends. They asked me what I thought about the war in Iraq. I decided "bad" wasn't illustrative enough. I flipped through my phrasebook and picked out "disaster". They nodded in agreement. They were Muslim, if only nominally, and regardless of this, nearly noone in China could possibly be an advocate of the war. I explained that it had been my experience that Muslims were probably the friendliest and most generous people I had met in my travels, which was no exaggeration: I meant that. This prompted them to ask if I was a Muslim. "Well, no..."

"No matter. As-salaam aleikum."

"Wa-aleikum as-salaam" I replied. Big smiles. We shook hands and they drove off.

We saw occasionally large numbers of chiu, herds up to 40, which Martin filmed on his video camera and plotted with a GPS, thinking it might be of use to George Schaller, the eminent chiu biologist and Changtang expert. I just watched and thought they were magnificent creatures, and it was encouraging that they were recovering, wandering south and so close to a fairly major road. They were usually skittish, but occasionally I was able to get to within perhaps 150m of the group, getting a good look at their brown wool and white underbellies.

One night we camped by a lakeshore, falling asleep to gulls on the muddy flat, looking at chiu tracks everywhere. The next morning, we broke camp and headed back to the road, watching two Land Cruisers rolling to the east, emblazoned with some logo that made Martin think it was an expedition. He rushed ahead, and the trucks stopped. They were Chinese from Chengdu in Sichuan, members of the "Leopard Cross-Country Club". They sprouted all kinds of electronic gadgets as we approached: video cameras, a tripod, a boom mic, digital and film SLR cameras. They were much more deluxe than we. I expected they would speak English, but they spoke none, leaving Martin out of the conversation. They were on a two-month tour, swinging back toward home in Sichuan province after driving the southern road in the east to Lhasa, visiting Mt Everest (Qomolangma Feng in Chinese), then progressing to Kailas and the ancient ruins of the Guge kingdom in the west near Ali, before wrapping around and taking the northern route back and then the road we had followed from Yushu to Nagqu in the reverse and home. We discussed road conditions a bit, although the experience of a Land Cruiser and a bicycle can be quite different: what is difficult for one can be relatively easy for the other. They offered us cigarettes, a time honored Chinese tradition (you will never meet a Chinese who doesn't offer you a smoke after a minute or two), and then pulled out some power bar-type biscuits for us to take along the road. We posed for pictures, having been filmed during the conversation (oh my miserable Chinese!), shook hands, and went our separate ways.

"I knew they would give us power bars," Martin said with a smile.

Nyima Zhen

Nyima was a half day from the lake and the Leopard Cross Country Club encounter. We had high hopes: after 8 days of travelling along a sandy road, being coated with dust each time a truck passed, I was ready to rinse off, maybe buy a piece of chocolate, something like that.

We arrived just ahead of a dark storm closing in from both sides. There was ample construction going on on the outskirts of town: a large building, four or five stories high was going up. Nevertheless, the town appeared to be a dustblown collection of hovels. "What a rathole" was Martin's assessment as we approached. We ducked out of the wind into the first Hui restaurant we found (I was becoming adept at locating the crescent moon on the restaurant signs) and had noodles, the Hui specialty. A young boy of about 10 served us. An even younger girl, related somehow, swept and mopped the floor. A woman, the wife of the proprietor, cooked the meal. The man of the house sat and smoked and made small talk with us. We talked about child labor (in English amongst ourselves...) and the easy privileged lives that both of us had led as children, going to school, playing in the woods, living carefree. These two, like so many other children we had seen, were put to work, a sort of capital investment for their families. And of course, maddeningly, the man did no work, unless gladhanding customers is considered work.

Nyima looked bad, holding no promise, a new building on the outskirts and a concrete bridge to distinguish it from any other town in northwestern Tibet. We were ready to leave, but I saw from the bridge something largish poking out from a hill.

"What's that?"

"Don't know, can't see. Let's have a look."

We cycled down the dirt road, some large building came into view, and then we rolled up an earthen ramp onto a concrete street, turning left and looking at a huge construction zone. We cycled past shops stocked with urban goodies, a clothing store, a covered market with women hawking vegetables and fruit. A garish white building was in the finishing stages of construction, and a city square with an ampitheater and large government buildings was nearly done. It was all empty, predictably, but obviously some planner somewhere had big ideas for this place. It was the county seat for a district that stretched all the way to the Kunlun Mountains on the Xinjiang border, across the Changtang, 300 miles or more away. The workers were all Han: the Tibetans looked dazed in amongst all the gleaming white buildings. At least stylistically they were being finished with a Tibetan aesthetic.

The last shop before leaving the area, and directly across from a foreboding army base surrounded by razor wire and looked over by a panopticon guard tower, had a yellow sign with a very familiar looking clown smiling down at me. Ronald McDonald, in his silly yellow suit and shock of red hair, was pointing at the store from above. Martin went in and bought a few things, while I sat outside, chuckled ironically, and snapped a picture of a snot-nosed Tibetan urchin practically in rags standing underneath the capitalist icon. After Martin came out, I mused aloud whether if I alerted McDonalds, Inc. to this egregious violation of copyright, brand recognition, and intellectual property, the long arm of the legal department of McDonalds would descend upon this scofflaw and smite him from his dusty shop in nowhere, Tibet.

We hadn't contemplated really staying in Nyima, since Gerze was only 5 days further on, but Martin wanted to check for a wangba (internet cafe). I asked around, and was directed vaguely back in the direction of the McDonalds shop, which didn't seem right. The man I was talking to hailed a young man in a black leather coat and stylish sunglasses. The man came over and said in English "How can I help you?"

I told him I was looking for an internet cafe. He said there wasn't really a functioning one in Nyima, but he had a connection in his room.

"In your room?"

"Yes, I'm an engineer working on this construction project."

He lived in a room provided by the army inside the base. We passed the gate (not guarded) and walked through a courtyard to his room, a south facing room in a concrete one-storey block, with a glassed in walkway used as a corridor between the various rooms. It was pleasantly warm and there was an attempt, partially successful, to grow flowers in a pot inside the glassed in area. The room itself was very spartan, with two simple beds, some rolls of blueprints, and 4 orange hardhats hanging from pegs. He pulled out a newish IBM Thinkpad, turned it on, and turned it over to Martin. "Go ahead," he said cheerily. The connection was some sort of satellite broadband, something I had not expected to find in Nyima, certainly.

While Martin sent a quick message, we had a conversation, half English, half Chinese (his English was about as good as my Chinese, perhaps a bit better, but we filled the gaps in each other's language capabilities by alternating tongues). He got out good candy and poured green tea.

"So what are you doing here?" I asked.

"I am an engineer, a - what is it - building engineer?"

"Structural engineer?" I suggested in english.

"Yes, yes, structural engineer. I am here with my company for 3 years. We are building a new town."

That much was apparent. I asked what he was responsible for.

"The Nyima Hotel - the large white building on this side of the street. If you were here 3 weeks later, you could be one of the first guests."

"How many rooms will it have?"

"One hundred. Very nice rooms."

One hundred rooms. Nyima probably had a population of 1000, tops. "Who is funding this? The Tibetan provincial government?" I was curious whose harebrained scheme this was.

"No, it is privately funded."

"The whole thing?" This sounded very improbable, or else completely reckless investment: how in the world would you get any return on investment, unless the term on the load was 5 decades?

"Yes, the whole thing. I am also here to help. I like my work very much."

"To help - with the project?"

"No, no, to help the local people."

Something philanthropic? Charity? "You mean to learn to be engineers?" I figured that wasn't the case.

"No, mostly to learn the Chinese language."

"But the workers I saw, they aren't locals"

"No, they are all from Hebei and Anhui province - you know these?"

"Yes." They are Chinese provinces in the middle part of the east coast, not as prosperous as Beijing, Canton, or Shanghai, but certainly a lot better off than Tibet. "Why aren't there Tibetans working on the project?"

He paused. "They don't seem...interested. They don't want to work."

I wasn't sure about that. A skilled laborer from the east could expect to make about 40Y per day, a very large sum of money to a Tibetan. "They don't want to, or they don't get hired?"

"Well, they have to tend their livestock, sheep and yaks, so they don't have time. There aren't enough people." And yet they were building a grand town square and a 100-room fancy hotel.

I changed the subject. "What do you teach them then? Math? Physics?"

"No, no, just Chinese language. But the older ones aren't interested. The children are OK, though."

"Maybe you should read 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed'."

"What is that?"

"Nothing. It was a joke."

He smiled nervously, and laughed a small laugh. I felt like a jerk making fun of this genuine young man. "How old are you?"

He was 28, and had come here straight out of university after getting a job at China National Oil and Construction Company. If this was a privately funded project, it was surely a politically connected firm securing a bad loan from a politically connected bank. I asked about oil. "Is there oil here, then?" That could explain the investment, if prospects for oil extraction were promising in the Changtang. The Chinese are very keen to develop natural resources in Tibet, and particularly oil, anywhere in China: national energy consumption demand is growing at more than 10% a year, which will become a major economic, and strategic, concern for China in the very near future.

"No, no oil. It is just an investment."

I switched places with Martin, sending a quick email to friends and family: "Hi, I'm in Nyima. Its a ridiculous place." Martin continued my line of questioning, albeit with more attention paid to numbers and statistics: his quantitative mind was rolling.

M: How much investment?

H(his name was Hao, "good" in Chinese): 8 million yuan (approximately 1 million US dollars).

M: How long was the total project time?

H: 5 years from planning to finish - the project ends in November and I go home.

M: How many workers are here?

H: About 300, plus 5 engineers?

M: How will the money be recovered?

H: We will rent the apartments, a private company will take over the hotel, paying rent to the company as landlord, and the local government will rent office space for their functions.

That was capitalism for you: even in the US, municipalities usually own the property and the buildings in which they house their various agencies and departments. Here in communist China, the government played tenant to a large oil and construction consortium.

"I have a pet wolf," he offered, apropos of nothing after Martin's questions petered out.

A pet wolf. OK, I wouldn't mind seeing that, if its on a chain. He went to get the key to the gate behind which the wolf was held. This took some time, since it was a military area. The sign next to the gate said in Chinese "Please put out your cigarettes. No lighters".

"Why the sign?" I asked.

"This building is the place where they keep the guns. You probably shouldn't come in here - why don't you wait outside."

Sage advice, since I was a foreigner on a Chinese military base, and there was a guard tower manned by a guy with a gun behind me. I kept a good distance from the weapons cache.

He brought out the wolf. It was young, pretty far from fully grown, and had a bad limp. I wondered if he had found it lame.

"No, the local people attacked it one night. They hate wolves. So now I don't take it for walks in the street."

The local Tibetans knew wolves to be predators killing sheep, so they had reason to be distrustful. I found it pretty fantastic that they had snuck onto an army base and stoned the wolf cub. It was about 7 months old, he guessed, and he had kept it for 6 months, after he found it alone and starving on a drive in the area.

Martin was completely overtaken by a desire to pet it. Hao wasn't too keen on this, but Martin eventually worked up the wolf's confidence and petted it cautiously. Martin was definitely an animal lover: he cooed and called to every mangy kitten or cat we saw in Tibet. After this episode, I asked if he was excited to go home to Beijing.

"Yes, I can't wait to see my wife."

"Your wife?!? When was the last time you saw her."

"I saw her about 2 years ago. It has been a long time."

No kidding. You get out of school, get married, and 3 weeks later ship out to Nyima for 3 years. I wished him good luck, and thanked him for his kindness and patience. He indicated a hotel across the street: "You can stay there if you like. I can't keep you on the army base - they won't like that. It is simple, not like the Nyima Hotel." He said this last with a smile.

"That's OK, we're not picky."

The hotel was indeed basic, and expensive for what it was. It was run by a Sichuanese man and his younger cousin. The younger man sat in the room and registered us. I asked him how long he had been here.

"Two years."

"And you are, what, 21?"

"Twenty."

"How do you like it here?"

"It sucks." I could sympathize with that. I doubted I would have wanted to live there for 2 years, at the age of 21, or my current 31 for that matter.

We spent the night, shopped for some sundries in the morning, and headed for Gerze.

To Gerze: Gold in Them Thar Hills

Nyima to Gerze was about 350km, 5 days of cycling. The wind was relentlessly blowing from the west into our faces, driving sand and grit into my teeth, eyes, nostrils. The road also followed a puzzling route, wandering up valleys for reasons that were unclear to the layman. I felt like I was slowly gaining the knowledge of a civil engineer, having seen so many road construction sites, survey teams, markings on roadsides, heavy machinery grading roads and compressing roadbed, but I couldn't fathom the full picture. Martin was even more frustrated. Why were were climbing passes that didn't look neccessary?

What was more, the road atlas we had was misleading. Towns in bold characters, with dots in the center of the circle, turned out to be a hamlet of two buildings with nothing, so we couldn't count on shops or restaurants. We just bought a lot each time we came across something.

One night, we camped next to a town with a circle and a dot: it was a Hui restaurant tent and one mud brick Tibetan house. At 7am, somewhere well below freezing, a pair of Tibetan shepherds started tapping on Martin's tent, insistently. "I'm sleeping" Martin said. This didn't work: it encouraged them. I could hear the crunching of their feet on the gravel around his tent, checking out his bike, poking at his tent, fiddling with the zipper. "Please go away" This, too, to no effect. I had to suppress my laughter: he sounded unhappy. They persisted for 10 minutes at least, until he opened up the zipper, said "I'm sleeping again", made what I guessed was the universal hand-pillow gesture to indicate fatigue, and closed the door in their face. They came over to my tent. I tried Spanish: "Yo tengo sueno". They left a minute later.

Later that day we met a Japanese in a Land Cruiser, our first tourist encounter since Yushu. He was very enthusiastic. He topped his salt and pepper hair with a black baseball cap with the Tibetan character for Tibet, "Zang", embroidered on the front.

"Wow! On a bicycle! Great, great! Let me get a picture." We posed. "Where from? How long? Where to? Great great!" This guy was nuts. I asked him if he was heading to Kailas, a standard destination for tourists. "Naw," he said dismissively, "I've been there 4 times already".

His guide got out of the vehicle. He was a young, smooth faced Tibetan in baggy jeans and a North Face copy jacket. He said hi and asked where we were heading.

"Ali and Kailas."

He barely waited for an answer before asking if I was American. Yes, I said.

"America is great. I want to go there. I got a passport from the Chinese authorities after waiting 5 years. Now I have to get the visa for US and I will go. Can you help me?"

I said I had no connections in either the State Department, the Embassy in Beijing, or the Immigration section of the Department of Justice. He turned to Martin and began gushing about the United States.

"I'm from Denmark" Martin said, midsentence.

He was unfazed, and carried on for another 5 minutes, not even allowing us to get a word in edgewise. The Japanese rescued us by asking us to cycle toward him so he could take a picture. He took two, with two different camera bodies. He jumped back into the Land Cruiser, and wished us luck, with an emphatic thumbs up, before speeding off. We looked on jealously: the road was impossibly sandy. We had to push long stretches up the pass.

The next day, sometime after a second pass, we came upon a place that was busy with traffic. It looked like construction traffic. I felt encouraged, that there would be a restaurant, something. I followed a truck up a hill, past what I figured was the onward road. My stomach was driving. At the top of the climb, 3km later, I was looking at an enormous mountain of earth, and a steady stream of water trucks. It didn't make sense: it couldn't be a bridge - this was much too large.

Martin trudged up the hill, frowning. "The turnoff was down there, about 3km back" he said in a low frustrated voice.

I cheerily responded "Yeah, sure, I knew that, but there's bound to be a restaurant up here."

We rode further up the hill, past workers' tents. I asked about a restaurant: "Sure, there'e one about 4km away." This killed Martin. They offered tea. "No thanks," then to Martin, "Let's get to that restaurant."

The hill continued, and Martin grumbled. I asked another group, working on a bulldozer, how far the restaurant was. It was still 4 or 5km. "Forget it, lets just get water from those other guys and head on to Dong Tso". This was the next settlement on the map, hopefully replete with restaurants and shops.

I asked what this site was. "A bridge?"

"No, no. Its a taojin".

I didn't know that word. They made a symbol for jewelry. "Ah, its a gold mine." This sparked Martin's curiousity.

We rolled back down to the other workers' tent and asked for water.

"Come in, come in" one young Hui cried. They sat us down for tea, then mantou, then potato soup. The tent filled up with Hui men, all very friendly, all from Qinghai.

I asked about the mine. "How big is it? How much gold do you get out every year?"

"About 600kg". That was probably 20-25 million dollars worth.

"And how much are the workers - like yourselves - paid?" I was no longer shy to ask this question, since it was always asked of me.

"30Y per day. We work for 6 months and go home." At 6 days a week, that was about $650 dollars.

The elder statesman in the group offered that the mine was discovered by an Englishman about 100 years ago. Martin began throwing out names of British explorers: he was very well-read about the Changtang and the various explorations, past and present, into the region. None rung a bell, but he speculated afterwards. "It must have been Rawlings." Could have been: I didn't know.

The younger guys began to filter out, but not before forcing 5 more huge mantous on us, assuring us it was a long way to food. An older man set himself up for a saline drip. "For altitude," he told me, seeing my curious and slightly alarmed look.

We left, feeling warm and very interested by the mine. Martin vowed to research it when he got home. A very strong wind blasted us the rest of the afternoon, and we had to make a cold river crossing, removing our boots and going barefoot, but just as night fell, we saw a group of buildings: Dong Tso. Telephone poles joined our road from the south - this was the junction heading down to the main road to Lhasa, hundreds of km away. And finally, in the last light of dusk, the green flag of the Hui, snapping loudly in the wind, signaled a warm place for dinner.

Rest in Gerze

We camped in Dong Tso village, basically an amalgam of truckstops, shops, and one largish building that contained a school and some administrative offices. We headed out to camp, passing the local pack of feral dogs, which kept us up much of the night barking and howling. After breakfast at the restaurant from the night before, we headed west, on a road which was maintained to the usual degree: throw some dirt into the worst of the potholes, and build the occasional culvert over the washes coming down from the hills nearby. There was no cessation in the wind, and we battled it all day, with Gerze coming into view towards sunset. Knowing full well we wouldn't find a decent hotel, we just stopped early and camped 5km from town, to save something in the neighborhood of 50Y and to get a good night's sleep, which is not always possible in the cheaper hotels.

The next morning we cycled into town, freezing in the cold headwind. The place was large - in a west Tibetan sense - with a corporation yard piled several meters high with sacks of cement. There was an extensive array of greenhouses for growing vegetables in the harsh climate, and a large selection of truck repair shops at the east end of town. We selected a cozy Hui restaurant for breakfast and then rolled up onto the concrete streets of the town to look for a hotel.

After asking some day laborers where there might be a cheap hotel, we were directed to a typical courtyard-type truckers hostel. The place looked good, but didn't have a room for two, only dorm beds. From prior experience, Martin didn't have any desire to sleep with several curious truckers who would likely keep us up all night drinking or playing cards, so we decided to look elsewhere. A "real" hotel was a few hundred meters away, so we decided to have a look.

Hotels have gotten considerably more expensive in China: there was a time a few years ago when you could get a nice room with a shower for $3-4. Nowadays, you are looking at 80Y ($10), and you probably don't get a shower with that. The place had a restaurant attached, and there was a main building and two outbuildings which contained the cheap rooms. "Cheap" meant 45Y for a dark room with a lumpy bed and a stove that burned animal dung for heat. This was expected, so we took the room after working hard to get the reception to get up off of the couch and unlock a door for us, unloaded our stuff, and went to look for the public bath.

The shower was gloriously hot, almost too hot, and we took a long time at it, washing clothes and dust off our bodies, emerging feeling like new people. We got some lunch, found an internet cafe, and returned to the hotel. I asked the attendant, a teenaged girl, for the key to the room. She came over eventually and fiddled with the lock, trying several keys unsuccessfully. She got out a cell phone and called the head attendant, who was out and about somewhere, and got the advice that she should break into the room. So that is what happened: two girls forcing a window and crawling through the transom into the room. The lock was hopeless. So for 45Y each, we had a room we had to break into...We sighed, hung out our clothes to dry, and went shopping for the various things we might want for the next part of the trip.

We returned towards dark, and gazed at maps for a while, coming up with a few alternate routes across the Transhimalaya ranges to the south. When it got too dark to see the maps outside, we went into the room, thinking to continue this for a bit and then go out for a bite. The light didn't work. I went to the reception across the dirt yard from our luxurious suite and asked if we might have some light. The girl there (she was perhaps 17) sighed, and made a call on her cellphone to the room attendant who was no more than 50m away (the joys of modern convenience). This took three tries, during which time it would have been very simple to walk over to her room and explain the situation. But never mind...she answered the call eventually, upset at being interrupted from the finale of the Chinese season of "Star Search", and, loudly complaining at having to work, came over to have a look.

Yes, the light doesn't work, she says. I know that, thats obvious, can I get another bulb? I say. Well, no, but I'll give you a candle. Martin stepped in here and berated her in English. She got the message, and offered the empty adjacent room, with its light a-glowing, to us. So we moved, she left, everyone was happy. We made to leave for dinner, turned off the light switch, and...nothing happened. The contacts were broken, so we left the light on. After dinner at a Sichuanese restaurant, we came back, got into bed, and I unscrewed the light bulb to turn out the light.