List of equipment, list of things to do, list of lists. I had an unending list of tasks that I needed to do before I took off for China, buying a water filter, tools, building my bike, on and on. As my departure date I chose April 1, 1994. The seasons in Tibet had determined the date. Much later I would learn that there would be many things on this trip that would remain out of my control.
Returning to China
My Dragon Air flight landed in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in the People’s Republic of China. This region of Yunnan Province borders both Burma and India. The PRC has a law stating that foreigners cannot possess private vehicles. Whenever I have inquired at Chinese Consulates I have always gotten different answers as to if a bicycle constitutes a private vehicle. I had packed my mountain bike in a small cardboard box. The idea that Chinese custom officials would not let me into the country with a bike worried me. When I pushed my cart up to the customs counter, the official asked me in Chinese what I had. I replied, in Chinese, “This box is my bike and that one has my clothes.” She waved me through without even inspecting my boxes. A feeling of relief calmed my nervous mind. I suddenly realized as I stood out on the street that I did not have any renminbi, Chinese currency. In my anxiousness to get through customs I had completely forgotten to change any money. I asked another American, whom I had met on the plane, to watch my baggage. When I ran back through customs, no one blinked an eye. I changed US$50, and ran back through the customs gate again. So much for my worries of strict Chinese officials.
My first hotel room tempered my immersion into China, it held both a hot shower and a color television. The next morning I woke up to a bouncy 12-hour bus ride to Dali. This marked the beginning of my mountain bike trip-the beginning of a trip from which I was not sure I would ever make it back alive. Dali is a great little town nestled between Erhai Lake the 13,000 foot [3963 meter] peaks of the Cangshan Mountains. It is a backpacker hangout in an area that is mostly inhabited by the Bai and Naxi hill tribes, two of the fifty-three ethnic minority groups in China. I listened to Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead sing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” while I relaxed in a small travelers’ cafe. I spent most of the afternoon stuffing myself with tasty treats. I knew that this was one of the last places to enjoy any Western-style food or music for a while.
I had a beautiful day to start, brilliant sunshine and snow-covered mountains surrounded me. Nothing compares to riding a bike in the sun while looking up at snow-capped peaks, that was why I traveled halfway around the world. I knew that the first part of the ride would be straightforward, but I would rapidly cross the border into the part of China restricted from foreigners. This line moved back and forth all the time. During Chinese crackdowns in Tibet, security would be tight in all the Tibetan border areas. For the last few months I had been hearing that things had loosened up in Tibet. That news sounded good to me. Most of my entire trip ran through an area totally closed to foreigners.
My first Chinese checkpoint came quickly. A large red and white turnpike blocked the road, and a few Chinese policemen talked among themselves in front of the guardpost. I decided to keep pedaling. I approached the turnpike and pushed my bike under it. With a quick glance back, I saw a guard holding an automatic weapon across his chest. Things seemed pretty cool, no one yelling at me, just a “nihao” (‘hello’ in Chinese). I had been baked by the hot sun for most of the day. I needed drinking water. I took my chances and stopped to chat with the checkpoint guards. They were a group of young guys from Beijing, with one gun and one hat between all of them. They would hand the gun and hat to the next guy whenever the soldier on duty wanted a break. Like most policemen stationed in Western China, the work bored these guys out of their skulls. My presence meant entertainment for them. While they asked me a few questions about where I came from, I heard a video game somewhere in the back room. After investigation, I found a group of guards playing a game from Hong Kong, called “Contra.” In this brutal game Rambo-style heroes get to fight head to head against the video images of Nicaraguan Sandinista forces. Sometimes I am so far from the USA, sometimes I never leave.
Signs of Tibet
The hardest part of a long uphill on a bike is not knowing how much more remains. The great thing about cycling in a Tibetan area is that prayer flags always wave in the wind marking the top of passes. I climbed my first real pass, 10,500 feet [3200 meters], an entire day of cycling uphill. When I saw the small colored flags that release prayers as they blow in the wind, I knew I had returned to Tibet! The Tibetan prayer flags or “wind-horses” came from the pre-Buddhist practices of Bonpo, the folk religion of Tibet. Each of the flags is imprinted with images and prayers meant to purify the wind and please the gods. This pass signaled what would be the first of countless days of climbing. By the end of the trip I had succeeded in climbing 160,000 vertical feet [48,700 meters] of uphill, almost six times the height of Mt. Everest. This marked the beginning of the climb into what makes up the eastern edge of the Himalaya. Some of the great rivers of Asia flowed through the valleys of this area. The Mekong finds it way south to Vietnam, the Yangtze east to Shanghai, and the Brahmaputra cuts southwest into India.
Zhongdian sits on the southwestern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The town consists of a mix of ugly Communist Chinese concrete buildings and old adobe Tibetan houses. Since it is the county seat, there are a large number of Chinese government buildings and Chinese workers in the town. I have often wondered who could design such hideous concrete cube-shaped buildings, which seem to set the architectural standard for the PRC. Up until just six months earlier this area had never officially been open to foreigners.
After my arrival in town, I learned that the one and only backpacker hangout was a little place called the “Lhasa Cafe,” which was run by a young Naxi and Tibetan woman named Lama. A wonderfully energetic and intelligent woman. By herself, she created and managed this hip cafe. Lama and I quickly became friends. She wanted to learn more English and I wanted to learn more Chinese. We both had roughly the same level of language skills, respectively. During one of our many conversations, I mentioned the English word “capitalist,” which she did not understand. I looked up the word in my Chinese/English dictionary and showed the characters to Lama. When she spotted the Chinese definition she reacted rather adversely to the word and the concept. I instantly realized that this was the result of years of Chinese propaganda. When I asked Lama if she thought she was a “capitalist,” she flatly refused that she had anything to do with being a “capitalist.” I asked her a bit about how she actually ran her business. She told me that she rented the building from the government bus depot, for about 300 yuan (US$60) a month. She also paid both her mother and another woman to help with the cooking. I asked her what would happen if she could not pay the monthly building rent, and she replied, “I would be kicked out.” This all sounded to me to be a purely capitalistic enterprise, but Lama did not want to be identified as being a “capitalist.” After a lengthy discussion, Lama started to understand the true meaning of capitalism. Since Dung Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1980’s, China has been in a rather strange state. Officially it is a Marxist Communist country, but in certain areas limited capitalist enterprises are allowed to operate.
Another result of the changes in China was the disco operating next to the Lhasa Cafe. I had seen large numbers of discos in the bigger towns and cities all over China. I had never actually ventured inside of one of these discos before, but I had heard plenty of stories from other foreigners who had lived in China. Lama told me that she went over to the disco every couple nights when they played the “BananaRama” music video. I think I disappointed her a little when I informed her that I had never heard of “BananaRama.” So, when her friend came running over to announce that the “BananaRama” video was about to go on, she invited me to dance with her. One of the few things that I knew about Chinese discos is that most of the time women dance with women and men dance with men.