Over the course of the previous couple days, I had been hearing rumors about other Westerners also riding mountain bikes to Lhasa. When I stopped and talked to the road construction workers, they would ask me if I was riding with the other foreigners whom they had seen. When I inquired, I heard that they rode from two days to ten days ahead of me. Every now and then I would spot some tracks on the road that looked to have come from another mountain bike. Once I knew that someone else might be out there making the same trip that I was attempting, everything seemed different. I wondered if there was someone else crazy enough to attempt this same journey. The idea of meeting other Western cyclists intrigued me, but I also felt hesitant to give up the comfort of solo travel.
I had heard that Zogong was a safe place to stop for a rest, no problems with the police. It appeared to be a town of a few thousand people, which meant I could eat well and resupply. By the time I arrived in town, my stomach ached from the lack of food. The day’s riding had worn me down to the bone. I stopped at the first place that looked like it served a reasonable meal of rice, noodles or vegetables. Peering in through the window I spotted a couple of cooked chickens and a few bowls overflowing with fresh vegetables. Once I got off my bike, half the kids in town decided that I was going to be their entertainment for the afternoon. Whether I was waiting for my food to be cooked or eating, I was without a doubt the most popular attraction in town. Certainly other foreigners had visited the town before but most likely not more than a dozen or so a year, with few ever spending more than a couple minutes.
Later in the evening I noticed a black chalkboard sign advertising a video at 7 P.M. It was just outside a small room containing a VCR and a color TV with a few beat up wooden benches for people to sit on, a third world movie theater. It sounded good to me. I could use a little brain-dead entertainment. It turned out to be some kind of shoot’em up blow’em up movie, where a motorcycle gang tried to assassinate a US Supreme Court justice- an American movie that had been copied a few dozen times and dubbed into Chinese played on the VCR with the volume turned up to “11”. The film tried to imitate a Schwarzenegger/Rambo-style movie, but failed. The audience consisted of mostly young Tibetan men and a few Chinese guys. During the middle of the movie a young man asked me if the images came from my country. I answered with a reluctant “yes”, not taking the time to explain that this film did not actually portray normal life in the USA. It embarrassed me to have any kind of association with what I saw in the video. When the movie ended, I walked out to the street. I looked up to see the jagged peaks that I had just descended from, silhouetted in front of the round disk of a full moon. This was Tibet, land of extremes.
This trip was about extremes, about extremes of thought, extremes of feelings, extremes of physical effort and extremes of the environment around me. One day I would be baking in the heat of the sun, the next day snow would be freezing in my beard. One day I would be happy as can be, on top of the world, the next I would be scared, depressed and wondering why I was doing the trip. One day I would be strong as can be and climb the mountain passes as if nothing could ever get in my way. The next I was weak, slow, and I would fall asleep lying in the dirt on the side of the road.
Someone to Ride With
Bamda is a insignificant truck-stop at the intersection of the main road to Lhasa and the road coming down from Northeastern Tibet. I moved slowly that day. Most of the night before I had been up vomiting onto the frozen ground just outside my tent. I could use a decent meal and a bed. When I pulled up, a young Tibetan boy said something about another Westerner in the hotel. Three weeks had passed since I started riding. I had not spoken English in a while. I was anxious to talk with another Westerner. Andrew had started out on this trip three and half years earlier. He had given himself five years to cycle around the world. From his home, Jasper Alberta, he had ridden down to Central America and South America. We spent the evening chatting about cycling and computers. We both set out the following morning on the road toward Lhasa. It was a different experience to ride with someone. Experiences were influenced by and filtered through someone else’s consciousness. It was no longer just me moving through the world. When I spent my days alone I didn’t have someone to reflect ideas and thoughts off of. Just my own observations and my own ideas filled my mind.
I had heard a warning earlier in the journey that the toughest checkpoint between Markam and Lhasa blocked the road just after Bamda. The former Lhasa policeman said that after the famous “72-Bends,” a descent of seventy-two switchbacks, there would be a tunnel through solid rock guarded by a Chinese soldier with a large gun. He said that at this place most foreigners who were headed toward Lhasa were turned back. After the exhilarating two-hour descent down to the river, Andrew and I spotted the guard’s living quarters just before a bridge that crossed the water where the road continued into a tunnel through solid beige colored rock. The river ran far too wide and deep to get across. We both knew that the bridge represented the only way across.
We decided to take our chances, and just try to ride across the bridge. Another building blocked our view of the guard post. Not until we were right on top of the guard did he spot us. About ten feet [3 meters] before the guard post we came into his line of sight. It was all just like I had been told, a soldier with a big gun guarded the bridge with a tunnel that went into solid rock. A heavy belt of extra bullets and other assorted weaponry hung around his thin waist. He held an solid black automatic weapon across his chest. By this point in the trip I possessed reasonable comprehension of Chinese. When the guard yelled, “ni qu nar?” (where are you going?) I knew exactly what he said. I just chose to ignore him. I waved my hand to indicate that we planned to head straight ahead, and kept on riding. He yelled again, “ni qu nar?” We rode on. Thoughts of bullets in the back of my skull raced through my mind. In another fifteen seconds we rode into the tunnel on the far side of the bridge. My mind moved to thoughts of an army jeep coming after us. I listened for the sounds of a jeep engine and kept pedaling hard. Nothing, no trucks, no jeeps, no gun shots, nothing, no one followed us. I kept riding at a strong pace. After another two hours passed I knew that they had no intention of chasing after us. During the next few hours we climbed up a small rocky canyon, regaining the altitude that we lost during the speedy ride down the “72-Bends.”
As part of my research for the trip, I compiled a list of all the main towns on my route. Next to each town I wrote notes as to if the police were rumored to be difficult or not, the remaining mileage to Lhasa or Kashgar, the availability of food. For Eastern Tibet most of my information had come from a friend who had walked the entire length of road from Southwestern China to Lhasa and then down to Kathmandu, Nepal. I had met Robert in the popular Yak Hotel of Lhasa in 1992. He was in the middle of a walking trip across Asia. A few years before, he had spent two and a half years walking from the southern tip of South America to Texas. He lived two and a half years of waking up every morning and walking all day long, then going to sleep and waking up the next day to push on northward. When I met him, I was headed to Kathmandu on a mountain bike and he was headed there on foot. We had a bit of an informal race to Kathmandu. He won, I never said I cycled quickly.