Suffering Along the Friendship Highway
October 20 - November 11, 2001
It was very pretty cycling down the Kyi Chu: farm villages and pretty houses, after I got out of the small industrial belt that the Chinese have created outside town. After 30 kilometres, I stopped to have a look at a small but historically significant temple beside the road. After all the huge monasteries of Lhasa, this one, Nethang, was a breath of fresh air. It�s quite a small chapel, so it can easily be seen quickly, and it had the feeling of an establishment that is quite vigourous and alive. Atisha, the great Buddhist scholar from the Vikramasila university in Bengal, came to Tibet in 1042 at the invitation of the king of Guge, the kingdom in Western Tibet near Mt. Kailash. Buddhism had more or less died out in Tibet by this time; it had never penetrated beyond the court and the nobility, since the common Tibetans stayed loyal to the indigenous Bon religion that pre-dated Buddhism. After the collapse of centralized authority in central Tibet, the early monasteries had more or less been abandoned, and the future of Buddhism looked bleak. Atisha, though, was a key figure in the Second Diffusion of Buddhism, spearheading the re-establishment of monasteries throughout the country. After a spell in Guge, Atisha moved to central Tibet and spent his last years living and teaching in Nethang, a monastery that he helped to found. He died at Nethang in 1054, and the chapel still contains his funeral chorten and his personal effects such as his begging bowl. I had a brief prowl around, then got back in the saddle, still dreaming of making it to Tsethang.
The riding was flat, fast and easy as far as the junction of the Kyi Chu with the Tsangpo at Chugyul. Unfortunately, pavement means broken spokes for me, and this was no exception; I spent an annoyed half hour beside the road fixing yet another popped spoke from the non-freewheel side of the back wheel. I crossed the Tsangpo on a bridge, and then, rather than follow the Friendship Highway by turning right, I turned left, heading east downstream along the Tsangpo, towards the Lhasa airport. The river valley is a desolate desert, with dramatic sand dunes and little habitation. The road is paved, but a howling headwind killed progress and any last hopes I still had of making Tsethang. Once I got past the airport, my progress seemed to slow to a crawl, and I eventually camped in a lovely grove of willows beside the Tsangpo, 33 kilometres past the airport after a day of 133 kilometres.
After a peaceful night�s sleep, I awoke to ice on the tent and took a while to warm up, break camp and head off. I might just as well not have bothered. I got a couple of flat tires immediately, and left my spare inner tubes and my water purification bottles behind, sitting beside the road. I didn�t realize this for a long time. I made it to my next monastery, Dranang, about 16 kilometres further on. Dranang was real highlight, with ancient wall murals from the 11th century. I loved the murals, so life-like and full of vigour and almost Western in inspiration, so much more artistically interesting than the flat, stereotypical, almost comic-book style of more recent times. The faces in the murals, depicting people worshipping the Buddha, are strangely European or Central Asian in appearance. The men have big noses and bushy beards and are going bald; the women have square faces and curved body postures that reminded me of the 7th century frescoes from Sigiriya (Sri Lanka) and Ajanta (India). My Tibet Handbook claims that the paintings are Byzantine in feeling, but they reminded me more of Giotto�s church frescoes: not much realistic perspective, and bodies that are curiously flat, but wonderfully detailed individual portraits of the faces. Pre-Raphaelite art in Tibet?
It was as I was leaving Dranang that the day took a turn for the worse. I decided to head further off the highway in pursuit of some ancient monumental burial mounds about 5 kilometres away. The track leading there was completely flooded and while trying to push my bike through a small lake, I ran over something and got another flat. I realized then that my spare tubes had been left behind and had an annoying hour beside the puddle, patching the tire while being watched by 25 Tibetans. The patch didn�t hold and I had to put on another one, to the great amusement of the mob. I abandoned thoughts of burial mounds, got out to the highway and set off back towards my abandoned spare inner tubes. Along the way I realized I had another slow leak, but I just kept pumping up the tire every few kilometers until I got back to the patiently waiting stuff. I replaced the flat, realized that my other spare had a puncture as well and began to wonder why the cycling gods were picking on me. I retraced the 16 km to the Dranang turnoff, passing a bunch of villagers threshing barley who must have wondered why I was spending the day riding back and forth along this stretch of road. I wondered the same thing. Battling headwinds until dark, I eventually camped in more willows only 38 km down the road from where I had started the day. I was annoyed at my own stupidity and at the endless spate of flat tires. I wrote, rather prophetically, that the only way the day could have been worse was for me to have been arrested.
The next morning, my departure was delayed by a marathon tire-patching session. I discovered the reason for my rash of flat tires, a species of shrub that dropped copious quantities of thorns everywhere. I used up no fewer than 9 patches fixing my back tire and both spares before finally rolling off through the inevitable headwinds to Tsethang. Tsethang was a dismal town, one of those instant Chinese concrete block cities that spring up out of nothing. The whole town was a construction zone, and the first hotel I found was the most expensive I saw in all of Tibet. The cheapest single was 888 yuan (US$107), the cheapest double was 1333 yuan (US$160), and the suites started at 2300 yuan (almost US$400). It seemed a bit much for a dusty provincial nothing town, so I looked elsewhere. I ended up paying 80 yuan ($10), still not a pittance in China, for a dismal room in a building without a toilet. I grumbled, then left my luggage and set off to explore the area.
Tsethang is at the mouth of the Yarlung Valley, the historic birthplace of the Tibetan nation. In mythology, this valley is where an ogress and a monkey mated, giving rise to six children, the ancestors of the ancient tribes of Tibet. More prosaically, the valley is where the first Tibetan kingdom arose, around the time of Christ. and was centred. For hundreds of years, the Yarlung kings held sway over the immediate surroundings of the valley, ruling from castles such as Yumbu Lagang, but in the 6th century they expanded to take over all of central Tibet, including the then-unimportant Lhasa area. Songtsen Gampo (617-650), the first king to embrace Buddhism, and the builder of the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, moved his capital to Lhasa but the dynasty continued to bury its dead in monumental tombs in the Yarlung Valley.
My plan was to spend a couple of days poking around the valley, visiting the tombs and the castle of Yumbu Lagang and some of the old monasteries in the area as well a huge complex of meditation caves, and then cross the Tsangpo to visit the oldest monastery in Tibet, Samye, and see the oldest surviving temple, Kachu. I was really looking forward to this visit. Of course, when I had asked the killjoys at the PSB (Public Security Bureau) in Lhasa, they had told me that all of these areas were closed to individual travelers, and that I would have to join a group, hire a jeep and driver, and generally do my bit to enrich the coffers of the glorious People�s Republic of China. They did say, though, that Tsethang was open to foreigners, and I knew that there were no police roadblocks in the area, so I figured that as long as I slept in Tsethang and not in Samye or at the monumental tombs at Chongye, I should be safe. After all, I had made it across 1400 km of closed territory to get to Lhasa, and a few little clandestine incursions should be easy. How little I knew.
I made it out to Yumbu Lagang fairly painlessly on a paved road (at least the bits that weren�t under construction were paved). The castle looks dramatic, perched atop a slender crag like an evil witch�s lair in a Disney cartoon. It was the cover illustration for an old edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Tibet, and I had always wanted to see it. It was very picturesque from below, although when some monks wandered out to gaze over the ramparts I could see that its apparent size was misleading: it�s a tiny little gingerbread castle, only 11 metres high and 15 metres long. It was nice to look at though, even if it�s only a recent reconstruction; the original building, probably the oldest building in Tibet, was leveled to the ground by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution.
The ride to Chongye was very pleasant. The Yarlung Valley is green, heavily irrigated and densely patchworked with farm fields. Unlike most of Tibet, the locals mostly ignored me, rather than following me around and/or throwing stones at me. The afternoon light was soft and brought out the subtle colours of the rocky cliffs of the valley wall. I rode through tiny villages of typical cubic Tibetan adobe houses, and passed under the ancient Rechung Phuk monastery, dug into the sides of a cliff and looking very much like a mysterious Eastern monastery should look. The little dirt paths I was following slowly petered out and disappeared into overflowing irrigation channels, and I eventually had to spend a long half hour hauling the bike through farm fields, over stone walls and wire fences and through the Yarlung River to regain the main road to Chongye. Chongye was a good 26 km south of Tsethang, and the sun was low in the sky by the time I got my first glimpse of the tombs in the distance from a rise just before Chongye. I seriously considered stopping there, taking a picture and racing back to Tsethang before it got dark, but I thought that I might as well have an up-close look at the tombs having come so far.
This was an error of judgment. I made it through the village of Chongye and was just approaching the first tomb, a huge mound of earth that looked like the top fifth of an Egyptian pyramid, when a motorcycle and sidecar pulled up alongside me. One look at the blue and white d�cor and the Chinese characters for PSB and I knew I was in trouble. �This town closed for foreigner. You are under arrest. Get in.� I tried to argue, but they weren�t in the mood. I got in the sidecar and one of the cops rode my bike into town. He was short and my bike has a big frame and a very high seat. Straddling the crossbar on the bumpy downhill must have been very, very uncomfortable for the cop, which was my one consolation as I was bundled into the PSB station. I was annoyed at myself for running a needless risk, at the Chinese for making up ridiculous rules to restrict freedom of movement, and at these cops for being the ones who arrested me. I was also worried: the fines imposed on cyclists for being where they�re not supposed to be can be huge (several hundred US dollars), and always involve a protracted and unpleasant bargaining and pleading session. I was also concerned that I might be sent back to Lhasa. After being kept waiting, I was finally given a little speech by the policeman who had arrested me. He kept repeating that I was in a closed area, and I kept offering to fix that problem by hopping on my bike and getting out of Chongye as quickly as possible, back to my overpriced hotel room in Tsethang. In a typically bureaucratic solution, though, I was required to spend the night in Chongye (where I wasn�t supposed to be, you�ll remember) in a hotel and return to Tsethang the next morning by bus. I held my breath: how much was the fine going to be? I kept waiting, and suddenly the harangue was over and I was being taken to the hotel, my wallet still intact. I had gotten off lightly!
That night was unpleasant. The only town in town put me up in a small room with a Tibetan roommate, with three more Tibetans in the room that opened onto mine. They stayed up until 1:00 am, smoking heavily and watching TV with the volume turned up to full blast. The cop who had arrested me came to visit later to see if I had any foreign stamps that he could add to his collection, and to get some pointers on his English, neither of which I was keen to give him. In the night my bike, which I had leaned against my bed, fell over and landed on my roommate. I was less than sympathetic. The next morning, bleary-eyed and still annoyed, I put my bike on top of a bus and climbed aboard well before dawn. I was the first person on, and at departure time only half the seats were full. I was surprised. Of course, the bus left 40 minutes late, by which time the bus was as crowded as only a Third World bus can be, with the worldly possessions of a large family going on pilgrimage occupying the aisle to a depth of a metre and a half. My only consolation was that I hadn�t had to ride my bike back to Tsethang in the pitch black the night before.
Once bitten, twice shy. I decided to shelve all further plans for Yarlung exploration, abandon hope of visiting Samye (I had already been warned that the PSB checked travel permits pretty thoroughly there) and head as quickly as possible for the Friendship Highway. The next time I was arrested, I might not escape so painlessly. I cursed the Chinese for making it so hard for individual tourists to see the byways of Tibet; it�s not as though it�s a matter of sensitive border areas or protecting the local culture, it�s simply a means to force tourists to take expensive tours and extract as much money as possible out of them. The Chinese genius for making money has not been crushed by fifty years of Communism.
On the way out of town (after the obligatory tire-patching session: damn thorns!), I stopped by Trandruk monastery, one of the 12 demon-suppressing temples built by King Songtsen Gampo to pin down symbolically the demoness whose body overlay Tibet and who prevented the Jokhang from being completed. I had visited Katsal Gompa, which holds down her right shoulder, two weeks earlier on my last day into Lhasa. Trandruk, with an odd, old-fashioned layout like the contemporaneous Jokhang, holds down her left shoulder. It was a pleasant little temple, full of dark, mysterious chapels and decorated with faded frescoes, but the artistic highlights of the temple, according to my Tibet Handbook, was an old embroidered thanka banner which was missing, as were the oldest statues of the temple. I wondered whether they were under restoration (unlikely) had been taken away by the Chinese (not unlikely) or stolen to feed the international art black market.
I spent the day racing along, the previous days� headwinds now squarely in my back, and made 125 km after leaving at noon. The roadside was alive with scurrying hares and villagers threshing barley, and I felt much more positive about life that evening, secreted among riverside willow trees, than I had 24 hours earlier. Even discovering 3 more thorn holes in my tires didn�t dampen my mood.
The next day I enjoyed a marvelous act of thoughtfulness and generosity. Early in the day I was passed by a tourist agency Jeep which pulled over and flagged me down. The sole tourist on board was a kindly Dutch grandmother whom I had met in Tsethang very briefly. She wanted to know about my trip and we had a pleasant chat for a quarter of an hour or so before I got cold and had to start pedaling again. She sped off, but a couple of kilometers further along her jeep stopped again and I could see her waving something in the air. As I got closer I got more curious, then excited: it looked edible. It turned out to be more than merely edible. It was an enormous loaf of gevulde spekulaas, marzipan-stuffed spicy Dutch gingerbread. I nearly burst into tears. She had brought it all the way from the Netherlands, intending it either as a treat for herself or for a local, but was giving it to a grubby but ravenous Canadian cyclist. She kissed me on the cheeks, bade me good luck and left me to the spekulaas. Amazingly, I managed not to devour it all at once.
It turned out to be a life-saver since the toughest pass between Lhasa and Kathmandu lay ahead of me that day. I passed the Chugyul Bridge, rode off the end of the pavement and began a 23-kilometre, 1400-metre ascent to the Kamba La (4800 metres above sea level), zigzagging endlessly up a steep ridge separating the Tsangpo from the basin of Yamdrok Tso, the Scorpion Lake. Near the bottom I had my first rock-throwing kids for several weeks, but they were only about six years old and couldn�t make their rocks reach as far as me. Halfway up, on one of several spekulaas-munching breaks, I was passed by a pack of Argentinian mountain bikers on an organized tour, going the other way. I waved and shouted hello, but they were concentrating on their last big downhill and ignored me. The climb got steeper and steeper, and it was late afternoon before I got to the top and looked down on the lake. It was grey, cold and windy and the famed emerald colour of the lake was nowhere to be seen. I put on all my warm clothes and bumped down a few kilometres to the lakeshore. At 4408 metres of elevation, it�s a cold place even in the summer, and now, in late October, the late afternoon winds were bitter. I set up my tent, cooked a mess of noodles and collapsed into bed, utterly exhausted.
The next day it was tremendously cold (maybe �10 or �15) before the sun climbed over the mountains to warm me up. It was hard to motivate myself to get out of my warm sleeping bag, cook breakfast and get going. Because China is on one time zone over its entire landmass, the sun rises at about 8:20 at this time of year in Tibet and sets around 7:00, which had a strange psychological effect; I always looked at my odometer at 12:00 and got depressed at how few kilometres I�d done by then, thinking that it marked the halfway point of the day. In fact, it was rare that I got rolling before 12:00 and I usually rode until 5:30, so noon was more like a quarter of the way through the day, and I needn�t have worried so much that I wouldn�t get very far that day. The day spent rolling around the shore of Nam Tso was enjoyable, with lots of birds to look at: great crested grebes (reminiscent of Canadian loons), orange Brahminy ducks and a huge flock of mallards (more shades of Canada). The colours on the lake and on the barren hills behind it were beautiful; the white of freshly-fallen snow on the more distant hills, though, reminded me again that it was getting late in the year to be cycling. I had a great meal in the lakeside town of Nakartse, with the local Dickensian street urchins keeping their noses pressed up against the restaurant window to watch me eat, then left the lake behind and headed for another pass. In the distance I could see Samding Gompa, the only Tibetan monastery headed by a female monk, who could allegedly transform herself and her nuns into sows at will. I thought of making a sidetrip there, but I decided to try to make it to the foot of the next pass, the Karo La (5045 m) before dark. I headed up a deep, steep-sided gorge and camped beside a frozen river 16 kilometres below the pass. My stove absolutely refused to light that evening, and I went to bed cold and hungry.
I should have thought about things like sun exposure when I picked my campsite. My tent was in the shade when I woke up and stayed that way until I left, and the resulting cold was intense. I wasn�t carrying a thermometer, but it felt like �15 or maybe �20, with a brisk wind. I coaxed a reluctant dirty yellow flame out of the stove and managed to boil water for tea and milk for my cereal. I had to break a hole in the ice on the river, and my toes and fingers rapidly went numb as I squatted in one place cooking and pleading with the recalcitrant stove. As I sat there, I watched a steady stream of horse-drawn carts and put-putting tractors heading up the pass to collect dried yak dung for fuel. With the harvest safely in, it was time for the farmers to start laying in fuel supplies for the long cold winter ahead. Cold as I was, I couldn�t imagine living at this altitude in February, with only the feeble heat of a yak-patty fire to keep out the bone-chilling cold. I climbed gently up the valley to the pass, then descended equally gently down onto a wide, windy plateau, with a few snowflakes being driven into my face by the wind. On either side of the road there were 7000-metre-high peaks with fluted snow clinging to their summits like modern sculpture. I descended, very slowly, a desert valley, startling a beautiful fox who was trotting along the road, and circled a hydro reservoir before camping, out of the wind, inside the walls of a ruined house. My stove started working again, and I ate and slept well. My only worry was that there was supposed to be a police checkpoint a few kilometres ahead, in the village below the dam, and I wanted to do my usual slip-past-before-they�re awake routine early the next morning.
I made it safely through the checkpoint the next morning, but discovered from other travellers later that nobody had had their papers checked their, and that it was likely not manned anymore. Better safe than sorry, though, and it gave me an early start to race along a good dirt road to Gyantse, getting there before 10 o�clock. I spent the rest of the day poking around the sights of Gyantse, perhaps the least Sinified of the towns of Tibet. The spectacular step pyramid of the Gyantse Kumbum (an eight-story chorten) and the impressive ruins of Gyantse Dzong (the old fort) dominate the town, and the buildings in town are almost entirely Tibetan in style: cubic stone and adobe structures decorated with coats of whitewash and ochre paint. Gyantse was the main seat of power in Tibet from 1350-1500, and many of the old monuments date to that perieod. The Kumbum is crammed with dozens of tiny chapels with their walls covered with frescoes of literally thousands of copies of the main god worshipped in that chapel. It gets rather overwhelming after a while, no matter what the art-historical significance of the paintings. The view from the top level, though, is a great antidote, gazing out over the Gyantse plain, with the Dzong dominating the skyline and old neighbourhoods clustered about its foot.
Gyantse played a key role in the British invasion of Tibet in 1904. British forces, after camping for the bitter winter months just north of the Sikkim-Tibet border while trying to negotiate with the Dalai Lama on trade and border disputes, moved to Gyantse in the spring and halted there again. A series of battles between the British, a modern force armed with machine guns, and the ill-trained, ill-equipped Tibetans took place in and around the city, with the British capture of the fort the key blow to Tibetan resistance. The Chinese have turned the Dzong, like the Potala more impressive from afar than from close up, into a museum dedicated both to the memory of the Tibetans� �heroic defense of the Chinese motherland against the treacherous imperialism of the British� , and to the horrors of the old feudal system in place before the �peaceful liberation� of Tibet in 1950. The Chinese love dioramas, and various rooms were full of life-sized evil Tibetan aristocrats torturing the oppressed peasantry in The Bad Old Days, or of peasants rotting away in dungeons, or of the Tibetans bravely resisting the British. I would have thought that praising the Tibetans� bravery in a futile struggle against a powerful foreign invader might be a risky course for the Chinese authorities, in case the Tibetans wondered what the difference was between the British invasion of 1904 and the Chinese invasion of 1950. A book I read recently said that in parts of Tibet, the Chinese authorities blame the Younghusband Expedition of 1904 for the ruinous state of the monasteries destroyed by the Chinese since 1950s. It�s always handy to have a scapegoat for one�s own misdeeds. That evening, searching for batteries for my radio, I discovered how to get the best price out of a rapacious Chinese merchant: bargain with him while he�s busy gambling at mah-jongg and he will eventually give an only mildly extortionate price just to get you to go away and leave him to his game.
The road between Gyantse and Shigatse is infamous among cyclists as the most unfriendly stretch of road in Tibet, with bike tourists running a constant gantlet of kids trying to block the road and pelting cyclists with blizzards of rocks. Luckily the main road is now under construction, and the alternate route, on small roads along the river, is so far free from this curse of stone-throwing. I had a great day of cycling: for the first time in my life, I was able to do over 100 km in a day on dirt roads while fully loaded with luggage. The sun was shining, the river and its banks were full of birds
(gulls, goosanders, Brahminy ducks, laughing-thrushes and various waders). I picnicked beside the river, and even had time to go see Shalu monastery, an unusual temple topped with purely Chinese tiled roofs a few kilometres off the main road about 17 km before Shigatse. Its big attraction are more ancient frescoes, not as old as the ones at Nethang, but still impressive for their vigour and life. They are similar in style to the Newari art of the Kathmandu valley, not surprising since the Gyantse princes invited Nepali artists to come and work painting their chapels. I really liked the paintings, but two of the key rooms were locked and the monks could not be persuaded to find the keys so that I could see the paintings inside.
Shigatse, where I arrived at dusk, is the second city of Tibet, centred around the Tashilhumpo Monastery, another of the Great Six monasteries of the Gelugpa. Its head, the Panchen Lama, ranks second to the Dalai Lama, and historically there has been great rivalry, political intrigue and even warfare between the supporters of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas. The Panchen Lama at the time of the Chinese invasion chose to stay in Tibet rather than flee with the Dalai Lama, and was regarded as a collaborator by some Tibetans. It is his picture, rather than that of the Dalai Lama, that is allowed to hang on the walls of all the temples and monasteries of Tibet. I didn�t like Tashilhumpo, for the same reason I didn�t like the three big Gelugpa monasteries around Lhasa (Ganden, Sera and Drepung): it seems to be a tourist theme park more than a real, working monastery. The entrance price is steep (55 yuan, or over US$ 6) and most of the buildings are closed and locked once you�ve coughed up the cash and entered. Physically it�s impressive, with the requisite gold roofs and whitewashed chortens and huge buildings, but it seems hollow and false. I did enjoy the pilgrimage trail around the monastery walls, lined with prayer wheels and chortens and religiously-significant rocks and weary pilgrims sitting down to enjoy the view from the hillside.
Aside from that, Shigatse was a place to tackle bureaucracy. For 200 yuan, I got myself a travel permit to make my trip to Nepal legal. I had wondered whether it was worth it, but after my arrest in Chongye, I decided that being legal was a good idea, especially since I had heard that the road to the border was lined with new checkpoints. In the end, though, no-one ever looked at my magical piece of paper, and I could have saved myself 200 yean, which I could have spent on food. By this point, I was feeling physically worn down, low on energy, really skinny and suffering yet again from dysentery. I tried to eat as much as physically possible whenever I got to a town, but my system seemed unhappy with Chinese cooking and the idea seemed to backfire. I felt really drained and listless in Shigatse, and set off the next day still in intestinal distress.
The ride out of Shigatse was surprisingly flat; horse-drawn carts were still the vehicle of choice for local Tibetans. I went over a tiny pass, barely noticeable, then gently downhill and equally gently uphill. I had my two most annoying encounters of the trip with stone-throwing kids. One launched a rock at me from out of a crowd of adults threshing grain; they watched approvingly and did nothing to restrain the kid, whom I scared by giving chase on foot, waving my stick and throwing rocks back at him. The other kids, late in the afternoon, were with their parents, and they too didn�t seem to regard it as a bad thing that their kids were hurling rocks at me. From then until the Nepalese border I made it a point to brandish my stick ostentatiously whenever I saw kids gathered beside the road to convince them that it would be a bad idea to mess with me. It seems hostile and unfriendly, but it worked wonders, and there were very few stones actually thrown at me after that. The scenery was also dull, with no mountains to break the monotony, and the combination of the stone-throwing, the dysentery and the boring surroundings led me to write in my diary that �I have definitely lost interest in Tibet�get me out of here!� At least I found a wonderful camping spot, in a little ravine far from the enquiring and irritating locals.
The next day, Halloween, I made good time to the town of Sakya, 25 km off the main road but still on the main tourist trail for its historical significance. The Sakyapa sect of Buddhism and the princes of Sakya ruled Tibet from 1250-1350, and the Sakya patriarch even became the spiritual advisor to the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan (he of Xanadu fame). The Sakya monastery, or at least its southern half, is still in existence and is said to be a repository of priceless paintings and sculptures. I wouldn�t know, since I arrived in the mid-afternoon, after all the other tourists had wisely left town, and the monastery was firmly locked. It was yet another monastery maintained exclusively, it seemed, to milk tourist dollars from groups of foreigners. The town looked nice from a distance, with the houses painted a distinctive dark grey with vertical ochre and white, but up close it was dismal, the dirtiest, most depressing collection of hovels I saw in all of Tibet. Even the approach to town was grim, with hundreds of begging and would-be stone-throwing kids whom I warned off with my stick. I broke yet another spoke. My hotel was the worst of the trip (I was afraid to sleep in the bed) and I attracted a ragged mob of adults who stared at me for half an hour before I left to explore the town. The restaurant I ate in tried to overcharge me grossly, and as I walked around town another rabble, this time of schoolkids, followed me the whole way begging incessantly. I was not happy. I decided to abandon a plan to take a back road from Sakya to Everest Base Camp and to follow the main road to get there as quickly as possible.
The next day I raced back downhill to the Friendship Highway and on to Lhatse, where I rolled over my 10,000th kilometre of the trip. I commemorated with a celebratory meal of baozi (Chinese steamed dumplings), then left behind the city and its floating population of wild-looking nomads drifting aimlessly through the streets in search of excitement. Outside town I stopped at a checkpoint where they seemed surprised that I had bothered to stop, and with a cursory glance at my passport, they sent me on my way. The rest of the day was a scenically dull slog up a gloomy canyon. From this point on I was on a road I had travelled before, in a jeep in 1998 at the end of my bike trip to Mt. Kailash, but I can�t say I recognized anything. I was on my way up the highest pass yet, 5250 metres high and named one of the following: Byatso La, Jachor La, Maphu La or Lagpa La. (My guidebooks and maps couldn�t agree.) Whatever the name, it�s high and the climb up to it is another grunt: 20 kilometres of constant climbing. It took a little over 3 hours to reach the top, rather out of breath at the very top. The light at the top was lovely, and I took some pictures of my faithful Rocky Mountain Sherpa leaning against the tangle of Tibetan prayer flags adorning the top of the pass before I began to freeze solid and had to start moving again. The downhill was thoroughly disheartening, not improving my glum mood; the road was horribly rough, almost flat, and I had to pedal to keep moving downhill into a desert plain. Every pass since well before Lhasa had seen the scenery getting progressively drier and duller, from the semi-tropical rainforest near Bomi to this semi-Sahara. I found myself longing for greenness, for somewhere where life wasn�t such a struggle with the elements. I set up my tent beside the road, close to a road maintenance station that had clearly given up the struggle to carry out its duties, ate and fell asleep, tired from the day�s exertions at altitude.
I was now approaching the Mt. Everest region, and the next day, coming down another stretch of almost unrideable �road�, averaging 10 km/h downhill, I suddenly caught sight of a huge white pyramid on the horizon. It was my first glimpse of the highest point on Earth for several years, and it was a welcome reunion. After the uninspiring scenery of the past few days, it reinvigorated me to pedal harder and try to get to Everest Base Camp. I finally emerged from the long, dull canyon near the village of Shegar, where I popped onto a stretch of pavement which almost made up for the howling headwinds I had to pedal through. Rather than stay in an uninspiring little hotel in Shegar (itself an ugly blot on the landscape), I kept going, past a major checkpoint where the PSB cursorily checked my passport was but not my travel permit, and turned off the main road towards Everest Base Camp, my last �must-see� in Tibet. I camped in a howling wind close to the village of Tse and had to rescue my tent from blowing away as I tried to peg it down.
The next morning I had another pre-dawn departure, trying to avoid having to pay the 65 yuan road toll on the road to Base Camp. Sure enough, no-one was stirring at the checkpoint, and I set off to climb yet another huge pass, the Pang La (5250 m). It was 4 hours of switchbacks up a steep ridge. The road had just been rebuilt, and it was really a joy to cycle on such a smooth dirt road. I wondered why there were no tourist jeeps passing me, and found out afterwards that since the road wasn�t yet completed (a few short stretches on the Shegar side of the pass, and the entire other side of the pass, were still under construction). I ran out of steam after 18 km of steep climbing and barely made it to the top. The view, though, was ample compensation. In front of me were arrayed the giants of the Everest region: Everest itself, a huge triangle, with the black bulk of the ridge of Lhotse (4th highest peak in the world) just beside it and Makalu (#5) a little further to the left. To the right Cho Oyu (#6) rose above a tangle of ice ridges, and further away Shisha Pangma (#14) was just visible. The white of the mountains contrasted beautifully with the deep, deep blue of the cloudless sky. I had seen a mirror image of this scene 5 years before in Nepal, but somehow this seemed grander and more impressive because there were almost no intervening snow-capped peaks between me and Everest; the Himalayan giants rose abruptly from the dull khaki of the valleys below. I took picture after picture, reluctant to leave this beautiful lookout, before I finally headed downhill.
The road downhill wasn�t really a road; it was more of a labyrinth of intersecting segments of the old jeep track and the new, unfinished road. It was almost impossible to cycle at times, and I was glad to reach the bottom of the valley after several hard hours. I passed through the village of Pheruche, where the road forked: left to the Kangshung (east) Face of Everest, right to the North Face. I had originally planned to spend a week cycling to the end of the Kangshung Road and hiking to the rarely-visited Kangshung Base Camp, but I had heard that the killjoys of the PSB would be certain to arrest me if I showed up at the end of the road without a jeep, a guide and a group. Also, I was getting tired of being frozen solid every day, and it was a much shorter trip to the North Base Camp. I turned right and started pedalling into the worst headwinds I have ever encountered. I was on flat ground, the floor of the Dzakar Chu valley, on a reasonably smooth dirt road, but I couldn�t get going at more than 4 or 5 km/h since the wind constantly tried to blow me right back to Lhasa. The wind was like an animal, constantly clawing at me, trying to knock me down. I was never so glad to see a tiny trekking lodge as I was in the village of Passum. The village was tiny, as poor as any I saw in Tibet, with almost nothing to eat in the entire place, and my guesthouse was cold and dismal, but at least I was out of the wind, and I could see Everest looming on the horizon.
Cycling up the valley to Rongphuk Monastery the next day was hard. My body felt exhausted and it was the coldest morning yet, but the wind had died overnight and I forced myself uphill, along more not-yet-finished road, maintaining my enthusiasm by watching more and more of Everest appear in front of me, until suddenly I came to the top of a small rise and found myself next to a monastery and guesthouse. This was Rongphuk Monastery, at 4980 metres above sea level allegedly the highest monastery on earth. It was, of course, trashed during the Cultural Revolution and, while the buildings have been rebuilt, I didn�t see more than 5 or 6 monks there, a far cry from the 500 it once housed. I checked into the guesthouse and was surprised to find it full of tourists: where had they come from? Certainly almost no-one had passed me along the road. Chatting with a couple from Quebec, I discovered that there was a second jeep track leading to Everest Base Camp from Tingri, and that almost everyone had driven along this track. I spent the afternoon chatting, eating and generally relaxing, gazing up the valley at the vast bulk of Everest. From Rongphuk, the mountain looks far broader, bulkier and generally impressive than it does from the Nepalese side. The North East Ridge makes the left side of the peak disproportionately broad and flat, the peak has very little clutter of lower mountains around it, and the overall impression is of hugeness. I was happy just to look at it, leaving the short hike to Base Camp for the next day. After a few days of isolation, it was also nice to spend the evening talking to the other tourists, getting a fix of socializing.
I had toyed with the idea of hiking far up the Rongphuk Glacier, past Base Camp, to the impressive ice seracs between Camps I and II, but the next day the wind was ferocious again, and I contented myself with wandering up to Base Camp and meandering around on the moraines above it, chasing a herd of Himalayan tahr, or blue sheep, trying unsuccessfully to get a photo of a ram with his enormous curved horns silhouetted against Everest. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful break from the grim struggle of cycling, and reminded me of how important it was to get away from my bike from time to time, especially when I discovered that evening that I�d blown the sidewall out of my long-suffering Panaracer back tire and had to replace it.
The ride out from Ronphuk to Tingri was the hardest, most miserable ride of my entire Asian bike trip. It started innocently with a ride downhill to the turnoff away from the Shegar road along which I had come two days earlier. I then had to wade through a deep, cold, wide river. It took about twenty minutes to psyche myself up for the pain. I changed into my sandals to avoid soaking my boots, and then plunged in. The water was so cold it burned. I had to do two crossings because I couldn�t carry my bike and all my luggage in one go, and by the time I struggled ashore the second time I couldn�t feel my feet anymore. The rocks in the river were rimed with ice (the air temperature must have been �5 degrees or even colder) and it was a struggle to avoid slipping and falling into the thigh-deep water. I warmed up on the other bank as best I could by massaging my feet and doing jumping jacks and then set off up a narrow valley. I passed through the tiny village of Zangbo with the local village urchins trailing behind me as though I were the Pied Piper. The beginning of the uphill was easy, but I found myself running low on energy just as a gale started up in early afternoon. The rest of the way up the Lamna La was done on willpower alone, and the road was so rough and the gravel so loose that I ended up pushing my bike most of the way to the top. I was exhausted by the time I got to the top and sat down for the windiest picnic of my life, bundled up in all my layers and still cold. The downhill from the pass was rough, over gravelly terrain studded with big boulders. I looked for shelter for the wind to put up the tent and saw a sheep corral ahead. Unfortunately, it was already occupied by a nomad family, so I cycled further, and just as it was getting dark, I saw another corral ahead. It lay across the river, though, so I had another river crossing, and this time I foolishly plunged in in my boots, soaking them thoroughly. I camped on a carpet of sheep droppings, cooked some soup and noodles and collapsed into bed.
The next morning was the coldest of the trip; I would guess that a thermometer would have read �20 or even colder. The cold was cruel, and my boots, despite having slept with them inside my sleeping bag, were soon hard blocks of ice. Despite having a stone wall to shelter behind as I cooked, the Arctic wind worked its way through the gaps between the stones to chill me to the bones. The river had frozen overnight and it took some hammering with a heavy rock to open a hole to scoop out water. I boiled up some tea, made cereal, boiled another pot of water and left it sitting as I packed up the tent fiddled with the bike. When I returned to the water, it had already frozen to a depth of several centimeters. It was cold.
This was only a prelude to the cruelty ahead. As the jeep track descended the gravel desert of the valley, it crossed a series of streams, not on bridges but by plunging straight through them. At �20 degrees, fording rivers is no joke. The streams were frozen, but not so solid as to hold my weight, and I constantly broke through the ice into the frigid waters below. The jagged ice cut my legs, and my feet were completely frozen. I struggled to keep the bike from toppling over, and at one point, as I slipped on the ice, I dropped the bike right through the ice and soaked my luggage panniers thoroughly. It was an ever-increasing effort of the will to keep going: cold saps a person�s determination to survive. Finally I popped out into a village, got thorough lost, pushed my bike a couple of kilometres across country, and emerged on the track leading to Tingri.
Tingri is the centre of a huge, flat, desert plain, the largest flat expanse in central Tibet. The town is nothing special to look at, a cluster of stone houses around the base of a tiny hill, and a strip of guesthouses and restaurants along the Friendship Highway to serve the tourists, but it represented two important things to me: food and warmth. I settled into a cosy restaurant to eat bowl after bowl of stew, and filled a water bottle with boiling water to hold against my frozen, numb, swollen feet. It took two hours to restore anything near normal circulation to them, and even now, three months later, they�re very sensitive to cold and much faster to go numb than they were before Tingri. Eventually I tore myself away from the fire and the stew and headed for the Tsamda hot springs 10 km outside town.
There were no signs for the springs, and it took a long time to find them. When I got there I found a small guesthouse overflowing with Tibetan nomads around a filthy pool of hot water. The nomads had erected their tents in the courtyard of the guesthouse and were washing their dishes in the hot spring, which may account for the scummy appearance of the water, in which no-one was bathing. My arrival caused a sensation, and after the completely inebriated owner of the guesthouse had shown me to a room, every nomad in the place (and there must have been over one hundred) came to the room, opened the door and stood in the doorway to have a good stare at me. I leaned my bike against the door, and they moved to the window. I hung my tent groundsheet in front of the window and, frustrated, they began pounding on the door and trying to force the door open to look at me. I sulked in my room. Eventually, they got tired of this game and I peeked out the window to see that people were starting to move into the pool, and were even scooping debris off the surface of the water. I moved out and slipped into the blissfully warm water.
It seemed to be some sort of festival that had attracted such a crowd to the hot springs. The teenagers who made up much of the crowd were in their finest clothes: sheepskin cloaks, short swords and huge lapis lazuli earrings for the men; skirts, elaborately-woven aprons, huge silver belt-buckles that would have done a Hell�s Angel proud, and intricate plaited hairdos. A band struck up a gypsy-sounding tune on instruments resembling lutes, violins, drums and horns, and a crowd of girls began to dance in a circle, twirling half turns in each direction as they sang and shuffled slowly counterclockwise. The boys, meanwhile, lounged about, eyeing the girls and trying to look cool and unimpressed, looking like high school boys at a school dance. Meanwhile the old men were soaking in the springs, being served bottles of chang liquor by the older women. I sat there for an hour, soaking up warmth and the wonderful atmosphere (the sun had set, leaving the flickering glow of cooking fires to illuminate the dancing girls) until I felt deliciously warm and sleepy and my feet had stopped tingling. I wolfed down another three bowls of stew in the kitchen, then turned in early. The party went on all night, with singing and laughing, and when it got too cold to dance, everyone stripped naked and got into the hot springs. When I got up before dawn, the hot spring was still half-full of revelers from the night before. Someone came in to wake up my Tibetan roommate, but he was sleeping off several bottles of chang and was impossible to rouse.
I was now so close to Nepal I could almost taste the dal bhat and feel the warmth of the lowlands. I figured that with two hard days of cycling, I could get over the last pass and get to the border and escape from the cold and the annoyances of Tibet. The first day was relatively easy, 50 fairly flat kilometres to the last guesthouse before the pass, with a long, leisurely lunch break in a friendly restaurant. On the wall was a poster of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, the Holy Trinity of Chinese Communism, all with haloes and rays of light streaming from their heads. A more overt hagiography of these leaders would be hard to imagine. In the restaurant at the guesthouse that afternoon I asked for food and the women who ran the place looked surprised. Food? They hunted around in the kitchen and found some instant noodles, my dietary staple for the past two months and, quite frankly, not very nutritious, filling or satisfying. I asked if they had anything else. More prolonged searching turned up two eggs. Was there anything else? They found a lettuce several weeks past its prime. I ordered all three items fried up together, and sat down amazed at how little food there really is in Tibet. I looked around the restaurant, full of locals playing mah jong. They only ordered tea from the restaurant, carrying their own bags of tsampa (roasted barley flour) to dip into the tea, knead into little balls and eat.
I left the next morning in the dark, hoping to make it all the way over the pass and to the border. It was, of course, bitterly cold, and my hands were soon frozen, through my mitts, from the cold of the metal of my handlebars. My feet didn�t feel too great either, but soon enough I emerged from the narrow canyon I had followed all the way from Tingri and saw the gentle rise of the Lalung La ahead of me. There was a turnoff to the right to go to the base camp of Shisha Pangma, and I had originally planned to take a day and cycle there, but rumours of checkpoints along the road, along with my hunger and cold, made me abandon that plan and head uphill. It was 13 km uphill to the top of the pass at 5124 metres elevation, but it was so flat at the top that it would have been hard to tell where the summit was except for the prayer flags. A brief downhill to a bridge and a road maintenance station, then a final 7 km climb to the last pass, the Yarle Shung La (5200 m). Again it was gentle, and the scenery was so absorbing that I hardly noticed I was climbing. Ahead of me rose the Rolwaling Himalayas, but the real attraction was to the right where the isolated, broad massif of Shisha Pangma (8012 m) towered over the brown grass of the plain, dotted with thousands of sheep. It seemed incongruous that at such a huge elevation, at such a late season, there would still be nomads grazing their flocks (or riding their bikes, for that matter!) I snapped numerous pictures of the mountain, one of the most imposing mountains I�ve ever seen, ranking up with Kilimanjaro, Mustagh Ata, Fuji and Nanga Parbat. And suddenly, painlessly, I was at the top of the pass, looking down towards the Nepal border.
It�s one of the strange things about the Himalayas that they do not form the watershed between Tibet and Nepal. Numerous rivers carve deep canyons right through the Himalayas, and the real watershed lies in a range of grassy hills north of the main range of the Himalayas. This is because the rivers existed before the Himalayas arose, and eroded their way through the newly-forming mountains along their old valleys. The Yarle Shung La is at the top of one of these grassy knolls, some 50 km north of the main line of Himalayan peaks. From the top, I looked up at the mountains and down at the long descent into the canyon of the Bhote Khosi canyon. The longest downhill on earth, or so I was told, lay ahead of me, a drop of 4600 metres to the Sun Kosi river in Nepal. I took celebratory photos, had a party of Italian tourists take some of me and the bike, then bundled up and headed for the border.
As downhills go, this one was a grave disappointment. For the first 20 km I zipped along, taking steep shortcuts to cut between switchbacks. Then the road flattened out, the road surface became rutted, rough and almost unrideable, and huge headwinds began roaring uphill from Nepal. I eventually gave up the idea of reaching the border and crawled into the muddy, cold town of Nyalam, at 3750 metres, at dusk. I had passed the turnoff for the Phari pilgrimage just outside town, another possible sidetrip jettisoned in the rush to get somewhere warm. The road was full of yaks bearing firewood uphill from the forested lowlands to the treeless desert higher up. I ate enough food for four people and slept the sleep of the dead.
The real downhill started in Nyalam; the next day the bottom fell out of the Bhote Kosi and it plunged relentlessly downhill all the way to the border. The road was spectacular, clinging to cliffs hundreds of metres above the raging river, crossing areas that had been under huge landslides three years before; during August every year, the road is cut by landslides in five or six separate places, closing it to through traffic for a month or more. Every kilometre brought more moisture and greenery: first shrubs, then pine trees, then lush rainforest. The surroundings changed from desert to jungle in about 30 kilometres, and the bitter cold of the morning became shorts-and-T-shirt weather by the time I got to the Nepalese border post at 1700 metres� elevation. I passed two more checkpoints that day, the first (on the outskirts of Nyalam) unmanned, and the other (entering Zhangmu, the Chinese border town) manned only by two young soldiers who waved me on and returned to breakfast. I dodged Nepalese trucks grinding endlessly uphill and headed for the bank to change my leftover Chinese cash into Nepalese rupees. The Bank of China was its usual helpful self: �We can�t change money; we don�t know the rate.� This was a howling lie, but luckily two middle-aged women with a calculator and a shopping bag full of money were waiting for me on the bank steps and, after a brisk bargaining session, I got rid of my yuan and bounced downhill to the Friendship Bridge. A stamp of the passport and I was suddenly free, in the joyful, warm, tourist-friendly chaos of Nepal.
It was amazing how dramatic a frontier it was: the weather, the plants, the birds, the look of towns, the faces of the people were as different as night and day from Zhangmu to Kodari. I ate hugely at the first good restaurant I found (the Kodari Eco Resort), where I saw a touring bike I recognized. It belonged to Markus, a Swiss cyclist I had met in Lhasa and who had passed me by not going to Everest Base Camp. The waiter told me that Markus was at the hot springs down the road. After lunch I went to find him, and met him at a little restaurant. We excitedly exchanged notes, then I went to have a soak in the hot springs. It was a bit disappointing, since the water is directed through four spouts under which two hundred Nepalis were jostling for a few seconds of luke-warm shower. I kept going downhill, through a continuous stretch of well-stocked shops (where were these in Tibet?), past an extortionate roadblock allegedly gathering funds for a local school, to a river rafting camp I had stayed at in March, 2000 during my previous trip to Nepal. I drank beer, ate well and talked late into the night with the hordes of rafters and kayakers there. I hadn�t seen so many tourists in one place since Lhasa, and it was a strange feeling to be back on the beaten track.
I was 83 kilometres from Kathmandu, and it took most of the next day to get there. Down, down, down 26 km to the Sun Kosi/Seti bridge, then up, up , up 28 km to Dhulikel, the famous Himalayan lookout point. I treated myself to a huge lunch and sat outside in the sunshine staring back at the Himalayas I had just crossed. It was an odd feeling to think that I had been staring at the same mountains from the other side 2 days before. The mountains seemed so impossibly high that I couldn�t believe I had been at their height. Completely full of curry, rice, lentils and beer, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that I had to climb intermittently for the next 10 km before finally dropping into the bowl of the Kathmandu Valley. Finally, though, I was rolling along familiar traffic-choked arteries, getting lost in backstreets and finally entering the legendary tourist ghetto of Thamel. I checked my e-mail to find my sisters� whereabouts, then ran into Justin, Park and Miyuki, three of the big team of cyclists I had hung out with in Lhasa. I was glad to see that they had made it successfully. Then off to my sisters� hotel, a delirious reunion with Saakje, Audie and Serge (Audie�s boyfriend) and a night of riotous celebration at Rum Doodle Restaurant. After 10,582 kilometres, I had made it to Kathmandu. Trekking and a short ride to Darjeeling still lay ahead, but I had made it through the hardest part of my odyssey, and it was almost over.
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Previous Travelogues
Oct. 10-20: Lhasa-tude
Sept.5-Oct.9: Cycling to Lhasa
July 20-Sept.4: China by Train
June 29-July 19: SW China
June 27: Laos
June 20: Northeast Thailand
June 19: Cambodia Trip
May 27: Ko Tao to Bangkok
May 25: Diving the Similans
April 25: Southern Thailand
March 28: Kuching, E.Coast Malaysia
Feb. 28: Riding Across Borneo
Feb. 18: Brunei
Feb. 9: Diving Sipadan
Feb. 4: Exploring Sabah
Jan. 24: A Mexican Interlude