Thumpity Thump Thump, Over the Hills of Snow
Sept. 5-Oct. 9
couple of days of trains and buses from Hong Kong.
The city had changed, with the howling mobs of Chinese
tourists gone, although the rain and cloud remained.
My hotel, where I had left my bike, seemed to have
rotted from the humidity; in short order I put my foot
through my doorstep and knocked down a wooden railing.
My bike, too, needed some urgent attention, and I
spent a couple of days taking it to pieces and putting
it back together again. The front chain rings delayed
me by a day since their strange fastening system had
rusted and I couldn't get them apart. In the end a
machine-shop operator chiselled them apart, and I was
on my way.
I had planned to bypass Lijiang, the next tourist town
to the north, since I had been there already with
Joanne. In a typical Graydonesque move, though, I was
so pleased with my rapid progress around the lake that
I completely missed the turnoff I wanted. All
afternoon, as I climbed through scrubby pine forests,
I wondered why the road signs didn't correspond to my
map. I finally clued in near a small roadside truck
stop and in disgust called an early day and settled in
to eat and sleep. The latter was made difficult by
the karaoke music echoing down the street, and by the
hotel's night-time short-term trade.
The next day I made it to Lijiang, under leaden skies,
and made the most of the situation by eating well at
the tourist cafes. Lijiang still seemed full to
bursting of tourists compared to Dali, maybe because
it's a smaller town.
I made it to Tiger Leaping Gorge the next day in
typical rainy weather. Summer is the rainy season in
southern China, and I seemed to spend all of July and
August under a permanent rain cloud. At least the
road was easy, over a low pass and then endlessly
downhill to the Jinsha (Golden Sand) River, as the
upper Yangtze is known.
If you look at a map of Yunnan province, you will see
that up in the northwestern corner, three well-known
rivers flow parallel and very close to each other for
a great distance. From east to west they are the
Yangtze, the main artery of southern China; the
Mekong, flowing down into Laos, Cambodia and southern
Vietnam; and the Salween, the main river of eastern
Burma. In order to confine such major rivers and
prevent them from eventually flowing into each other,
there have to be enormous mountain ranges separating
them, and this is the case. This downhill was my
introduction to the grim geographical leitmotif of my
ride to Lhasa: awe-inspiring downhills to deep river
canyons, then heart-attack-inspiring uphills to cross
the high passes beyond.
In the town of Qiaotou, I left my bike for three days
of walking in Tiger Leaping Gorge. It's an almost
obligatory stop on any backpacker tour of Yunnan, and
it's easy to see why. The Yangtze funnels through a
deep, steep gorge for 50 km or so, between two
5000-metre-high mountains, making for beautiful photos
and pleasant walks. As in Nepal, enterprising
villagers have built small guesthouses along the
trail, allowing trekkers to travel light and
concentrate on the views rather than their leaden
backpacks. Most people walk through the gorge from
one end to the other, but since I had my bike, I
nipped halfway through and retraced my steps.
The walking was wonderful, far from the blaring truck
horns and bumpy Chinese asphalt that had been my world
for the past three days. Birdsongs and the sound of
the Yangtze surging far below filled the air, and only
the periodic blasting from the Chinese construction
projects along the river spoiled the bucolic idyll.
The Chinese are not a nation to allow mere natural
beauty to be sufficient reason to visit a place.
There has to be a road good enough for tour buses, and
a string of "attractions" to bring in the multitudes.
In the past few years, a bus road has been blasted
halfway through the bottom of the gorge, and one day
it will reach the entire way. A theme park is being
built partway along, and a huge concrete hot spring
complex already defaces the far bank of the river.
Luckily, the masses stay low down along the road,
leaving the high path and its guesthouses as the
preserve of the backpackers and nature enthusiasts.
I stayed at the innovatively-named Halfway House for
two nights, making a trip down to the river at the
narrowest, most impressive of the gorges. The power
of the Yangtze at this point was frightening. An
enormous hydraulic hole filled the river as it poured
over rocks; it was at this point that the Chinese
expedition seeking to raft the entire length of the
Yangtze lost a member or two in a suicidal attempt to
run the gorge.
That night, listening to my shortwave radio as I was
falling asleep, I heard the news of the airplane
attacks on New York and Washington. In such a
beautiful, isolated setting, it seemed unreal and far
away, but for a New Yorker staying in the lodge, it
set off a panicked speed-hike to the nearest
telephone, 6 hours away in Qiaotou, to see whether her
family were alright. Over the next few weeks, the
assorted fallout from this disaster would have effects
even on my bicycle trek through Tibet.
From the Yangtze, I paid for my gravitational free
ride by climbing 50 km up a sidevalley and over a
pass. Frustratingly, I went back to the east of the
river, meaning that eventually I would have to cross
it again. At the crest of the pass, the world
suddenly changed. I passed a Tibetan chorten
(Buddhist stupa) decked out with thousands of
colourful prayer flags and suddenly I was in cultural,
if not political, Tibet. A high plateau stretched in
front of me, and I raced past farmers engaged in the
barley harvest, fortress-like Tibetan houses and the
odd temple as I headed for the town of Zhongdian,
ethnically Tibetan although still part of Yunnan. It
was September 13th, my 33rd birthday, and I celebrated
with a single beer and an early bedtime, worn out by
the day's climbing.
The next day I discovered that the rather dubious
noodle soup I had had for lunch in Xiaozhongdian had
contributed to the worn-out feeling by laying me low
with an attack of dysentery. I managed to wobble out
to the big Tibetan monastery of Songzanlin, where the
early morning light on the golden fields of barley
made for perfect photos. The monastery itself seemed
a bit of a movie set: far too many buildings for the
handful of monks that were there. As would be the
case in many subsequent monasteries, I found myself
wondering what the monks did all day. It was rare to
find them actually praying or meditating or reciting
sutras. They seemed to spend their days sitting
around waiting for a tourist to come along to practice
their English or to beg a few alms.
Later that afternoon, I met a Dutch cycling couple who
were just arriving. Timo and Petra had been on the
road for over a year, riding and hiking through
Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, China, Pakistan, India,
Nepal, Tibet and back into China. They had tried to
ride my proposed route in reverse, from Lhasa to Dali,
but they had been arrested and fined in the town of
Ningchi and sent back to Lhasa. I had dinner with
them and found out as much as possible about the ins
and outs of dodging the Chinese authorities. Our
dinner was marked by a teenage monk begging alms who
grabbed onto our table leg and wouldn't let go. It
was my introduction to the standard personal
interaction between Westerners and Tibetans.
September 15th marked the start of the real adventure.
The standard backpacker trail turns back from
Zhongdian, since little of interest lies between the
town and the Tibetan border, beyond which a special
(expensive) permit is required to continue. As if in
acknowledgement of this, the pavement ends just
outside town, and the dirt road continues, with a few
paved interludes, for the next 1200 km. The first day
was easy enough, since much of the way was a downhill
return to the Yangtze, followed by a climb to a
pleasant little campground. It was a pleasant change
to be staying in my tent, although the novelty would
wear off over the next month.
The next two days were spent climbing over a pass
between the Yangtze and the Mekong. The two rivers
are at an elevation of around 2000 metres near here,
while the pass was at 4600 metres. Every time I
thought I was nearing the top, I would see that the
road continued to climb around a corner. On the first
day I ran into a National Geographic team of reporters
doing a story on pollution and environmental problems
in China; it should be a pretty long article! After
crossing what turned out to be a triple pass, I bumped
downhill to Deqin, the last town in Yunnan and my last
real hotel for quite some time.
Deqin is famous among Chinese tourists for spectacular
views of a spectacular mountain, 6750-metre Mt.
Meilixue, which stands across the Mekong. The next
morning, as I rolled out of town, I looked for it but
it was lost in the omnipresent low grey cloud. A
party of middle-class Chinese tourists kept a hopeful
vigil with their Nikons at the best lookout point, but
I doubt whether the mountain showed its face for a few
weeks thereafter. The tourists made my day by plying
me with cookies and chocolate in return for taking
endless photos and video footage of me. They were
from Kunming, and the video man apparently worked for
the local TV staion; they told me I would appear on
the Kunming news in a few weeks' time.
That day I set a personal record by doing 106 km on
dirt roads. The road was in reasonable shape, and
having a 40-km downhill to the Mekong didn't help. I
camped beside the river in the desolate desert canyon,
ready for my first checkpoint-evading night run, past
the Tibetan border at Yangjing.
I had been using a website called www.inorbitt.com for
information on distances and positions of checkpoints,
and I discovered that night how inaccurate they often
are. I thought I was 3 km from the checkpoint, but I
found out otherwise. At 3:30 am I packed up my tent
and set out in the dark, pushing the bike because it
was too bumpy to ride. I spooked four horses who ran
in front of me the entire way to Yangjing. After 7 km
I saw a bridge far below me, lit up by floodlights.
This corresponded to inorbitt's description of the
checkpoint, so I was surprised when the road continued
to climb and left the bridge behind. I trudged on,
wondering where the hell Yangjing was. Finally, after
12 km of pushing and with the jittery horses still in
front of me, I came around a corner and nearly tripped
over the checkpoint. My heart was pounding and my
nerves were on edge, but I walked underneath the
barrier pole without waking the checkpoint man, whose
snores filled the night. Just past the checkpoint, a
dog began barking at me and I feared that the guard
would wake up, but he slept soundly on. A truck
driver came outside and looked at me incuriously, and
then I was around the corner and home free.
Or so I thought. As the sky began to lighten, I began
riding through the very long, narrow village, hoping
that no-one would be awake yet. Aside from one man
smoking a cigarette on his doorstep, no-one was. Just
as I was leaving the village, congratulating myself on
a successful escape, I nearly decapitated myself on
another candy-striped pole across the road. There was
a second checkpoint, a fact that inorbitt had
forgotten to mention. It was now light enough that I
was in plain view to anyone near the checkpoint, so I
ducked under the pole and rode like hell until I was
around a corner and out of sight. Now I was truly in
Tibet, and safely past the first danger point. What a
contrast to 1998, when my sisters and their partners
and I entered Tibet over a 5400-metre pass in glorious
afternoon light. This time I sneaked in along the
bottom of a canyon under cover of darkness.
I kept riding all day, determined to put distance
between Yangjing and myself. The road climbed high
above the river; once again it moved away to the east,
meaning that I would have to return to the river later
and that all this climbing was, in a sense, in vain.
At least the weather was sunny and the views back down
to the oasis towns and the river rapids were
memorable. I climbed for 38 km, through lush pine and
rhododendron forests alive with colourful rosefinches,
coal tits, white-cheeked bulbuls, black redstarts and
the occasional vulture. Eventually I crested the
pass, full of Tibetan nomads cutting wood and
gathering some sort of wild vegetable. I looked back
down over sun-dappled villages, then bumped downhill
to a beautiful campground amidst the pines.
The next day I received a rude surprise, as my
anticipated downhill day ended after 7 km and I spent
the rest of the day riding upstream. Again it was
nice weather, and all the Tibetan villagers, dressed
in colourful clothes and red headscarves, were out
harvesting barley. It was a pretty, photogenic day,
marred only by my first attack by stone-throwing kids.
Tibet seems to be a place, like parts of northern
Pakistan, where it is deeply ingrained into children
from a young age that foreigners on bicycles are ideal
moving targets. I stopped to buy cookies and noodles
and Jian Li Bao soda (the staples of my diet) and
immediately attracted the idlers of the village (that
is to say, everybody). As I rode off, the kids ran
alongside, trying to steal things from my back rack,
throwing empty pop cans and eventually rocks at me
while the adults smiled and nodded encouragingly. If
there is one thing that enrages me more than anything
else, it is having rocks thrown at me, so I put down
the bike, pulled out my handy walking stick and chased
the kids for a while before firing off a few stones of
my own. I left town under a long-distance artillery
barrage that was, luckily, about as accurate as
American air strikes. Unfortunately, it was a
harbinger of things to come.
That afternoon, I nearly ran right into Markam, my
next checkpoint and the junction with the road from
Chengdu, since it was closer than inorbitt said. I
sat down on a beautiful golden grassy hill to have a
snack and figure out a good hiding place for me and my
tent. I was soon found by a local schoolteacher who
insisted I come home with him to have something to eat
and meet his family. Thinking it was a good chance to
interact with Tibetans, I went along. This was a
mistake.
First of all, his house, described as nearby, was in
fact 3 km away, over hill and dale and stone fence,
through a few streams and generally difficult to
reach. His Chinese, about as good as mine (ie, not
very good at all) was soon exhausted and he soon gave
up on conversation. He claimed to earn 1500 yuan
(US$190) a month, but it was hard to see what he could
have spent this money on. Perhaps he meant 1500 per
year. The house was almost devoid of furnishings,
with one electric light bulb, one ancient blender and
am antique malfunctioning cassette player the only
concessions to modernity. A few burnished copper
storage jars provided the only colour in the dark
interior. A small shrine displayed a few Buddhist
deities and a (forbidden) picture of the Dalai Lama.
And that was it for the contents of the house.
We sat in uncompanionable silence, waiting for his
wife to come home (heaven forbid that he should cook).
Some of his 5 children sat regarding me with saucer
eyes and runny noses. I tried to break the ice with
them by blowing soap bubbles, playing some songs on
the guitar for them, drawing pictures and whatever I
could think of, but they gave no reaction. They sat
and watched me much as people watch TV; this would be
another recurring theme throughout Tibet.
Eventually the teacher roused himself from his reverie
and dug through a school textbook for a picture of a
radio. Did I have one? I unwisely admitted that I
did. For the next few hours, he happily fiddled
through the shortwave band looking for the Dalai
Lama's Tibetan station. Not finding it, he tuned to
excruciating Chinese pop and turned the volume to
eleven, deafening the room with distorted
caterwauling. He then began the true purpose of the
visit: convincing me to give him the radio. I tried
to tell him in broken Chinese that he could buy a
Chinese-made shortwave for 70 yuan in Markam, but he
would not be denied. Throughout the frugal meal of
rice and undercooked potatoes, he kept up his
badgering. When he realized I would not part with my
prize possession, he looked murderous and moved over
to turn on the cassette player which made far more
noise. I retired for the evening with the cassette
player echoing around the empty house.
I got up at 3 am to driving rain. Before my man woule
open the door for me, he again demanded the radio,
and, failing that, 20 yuan. This seemed a bit steep
for cacophany and rice, but I was too tired to argue.
I set off through the downpour, losing my way in the
dark, stumbling through knee-deep streams and
generally having a miserable morning. It eventually
stopped raining when it got colder and changed to
hail. Needless to say, no-one was up and about in
Markam and I sailed through the police checkpoint just
as the hail stopped and the dawn began to glimmer. A
gentle 12 kilometre uphill led to a 4338-metre pass,
my third 4000-metre pass since Zhongdian. I was wet
and frozen, but the beautiful alpine meadow at the
top, shimmering green and full of tiny rodents
(marmots?), hares and unidentified white birds and
wildflowers made up for the physical discomfort.
Physical discomfort was the order of the day on the
downhill, as the Chinese had decided to rebuild the
entire 45-kilometre descent back to the Mekong. I was
glad I was headed downhill; a Chinese cycle tourist
heading the other way had to push his bike the entire
way uphill because the road was utterly unrideable
going in that direction. I had a horrible scare at
one point when I stopped for a rest; I noticed my
wallet wasn't in its accustomed place in an outside
pocket of my front pannier. It had bounced out
somewhere in the previous kilometres from the horrible
road surface. I was in a panic, since the nearest
places I could change money were Zhongdian and Lhasa.
Luckily, the wallet was laying on the road barely 20
metres behind me. I found a more secure spot for it
after that.
I eventually arrived at the army town of Juka, where I
treated myself to a night in a truck stop motel, since
there seemed to be no meddlesome police in town. The
next morning saw me cross the Mekong and leave it
behind for good, headed for the highest pass yet,
separating the Mekong from the Salween. I climbed 24
km, dropped for 16, then began a long, hard
38-kilometre ascent of my first 5000-metre pass. On
the way, I marvelled at the contrast that altitude
made. Juka was at the bottom of a parched desert
gorge, but 1500 metres above was a landscape of
rushing rivers and lush pine forests, while the top of
the pass was a dusty high-altitude desert on one side,
with beautiful green grasslands on the far side. On
the way up, two Tibetan girls asked for a lift on the
bike (as if!) but settled for begging for my
sunglasses, some cookies, money and my jacket.
Luckily I could outpace them, and I camped that night
in an idyllic riverside meadow.
Slogging over the top of the pass the next day was
both helped and hindered by the Chinese army. The
army was doing road maintenance, and their crew took
pity on me and fed me royally beside the road. Their
colleagues, however, were travelling along the road in
convoys of 50-100 trucks that passed me in choking
clouds of diesel and dust. It took until 4:30 to
reach the top of the pass, out of breath and grey with
dust. The view from the top, out over the endless
mountain ranges to the west, was magnificent, as was
the downhill. I even hit asphalt after a while and
zipped downhill through a landscape of red rock and
pines that seemed oddly reminiscent of Arizona. I was
on a small tributary of the Salween, and it was the
first clean-looking blue water I had seen for ages
after the muddy turbulence of the Yangtze and Mekong.
It was logging and cowboy country, with dozens of
horsemen trotting along the road in jaunty cowboy
hats, and the smell of freshly-sawn pine in the air.
I roared right through another supposed danger point,
the town of Zuogang, and spent the next day and a half
slowly working my way upstream. The pavement and the
gorgeous forests eventually ended, but the farming
villages that followed were equally pretty, even if
the people weren't. I was pelted with more rocks, and
spent an annoying night camped with the village kids
sitting outside the tent begging. A mother came and
shooed the kids away eventually, then settled down for
her own session of begging. I was awoken in the
morning by the pitter-patter of little feet, as the
kids returned for more entertainment.
I don't know what annoys me more, the fact that the
automatic reaction of most Tibetans when they see me
is an outstretched palm, or that no-one seems to
believe that I'm a human being. I'm a combination
ATM/TV with legs, and even if I try to talk to people
in broken Tibetan out of a phrase book, trying to
establish some sort of human-to-human contact, they
ignore me and continue staring and commenting on me
(or my possessions) with their friends. It's as
though the TV were suddenly to start talking to you
personally; you wouldn't believe the evidence of your
own ears and would try to continue as normal.
Whatever the case, just as in parts of northern
Pakistan, kids and adults will run hundreds of metres
out to the road in order to beg. Fortunately, they're
not as dedicated as in Pakistan, where kids would
follow us for 5 or 10 km to beg for pens; here, a few
hundred metres seems to be the maximum.
The next day I came to a road junction: east to Qamdo
and Chengdu, or west to Lhasa. A brief climb, and I
was 4839 metres above sea level, staring out over more
peaks. For the first time there were heavily
glaciated mountains to be seen; the Salween is flanked
along its entire Tibetan length by high mountains. I
found the 40 kilometre downhill to be an exact copy of
the drop to Juka: army convoys and endless
construction made it hellish. Thousands of
construction workers, mostly Sichuanese immigrants and
most drunk by this hour ofthe evening, were engaged in
a futile struggle against river erosion and landslide.
I met another unfortunate Chinese cycling couple
pushing their steeds uphill through the mud and rock
and traffic jams caused by stalled army trucks. It
took hours to escape this hell, and I ended up camping
at a gravel pit at 10:30 at night, the first flat
ground I had seen after the construction.
At 7:00 the next morning, it became clear that this
was a bad place to camp. In my sleep, I heard a truck
pull up, and then my tent was being shaken violently
by a construction worker who urgently mimed an
explosion. I leapt to my feet and took shelter behind
the truck as he set off a dynamite charge which set
off a satisfying sandslide and filled my tent with
fine abrasive dust. I got going soon afterwards,
after an epic begging session from one of the workers
for my radio.
I was now in the main valley of the Salween, another
river of liquid mud between lifeless stone valley
walls. I found a little restaurant, where my bike
pump came in handy inflating the owner's motorbike
tire, before crossing the Salween and taking a
tributary valley upstream. I was now almost through
the canyon country, and my legs were mightily glad of
it.
The next valley was dry and dusty and fairly steep,
but at least it was paved much of the way. Few people
lived in this valley, and I camped for the next two
evenings without too many unwelcome visitors. The
most memorable sight of this valley were the handcart
porters who carried the luggage of foot travellers and
pilgrims over the pass at the end of the valley on
large handcarts. They toiled uphill in pairs, and it
looked like much harder work than cycling. Once over
the top, they leaned back on the handles, lifted their
feet and went screaming down the road at a suicidal
pace, occasionally putting their feet down to brake.
I figure they have to burn through a new set of shoes
on each downhill.
The pass at the end of this valley was the gentlest
yet; I wouldn't have believed it was a pass except for
the sign and the obligatory prayer flags. I was
leaving the Salween behind and joining the drainage of
the great river of Tibet, the Tsangpo (or
Brahmaputra), which rises near Mt. Kailash in the west
and flows into Bangladesh to flood out a few million
peasants every monsoon season. After an exhilirating
20 km downhill through steep gorges, I suddenly found
myself beside a high alpine lake ringed by snow-capped
mountains and yak pastures. It would have been an
idyllic place to camp and take a rest day if not for
threatening rain clouds that chopped off the mountain
tops and made the place cold and unappealing.
I would follow the river out of this lake for 200 km,
through green pine forests full of logging towns, all
the way down to low-lying rainforest full of leeches.
I was none too pleased about the leeches, especially
the one which climbed into my mouth to attack my lip,
but at least the tent kept most of them out. I spent
days afterwards picking dead leeches off the tent fly.
This endless downhill was probably the scenic
highlight of the trip, even if constant rain and
clouds obscured the really high peaks in the distance.
Near here, the Tsangpo makes an abrupt 180-degree
turn to plummet 2500 vertical metres through the main
range of the Himalayas in a series of gorges so deep
and inaccessible that they were only completely
surveyed 2 years ago. In a little nowhere village in
this valley, I met a Czech trekker who was coming back
from the Great Bend of the Tsangpo. Had the weather
been less rainy, it might have been a nice trip, but
he hadn't really seen any decent scenery.
Far past the town of Bomi, at the lowest point of the
road, I went through the biggest nightmare stretch of
road yet. The entire mountainside seemed to have
turned to liquid mud, engulfing the road for 20 km in
a series of landslides. A bulldozer and an army of
Sichuanese peasants picked ineffectually at the
rockfall, while I spent most of a day manhandling my
bike through the mud and wondering why I was doing
this trip. Eventually, I turned upstream on the Rong
Chu and the mud ended (along with the leeches).
The Rong Valley was classic Rocky Mountain or Alpine
scenery: virgin pine forests, rushing blue rivers,
steeply-pitched roofs on the few scattered farmhouses.
The Rong Valley became famous early this century as
one of the most botanically diverse places on earth,
and plant hunters such as Kingdon-Ward and Bailey
prowled the passes leading out of the valley in search
of new species of poppy, primula and rhododendron.
Even I, a complete non-botanist, was impressed with
the colours of the wildflowers, although by the time I
got to the pass out of the valley, I had been poisoned
by a roadside truck stop restaurant and had little
interest in flowers.
This last pass, 4720 mmetres high, marked my entry
into the Tibetan heartland. At the foot of the pass
lay Ningchi and Bayi, where Timo and Petra had been
arrested, and in Bayi there was a choice, between the
paved, direct northern road to Lhasa, or the longer,
unpaved road along the Tsangpo. I had planned to take
the southern road in order to do some hiking in the
sacred valley of Tsari, but with constant rain (and
hail on the passes) every day, I decided to skip
hiking in favour of a smooth ride to Lhasa, only 420
km away.
The night ride through Ningchi and Bayi went without a
hitch, helped by a full moon on October 5th. I hit
pavement just outside Ningchi and had done 107 km by
lunchtime, along a beautiful river valley full of fall
colours and birds and willow-clad islets in the
braided stream. I called an early halt in the hope of
going hiking around a nearby sacred lake the next day,
but once again rain quelled my enthusiasm for taking
to my heels. Instead, I rolled onwards, loving the
brand-new asphalt, the forests, the colours and the
feeling that I was finally nearing my goal. Two more
days saw me over the final 5000-metre pass, the
Mangshung La; I awoke just below the pass to heavy
snow and the thundering passage of hundreds of yaks,
spooked by my tent and, doubtless, my outlandish smell
(I hadn't showered since Zhongdian). Luckily the sun
soon melted the snow and I was over the pass with only
150 downhill kilometres separating me from Lhasa.
I stopped off en route in some hot springs about which
inorbitt had raved. I arrived to find that the
Chinese authorities had decreed that the springs were
to become A Big Tourist Attraction, and thus the
entire village had vanished under the chaos, dust and
filth of a Chinese construction site. The springs
were still there, hidden behind the rubble, and I
soaked contentedly for an hour before I looked closely
and saw tiny worms wriggling around in the water
beside me. Chinese and Tibetan norms of hygiene are
fairly non-existent, and one gets used to it, but this
was a bit much, and I leapt to my feet and towelled
off rapidly.
The last day into Lhasa, October 9th, was interrupted
by numerous sidetrips to monasteries, such as Katsal
Gompa, first built in the 7th century to help subdue
the great demoness of Tibet (this monastery was
supposed to pin down her right shoulder), and Lamo
Gompa, once one of the great monasteries of Tibet but
now a locked-up backwater. The birthplace of the
first Tibetan Buddhist king, Songtsen Gampo, was
marked by a picturesque hillside monastery glinting
gold in the sunlight.
Then it was time for a long pilgrimage to the
headquarters of the Dalai Lama's sect, the Gelugpa,
situated 10 steep road kilometres above the highway.
It was a tough climb, although I made it easier by
hiding my luggage behind a rock and biking up with
only my camera bag. The monastery, flattened with
artillery and dynamite in the Cultural Revolution, has
been rebuilt, but it seems empty and dispirited, a
Potemkin monastery put up for the tourists. Only a
handful of monks were in evidence, a far cry from the
5,000 who once lived there. The few monks I did see
all seemed to have adjusted to life in the new
capitalist China, hawking wood-block prints,
wood-blocks, or just enticing me to take pictures
(luckily I had seen the sign warning that it cost 25
yuan per picture). I wandered the pilgrim trail
around the monastery (spectacularly situated at the
top of a narrow ridge), then bumped my way back down
to the road.
I didn't know how far it was to Lhasa, but I did know
that the sun would set in less than two hours, so I
set off like a bat out of hell, determined to be in
front of the Potala Palace for a photo with my bike
before sunset. I rode flat out at 30 km/h most of the
way, passing trucks and tractors, but the sun
disappeared just as I entered Lhasa, and my triumphal
photos turned out to be 3-second time exposures in the
twilight. But nothing could quell my enthusiasm for
having made it. Three years after having to turn back
from my previous attempt to ride to Lhasa, 2070
kilometres from Dali and 8900 kilometres from the
trip's start in Kota Kinabalu, I had made it. I
treated myself to an extravagant dinner in the Dunya
Restaurant, and went to bed happy and exhausted on the
Roof of the World.
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Previous Travelogues
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