Submitted by jeff on Sun, 01/02/2005 - 01:00
I left Golmud late-ish in the day on December 16. The weather was fair, the wind wasn't bad - in fact, it was slightly behind me, and the road was nice and sealed.
Things went well for 30km: across the grey sandy plain approaching a perforation in the wall of mountains to the south, a finger of the Kunlun Mountains I had crossed in the opposite direction from Tibet six weeks earlier. I sat comfortably riding slowly up, watching numerous buses and trucks pass by to or from Lhasa: some of the buses were from points as far away as Lanzhou (Lanzhou to Lhasa is a long haul on a bus).
A collection of buildings approached after I passed under a railroad overpass: a few warehouses, a restaurant or two, a string of PetroChina gas stations at the far end. Trucks were queued up at a weigh station. I cycled in at about 2PM.
"Hey!!" A yelp from my right. I ignored it, knowing full-well that it might be the police. This tactic works sometimes, since it might be more hassle than it's worth to stop a foreigner for something minor, like "Um, can I see your passport?...OK, have a nice day."
I carried on and stopped at a gas station for a photo (the English translation of "China Petroleum" was "China Petrifies"). As I was putting away my camera, a taxi pulled up in a hurry, and a man in plain clothes gets out and flashes a badge.
"Hello." I smiled cheerily.
"Hello - your passport." I got my passport out, handed it over. "Where are you going?"
"Lhasa."
"You can't go there on a bicycle."
"Why? Is it too cold?" I knew the real answer, which was that they wanted lots of money for any foreigner to get to Tibet.
"No, the weather is fine here. You have to take a bus from Golmud."
"Ah, I see. But I would like to ride a bicycle there."
"It's not possible."
"Why not?"
Here he smiled: "Because you are rich. You come from the US, which is a very rich country. You have to go to the Tibet Travel Service and pay US$200 and then get on a bus" - another smile - " for the Chinese price: 200Y". This was less than $25, meaning there was a foreigner surcharge of $200 for the privilege of sitting on a bus for nearly 24 hours, assuming no breakdowns (which is a very generous assumption). It was outrageous.
"Well, yes, the US is a rich country, but then so again is China," I said. "And no one in the US pays $225 for a bus ride anywhere, if you want to look at it that way."
He just shrugged his shoulders. He was walking me back down to the checkpoint. "Go back to Golmud, buy a ticket, and perhaps I will see you tomorrow." He handed me my passport at the barrier, and indicated that I was to head back.
"Sure, OK. See you tomorrow." I even smiled and waved, since I knew this was not what I was going to do.
It was inconvenient, certainly, but not a show-stopper. I cycled back to the rail overpass. The newly constructed train with its embankment provided a nice cover if you walked along the other side, which was of course exactly what I did. The ride back to the rail line was about 3km, and then I had to walk back in loose soil. There was a hydroelectric dam along the river that cut through the mountains. I headed up to this, squeezed through a fence, walked along the dam reservoir (which was frozen on the surface) and rejoined the road, about 1km further south. I sat behind a rock outcropping - just in case - and had some snacks for lunch, and then moved on, saving myself US$200 in any case.
The road gained elevation steadily, and by the time I camped in the dark, I had come up about 650m from Golmud. The next morning I woke to cold, and cycled the remaining 5km into a town where I could get something warm to eat. I spoke with the woman running the restaurant I stopped in: she said she occasionally saw cyclists in better months, but not in December. She thought I was crazy; so did I.
A headwind came up, and for the next 12 days, didn't let up. I climbed into the Kunlun, and only 55km later into the day, I stopped in a cold ice drizzle at a Muslim restaurant. The place was run by a Sala couple, from an ethnic group that had migrated from Central Asia a couple of hundred years before and now resided primarily in the Qinghai-Gansu border region. A local holy man came by, and we chatted amicably about several things. I stumbled over a few Arabic characters, as he smiled at my very rusty recollection of written Arabic. I slept on a brick bed with a coal fire underneath it, cozy in an otherwise drafty and cold restaurant. I heard the azan (call to prayer) sometime in the predawm - the first time I had ever heard it in China. The family I was staying with, who ran the place, fixed up a clay-pot soup for breakfast. The woman, in a black Hui headscarf, was haggard and tired. The kids moaned in bed when prodded to wake up. The man, to whom I had spoken with at length the night before, suddenly didn't trust my Chinese when I asked how much I owed him. He pulled out a calculator, punched in a few numbers, and then handed it over: the display said 67 (the calculator, I guessed, conferred some legitimacy on the final tally). I raised my eyebrows: this was far too much. I wasn't in the mood to argue, and I figured karma would either pay he or I back, so I simply said "Look, I know you are charging me far too much, but I don't want to argue. You know its dishonest," and gave him the money. His face sank, the woman froze, but there was no further movement. I left, not feeling really much of anything, just eager to get over the pass and onto the Tibetan plateau again.
The wind was miserable. It took me several hours to climb 32km to the summit of the Kunlun Shankou (Pass), which was just below 4800m. The new train line snaked back and forth across the gorge on the way up. At the top, prayer flags flapped violently in the wind. I was re-entering Tibet.
I came down the other side and stopped in a small truckstop, half-Tibetan, half-Hui. I did what any sensible person would do: ate in the Hui restaurant, and slept with the Tibetans. The Tibetan that took me over to the hostel was a very friendly man by the name of Namu Jieben. We sat in the gathering dark next to a warm coal stove and talked in Chinese about my trip, about the ride in front of me to Lhasa, about the US. He put a large bucket of coal in my room, stoked the stove, and after I had gotten in bed, came back to make sure I was warm and tossed another 3 blankets on top of me.
The enormous guard dogs kept me from going to wake anyone in the morning for an hour or so. Each time I moved, they strained at the end of their chains and barked until they were hoarse, which took quite a while. Finally, Namu emerged, held one back, and let me into his room. He asked if I was hungry. I had assumed I would go back to the Hui restaurant, but he offered to cook up some breakfast, so I sat while he prepared fried rice. He seemed unsure over the stove, hesitating after each move, pausing over salt, then tipping over bowls and cups of tea as he remembered he wanted to add more oil. The end result was tasty. He went outside and retrieved two dirty bowls: "Gou chi" he said ("Dog food"). He spent as much time preparing something for the dogs to eat as for our breakfast, boiling some meat, adding the rest of the leftover rice, adding flour to make a white gruel. It touched me that someone would actually cook something for a dog, particularly those half mad mastiffs outside. I liked this guy quite a bit: he washed afterwards and slicked back his hair. He was dressed in loosely hanging pants, and a checkered flannel that made him look something like a lumberjack. As I left, he told me to stop in at Kekexilik to get some hot water, about 50km down the road.
The wind was nearly silent as I left, and I made the ranger station at Kekexilik in slightly over 2 hours. There was a watchtower, and barbed-wire fencing ran out into the plain to the west. Several late model cars were parked in front of what was essentially a trailer. I asked one of the well-dressed men out front if I could get some water here. He went to go see. Another man, similarly well-dressed urged me to come into the room.
There was some sort of event going on. Cake on the table, bottles of water and soda, and lots of people smiling and taking pictures. Someone handed me a pen and asked me to sign the banner on the wall. I was asked the usual. "Oohs" and "aahs" were murmured around the room. They asked me to pose with the ranger and a VIP, holding a certificate or check of some kind - a donation to the ranger station, I gathered. Around the room were several macabre pictures of slaughtered and beheaded wildlife, primarily the endangered chiru I had seen in western Tibet and on the Changtang. There was a series depicting the successful apprehension of poachers. They stood next to the skins they had tried to make off with, a guard pointing a rifle at them. There were strips over their eyes, making them anonymous. These men were likely dead by now: the penalty for poaching chiru in China is death. I turned around and watched the back-slapping and laughter, feeling uneasy. More photos followed, most with me in them. Perhaps a Westerner in the photo added some pizazz to the cause. All I wanted was boiled water.
As they left, the VIPs gave me a six-pack of Red Bull "Vitamin Drink". I drank them all that day, since I knew they would freeze. The stuff has more caffeine than coffee, I think, because I couldn't sleep that night after pulling into Wudolian, a Hui truckstop town with a hostel that was ordered around a trash-filled lot, but that had rooms that were very clean and painted an excruciatingly bright white, nearly antiseptic.
The following days to the southern edge of the plain at the Tanggula Shankou were prolonged suffering. The daytime highs were rarely above -5C, and nights were down to -30C. The wind was incessant. I had to cycle a half (or quarter, nearly) day into Toutouhe, a town on a branch of the upper Yangtze River, which rose to the west on the plateau near here. The wind was incredible, blowing sand, grit, ice from drifted snow into my face, and making it impossible to stay on the bike, or at any rate impossible to cycle in a straight line, which put me in peril of the trucks which continued to cycle in the nearly gale-force winds, although they were very high-profile and the visibility had dropped to about 100m. At the town (Toutouhe), I called it quits, got a dismal room in a truckstop hostel, had something to eat, and went to sleep early, hoping the next day would dawn better.
Two truckers were put into my room late at night, staggering in, one flopping on the bed next to mine. He gurgled, moaned, shifted around under the blankets, his head buried in there somewhere. At some point he begain to belch and vomit loudly. This went on periodically for some time. His friend was kind enough to wipe the vomit off of the side of his face and try to keep the sheets somewhat clean as his dinner ended up on the floor. The room reeked. In the morning I asked his friend if the guy had altitude sickness. "No, he just drank too much." I managed a wry smile, gathered my things, and checked out.
I spent a last night on the high plateau in the last settlement before the Tanggula Shankou and the border into the Tibet Autonomous Region, in the aptly-named town of Tanggula. I found a restaurant/hostel, where a man with taut skin that was still wrinkled around the neck over his turtleneck served me mutton soup and rice without saying a word. I was tired and asked about a bed. He indicated a room beyond the kitchen: again no words. I fell asleep in the bed, the odor of diesel from the generator permeating the sheets and blankets. In the morning, I got up, figuring to ask for fried rice. The proprietor wasn't up, so I wandered the place looking for a shop or restaurant. Nothing was open, even though the sun was out all the way, and it wasn't particularly early to rise. Eventually a Hui opened a tea house, and I had instant noodles and some steamed bread. I returned to the hostel, where the man was just rising. He asked if I had had something to eat. I said, yes, paid him for the mutton soup and the bed, and left into the sun: we had had about 20 words between us.
A day and a half later, I was in Amdo, after struggling down from the Tanggula Shankou into the TAR in a hard-driven snow, and camping a very cold night at high altitude between the Tanggula and another only slightly lower pass, breaking ice for water in the evening. When I arrived in Amdo, the wind was howling, the temperature had plummeted, and my face was frozen stiff. I found a restaurant, thawed out, and quit a couple of hours early for the day, figuring on getting a hotel room. I asked around and was directed to a dilapidated 3 storey building across from some billiards tables, which, remarkably, had a few patrons trying to play a game in the absolutely frigid temperatures and wind (it was about -10C and a very stiff wind whipped through the town). A Tibetan woman sat in an office warming herself by a yak dung stove. A room could be had for 30Y, or 50Y if I wanted a room with a large bag of yak dung to keep myself warm. I passed on the dung, figuring I had camped and could handle a cold room. The room was freezing, hardly warmer than my tent. At 4AM, a horrendous cracking sound woke me: it sounded like someone was going to fall through the ceiling, or was trying to tear their way through the wall to my side. The sound persisted. I turned on the light. The floor, with red faux-marble tiles laid on top of it, was buckling from the cold, causing the noise. I checked my watch for the temperature: -15C. I was indoors, and my room was -15C. I laughed, burrowed down under the covers, my sleeping bag, and my army coat - all of which I had piled on top of me, and tried to ignore the sound of the floor buckling underneath me.
The ride to Nagqu was better, as I descended towards Lhasa, and the weather improved slightly. I camped about 40km out of town, in exactly the same spot that I had camped with Martin as we left Nagqu for the west in mid-September. I stopped in Nagqu for a lunch and a quick check of my email (in a net cafe where the staff were struggling with the chimney of their yak dung stove, which was spewing smoke into the room which I had to peer through to see the monitor. When I left the city in the mid afternoon, the wind had picked up again, and I struggled for the next day and a half.
I was sick of the wind, and the sky was overcast. I was ready to throw in the towel and try to flag a ride to Lhasa, 250km away, when I came upon two groups of prostrators. One of them called me over for lunch. While I had tsampa and tea, and shared the candy I had with them, I found out they had started from a small place southeast of Xining, near the Gansu border and not far from Lanzhou. How long had they been going like this - two steps and then laying themselves out on the road completely prostrated? "Seven months, and about another month and a half before we get to Lhasa". This is always stunning to hear, even if you know people do this: scraping the ground for 8 1/2 months to make one's way to a holy place. There isn't anything in the US, or the western world, that I can think of that compares. The devotion was so complete, I felt I had to go on. What was another 2 or 2 1/2 days into the wind in the face of this display of piety?
That night I stayed in a Tibetan teahouse, hosted by a monk from a local monastery who chanted, seemingly without taking a breath for over an hour, completely mesmerizing me, and impressing even the locals. The following day, I carried on south through a snow-blanketed valley, past more prostrators, and then down into much warmer weather.
The ride into Lhasa was pleasant, although I put in two long days to make it there for New Year's Eve. The road passed fallow fields, indicating heavy cultivation in non-winter months, lying next to nice tidy whitewashed Tibetan settlements. Lhasa itself sprawls out along a river for many kilometers. The western end of town was indistinguishable from a Chinese city. I thought to myself: where are the Tibetans? Chinese crowded fancy restaurants and boutiques, men in leather jackets talked loudly into cellphones, new cars plied the roads driving like jerks. I was dismayed: this was a radical change from what I had seen in 1999.
The eastern end of the city was slightly more sedate, with Tibetans peopling the sidewalks and roads. The Potala was dark in the night - the Chinese had had the grace not to floodlight the place as they do with any other monument or attraction. Fireworks crackled behind me, celebrating a New Year that was more or less meaningless to either Chinese or Tibetans. I found the Barkhor, and the guesthouse I had stayed at in 1999, found it still there, and just as cozy. I checked in, took a shower, and had ideas of trying to stay up for the New Year, for....no reason, really. I gave in to sleep, and was unconscious well before the beginning of 2005. And so another year passes...