cycling

We waited in the bus terminal area of Rampur, what appeared to be a charmless one-street town, but turned out to be a charmless one-street town with a bazaar that fell away from the road along the steeply sloping bank of the Sutlej. I went in search of some juice while Martin sat dazed and glum looking, rubbing at his throat and sucking on lozenges like they were candy.

We arranged to take a van to Koksar, at the junction with the road to the Spiti Valley, and begin cycling there, the last segment of our bicycle ride in India .This van was set to leave at 3am “tomorrow morning”, which I tried to clarify with the driver. Does “tomorrow morning” mean what we would refer to as “tonight”, or does it mean the following night, sometime after midnight and therefore actually two calendar days hence? I struggled with this for some time, and called the man's cell phone to reconfirm in the evening.

“Tomorrow morning, meaning after midnight tonight?” I asked.

The town of Leh is a collection of cultures, and the capital of Ladakh. The people are primarily Ladakhi, but the place is polyglot, with lots of downcountry Indians from Punjab or Haryana conversing in Hindi, Muslims from Kashmir gathered around the mosque speaking Urdu, Tibetan refugees selling handicrafts lining the Main Bazaar, and a sprinkling of foreign tourists bargaining in English. There are rug shops, cafes catering to Western tastes (pizza, pasta, burgers and fries), stalls selling the sickly sweet Indian snacks: gulab jamun, jalebi, barfi, kulfi.

We left Manali under sunny skies, having bought a few provisions for the road. The town ended abruptly at the river, which was crossed by a bridge festooned with prayer flags. Just beyond the bridge we began to climb, an ascent that was to last the rest of the day and part of the next one. We passed through two Tibetan refugee camps, depressing places constructed of scrap wood and metal panels salvaged from trucks and cars, beaten into material for walls and roofs. This place didn’t resemble anywhere in Tibet.

Before leaving Dharmsala, Martin had one last chore to do, which was to go to the post office and mail home two huge stones (geodes) that he bought off the street near our hotel. What possessed him to go and buy stones in India the day he was to leave on a bicycle ride, I don't know, but he did it. They were nice enough stones, but they weighed about 20kg (thats 45 pounds). And I experienced the Indian postal system years ago, and unless things had changed dramatically, I knew this would be at least a two hour ordeal.

Janne and I left Kashgar on August 27th, leaving me with about three weeks on my visa. (An aside here: Hong Kong agencies can issue six month visas to just about anyone, but since the beginning of 2007, US passport holders can no longer get six month visas. Again, I carry the cross...) Our plan had been to cycle from Tashkurgan east towards Mazar, but Steve had just been in the area with horses and camels, and had run into major washouts along this road, ending near the settlement of Pilu with an uncrossable river that had eaten the entire road along its bank.

I spent considerably more time in Kashgar than I had either anticipated or wanted to spend. A slew of cyclists were in town, many of whom had ridden from Europe to western China via Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. Days went by, with nothing more on the agenda than to wander from food stall to food stall, wander around the old city, and toy with the idea of fixing my bicycle - only to put it off. Martin and I stayed first at the Overseas Chinese Hotel, welcomed back with big smiles by the floor attendant, whom I had grown fond of during our previous stay here, and was now jocular and entitled.

We left Golmud a day later than we had anticipated: my illness was harder to shake than I had expected. Martin kindly supplied me with antibiotics which eliminated the lung infection in 3 days' time, and made significant inroads against the sinus infection that I had also developed...

In the interests of saving time, Martin and I took a bus from Xining to Maduo, a Tibetan town on the plateau at 4300m elevation. The day began smoothly: a relatively orderly line in front of the ticket counter and about $10 each later, we were equipped with a printed ticket (the days of a hand-scrawled ticket are gone), paid a bit for the bicycles, and we were off. The bus was the typical work-horse vehicle made for short runs, seating about 40 with a luggage rack on top, with a net cast over the contents to keep them from rolling off.

(I wrote this as an email to several people, in a free-ranging style, which, as is usual for me, didn't follow the rules of punctuation, capitalization, or good sense. It turned out to be rather long, so I am posting it here, to be edited, refined, deleted, whatever, at a later date...)