passes

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.

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...)

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).

The road out of Rouqiang passed through oasis farmland, peopled by a mix of Hui, Han, and Uighurs. Bicycled traffic, heavy at first, decreased, and I was on my own 10km down the road. The pavement ended soon after, and again it was desert. Work had begun on continuing the sealed road towards the east, but hadn't gotten very far at this point. I came across a solitary Uighur worker, shoveling sand into a trailer bed. It seemed ludicrous to shovel sand to take anywhere in a place with nothing but sand, but there he was, standing alone, doing his job 20km from anywhere.