Journey To The East

Joining the two red dots: some more climbs after Yushu, then down off the Plateau to Chongqing

Our route from Yushu to the end of the Tibetan Plateau crossed another series of high passes over a distance of about 1000km before meeting up with the urban sprawl around Chongqing, where we planned to spend Chinese New Year. We were now heading due east, a huge relief as we lost the battering southerly winds which had been our biggest obstacle to get to Yushu. But Lobby’s fingers were continuing to give him considerable discomfort, and we still reckoned it was dangerous for him to be riding at such high altitude: the first half of the ride ahead rarely dipped below 4000m above sea level. So we searched for trucks, minivans, buses, anything heading in the right direction that could take Lobby and his luggage: I joined up the dots more slowly by bicycle behind him and we met up in the evenings. This section was quite a rough period for poor Lobby as he subsequently got food poisoning on the edge of the Plateau, which took him out for half a week. He was definitely very relieved to be fit and warm once more by the time we reached Chongqing, at a much more manageable altitude of 200m!

Elevation map for first 400km

Lobby forced to take transport after some cold scares

So I was mostly on my own to cycle the second half of the Tibetan Plateau. Luckily this section wasn’t as hard as our southerly route from Xining, and after a series of very steep climbs in the first few days out of Yushu I descended to a more reasonable 3500m altitude.

Mountain scenery

Snaking up the mountain – spot the road

Summiting a high climb out of Yushu

Yak at the top of another pass

The sun came out: after the driving snow and wind of just days before, this was glorious. I skirted along lakes whose water was beginning to unfreeze as I descended below the treeline into a valley framed by much larger mountains to my left and right. Tibetans were getting out of their cars and taking selfies with the trees, as excited as if they’d spotted a snow leopard or rare bird instead of the regularly-spaced sentries on the side of the road. For people constantly living at altitude, trees must be an uncommon sight!

Rivers unfreezing lower down

These kids out and about as it got warmer

Much warmer lower down

An easier life below the treeline

Gradually mudhouses were replaced by larger wooden constructions and villages became bigger and more frequent. Again people would invite me in for tea, yak yoghurt, bread and rice with an insistence which made it very hard to refuse. Hygiene standards were still kept very low though, and in guesthouses priority was given to setting up a WiFi connection over building any sort of a loo: even in the bigger villages many people still went to the loo in the gutters alongside the main road, hitching up skirts and squatting down next to festering flaming rubbish piles. Hard to know where to look!

Tea with a monk – his iPhone on the table

More Tibetan hospitality

It was in one of these villages that a little kid on a tricycle managed to nick one of my water bottles while I chatted to my host over lunch. I only discovered my loss 10km up another steep climb! Being hoodwinked by a small child stung, but I wasn’t about to head back down to chase the tike around the village. It was actually quite a good feeling that after a journey of 13,000km my water bottle would come to rest in the Tibetan village I’d just left. There then followed another more sinister encounter, when a car stopped outside the next small town and a Tibetan man got out, gesturing me to stop too. He was dressed in loose furs, wore a cowboy hat and had several gold teeth. He asked me if I had a full set of teeth. We’d got accustomed to some pretty odd questions on the Plateau so I didn’t think much of it and answered that yes I did, thank you for asking, how were his teeth doing. At this he opened his mouth, pointed to an obvious gap and asked me how much I wanted for one of my incisors. I initially tried to explain that perhaps tooth replacement wasn’t all that simple, but this bloke was having none of it, insisting that all would be well if I handed over one of my incisors in return for some cash. He actually got quite aggressive: I had to dive into a monastery nearby to get away from him! Happy to lose my water bottle to the Plateau but would rather not donate my teeth!

Probably my water bottle thief

More worrying than the occasional tooth-hunting crazies I met along the way were the Tibetan dogs whose attacks became more and more frequent. I was riding into the grasslands, an area home to thousands of nomadic Tibetans who raised yak, and often became much wealthier than sedentary Tibetans by doing so. Chained-up guard dogs lined the roads, which was fine as all they did was bark and look fierce. What was less fine were the wild dogs, whose numbers had swollen since controlled dog breeding presumably wasn’t a priority. They gave chase, bit my panniers and snapped at my heels as I frantically kept the pedals spinning to try and outrun them. These dogs – Tibetan mastiffs as they are called properly – are not dogs as we know them. The Chinese have a different word for them, because they more closely resemble a cross between a bear and a lion than the stray dogs you may be imagining. They were huge. No, not as scary as the wolves of the Pamirs, but those were often talked about and rarely seen. The shaggy and rabid dogs of the Plateau were daily menaces; and frustratingly, they were regarded as totally okay by the locals. I had entered a strictly nonviolent region of the Plateau called Kham, where people didn’t kill yak for their meat nor did they slingshot any wild dogs as we’d seen previously. So the bear-lions had nothing to fear from humans: they ruled the grasslands.

The grasslands

The grasslands

Herding yak by motorbike on the grasslands

I developed a system of dealing with the dogs to try to stay rabies-free. For a start, I wasn’t tied by Tibetan rules of non-violence. The system worked quite well, though I still got my shoe nipped once and my waterproof trousers raked on two occasions. As I cycled I could see these animals from miles away sprinting across the grasslands towards me, so they never took me by surprise. In fact they would often gather numbers as they ran so I ended up with two or three mastiffs closing in on me from different spots – the trick was to try and keep an eye on all three and not leave an ankle exposed to the fourth I’d missed. It was not possible to outrun them unless I was cycling at 40km/h downhill – this I very quickly found out. If there was a manageable number of chasing dogs I would unclip my left shoe and try to steer them into the oncoming lane, lashing out at them with a kick if they came too close. Usually an oncoming truck would shake their resolve and they would scatter. This tactic involved quite a lot of weaving across the road as the dogs would try to sink their teeth into my spare tyre or rucksack if I maintained a straight line.

A Tibetan mastiff

Tucking into a straggler

If there were no trucks the riskier option was to lure them further in and land a knockout kick to the face, something I achieved once but in another attempt got a nip to the shoe, so we’ll call it 1-1. However the kick I landed was between the animal’s eyes and floored it onto the tarmac, quite a satisfying conclusion to a high speed bear-lion chase. If there were more than a couple of mastiffs chasing then I had to stop the bike – quite a nerve racking decision when they are right behind you! – and use the bike as a shield while pelting rocks at them. I tried to do this near a house if at all possible because the dogs’ barking would provoke a Tibetan to rush out and help me fight them off: it was pretty handy to have an ally in these situations. I made it through without major incident but unfortunately without ever seeing an oncoming truck plough into a rabid bear-lion. Personally, however disgusted you may be at the idea, I think this dramatic conclusion would have made up for the hours of nervous dog chases and rock hurling that became my day-to-day as a cyclist on the Plateau.

The fluffy version

The real version

As I descended slowly the weather warmed to the point where there was no longer any ice on the roads, which meant I could finally break a new top speed (67km/h) with less risk of being chucked off the saddle on one of the many steep downhills. I met up with Lobby and we cycled the next two days together, passing a family of pilgrims on their way to Lhasa by foot from their hometown. Their journey would take them two months, they told us, though they were not prostrating themselves at every third step like the most devout do. They asked us where our pilgrimage would take us and seemed a bit taken aback when we gave the bright lights of Hong Kong as our answer!

A long walk to Lhasa

Next we headed for a town called Daofu which had seen a monk burn himself to death in protest the previous month: although in public people laughed and smiled in the sun, behind closed doors both Han and Tibetan groups had some very nasty things to say about each other. The unease was less intense than the Han-Uighur divide in Xinjiang, perhaps because the Han felt it less likely that a Tibetan would be wearing a bomb vest. However police points had sprouted now the plains were less agonisingly high, and pedestrians were frequently stopped to be questioned by very Han-looking cops. Despite not being in the TAR, the powers-that-be kept a close eye on the grasslands which we were passing through: local Tibetans told us that telephone signal magically disappeared over important dates such as the Dalai Lama’s birthday, to make it impossible for anyone to make or receive calls. The government also denied many people of Tibetan ethnicity (ethnicity is written on every Chinese person’s ID card) the right to travel to border zones, or big cities: we wouldn’t be seeing any Tibetans in Hong Kong, and that is a major reason why not many are seen in Beijing or Shanghai. The things you can do as a one-party state.

The Daofu vegetable market

Special forces on hand

We had planned to ride together from Daofu, but unfortunately this was the evening which saw Lobby throwing up into a flowerbed next to a yak eating cardboard out of a bin. Food poisoning compounded a week’s worth of altitude issues, and now Lobby’s priority was to get right off the Plateau and back to sea level, to be ready for our sprint across the urban sprawl. Again I followed slowly behind by bicycle, this time across a region which had been rocked by a series of earthquakes in November last year. Luckily there had been no fatalities, but a large number of the houses I passed had been badly damaged so people now lived at the bottom of their gardens in blue-disaster relief tents. The inside of these tents was small enough that prized possessions had to be crammed in on top of each other, the TV next to the stove next to the Christmas lights around the shrine to Buddha. People seemed very cheerful about their predicament considering they had just spent winter at 3500m in a tent, but that just goes to show how hard the Tibetans are. I got the full story over bread and soup with a couple who invited me in, much more worried about our journey through China’s Wild West than the fact that their house had just been reduced to rubble.

Many houses unsafe to live in

Invited into a disaster relief tent for tea

I was approaching the end of the Plateau but frustratingly still had two small mountains in the way, which was annoying as this meant any chasing dogs would be able to catch me, and by now my legs told me they were just about done with climbing anyway. The first climb emerged from around a hill in the grasslands, a towering beast of a thing with a tiny road snaking up until it disappeared around the side of the mountain and into the snowline. I reckoned the ascent was about 1500m. Seeing all the bends ahead of me was actually pretty rare for a long climb, as usually the road ducked and wove and dipped out of sight long before the summit: here I could calculate my spinning time accurately, which was very helpful. A sweaty four hours later I was at the top, back up at 4300m and looking down at the dots of cars where I had started from below. On the way up I had passed an airstrip which claimed to be the third highest commercial airport in the world – that should give a sense of scale! It felt like being on top of the world again. Next I had the longest continuous descent of the whole expedition, which must also be one of longest continuous descents in the world. I zoomed down 3000m in 90km, all in slightly over two hours, as the scenery around me changed from open grasslands to a rushing gorge. This was very definitely Han China once more, chickens and neat cabbage patches replacing yak and earth walls, people carrying woven baskets and wearing conical hats instead of the colourful furs of the Plateau.

Looking down from the top

The last of the Tibetan furs of the Plateau

The second climb was at the beginning of another long day, at the end of which I was supposed to be meeting up with Lobby for good, who was now feeling much better. But I never made it – because of awful road conditions I was forced to bail at sunset in a town which looked like it had been bombed. The climb itself was fine, though I was now crossing minibuses of Chinese tourists with sunhats and cameras (heading to where I’d come from, the most accessible point for a one-day ‘Plateau experience’) instead of the more fun but unpredictable motorbikes of the yelling Tibetans with their sound systems blaring Buddhist chants. After three hours of having buses stop for passengers to take my sweaty picture I reached the top, or not quite, as the Chinese had shaved the top off and instead built a tunnel through the mountain in a classic move for efficiency-over-environment. From then on things didn’t go my way: the 100km descent from the tunnel was all unpaved, on roads which made Uzbekistan’s look good. I pedalled some of it, pushed a lot of it, and swore throughout. The occasional tunnels here were all unfinished, unlit, rocky and wet from unknown water sources streaming down the walls on the inside. Quite a shock for the road-building monster that is China! I wondered dimly if this was to discourage the Tibetans from ever descending from the Plateau. The backup plan was to stay in the aforementioned arsehole of Asia, the gutted town I’d found complete with rivers of human waste running down the ruts of its main street. I aimed to leave as soon as possible the next morning, when it was light enough to cycle and not risk cholera by stacking it headlong into one of the waste pits. I would meet up with Lobby and we would continue on as planned.

Not an enticing entrance

Uzbekistan?

However to compound difficulties, now that I had entered Han China guesthouse owners were more bound by law to register their guests with the police. Technically in China every hotel still has to do this, scanning Chinese people’s ID cards to make sure Big Brother knows where they are when they’re not at home. In practice many rundown places in smaller or more remote towns don’t bother registering their guests, or only do so by hand into an old and very tattered logbook which presumably gets lost in the mists of time. Technically foreigners are also still required to stay in ‘foreigner friendly’ hotels – essentially the expensive ones – which are deemed to be ‘safe’ enough for us to use. The frustrating thing is that these rules are upheld very irregularly: China at a provincial level hasn’t yet found a consistent strategy for dealing with ‘off the beaten track’ foreign tourism. Up until now we hadn’t had any issue with staying in dives, since Xinjiang worked on logbooks (so we were long gone before anyone noticed), and the guesthouse owners on the Tibetan Plateau frankly couldn’t have cared less about Han Chinese box-ticking. But on this occasion I was sat down at a computer with the sweet old man running the guesthouse and asked to fill my details into the system. Naturally the system didn’t allow foreign passports – so instead I assumed the character of a Mr. Zhang, holidaying from his coal mining job in Shanxi province.

At about midnight my door was thrown open and five police officers rushed in, one holding a blinking video camera up like a gun. I had been rumbled. Little did I know but the sweet old man had managed to work a scanner, sending the fuzz a copy of my passport which didn’t match my concocted written description very well. Upon discovery that the holidaymaker from Shanxi was actually a bearded foreigner who had travelled by bicycle through Afghanistan enroute to Xinjiang, the police had got pretty jumpy. They ordered a complete bag search, so I sleepily explained away each item of clothing, pill and noodle sachet in my panniers to the gathered audience. During the process my worldly possessions were chucked around the room with some force and left where they lay – but given that I still hadn’t yet morphed into Mr. Zhang there was little I could complain about. The fuss was over by 2am and I was miraculously allowed to stay put in the shabby guesthouse, so I sneaked downstairs to apologize to the owner for all the hassle. He waved it off in a flamboyant hand movement, blaming his country’s poor administrative system for the mix-up, likening the town’s police force to its disgusting streets and asking what I wanted for breakfast tomorrow, on the house. A true legend. But unfortunately, not the last run-in we would have with the Chinese authorities on this expedition.

So with this nighttime escapade behind me, I met up with Lobby at the edge of the urban sprawl, now badly in need of a good rest. However we still had 500km to pedal before our next planned stop, since we wanted to catch some friends enroute for Chinese New Year. This section was dramatically different to the open plains and blue skies of the Plateau we had just been riding through: white polluted fog hung over huge grey landscapes of skyscrapers which seemed to connect city after city, after city. What’s more we were now only days away from Chinese New Year, the most important holiday of the year which sees hundreds of millions of Chinese make the journey back to their hometowns to celebrate with family. It is the largest human migration in history, and each year it only gets bigger: during the 10 days either side of New Year, it is estimated that 3.65 billion journeys are made domestically across China. This meant that roads were quite busy – and we were right in the middle of it!

Grey replaced green

Suddenly streets were lined with stalls selling fireworks, bangers and catharine wheels, bought and handed to small kids who duelled each other with them, chucking firecrackers over their shoulders and at passing cars. This was China finally letting its hair down for the big event of the year: families whose breadwinners worked on the east coast were joyfully reunited, noisy round tables set up outside and banquets laid on at the side of the road. Traffic was sometimes interrupted when long chains of firecrackers were laid across the road and lit, the sound of gunfire accompanying the dragon dancers who skilfully wound their way around the smokey chaotic centre. Handheld fireworks were being shot off like mortars, their trajectory more horizontal than vertical. It seemed there was hardly a moment without a loud bang or the machine gun sound of small explosives going off! On top of the traffic these proved quite a hazard, as a firework launched at speed at the bikes would not have ended well. Luckily we were spared, though some came very close. After dark the display intensified, and we cycled straight through areas which sounded like they were under attack – crates of fireworks were launched up into the night sky, duds spinning energetically away at head height across the fields. Young couples released red love lanterns skyward which joined dozens of others, the flickering yellow flames at their base licking at the canvas as they floated lazily up to the stars.

Selling fireworks on street corners

Making our way through chaos

We arrived in Suining, a small city outside of Chongqing, after a desperate sprint finish to make it in time for New Year. There we were put up in style and hosted for a big banquet by one of Lobby’s friends from his school days, Sammi, followed by many intense games of mahjong (we each got a helper for this as our level was far below what was acceptable for New Year). The hotel was the fanciest we’d seen all trip, and it was lucky that Sammi met us at the entrance or in our sweaty lycra we would probably have been turned away! The next day we visited a shrine which was teeming with people paying their respects over New Year. The custom was to light a big red candle (or several, the more the merrier) and burn fake paper money in the chimneys on the hill, both of which gave you merit for the coming year. The very wealthy apparently burned real money, which didn’t seem to us a very auspicious way of asking the New Year to provide more of it. We burned our share of fakes, bade farewell to our lovely minders and started on our last few hundred kilometres towards Chongqing, and a long-awaited rest day.

Things were looking up!

Definitely looking up

New Year’s banquet

Gaining merit

As usual Lobby had done a stellar path-finding job, navigating us through the sprawl by negotiating dozens of approach roads – sometimes seven lanes wide – which wound their way under overpasses in a seemingly endless spiral of grey concrete. I hadn’t had a day off in over 1000km so felt like I was running on fumes. However it was right on the outskirts of the prefecture capital that Lobby made an uncharacteristic yet crucial map-reading oversight, which had us detouring 50km along steep country lanes. Our final push into Chongqing was now looking like an epic 200km day, and it was right when dusk fell that I started feeling more and more unwell. We had to stop on the side of the road several times to see if I would throw up. After Lobby’s run of bad health it was definitely my turn! The bright lights loomed just as I started shivering and seeing stars. We were not there yet.

Nick x

Pathfinding with an audience

We set out from Golmud on a road bound for Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. We wouldn’t be following it all the way, as the Chinese government doesn’t allow independent travel to the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR, hashed in yellow below), which is also called political Tibet. The region is perhaps the most sensitive in China, after Mao declared it part of the PRC in 1950, rolled the tanks in and forced the Dalai Lama into exile. For better or for worse Tibet has remained part of China ever since, a very tightly controlled corner of empire – though frequent protests from inside the TAR still manage to hit Western media and anger Beijing. Luckily for us Greater Tibet (namely the Tibetan plateau) extends far beyond the TAR, and the overwhelming majority of people who live there are ethnically Tibetan. So as cyclists, if you’re prepared for a few weeks of tough high altitude climbs, you can still experience Tibetan lifestyle on what is called the rooftop of the world. This is what we planned to do. The plateau is at a base height of 4000m: similar to the Pamirs, cyclists normally only venture up here during the summer, but as usual, we were stuck with the winter snows and February winds. However buoyed by our recent Taklamakan success, we treated this prospect as an additional challenge.

Decisions, decisions …

Things get complicated: in green, our route from the Taklamakan and onto the Tibetan plateau, via an enforced overnight bus to Xining (in blue); in red, our original barred route; hashed in yellow, the TAR.

Our attempt to reach the plateau didn’t start well. A windy climb out of Golmud swiftly brought us to a police checkpoint, where it was established in no uncertain terms that we would be cycling no further. Although we were still 400km away from the official boundary with the TAR, from this point onwards special permits were required as we approached the sensitive zone. The fact that we would be turning off east before the TAR was entirely irrelevant, we were told. No permit, no onward passage. No discussion. While Lobby still argued hard for our cause, I started hatching a plan which had us sneaking through the police post after dark. But with beautiful timing the man in charge then turned to address me directly for the first time, as if he could read my mind, reminding me that the post was open 24/7 and that our descriptions had been radioed to the next station. Ah. Desperately frustrated at being held up by Chinese officialdom, we then blurted out that we would be cycling on anyway, as we made for the door, and that there was nothing they could do to stop us. With my hand on the doorhandle I heard the man state that if we crossed his checkpoint like this, he would make sure we were both arrested and then deported from China. This last word stung, as we had already been given the deportation treatment in Azerbaijan all those months ago! Beaten this time by the system, we had no option but to head slowly back to Golmud and regroup. We scrambled for a plan B as we pedalled. On this occasion we had tiptoed too close to the invisible line, following a truckers’ route directly towards the forbidden land: so we decided to head to Xining overnight and approach the plateau from a different tack. This plan would add mileage, and would bizarrely have us cycling west for a few days – but ultimately it should mean that we rejoined our original route in Yushu. Map above!

Climbing up to 3200m from Xining

The next morning saw us stumbling bleary-eyed from our overnight bus in Xining and straight back onto the bikes, following a road which punished our tired bodies with 1800m of steady climbing on our first day out of the urban sprawl. We were heading west for the first time in the expedition, and this combined with tiredness and the never-ending climb made for a tough day mentally. Leaving the outskirts behind we quickly found our first prayer flags, as well as huge white Tibetan carvings, Buddhist scriptures etched into the hills of the plateau. Woolly yak grazed and vultures ripped apart a sheep carcass by the side of the road. Over the next few days we would climb up to a plateau of 4000m, peaking at 4824m. This being China we wouldn’t be facing the Tajik problems of disappearing roads and power outages – but we would be coming up against snow and severe altitude once more, along with a much more potent obstacle: the wind.

First Chinese yak

Cue Lion King music

As we climbed further and further the wind began to attack us with unprecedented ferocity. It came down from the peaks to our left and right and swept straight across the plateau, carrying with it helpless birds, prayer flags (a good hazard to entangle our bikes) and even some yak herders wrapped up in their Tibetan furs. As cars reached the top of passes their passengers would pile out, and staying close to the ground they chucked little pieces of paper stamped with Buddhist mantras into the wind with great cries of delight. Afterwards they would dive back into the car, with the urgency of a drowning man being shown a lifeboat. Unfortunately we had no such lifeboat. Our bikes were at the total mercy of Mother Nature and were blown all over the road like twigs instead of the 150kg beasts they really were. I’ve never experienced anything like it, Pamirs included. What’s more, within a couple of days we had risen above the treeline, which made the riding even more exposed. If there was a headwind our speed dropped to a Central Asian 3kmh; if we were hit by a crosswind we would both have to dismount and walk, the safer option, having witnessed Lobby nearly pushed off the road and down a steep drop by a nasty gust. Once without thinking we left our bikes square to the wind, and they were slammed down into the tarmac. The two sellotaped chopsticks which together acted as our flagpole bent out at a horizontal angle to the bike, the Union Jack streaming madly behind us. This was proper wind!

Lobby braced against the wind

Entering the gale outside

The first rundown Tibetan places we stayed in were nearly all in one-street villages, with at least half the houses boarded up for winter. There were very few people outside. It felt like a scene from a Western shootout as we pushed our bikes down the empty wind corridor, dust churned up in front of us and the door of an abandoned house swinging wildly on its hinges. Life up here is harsh. If you were outside during the day you could quickly get sunburnt from the altitude – the Tibetan ‘rosy cheek’ look is actually years of compounded sunburn. If you lingered outside after dusk you could easily get very cold very quickly. Peter Hopkirk writes that the Tibetan plateau is the only place in the world where it is possible to get sunburn and frostbite at the same time, if you sit half in the shade and half in the sun at the end of the day.

Abandoned streets but colourful hills

Rosy cheeks actually severe sunburn

Those Tibetans who for some unknown reason had decided to stay up here during the winter spent the day huddled around their wood burner in a central room, as we had seen in Kyrgyzstan. I say wood burner but there was no wood at this altitude: it was the wife’s job to collect dried yak poo from the surrounding hills and feed the fire with that instead. Personal hygiene was kept to a minimum because of the lack of running water, which all froze. Poo collection was usually her first job in the early morning, when the stuff had had a chance to freeze overnight. Her next immediate task was to make breakfast for the family, who had presumably got used to the idea of yak particles being in their porridge. Lack of wood is actually a much bigger problem on the plateau than just fuel for cooking, as it also means people can’t be cremated when they die. The frozen ground is also much too hard to be digging graves. So instead of cremating or burying their dead, the Tibetan practice is to cut the corpse up into small pieces, grind up the bones and feed the resulting mince to the many vultures which circle overhead, in a ceremony called a sky burial (in Tibetan this translates as being ‘bird scattered’). Tibetan Buddhism treats the body after death as just an empty vessel (the soul is the important one which moves on), so the fact that it is consumed by birds is not met with the same alarm as it might be in the West.

Long furs to keep warm in winter

So you would expect that having to deal with these living conditions the Tibetans would be the most grumpy and miserable people in the world. I imagine if you put a Londoner somewhere for the winter where he couldn’t go outside, wash or breathe properly then he would lose his sense of humour pretty quickly. But the Tibetans were the complete opposite – extremely friendly people, upbeat, loud, real jokers! They wore colourful woolly caps and thick fur overcoats which they wrapped around like a sheet, with sleeves that went down to their knees, apparently so they could grip the handlebars of their motorbikes without feeling the cold. Motorbikes have largely replaced horses as the way of choice to get about, so many decked these out with rugs and big sound systems to zoom around town in zigzags, shrieking at the top of their voices over the Buddhist chanting droning from their boomboxes. Long black hair tied in a ponytail beneath a cowboy hat, gold teeth in permanent grins framing dark faces, Buddhist amulets dangling from their neck, prayer beads worn like a lasso across the chest and big riding boots over tight jeans: these guys were the opposite of Han Chinese in almost every single aspect. They greeted us in excited yells, and were visibly pleased to bursting when we managed to string a couple of Tibetan words together to shout back from our bikes. Our mangy beards went down pretty well since Tibetans have virtually no body hair at all – it became quite normal when we ate to have a man come across to our table uninvited and stroke one of our beards curiously. Arm hair was totally foreign to them too and produced sharp intakes of breath as well as stunned silence, as if they had just met a talking monkey. Then followed endless photos with the talking monkeys alongside every family member in every different pose, which we had to start refusing eventually or we would never get our mileage cycled for the day! It was a surreal experience.

Tibetan style

Causing a stir at breakfast

The most impressive building in every village we passed through was the monastery, usually on a hill far removed from the chaos below. On the same hill would be thousands and thousands of prayer flags, sometimes tipi-shaped, sometimes strung out in lines to make massive rectangles, or even spelling Tibetan words in giant multicoloured letters against the snowy mountains. The monastery complex also housed many of the monks who spent years of their lives up there, so there was nearly always somebody keen to show us round if we made the climb up the hill. We would be sat down in the huge kitchens with tea, yak yoghurt and – if we were unlucky – tsampa, a kind of Tibetan porridge (avoid), while monks bustled around us boiling water in gigantic pots and making yak butter sculptures for the monastery. We would then be led around the monastery by a monk who could speak Chinese and therefore could answer most questions we had about the inside – statues of the different Buddhas above pictures of famous lamas, against a backdrop of colourful wooden pillars, draped cloth from the ceiling and the pervasive sickly smell of yak butter.

Always on the top of windy, steep hills

The long walk down

Better way to travel

What to see when strolling around a village

Prayer flags everywhere

On one occasion a monk about our age invited us to have dinner down the hill, and we were introduced to his extended family over many big bowls of noodles. A framed picture of the Dalai Lama – illegal to display in China though this was largely overlooked outside the TAR – hung on the main wall above more amulets, offerings and quite tacky electric candles. The granny sat in the corner muttering mantras and vigorously spinning her prayer wheel throughout the evening. Our monk showed us the dagger his father used to carry on him for protection when he went outside, as most others had done of his generation. He grumbled that these were no longer allowed, and that the Han police would arrest you if they found you with one on the street (looking at the huge blade, we couldn’t help thinking that was fair enough). He then went on to show us what most people now carried to guard against the many wild dogs on the plateau, basically a small anvil on a thick string. It could be whirled around to strike a dog’s skull with enough force to crack it. Even the pacifist Buddhist monks took the wild dog issue very seriously, which slightly worried us – at the end of the evening he insisted on walking back with us in case we were attacked, anvil firmly in hand! On our walk back he opened up and described his people’s great sadness at not having a country to call their own, at having their spiritual leader in exile, and being routinely discriminated against by the Han. He told the story of being handcuffed as a teenager and put behind bars for a few days, just for being on the street after dark wearing a monk’s robe. It was a very powerful and memorable evening.

The skull-cracker

Totally reasonable for self-defence

On the bikes, we were still rising steadily and started encountering all the same altitude problems that we had suffered in the Pamirs. Lobby in particular began to develop some worrying breathing issues at about 4300m, energy sapping away with each pedal turn while still being buffeted by the strong wind. As usual our bikes were being blown all over the road. Rest stops grew longer and longer, and it soon became clear that Lobby was in quite a bad way: his numb fingers could no longer control his handlebars, which is pretty key when the wind hits you full-force. There were steep drops on either side of the road, so losing control of the bike at the wrong moment could spell the end of your expedition – and perhaps a sky burial if you were unlucky! We decided to try and hail down a car which he could take to our planned evening stop, and I would meet up with him once over the pass (4500m). Magicking his bike into a standard car’s boot space with a howling gale was a delicate process, but we managed it with the help of some very enthusiastic Tibetans and a couple of bungees to keep the boot closed. Lobby was on his way. I joined up with him as planned that evening after the pass, at which point his condition had unfortunately got considerably worse. The highest pass (Bayankala, 4824m) lay between us and Yushu, our rest stop at the halfway point of the plateau. Although extremely gutted, Lobby agreed that it wasn’t sensible for him to be climbing further in his state, or in fact to be on a bicycle at all: he would take a truck going the right way, and we would aim to meet up again in Yushu.

Hitching a ride to spare the fingers

So it was at 5 o’clock that I woke up on my own in a little shack, on my second day of a two-day push to the expedition’s highest pass. The windows had no panes and the door didn’t close properly – I’d been caught out overnight by not putting my water bottles in my sleeping bag, which had all frozen by the time the alarm went. Wheeling my bike out into the dark I grabbed a large rock as my host had done the previous evening, aiming my torch at the four pairs of reflective eyes whose owners started howling as if on cue. The dogs made a big racket but did nothing but circle the bike and snap their jaws, so my rock remained unlaunched and I was safely on the road, now fully awake and heart pumping the pedals quickly round into the blackout. It was very important that I cover the uphill to the pass in the morning, as the afternoon winds became much fiercer and could easily dash my summit attempt – much better to face those going downhill.

Staying over with this Tibetan family

Quite a grim morning ride

The first few kilometres threw me as they sloped downhill: I didn’t have time to put my gloves into the handlebar mitts to reach for the brakes before I was skidding all over the place on black ice, ending in a not-so-spectacular fall onto my hip. The bike somehow took most of the impact, which snapped my rearview mirror off and twisted my pannier rack round. I was left feeling stupid but unhurt, a good sharpener for a long day ahead! As the sky grew lighter the early morning truckers started zooming past, headlights flashing as if by blinding me they thought it would be easier to steer my bike on the snowy road. I spent the morning spinning the bike up a series of winding inclines, sheltered for now by the mountainside to my right. My beard froze to my jacket zip, and when I tried to melt it by dribbling saliva down myself that froze too. Not cool! Several cars stopped to ask if I needed help, I was quite impressed that they stopped at all really considering the abominable snowman look I was quickly taking on. One (Han) car offered me an instant noodle sachet, which was sweet but utterly pointless as I pointed out that all my water had frozen – to which they gave me a huge thumbs-up and drove off. To the Han Chinese, the message seemed to be that even at the worst of times there was nothing that couldn’t be solved by a sachet of instant noodles. Even just having one in my possession was a guardian against all ill.

Barren and pretty tricky

The sun rising to reveal compacted ice

He saw my face and offered me his mask, a very sweet man

The wind hit with full force at midday during my last two hours of climbing, right when I had planned to be summiting the pass. The climb had been tougher than I’d thought, so I’d been slower – now it would be windier too! There now seemed to be no other option but to groove my way to the top, so I blocked out the howling wind with some Parov Stelar on full volume and punched out the last 8km to the top that my lungs had in me. I realised halfway through that without a rearview I was effectively blind and deaf to the traffic behind me, so decided to ride obnoxiously in the middle of the lane in case anyone tried to jump me. Luckily few cars take the February route over Bayankala Pass.

The pass sign finally came into view with a crescendo of gale, which cut my cycling speed to a walkable 3kmh. I summited a shrieking, fist-pumping maniac, coat zip frozen to face, flagpole horizontal to the wind. A minivan full of monks was kind enough to lend me some hot water to unfreeze my face as they threw prayer papers out the window, which allowed me to record a short video: our donations page to Prostate Cancer UK had just reached £10,000. We had just reached our highest point of the expedition. It was quite a moment.

Gale force at the top – car stuck in a snow drift behind me!

Windier than Wales

I met up with Lobby in Yushu, who was much happier for having spent a couple of days in bed. Yushu had been worst hit in the Qinghai earthquake of 2010. According to official government reports 3,000 people died and 85% of all buildings were destroyed, though many Tibetans think the death toll was much higher. By complete coincidence I had been travelling through Yushu just three months after the event in 2010, which at that time was lined with rubble and blue disaster-relief tents. Now we entered a completely rebuilt city, with practically no sign that it had been flattened just five years previously – the pace of development was ridiculous. We hitched a ride out of town to a well-known monastery, which had a walking loop up a mountain around it, and were encouraged to follow a whole load of humming and chanting pilgrims around the circuit too as we hoped for a favourable wind over the next section – or at least not so brutally against us. Here for the first time we saw Tibetans prostrating themselves fully on the ground as they performed their slow loop, stretching their whole bodies out horizontally in the dirt after every third step. The most pious make a pilgrimage from their hometown all the way to Lhasa like this, face down in the dust for a third of the time, in a journey which can take months. The prostraters were covered in dust and mud but seemed very happy in their work, cheered on by all the prayer-wheel spinning, chanting, humming walkers who overtook them.

Yushu High Street, 2010

Yushu High Street, 2015

Following the pilgrims’ route up the mountain

Prostrating themselves at every third step – the hardcore way round

Clinging to the edge of the cliff

We finished our day – and the first half of the Tibetan plateau leg – by taking a walk around Yushu’s mani stone pile, which I can tell you was much more exciting than it sounds. A mani stone is a rock inscribed with a Buddhist mantra, usually the most famous “Om mani padme hum”. These are piled on top of each other in huge walls which people then walk around clockwise, accompanied by the usual prayer wheel spinning and devotional humming. The mani stone pile in Yushu is the biggest in the world, so unknowingly we were thrust into the middle of a revolving congregation of thousands and thousands of Tibetan Buddhists. Once part of the moving crowd it was very hard to get out: we were jammed together shoulder to shoulder, prayer wheels smacking anyone within a handheld radius and once in a while the masses parting to let through a yak or a buggy circumambulating the wrong way, swallowed up in a sea of colourful hats and furs. This became chaotic. Not looking in the slightest bit Tibetan we didn’t fit in well, and as soon as people spotted the foreigners they started grabbing us excitedly, tugging at clothes, holding hands, asking for photos. We made the mistake of stopping once for a quick picture, which turned into a paparazzi shootout with dozens of lenses and kids being launched in our general direction for the mantelpiece picture. Those who have already been to China will have experienced the excitement of feeling like a minor celeb as the Chinese anxiously gather round for photos – in Yushu that reached a whole new level. Fighting our way out of the corner we had been squeezed into, we dived into a shop thinking to lose some of our tail, but they marched in behind us, took over the shop floor and blocked off our exits. Some were hysterical. In that moment as we physically wrenched ourselves free of our new Tibetan fans to get to a taxi, I empathised with the daily struggle Justin Bieber must face walking down the street. Mugshots of hands over our faces from the taxi window. Safer to be on the saddle riding across an empty plateau, we thought, breathing heavily from the chase. And fortunately, we were soon doing just that: the second half of our Tibetan route had begun.

Nick x

Some just added the one mani stone…

…others opted for the wheelbarrow

Joining the swelling masses

Feeling important

Jumped by the excited crowd

Longing for open road once more – all this to come…