It started waking up under the road and ended camping in a far flung desert in a remote part of far Western China. As with the journey, it was what happened in between that defined it.
The previous afternoon, I had rolled my sleeping mat out in the confines of a concrete culvert. It was dry and the cement newly poured, and so it was clean. The headwind blew so hard it had felt like climbing a steep Himalayan pass for the past three days but, unlike the raw beauty of Tibet, there was no downhill on the other side to focus on. The wind was violently tearing at my face and ears. It was far too strong to pitch the tent. In the small culvert I was sheltered, but outside it felt like the earth was angry. Light plastic bottles and sheets of tin scuttled all over the place. Sand was torn from the earth and thrown in my direction. I didn’t expect to find anything living out in the barren desert, but wasn’t sure, and so I slept lightly that night. A small mouse crawled over me in the early hours of the morning. Startled in my haze of half sleep, I jumped out of the sleeping bag and shone the flashlight around. When I found him huddling in the windbreak I’d made from my bags, I saw the fear and realised he was just searching for the same sheltered place as I was. Startled as I’d been moments before, the little guy scampered away in the light and didn’t bother me for the rest of the night.
The wind hadn’t abated by morning. I saddled up knowing I was in for another hard day’s ride. The howling headwind continued to tear at my already weatherbeaten face, exacerbating my already scorched and blistered lips. At 4 km per hour it felt like a battle against the winds, at one stage stopping every few hundred meters to catch my breath and rest my tired legs. It was hard grueling work, made even harder by the three consecutive days I’d been battling these winds around the Taklamakan Desert. There was nothing out there, just an endless expanse of sandy gravel and black asphalt that stretched as far as the eye could see.
I was in the middle of nowhere. Between the Tibetan Plateau and the Oasis of Urumqi in far Western China lies an expanse of desert between worlds. Part of the ancient silk route, the Taklamakan roughly translates as a place where people enter but don’t return. It was hot, but I never knew just how hot until I pulled into a petrol station a few days earlier for some shade. The thermometer stuck up on a concrete pylon supporting the roof read 40 degrees. I wondered what it was in the sunshine. That same day my cycle computer overheated, leaving an LCD screen awash with a swathe of empty grey.
By mid afternoon I was tired and running low on food. My legs ached. The wind blew the bike all over the road, making it hard to keep in a straight line. It was difficult to stay upright and even harder to stay focused. I didn’t know how many kilometres it was until the pass. I could see hazy snow capped mountains in the distance. The map gave little indication and, with the poor level of detail, it could mean anywhere from 30-40 kilometres difference in real terms. (The previous week, on the way to Dunhuang, where the Great Wall of China ends and the vast expanse of desert begins, I cursed the map when clearly marked towns didn’t exist). At the speed I was going, it would take about seven hours to reach what I thought would be the longest possible distance to the pass I knew was ahead. I’d only packed enough food for three days but, against this wind, it was already four, leaving me low on food. In my mind the previous day, I had already started rationing my half a packet of biscuits, two packets of instant noodles, a tin of corn, a small tin of tomato paste and a large green tin of an unidentifiable substance – possibly some kind of vegetable, fish or meat; it was all in Chinese and all I could find. I had enough for breakfast and possibly lunch, but I knew that I would go hungry for most of the afternoon climb. With my continuing bouts of intestinal problems, I was worried my body couldn’t absorb the little energy I had. Ahead were jagged mountains seen through a distant heat filled dusty haze. I cursed myself for leaving behind a kilogram of tiny orange fruits – hardly worth peeling – that a lady had given me the day before.
I’d picked myself up off the side of the road half a dozen times already that afternoon. Just a little further, I thought, just to the next signpost, culvert or kilometre. In the late afternoon I arrived at the start of the pass, but didn’t think I had the strength to climb it. I pulled into this run down encampment on the side of the road and tried asking a Chinese man I found there for some food, water and rest, but I was soon heckled out of his rusty rubble filled yard. Reluctantly I struggled on, not knowing for how long it would last.
Slowly and wearily I cycled up a long pass. It was a marathon effort, not because it was a steep climb, but because my legs ached; my throat was parched and my stomach complained. I was still sick from India and I was weak. Exhausted, I wanted to give up, but I hadn’t enough food to stop. To my surprise, the pass wasn’t that high but, with the slow climb, the pain and exhaustion dragged on little by little, hour by hour. It was cold towards the top of the pass. It was bitterly cold, in fact, but no snow lay on the ground. As long as I kept cycling, the cold kept at bay and so, eventually when I did reach the pass, I only paused to throw on some more clothes. To my amazement, just 300 meters into the next valley, the wind began to ease then, a few minutes later, it seemed to vanish entirely. Grey clouds hung over the peaks. Moisture hung in the air but the clouds wouldn’t give up the rain. Craggy mountains rose from the eroded valley all around. The earth appeared alive; the mountain slopes looked covered in lightning tattoos as eroded water courses became broad finger-like veins rising up to the clouds.
Towards the bottom of the valley the clouds parted to blue skies. When I emerged from the mountains I found a small run down cafe used by local truckers on the side of the road. I pulled in behind the trucks and let the bike fall to the ground. I slumped myself into a chair and began pulling off the layers of clothes as I ordered the cheapest and quickest bowl of noodles available. I washed my face in a small basin. It was the first time in about a week. I looked in the mirror to see a face I barely recognised. I looked so tired, dirty and exhausted; my lips were cracked; my eyes tired and skin scorched. My hair was matted with dust; my shaggy beard itched and the sunglasses had left me with a panda tan and peeled nose.
After lunch, with a full belly, I enjoyed the downhill cycle across a huge delta of river gravel washed down from the mountains. It went on for 30 kilometres, gently falling towards the dunes. A wall of sand, blown in across the great expanse of the Taklamakan Desert, rose in the distance 300 feet high stretching across the horizon. Beyond lay the jagged peaks of the mountain pass and, somewhere below, the town I was looking for.
The sky seemed much paler in the desert than on the plateau. I cruised down to the valley with an effortless ease that drew new reserves of energy. It was close to freezing on the pass and every half an hour I felt it get warmer and warmer. Grass grew again on the sides of the mountains and, for the first time in days, water flowed in the valley below.
I flagged down a white 4WD to ask for directions. I’d barely spoken to or seen anyone in days. The clean white Pajero stopped beside me. A tinted electric window slowly came down. A young Chinese woman stared at me from inside the car looking a little agitated that I asked her to stop. In a tight fitting white singlet, her large breasts more than filled her delicate frame. Her nails were painted electric blue and attached to delicate hands which were firmly wrapped around the steering wheel. Her hair was swept back with designer sunglasses and her skin was a tanned olive without a single blemish. She was beautiful! The seatbelt nestled across her chest accentuating an already titillating situation and I struggled to find the few phrases of Chinese that I spoke. She confidently pointed the way and I let out a deep breath and smiled to myself as she drove away.
The city was surrounded by small farms following the river. A rolling expanse of empty desert surrounded the town towards the mountains. A plantation of birch trees flanked the entire city like an ancient wall offering protection from sandstorms. Beyond that there were rolling sand dunes in the west. I arrived through the thicket of birch trees to find a farmer with an old worn tractor blazing away down a modern city boulevard. I grabbed onto the back for a ride through town. As with all modern Chinese cities, the streets were wide and the roads newly paved. I stopped at a small store to take on a few more supplies and bought all the sugary snacks, nuts, chips and drinks I could stomach, and then some – for the next few days on the road! After an appalling post lunch sugary binge (that my sister, a dietician, would scold me over), I headed out of the city into the sandy desert. On the way out, I stopped in the shade for an ice cream that felt like heaven itself and couldn’t be found anywhere but in that moment.
The curves in the sand dunes were sexy and elegant, each one being a unique artistic creation of wind and time. Whips of sand snaked along the black asphalt out of town then vanished in moments. Huge sand dunes 50 stories high on the left, 30 on the right, flanked me as I headed down an ancient dry riverbed. It felt like I’d crossed the threshold of civilisation. I thought about the ancient silk road traders who must have passed this way hundreds of years ago, but the road’s black and silky smooth arteries reminded me that civilisation was never that far away.
It was 8 pm when I decided to fulfill a promise I made to a tired body for an ‘early’ rest. The sun didn’t set here until 10 pm – a legacy of China’s one time zone policy. The massive sand dunes parted to give way to a flat lifeless desert. I rode about a kilometre off the road along an old drainage line where the sand was compact and hard. The green mysterious tin can turned out to be pork in a jelly substance. Actually there was very little pork as it was mainly chucks of fat having the consistency of jelly. I ate it all the same – shame it should go to waste. Surprisingly it was quite filling, but provided little comfort for a quasi vegetarian and gave me all sorts of trouble the next day. In the small store I found earlier that afternoon, I also bought crispy deep fried samosa chips – similar to the ones I found in India, although these ones were much cleaner and far more tasty. They said on the packet in English they were simply ‘good’. If that wasn’t enough, a small picture of a smiling corn cob character was there to reassure me. Who’s going to argue with a cute cob of corn? In India they came in a dirty grease filled paper bag.
Reflecting in the journal I wrote, “I fought against the headwind; I fought against the traffic; I fought against the bike, the road and a raging battle inside. Why was I here putting myself thought this? What was I trying to prove?”. Even now, a month on, I still don’t know if there even was anything to ‘prove’. It’s not many times in our lives that we get to be so challenged by our natural environment. There is a common theme faced through hardship that undeniably connects us to something bigger than ourselves, a common thread that spans culture, race and region. It’s in the ancient tales of heroes overcoming adversity, in myth and folk legend. Closer to home it’s right there in the stories we tell children at bedtime. As a culture often so disconnected from our natural environment, had we simply forgotten how to ‘read’ them? They are simply more than stories. Since time immemorial, travellers, vagabonds and pilgrims have put themselves in these positions exactly for these reasons: to get some objectivity, to grow small, to be shipwrecked, to let go. I wondered if this was just the beginning. Would I be nostalgic for it in the future? Was that what it was all about; why the adventure was so enticing, so intriguing and yet so difficult?
There was a period during that day when I felt I had nothing left in me. Exhausted, empty and just about defeated, I felt about ready to give up. But that little voice inside persisted. It came from deep within, source of strength and also of pity. Going through my mind was perhaps the simplest of explanations. To borrow a line from the Foo Fighters, I realised, it really was, “… days like these where you learn to live again”.
See the pictures from Far Western China here: https://picasaweb.google.com/CycleStrongman/FarWestChina?authuser=0&feat=directlink
