A Different Kind of Freedom Read online

  The first day I managed to climb 4,600 feet [1400 meters], through patchy snow, nothing too difficult. I knew I was high enough to finish the climb the next day but not so high that I suffer from the cold during the night. At about 3 A.M. the low-rumble of a convoy of trucks slowly working their way down from the top of the pass woke me up. This was a good sign, it must have become passable enough for the trucks to get through. The next morning I started climbing again, little by little more snow appeared on the sides of the road. When I got near the top of the pass, I could see out onto an immense snow-covered plateau. The pure white snow blanketed my entire surroundings. The combination of sun and snow blinded me, I had to keep my sunglasses on to shield me eyes. I quickly realized why everyone had told me that the snow would extend for 15 miles, the road crossed a double pass. I had reached the top of the first pass but it would be another 15 miles onto the even higher second pass. I rode through 15 miles of mud and snow, not that bad, just messy. As I climbed the last bit before the 14,000 foot [4268 meter] pass, I spotted a group of Chinese Army soldiers walking on the side of the road. Their truck had broken down earlier. They decided to try and walk until they could find another ride. Near the top, the mud covered trucks and jeeps lined up in the slushy snow. They had dug ruts two feet [0.75 meter] deep in the snow, nobody could move, someone on the uphill side had become stuck. After a quick rest break, I hauled my bike through the snow and around the immobile mass of trucks. The only thing better than cycling under the sun in the mountains is blasting downhill in the mountains. I slid through the mud and ice, around the turns, with dirt spitting up into my eyes from the front tire. I reveled in a few hours of unending downhill that tired me almost as much as the uphill.

  Chinese officials in Zhongdian reported to me that the town of Deqing was now officially open to foreigners. The more places that are officially open the better I can eat and the easier my trip becomes. I quickly found a room in the Deqing government hotel. This place functioned mostly as a truck stop for the drivers that hauled tons of timber out of Eastern Tibet and northwestern Yunnan province. Chinese government hotels always look the same, large concrete buildings a couple stories high, with one or two attendants who live in a bored stupor and do not give a crap if you stay in the hotel or not. Most would actually rather have you not spend the night, so they would not be bothered with straightening the bed covers out in the morning. Changing the sheets was out of the question.

  I hauled my bike up the steps, locked it to the metal frame of the bed and headed out to find any other Westerners in town. A quick search turned up a group of four young German backpack travelers. They had stayed in town for a few days and had no problems with the police. I delighted in hearing this report. My immediate task became eating and stocking up on supplies. I shared a hotel room with a young Japanese traveler. We had met on the road a couple days earlier. He looked Chinese and dressed in Chinese Army clothes, so he did not have any worries about the police catching him. A few days of resting sounded enticing to me, but it got cut a little short. My Japanese friend, Toshiba, went to the local Public Security Bureau to inquire about getting his visa extended. The head policeman curtly told him that he could not get his Chinese visa extended and by the way this town was closed to foreigners. Toshiba relayed this story to me back in our hotel room. I decided to head out for a bite to eat before I packed up to leave in the morning.

  The Germans always ate at a small little family shop just across the street from the expensive hotel where they stayed. I dropped in to reiterate the story of the PSB policeman, when a large Chinese man holding a red German passport turned around and said in English, “I'm sorry, this type of visa not valid in town of Deqing.” One of the Germans replied with, “But we were told in Beijing, that Deqing was now open…” At this point I realized that I still possessed my passport. I stood up and carefully walked out of the cafe. A couple minutes later I returned to the hotel. I started to frantically look for the hotel attendant with little success. In Chinese hotels only the hotel attendants possess the room keys. A key is never given to the guest. I found a cleaning woman who informed me the attendant had gone out for lunch. I needed to get out of town NOW, not in a couple hours after the police rounded everyone up. After a bit of searching, I spotted a window that we had left open on the other side of the room. It was too high and small to climb in through. I managed to drop my belt down through the upper window to pull the latch open on the lower window. I quickly climbed in through the larger lower window. I jammed everything back into my packs and pushed my bike down the stairs. The town of Deqing covers the side of a mountain. From Deqing only one road continues on to the Tibetan border. To get there I would have to ride back past the cafe where the Germans ate their lunch with the police, a place that I could not afford to return to. I spotted a steep goat trail that zigzagged its way up the hillside to the upper road. With great effort I carried my bike up the goat trail three feet [1 meter] at a time. As soon as I reached the road I sped down the hill, through the main intersection, and out of town. Two hundred yards passed town, Toshiba stood at the edge of the road with his pack on his back. Lhasa was the destination that both of us had in mind. We both knew that the time to move on had come.

  Since the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1959, they have created what is called the Tibet Autonomous Region. They have also taken large parts of the border areas of Tibet and have moved them into the surrounding Chinese provinces, effectively reducing the size of Tibet proper. So far, I had ridden in the Deqing Tibet Autonomous Region in Yunnan province, not “officially” in Tibet. As I got closer to the borders of Xizang, as the Chinese call Tibet, I knew that I would have to become more skillful about dealing with the police. I approached the town of Yanjing. I knew that a turnpike blocked the road some place in town but I did not know if the police would be on the lookout for foreigners. I spotted Yanjing up ahead, a small town in the valley between two massive 18,000-foot [5487 meter] ice covered peaks. The afternoon sun shone high overhead. I thought it would be wise to wait until dark in order to facilitate passing through town. Waiting, waiting, waiting, I spent a lot of time on this trip waiting. The worst times always came while waiting for the sun to go down, or waiting for the sun to come up, so I could sneak pass a police checkpoint. The waiting without knowing if my trip was going to be over or if I would be turned back created one of the hardest parts of the trip.

  Tibet

  Only a couple of roads cross the region of Tibet. Two of the main routes through Eastern Tibet come together in Markam. Markam is one of the old-time trading posts where the Tibetans from Kham would come together to meet and trade with people who brought goods in from China. It is on the main road that goes on to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Markam lies inside the Tibet Autonomous Region, TAR. This represented my first police checkpoint in Tibet. A former Lhasa policeman informed me that foreigners could freely pass through Markam, he assured me that the security police would not be interested in me. For most of the last six months I had heard mixed stories from other travelers. I did not have a choice. I had to stop in the town either way. I was tired and running low on food, and Markam would be the last place to resupply for a while. The sun sat low in the sky, descending toward the horizon. I decided to buy my food and leave in the morning. I had to take the chance.

  A Tibetan man, from the truck-stop hotel, called to me in the street, “I have a room for you in my guesthouse.” I figured that maybe he would not turn me into the police as quickly as a Chinese man would, since there is always a bit of animosity between the Tibetans and the Chinese. I was too weak and the stairs too steep to carry my loaded bike up to the room. I unpacked a few things to lighten the load, but still I struggled while hauling my bike up the steep stairs to my room. I immediately headed out to look for a meal and food supplies. Since China is a Communist country, almost every shop is a government store. Most look like a bomb had blown up inside. Glass cabinets line the walls, filled with items that look to be one hundr
ed years old, covered with dust and in some sort of totally random order. I found some jarred fruit sitting next to crescent wrenches. The fruit looked good, but I skipped the foot-and-a-half-long crescent wrench. The only way to find anything in a town like Markam is to inspect every store. After a couple hours of searching, I found packs of dried fish, dried fruit, ramen noodles, and cookies- everything that I needed.

  Tibetans call the eastern part of Tibet, Kham. The people that live there are referred to as Khampas. The Khampas are the toughest of the lot. All the men wear their long black hair braided with a 2-inch-thick bundle of thick red strings, wrapped up around their heads. The classic image of a Khampa man shows him with a bottle of chang, local barley beer, in one hand, a foot-long [30 cm long] knife on his belt and an entire leg of yak meat in the other hand. If motorcycles were readily available throughout Tibet then Khampas would be riding Harleys.

  Dirt roads run through town covered in mud puddles and horse crap. Most times these small towns remain far enough away from the law that whatever the local police say goes. Huge timbers about eight-feet [2.5 meters] long and two-feet [0.75 meters] in diameter filled the courtyard behind the truck-stop hotel. Piles of logs sat stacked six high. It seemed that someone needed these trees moved to the other side of the courtyard. Since no one owned a crane in town, the hotel owner called the local gang of thugs. The leader was a small tough guy, wearing a calf-length denim coat. He carried a small silver pistol on his belt. Chinese law says that citizens are not permitted to carry weapons, this guy was an exception and I did not want to know why. He sent his crew out to relocate all the logs to the other side of the courtyard, and then ordered up a meal. The cook said something about being out of food, so then the gang leader drew his gun in a half-joking, half-serious manner and said, “I think you can find some food for me.” With that I called it an early night and went back to my room to do a bit of writing and packing. I could not afford to have a rest day in Markam. I knew word would spread quickly that a foreigner had arrived in town.

  As my body grew ready for sleep I heard a knock at my hotel room door. Two Tibetan men wearing clean Western style clothing entered the room. They said a friendly “ni hao”, while they sat themselves on the empty beds in my room. They both asked me the standard questions, “What country are you from?”, “Where are you coming from?”, “Where are you going?”. My nervous mind wondered exactly what these guys were doing in my room? Neither of them carried any baggage. Finally one of them told me that they both worked as policemen. He reiterated, “Do you understand? We are both police.” This definitely worried me, why were two police in my room? I carefully answered each question that they asked. As the discussion continued they did not seem concerned with my travel plans. When they finally explained to me that they needed to spend the night in Markam in order to catch an early morning bus, my body relaxed with relief.

  A slow but continual climb filled most of the day as I made my way to the top of a 14,200-foot [4329 meter] pass after Markam. Afterward I cashed in on my reward, a 27-mile downhill that brought me back to the banks of the mighty Mekong River. In the course of a couple hours I transitioned from ice and snow at the top of the pass, to basking in the warm sunshine at the banks of the Mekong. Then I crossed the river to a small broken-down shack for a warm meal of rice and vegetables. The Chinese army guys I had seen walking on the road a week before had finally caught up to me. They had been hitchhiking, trying to get to Lhasa, but their trucks would always break down. I ended up leapfrogging them for a couple weeks. It became apparent that travel through this land created difficulties whether on bicycle or truck.

  I crossed another pass and still one more pass stood at 16,500 feet [5030 meters]. The highest one I had crossed so far. The lack of oxygen crippled me. I crept along slowly on my bike. At this altitude my legs could move much faster than my lungs could take in oxygen, so I had to learn how to slow down everything I did. By the time I reached the top, a sudden snowstorm had pushed in from the other side of the ridge. I had to move on to get down below the howling winds and blowing snow of the storm. I would freeze if I stayed up this high in a storm. With snow blowing in my eyes making it impossible to see, I put my sunglasses on to give me some kind of protection from the winds and the snow. I stopped to take a picture of a couple of yaks walking across the frozen snow-covered river beside the road. By the time I returned to my bike, the snow had piled up inside my open pack, reminding me that I could not spend much time hanging about. Gravity did its work creating a speedy descent for me. I only stopped occasionally to thaw out my frozen fingers and clear the ice off my sunglasses. A few hours later I enjoyed the warm sunshine at the riverside while I ate a few sweet tasting oranges that I had carried from Markam.

  Over the course of the previous couple days, I had been hearing rumors about other Westerners also riding mountain bikes to Lhasa. When I stopped and talked to the road construction workers, they would ask me if I was riding with the other foreigners whom they had seen. When I inquired, I heard that they rode from two days to ten days ahead of me. Every now and then I would spot some tracks on the road that looked to have come from another mountain bike. Once I knew that someone else might be out there making the same trip that I was attempting, everything seemed different. I wondered if there was someone else crazy enough to attempt this same journey. The idea of meeting other Western cyclists intrigued me, but I also felt hesitant to give up the comfort of solo travel.

  I had heard that Zogong was a safe place to stop for a rest, no problems with the police. It appeared to be a town of a few thousand people, which meant I could eat well and resupply. By the time I arrived in town, my stomach ached from the lack of food. The day’s riding had worn me down to the bone. I stopped at the first place that looked like it served a reasonable meal of rice, noodles or vegetables. Peering in through the window I spotted a couple of cooked chickens and a few bowls overflowing with fresh vegetables. Once I got off my bike, half the kids in town decided that I was going to be their entertainment for the afternoon. Whether I was waiting for my food to be cooked or eating, I was without a doubt the most popular attraction in town. Certainly other foreigners had visited the town before but most likely not more than a dozen or so a year, with few ever spending more than a couple minutes.

  Later in the evening I noticed a black chalkboard sign advertising a video at 7 P.M. It was just outside a small room containing a VCR and a color TV with a few beat up wooden benches for people to sit on, a third world movie theater. It sounded good to me. I could use a little brain-dead entertainment. It turned out to be some kind of shoot’em up blow’em up movie, where a motorcycle gang tried to assassinate a US Supreme Court justice- an American movie that had been copied a few dozen times and dubbed into Chinese played on the VCR with the volume turned up to “11”. The film tried to imitate a Schwarzenegger/Rambo-style movie, but failed. The audience consisted of mostly young Tibetan men and a few Chinese guys. During the middle of the movie a young man asked me if the images came from my country. I answered with a reluctant “yes”, not taking the time to explain that this film did not actually portray normal life in the USA. It embarrassed me to have any kind of association with what I saw in the video. When the movie ended, I walked out to the street. I looked up to see the jagged peaks that I had just descended from, silhouetted in front of the round disk of a full moon. This was Tibet, land of extremes.

  This trip was about extremes, about extremes of thought, extremes of feelings, extremes of physical effort and extremes of the environment around me. One day I would be baking in the heat of the sun, the next day snow would be freezing in my beard. One day I would be happy as can be, on top of the world, the next I would be scared, depressed and wondering why I was doing the trip. One day I would be strong as can be and climb the mountain passes as if nothing could ever get in my way. The next I was weak, slow, and I would fall asleep lying in the dirt on the side of the road.

  Someone to Ride With

 
Bamda is a insignificant truck-stop at the intersection of the main road to Lhasa and the road coming down from Northeastern Tibet. I moved slowly that day. Most of the night before I had been up vomiting onto the frozen ground just outside my tent. I could use a decent meal and a bed. When I pulled up, a young Tibetan boy said something about another Westerner in the hotel. Three weeks had passed since I started riding. I had not spoken English in a while. I was anxious to talk with another Westerner. Andrew had started out on this trip three and half years earlier. He had given himself five years to cycle around the world. From his home, Jasper Alberta, he had ridden down to Central America and South America. We spent the evening chatting about cycling and computers. We both set out the following morning on the road toward Lhasa. It was a different experience to ride with someone. Experiences were influenced by and filtered through someone else’s consciousness. It was no longer just me moving through the world. When I spent my days alone I didn’t have someone to reflect ideas and thoughts off of. Just my own observations and my own ideas filled my mind.