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List of equipment, list of things to do, list of lists. I had an unending list of tasks that I needed to do before I took off for China, buying a water filter, tools, building my bike, on and on. As my departure date I chose April 1, 1994. The seasons in Tibet had determined the date. Much later I would learn that there would be many things on this trip that would remain out of my control.
Returning to China
My Dragon Air flight landed in Kunming, the capital of Yu
My first hotel room tempered my immersion into China, it held both a hot shower and a color television. The next morning I woke up to a bouncy 12-hour bus ride to Dali. This marked the begi
I had a beautiful day to start, brilliant sunshine and snow-covered mountains surrounded me. Nothing compares to riding a bike in the sun while looking up at snow-capped peaks, that was why I traveled halfway around the world. I knew that the first part of the ride would be straightforward, but I would rapidly cross the border into the part of China restricted from foreigners. This line moved back and forth all the time. During Chinese crackdowns in Tibet, security would be tight in all the Tibetan border areas. For the last few months I had been hearing that things had loosened up in Tibet. That news sounded good to me. Most of my entire trip ran through an area totally closed to foreigners.
My first Chinese checkpoint came quickly. A large red and white turnpike blocked the road, and a few Chinese policemen talked among themselves in front of the guardpost. I decided to keep pedaling. I approached the turnpike and pushed my bike under it. With a quick glance back, I saw a guard holding an automatic weapon across his chest. Things seemed pretty cool, no one yelling at me, just a “nihao” (‘hello’ in Chinese). I had been baked by the hot sun for most of the day. I needed drinking water. I took my chances and stopped to chat with the checkpoint guards. They were a group of young guys from Beijing, with one gun and one hat between all of them. They would hand the gun and hat to the next guy whenever the soldier on duty wanted a break. Like most policemen stationed in Western China, the work bored these guys out of their skulls. My presence meant entertainment for them. While they asked me a few questions about where I came from, I heard a video game somewhere in the back room. After investigation, I found a group of guards playing a game from Hong Kong, called “Contra.” In this brutal game Rambo-style heroes get to fight head to head against the video images of Nicaraguan Sandinista forces. Sometimes I am so far from the USA, sometimes I never leave.
Signs of Tibet
The hardest part of a long uphill on a bike is not knowing how much more remains. The great thing about cycling in a Tibetan area is that prayer flags always wave in the wind marking the top of passes. I climbed my first real pass, 10,500 feet [3200 meters], an entire day of cycling uphill. When I saw the small colored flags that release prayers as they blow in the wind, I knew I had returned to Tibet! The Tibetan prayer flags or “wind-horses” came from the pre-Buddhist practices of Bonpo, the folk religion of Tibet. Each of the flags is imprinted with images and prayers meant to purify the wind and please the gods. This pass signaled what would be the first of countless days of climbing. By the end of the trip I had succeeded in climbing 160,000 vertical feet [48,700 meters] of uphill, almost six times the height of Mt. Everest. This marked the begi
Zhongdian sits on the southwestern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The town consists of a mix of ugly Communist Chinese concrete buildings and old adobe Tibetan houses. Since it is the county seat, there are a large number of Chinese government buildings and Chinese workers in the town. I have often wondered who could design such hideous concrete cube-shaped buildings, which seem to set the architectural standard for the PRC. Up until just six months earlier this area had never officially been open to foreigners.
After my arrival in town, I learned that the one and only backpacker hangout was a little place called the “Lhasa Cafe,” which was run by a young Naxi and Tibetan woman named Lama. A wonderfully energetic and intelligent woman. By herself, she created and managed this hip cafe. Lama and I quickly became friends. She wanted to learn more English and I wanted to learn more Chinese. We both had roughly the same level of language skills, respectively. During one of our many conversations, I mentioned the English word “capitalist,” which she did not understand. I looked up the word in my Chinese/English dictionary and showed the characters to Lama. When she spotted the Chinese definition she reacted rather adversely to the word and the concept. I instantly realized that this was the result of years of Chinese propaganda. When I asked Lama if she thought she was a “capitalist,” she flatly refused that she had anything to do with being a “capitalist.” I asked her a bit about how she actually ran her business. She told me that she rented the building from the government bus depot, for about 300 yuan (US$60) a month. She also paid both her mother and another woman to help with the cooking. I asked her what would happen if she could not pay the monthly building rent, and she replied, “I would be kicked out.” This all sounded to me to be a purely capitalistic enterprise, but Lama did not want to be identified as being a “capitalist.” After a lengthy discussion, Lama started to understand the true meaning of capitalism. Since Dung Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1980’s, China has been in a rather strange state. Officially it is a Marxist Communist country, but in certain areas limited capitalist enterprises are allowed to operate.