Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (20 page)

Our wheels were soon layered with pebbles and small rocks that clung happily, waiting for their moment to puncture the tube. The snaking mess continued for several kilometres and we were forced to get off and push the bikes, the tar collecting so thickly on the tyres that it collided with the frame at each revolution. We had to stop frequently and tear off bits of soft tar and gravel before getting on and cycling again.

By the afternoon, the heat continued to intensify, zapping through us and, with no shade, we both began to feel nauseous and light-headed. We gasped and stopped for breath every ten metres while ‘upstairs’ at 4500 metres. What’s more, our water was running out quickly, and our thirst impossible to quench in the dry air.

But then the cavalry arrived. A convoy of 30 camouflaged Isuzu four-wheel drives stopped, each one sporting an Israeli flag and occupied by middle-aged men and women. Hands stretched from the vehicles, bearing gifts – water, food, crispy things, chocolate and even Scotch. We thanked them profusely.

One of the Jeeps stopped and the driver, a young man, jumped out, smiled warmly but then recoiled with horror.

‘What?’ he said in his thick Israeli accent, pointing to the forks of my bike. ‘No shocks? What are you? Stupid!’

‘Yes, I’m absolutely crazy!’

Our Israeli friend cocked a questioning eyebrow at me and jumped back in the Jeep and followed the rest of the yellow snaking convoy, disappearing over a hill.

Later on, thinking that the next blind corner would reveal the pass, we were crushed to find more turns leading to a steady, unclimbable slope. I was hoping that this would unravel the road to a giddying descent into a cool, cool valley. But no. It wasn’t there.

‘Come and sit in the shade,’ Bec said, soothingly. Shade. Ah, there wasn’t much of that dark stuff about. I was feeling sick and said so to Bec. My eyes were punched up, my mouth was dry, and my lips were chafed and sore. I didn’t want to go on. There was another 5 kilometres to go – at least an hour. But we had to keep going.

The bikes
clack-clack-clacked
as they carried the valley’s stones in the tar stuck to our tyres. A Jeep passed us and veered off up a rough dirt road. We followed up the loose gravel, heaving, slipping, trying to push the bikes up when I stopped, and flopped over the handlebars, crucified.

‘Give me a minute, Bec.’ I was struggling to breathe.

‘Let’s go back down,’ Bec said.

‘No, we’ve committed ourselves. Just give me a minute.’

Halfway up, I saw an old campsite – used tar drums and a flat space surrounded with rocks. Bec suggested that we camp there, but as we tried to construct our new tent – well, a large rainbow tarp strung over our upside down bikes like a lean-to, we both felt dizzy as the high altitude and the sun bit holes in our heads.

‘At this altitude, so near the pass, it’s dangerous to sleep here,’ but Bec had already half-constructed the tent. ‘We will have to go over the pass.’

‘But you don’t know how far it is.’

‘It’s one kilometre.’

‘The map could be wrong.’

I took my pulse; it was going crazy. I felt a stabbing pain in my chest.

‘I DON’T FEEL WELL! I MUST GET DOWN FROM HERE!’

‘All right, all right!’

We packed our bikes and pushed the bikes around the next bend and there it was: THE PASS!

An altitude marker was covered in bedraggled but colourful prayer flags. The flags go by the Tibetan name of
Lung Ta
(wind horse) and are symbols of spiritual goodwill for those who erect them and for those who pass. (If the flags are hung on the wrong astrological date, however, they apparently have the opposite effect, so I hoped that whoever hung these ones hadn’t got their leap years mixed up.)

Around a turn was the moment we had been waiting for – the descent!

I thought the tar would simply fling off as we gained speed, but instead the wheels whipped the frame with their stone teeth. Our bikes chugged away, rattling themselves into nervous breakdowns until we arrived at the bottom of a small valley. The town of Gata, as it appeared on my map, was in reality one large, drab, dirty tent with rusty tar barrels scattered around it. Filthy road-builders oozed out and clumped over in their tarred-scuffed gumboots towards us.

They weren’t the most welcome sight considering that we had fought their handiwork all afternoon, our tyres now resembling hairy Ferris wheels, not to mention being surrounded and whistled at by another group of workers earlier in the day. The men watched as we struggled with our bikes – throwing them upside down, flipping the tarp over, placing rocks at the ends of the tarp and anchoring the bikes with rope – and did not leave until we went inside our bike tent. Sometime later, a Tibetan man – shiny red cheeks, dark-bronze tan – sat outside our tent clutching a plastic bag.

‘
Namaste
!’ he said and broke into an elfin grin.

‘
Namaste
,’ I replied. He sat there grinning, rocking back and forth on his haunches. He muttered something, scraped the ground with his hand and then pointed to the mountains.

‘I don’t understand.’

He grinned again and then in a whisper vanished into the cold night.

When I awoke the next morning, I looked around the tent: shoes were tied to spokes, clothes hung on pedals, and bags were scattered along the base of the tarp. The tent had worked extremely well. Except for one thing.

‘I’m wet,’ said a basket of gnarled blondeness.

‘Darling!’

‘No! Everything is wet,’ she snapped. Condensation had trickled all over Bec and her sleeping bag. I, on the other hand, was crispy dry, having enjoyed the airy apex of the tent, though a handlebar had kicked me in the ribs most of the night. Again I had slept badly, catching only a few hours between midnight and four a.m. Bec complained of a ringing headache.

‘Just as well we hadn’t camped up on that peak,’ I said cheerily (or was that smugly?).

Rebecca growled.

‘Right!’ and I went off and made us lumpy porridge with honey for breakfast before setting about attacking the hardened tar with a screwdriver.

‘If there’s tar on that road, I don’t want to do it; I’m throwing the bike on a truck.’ Bec seethed, angry at the two hours it had taken to clear the tyres of tar. Once de-tarred, we set off … well, pushing the bikes up the potholed and rocky road.

Halfway up, an Israeli couple in purple tie-dyed shirts and dreadlocks passed us on a farting and overloaded Enfield. The girl’s curly locks trailed behind her with the exhaust. She waved.

It was only nine a.m. yet the sun was already cutting through my wet sarong, glaring off the mountains and giving us sharp headaches. It took us another two hours to climb this monster, but once over the peak, we sailed down through an amazing narrow gorge of honeycomb walls, swirling rocks and towering tufts that rose out of the sandy slopes like gods. It was truly magnificent and it was at times like these, as a sense of euphoria washed through, that I felt all the pain and struggle had been well worth it.

That evening we stayed at Pang, another tented city. Foreigners sat around the impromptu courtyard, propped up in plastic chairs, while the drivers of goods-carrying trucks dozed in their cabins, legs poking out of windows.

Bec and I stayed in a large tent with a parachute roof. The tent was owned by a Nepalese family who tended to their guests, cooked
chow mein
over a kerosene stove, sold potato chips and
chai
, and issued bedding. The family made enough money, according to 18–year-old Jangpur, to last them through the Nepalese winter, and they would return to Kathmandu once the season ended in September. Her
12-year
-old sister, Sampa, helped with the chores, but most of the time she entertained us.

‘Natural gas, no problem!’ she said, then lifted her leg, pointed her finger like a gun and made a farting noise with her mouth. We all laughed.

‘See what you’ve done!’ Bec laughed. ‘Teaching kids bad jokes.’

The joke was a hand-me-down from my father and I was happy to see it cross cultural borders. It was funnier still when Sampa repeated the routine, shooting foreigners in the middle of the night as they staggered off the bus in search of hot drink.

As darkness consumed the ragged cliffs, Bec and I watched the night sky; it was clear as glass. Holding hands, we went back inside the communal tent, and under the covers, began making love. Everyone was sound asleep … we thought. It was only after we had finished that we realised that Jangpur’s mother had been there the whole time, happily watching us from the corner while she knitted a baby’s jumper!

The last of the arduous climbs was the Tanglang La Pass (5328 metres), the highest of all passes on this highway. It was only 20 kilometres from Pang, and by the late afternoon we were over this scary beast’s rocky head. We stopped, posed and took photographs.