Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

黃昏我站在高高的山岡
At dusk I stand on a tall mountain
看那鐵路修到我家鄉
And see the railroad that has been built to my homeland
一條條巨龍翻山越嶺
Huge dragon after huge dragon cross the mountains
為雪域高原送來安康
Bringing peace and health to the snowy plateau
那是一條神奇的天路哎
It is a miraculous heavenly road
把人間的溫暖送到邊疆
Bringing the warmth of the human world to the frontier
從此山不再高路不再漫長
From now on, the mountains are no longer high, and the road is no longer endless
各族兒女歡聚一堂
The sons and daughters of every race joyously assemble under the same roof

The plateau, a place not easily forgotten, by Andy

The preceding is an excerpt from the song Heavenly Road (天路), a song sung in Chinese set to Tibetan style music about the Beijing-Lhasa railway. It is likely the current most popular propaganda song in China (by far surpassing Dao Lang’s “Salaam Chairman Mao”), and also the single song I hate most in the world. I hate it so because unfortunately I used to be pretty into it, owing to the frequency with which I heard it, until the one day I bothered to pay attention to the lyrics, which I’ve pasted in totality at the bottom of this post for the curious. Aside from the fact that it’s hilariously ridiculous to think that prop-pop is actually an acceptable art form in China, the song’s popularity highlights the attitudes most Chinese have toward Tibetans: that they are griping benefactors of the goodness of the Han. I’ll go into this topic in depth in the post that continues this one.

Aside the hundreds of times I’ve heard the first lines of this song as a ring tone on this trip, I was graced to hear a group of vacationing cyclists from Liaoning wearing matching red long spandex uniforms singing it boisterously within eyesight of the miraculous railroad on the northern bank of Lake Qinghai. Beside the fact that these were some real chumps (like most of the vacationers making a circuit of the lake), their shameless rendition reminded me that we were on our way out of traditional Tibet and headed back into the hard world of Northern China. (more…)

• New pics from Andy http://is.gd/eufWa #
• Less than a month of riding left and still almost 1,800 km back to Beijing! It's the final push now! #

• In Gansu again. Rest day tomorrow after a good five days of riding! #

• Sucking burning garbage smoke tonight. Pushed crew to 116km on a late start. Had to scramble for a campsite at dusk…next to a landfill. #

• Tons of new, belated pics up from Andy http://is.gd/ennpE and Evan http://is.gd/ennqq … We're still alive! #

By Andy

It’s been a long time since an update, and we apologize. Internet access has been scarce lately, and we have been a bit distracted by the presence of a much larger crew of late! My girlfriend, upon completion of her summer internship in Shanghai, has been roughing it with us for the past 9 days. After a harrowing, 32-hour train ride detailed on her blog, Devi arrived in Xining where she met with my dad and his girlfriend, who had just arrived from the U.S. to finish out the last month of our ride back to Beijing with us. After hiring a car, the three of them arrived in Gonghe (共和縣) where they had a single afternoon to acclimate to the altitude and prepare themselves for one hell of a ride!

The next day we set out from Gonghe for Qinghai Lake (青海湖), Devi on a borrowed, folding Dahon bicycle (with only 8 gears!), and my dad and Ellen on their brand new touring bikes. Just out of town, we ran into a mountain of a scale Evan and I haven’t even climbed in some time. It took most of the day to crest that mountain, and not long after, we spotted a storm on the horizon and called it quits for the day. We set up camp on an absolutely beautiful, green mountainside with yaks and sheep covering the hills as far as the eye could see. The rain fortunately never materialized, and we had a great evening of snacks brought from America and a specially requested bottle of Talisker 10-years Scotch whisky from duty free.

Over the next weeks, we arrived at and worked our way around Qinghai Lake, to arrive today in Xining, where Devi is leaving us tomorrow to return to America and a last semester of grad school. Tonight we celebrated our trip around the lake with a wonderful Italian meal and a few bottles of wine, probably the last we will see until our arrival in Beijing!

From here we’ll be heading northeast through Gansu, the deserts of Ningxia, and finally some grasslands in Inner Mongolia before dropping down into Beijing. Time is running short, and we’ll be pushing hard to make our mid-September deadline, 2,000 km away!

I promise we’ll have more substantive updates to come. Unfortunately, tomorrow isn’t a rest day for us, and it’s getting late. Rest assured, we haven’t been mauled my mastiffs, frozen or lost in the wilderness! In the meantime, we did manage to get some pictures up from the past few weeks. Check out mine here and Evan’s here!