Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Now, after over ten months of munching away the dry bottom layers, we have finally arrived at the icing on the cake of our adventure: Qinghai. This, the fourth largest territorial unit in the empire and birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, embodies nearly every reason we undertook this colossal ride: pristine natural beauty, life highly unadulterated by the worst parts of modernity, and for once, healthy resistance to mainstream ideology. The green, spacious province was also the intended target for my China ride in 2007. Thankfully, however, a grocery store clerk and hobby cyclist outside of Chengdu managed to convince me that my friend and I were unfit and underprepared for biking of that order.

Truly in 2007 I was in no way ready for this territory on my folding Dahon without camping supplies, warm clothes, or bike tools (I didn’t even carry any chain oil!), and so I probably owe my life to that grocery store clerk I found riding outside of Chengdu. This time around, however, we’ve built the entire trip — endurance, equipment, etc. — around our eventual arrival here in the northeastern corner of the Tibetan plateau, the challenges of which we have met in stride. This, of course, flies in the face of nearly every Han we told of our eventual arrival here. The vast majority was convinced we’d meet with something between certain doom and probable vexation in the territory of the rowdy, lawless Tibetans. In the end, they were right about the trouble, but completely off base on where it would come from. (more…)

By Evan

nomad |ˈnōˌmad|

noun

• a member of a people having no permanent abode, and who travel from place to place to find fresh pasture for their livestock.

• a person who does not stay long in the same place; a wanderer.

– New Oxford American Dictionary

The nomadic lifestyle, by Evan

Although the only things we seek that might pass for “fresh pasture” include fried rice noodles with eggs and maybe bottles of oil (or whisky), we do quite neatly fit the definition of classic “bike nomads.” This, of course, is a very difficult concept to convey to most Chinese, who typically after hearing the entire spiel about what we’ve done over the last nine months and will continue to do for the next four will then ask, “so you both live in Beijing, and you’re students there?” “Home is where your (sore) butt is” will probably mystify most until we get onto the Tibetan plateau in a month. I digress.

Back to the point, more often than not on this big, ridiculous trip of ours, we fall short of our forecasted feral-ness. We had planned from the beginning to stay a majority of our nights either in the homes of LBXes or in the wilderness, but this man-like plan has like many others gone mice-like. So it was decided, after several days of self-pampering à la European backpacker in Dali in the walled-in hippy nest of Andy’s college bud Rick, that we should man up a little. We also wanted to live cheap to recover the old wallet from our spending frenzies. Up to $20 USD in a single day — madness, madness! (more…)