Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

… continued from last post. After thanking Rinchen for his gracious hospitality, we took our leave from him and inspected his monastery, which is populated by 300 monks, from the hill behind it. The premises were about as large as an average American high school with scattered buildings organized around two large temples with gilded roofs. Even from hundreds of meters above, we could tell that even the parts of the monastery not currently under construction had not long been around. Almost no monasteries we came across had existed for over 30 years, since all their previous incarnations had been destroyed by red guards during the black period.

Dorgye then drove us back to the town for Tibetan dinner in the restaurant of his ex girlfriend, a plump, rosy cheeked girl in her thirties. Over yak dumplings, noodles, and butter tea, we tried our best to describe America, the place our new friend most wants to visit in the world, despite the fact he’s sure he’ll never be able. During the meal, a short man with curly hair and sharply arched hunchback joined us at our table. He, like pretty well everybody in the town, was friends with Dorgye, and he was another example of Tibetan eccentricity that makes us love these people. Sitting next to us for nearly an hour, he neither spoke a word nor ate any of our food, despite our repeated offerings. He was subjecting himself to a day of fasting — to feel the pain of hungry people — and a day of silence — to feel the pain of the animals, who cannot speak — apparently both common practices. At the conclusion of the meal, Dorgye drove his friend to his home and us to his own, where his mother had prepared for us about two gallons of yoghurt from fresh yak’s milk — probably the best I’ve ever eaten in my life (no, we didn’t finish it, but god did we fart that night from the overwhelming of our systems by dairy products). (more…)

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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…)

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By Evan

I am writing this post just to convey the events of yesterday, which may stand as one of the most ridiculous days of the journey so far.

A nice place to camp, by Andy

I woke up in my sleeping bag around 7. The wind, which was blowing so furiously the night before I thought my fly would rip itself in half, was by now completely still. Andy and I climbed out of the tents nearly simultaneously. We hadn’t showered in three days and had camped on the open grassland two nights running. We sun dried the flies and packed up quickly. I took one last look from the top of the hill over the half-mile-deep crevasse behind us and the half-mile-high mountain ridge before us. We both munched down a few handfuls of trail mix, planning to be in the next township of Yangxia (羊峽鎮) around lunchtime. Bikes packed and sunscreen applied, we began crawling up the long mountain road.

About 10 km into the ride, the scenery became so stunning I felt I was in a scene from Lord of the Rings. For days now, our surroundings have grown steadily drier, and the peaks starker. At points it felt like riding across the face of the moon, if the moon had some sparse grass, a few herds of sheep, and an occasional Tibetan. For almost the last month, our route has been so naturally resplendent and wild that I almost completely forgot we were in China. (more…)

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Alexis in his training apparel / Alexis en habillement d'entraînement

English: Alexis, our friend and previous teammate, has finally gotten his lazy French butt around to opening his own site, entitled Sentiers De Chine (Trails of China), where he’ll be recording his adventures (in French) and pictures from May until whenever he decides to stop going. We wish him the best of luck on the rest of his voyage!

Pour les francophones: D’abord, comme Alexis me rappelle souvent, je ne suis qu’un ‘ricain, donc permettez-moi SVP quelques erreurs en la langue de Lafesse! M. Lerognon, notre cher ami et ex-co-aventurier, s’est enfin appliqué à se faire un site à lui-même, et avec seulement 3 mois de retard! Comme disent les chinois, “vite venu, vite parti (來得快，去得快),” et alors on espére qu’il pourra y partager les anecdotes et photos de son périple au moins aussi longtemps qu’il a pris en l’ouvrant! Mais franchement, le site, qui s’appelle Sentiers De Chine, est très bien conçu (apparemment grâce à Gilles Vigner), et nous lui souhaitons une excellente continuation et plein d’aventures et mésaventures (car celles-ci sont les plus marrantes à raconter)!

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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…)

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"The Han are inseparable from ethnic minorities; ethnic minorities are inseparable from the Han; ethnic minorities are inseparable from each other - CCP Xiahe Organization Department" If you follow our Flickr feed, you know one of my side pursuits out here is recording modern propaganda. This is tangential to the goals of this site, but seriously, wow, I had to show this to the world. It was taken in Xiahe (known in Tibetan as Labrang), the site of the most pilgrimized Tibetan monastery outside of Tibet. The southern half of town is old and Tibetan, and the northern half is modern Han/Hui. The old side is being torn down bit by bit to make way for new development, and the monastery itself is being tapped for tourism.

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By Evan

I said we’d go looking for Tibetan shenanigans in that last post, and boy, did we find them! We’ve seen and done so much in the last few days, I’ll do my best to redact and break up details. By the way, all the Tibetan names below have been changed and no pictures are included… just in case.

So out of Shuajingsi (刷經寺), we climbed and climbed all morning until we hit 4345 m (14,255 feet) and descended miraculously into the wide open grassland. Immediately we came across herds of yaks, nomadic tent clusters, and huge mastiffs — sure signs that we had entered the Tibetan regions. If the yaks weren’t enough to confirm this, the massive military presence sealed the deal. Behind the tourist trap tent city where we had our first real Tibetan meal was an encampment of hundreds of military tents, dozens of howitzers stationed on the road, and all other manner of malevolent machinery.

Thankfully though we were too lost in the scenery to care much about politics for awhile. These landscapes up in northern Sichuan are like something from another world, endless rolling hills of green sprinkled with yellow and purple flowers like the world’s biggest king cake, skies bluer than the deep ocean, and more clouds in every direction than I could even see in a dream. The place makes Yellowstone look like the Jersey Turnpike! It has also been refreshing, to say the least, to take in deep cycling breaths in some of the world’s cleanest (if thin) air, all the more striking due its proximity to some of the world’s dirtiest air. (more…)

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By Evan

The Sino-Tibetan fusion family of Emasiji, Duosiji, and Mr. Sun, by Andy

It’s been only six days since we left Chengdu, but it feels like a year ago already. Fat reserves replenished and bikes passably maintained (poor Andy’s bar-end shifter crapped out in a part of the world where only mountain bike parts are available), we made our way to Dujiangyan (都江堰). That city, located in the northeast corner of the basin, is named after one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. It is a complicated flood relief system that redirected the tempestuous Min River (岷江) into the irrigation system that allowed the Chengdu plain to become “the Garden of China.” The plain is now so covered by sprawl and industry it could be called the “New Jersey of Western China,” but the irrigation system works today just the way it was designed to way back in 256 B.C. Sweet!

From there we headed north on G213 following the Min River valley up through the scads of giant green mountains that delineate the low basin and the high plateau. The road, the only one for hundreds of miles around, happens to be the preferred biking route from Chengdu to Lhasa, and so we were repeatedly asked if we were on the classic Chinese “prove your biking mettle” path. Andy pointed out that a long time ago, a pilgrimage to Lhasa, was a deeply significant affair reserved for devoted Tibetan Buddhists and the occasional Brad Pitt. Nowadays it’s the destination for all self-proclaimed badass bikers. That is to say that basically any pedaler worth his spit has either been there, is en route and already ran into us over the last few months, or is planning to go just as soon as he gets his chance. We met several groups making the month-long trip, including four cool dudes from the Beida (北大) cycling club and a bunch of old folks from the Chengdu Retired Persons Association — power to them! (more…)

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By Evan

Sichuan (aka Szechuan) is one of the provinces we’ve dreamed and talked about since the beginning of the trip, especially on bland food days. Andy and I had both been here a number of times, and we had the impression it was one of the most in-your-face, interesting, and visually striking provinces around. Unfortunately, Sichuan and sister municipality Chongqing have largely been a disappointment. There was certainly a lot of greenery, mostly from of growing corn and rice, but it was all very monotonous. The villages and towns mostly looked alike, lots of concrete squares and white tiles. Just as up in the North China plain though, the place has been full of industry right smack in with the villages and towns, and we’ve seen nary a blue sky in our entire time crisscrossing the basin. Sichuan does have the rotten luck of following Yunnan and Guizhou, where we could hardly go a day without giant blue skies and stunning landscapes. All that said, there were some moments worth sharing, which I’ll talk about now.

Only a few days into the province, we undertook our greatest physical challenge to date, a 235 km (146) mile push from Jiang’an county (江安縣) on the Yangtze into Chongqing. All I’ll say for the ride is that the first 100 were the hardest, since it’s all in the head, and then the last 135 actually went fairly smoothly, with the exception of those 3 mountains (bad navigator). Once we shot out of the last tunnel and into the beginnings of what the uninformed might call “the city proper,” we were deluded to think we were almost there. For anybody who has never had the pleasure of entering a first tier Chinese city, I’ll try to explain succinctly. First you hit a wall of towers, giant gray rectangles somewhat spread out and interspersed by mega highways 6-10 lanes wide with no smaller surface options. As you travel inward, the buildings grow taller and tighter, and the roads become more crowded and frantic. Imagine a Beethoven symphony perverted into rhythmic bursts of cacophony, a grating, unchanging noise that rides a quickening pace up and down louder and louder until you think it should hit a deafening crescendo. But it never does. We rode down those mega highways for 15 km, past dozens of signs prohibiting bikes, and likewise past hundreds of bikes and pedestrians (since they have nowhere else to traverse) deeper and deeper through more and more sociopathic drivers until we hit the city center, where the only visible difference was higher density, more traffic, and more signs for brand names. With few exceptions, you could airlift us blindfolded to any big city in China, and we’d never know where we were based on the surroundings alone. (more…)

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By Evan

Our loyal steeds, mine on the left, Andy's on the right, by Andy

I’ve always believed that in order to really love (or hate) something, you have to name it. Since we’ve become as attached to our bikes as classic knights-errant became to their horses, we have decided that it’s well past time to apply brands to our babies. The official handles are as below: (more…)

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