Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Glorious landscapes of... Hebei! by Evan

Just two days ago when I woke up at 11:00am in my top bunk sleeper train berth, we were rushing past tranquil scenes of rolling green hills and high rice paddies. In fifteen short hours of much-needed repose coiled up in less space than corpses get in coffins, I had been passively sped back to the enchanting South and its rice, a sight that previously required two months of hard cycling across the Mad Max landscapes of the North China Plain. More than any moment in Beijing during the few days prior, it was those paddies that made me violently awaken to the fact that the all-consuming trip of my lifetime (up to this point), the one where the scenery changed gradually and pedal by pedal, is now over. As I now recall the last week up to the finale, all the events have taken on blurred edges as if part of a dream.

Without further ado, I should relate some of the details of that last week. To our dismay, the forecast called for up to six days of rain across all of central Inner Mongolia, and for once did not deceive us. The first bit out of Hohhot had us push up the longest, hardest hill we’d face for the rest of the week through a steady rain. The driving rain and gusty wind on the downhill robbed my body of all its heat and forced us to take shelter and change clothes in the first crappy restaurant of the town after the descent. I had gotten so chilled that Andy could in no way convince me to finish the day — it was still raining — to our goal, especially since the patron had cheap rooms to let. Then said patron did himself the disservice of attempting to double the cost of our fare on account of our having “cleaned up in the bathroom,” and so anger propelled me the last miserable 20 km. (more…)

I just wanted to let all our followers know that we safely returned to Beijing 3 days ago, and that the party was a smashing success. As soon as all the post-trip logistics calm down, there will be several more posts about the last part of the trip and hopefully some conclusions. Stay tuned!

By Evan

A beautiful day on the grundle busters of Bayan Nur. This picture was taken just as we realized that our path, which a farmer had told us to take "all the way" to the next village, had suddenly ended. By Evan

I’d like to quickly jot down some thoughts here about our time in Inner Mongolia as I lay in the top bunk of a Mongolian guesthouse in Hohhot. First, and as always, I don’t know why I even bother forming expectations anymore, since they invariably turn out to be wrong. We chose our current route through the “autonomous region” with a few such expectations in mind: 1) we’d be able to avoid most of the terrible industry that blighted our last trip across northern China, 2) we’d spend time with a lot of Mongolians and experience one last cool culture on the way out, and 3) by virtue of 1 and 2, we’d be able to keep up the spirit of the trip and finish out our year on the highest possible note. We were especially anxious for the above after our time in Ningxia, which was a total washout. The place was scarcely more Hui Muslim than large parts of Gansu; it was more a bastion of scientific development, with its vast industrial parks along the Yellow River alternatingly spewing odors of lighter fluid and ammonia.

So you see, we had big expectations for the grasslands of Bayan Nur, a destination we chose specifically for chances to mingle with Mongolians (since it’s just south of Mongolia). The corridor leading from Yinchuan to Bayan Nur, however, was a bleak desert traversed by innumerable coal trucks. Our only consolation for this period was the company of our friend Pete, the company of the whisky Pete brought us, and camping every night in a new place (this may be the single thing I miss the most about the trip after it’s over). Our little whisky sipping sessions were abruptly ended at the fall of dusk nightly, as swarms of mosquitoes in amounts I had never imagined in my worst nightmares (made New Orleans summer nights look like child’s play) simultaneously began their sanguine assault (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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)!

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

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…)