A Different Kind of Freedom, стр. 30
Just before the village of Kudiyah I saw my first tree in two months. Kudiyah is a small Uyghur town, on the banks of a desert river. It was my first Uyghur town. I missed the spirit and magic of Tibet and the Tibetan people. I missed the prayer flags, the prayer wheels, and chanting monks. The Uyghur people lived in the desert for centuries. They did not like the mountains and did not know how to live in cold harsh climates. They built homes of adobe and surrounded them by small groves of poplar trees. The villagers planted each tree by hand, carefully maintaining each one. Any natural forests had been cut down long before, only cultivated ones remained. These practices have gone on for hundreds of years. Since Uyghurs follow the Islamic religion all the women keep their heads covered. In China this is usually practiced by wearing a light scarf over the top of their head, whereas in Pakistan where there is much stricter enforcement women cover most of their face. One of the byproducts of the hard life Tibetans live is general equality between the sexes. A young Tibetan woman can carry an 80 lb. sack of grain on her back just as easily as a young man. With the easier environment and the Muslim religion, this equality of the sexes disappears among the Uyghur people.
All day long I worked my way down out of the mountains. The valley grew wider, while the sand started to cover more and more of the tan and brown landscape around me and of course the temperatures grew hotter and hotter. Uyghurs on camelback replaced the Tibetans on horseback. The camels that I followed down the road seemed to let out an almost continual stream of farts as these seemingly awkward beasts moved along.
When I approached the desert, the sky filled with a thick gray haze, and I left behind the high-altitude deep rich blue skies of Tibet and the clear running streams and rivers. As the Kun Lun Shan Mountains faded away, the desert consumed all the horizon with flatness. The town of Pusar marks the location on the road where the transition takes place. It was the first town that had shops selling almost everything I wanted, peanuts, candy, noodles, and dried fruit. The town even had a local TV station. This was civilization. My reentry into the world that had I left behind months before had begun.
Riding on a flat road does not have the same kind of challenge that a mountain road has. Riding on the flat is just a matter of putting in time turning the pedals. I would check my maps, my speed on the bike computer and look at my watch, it all became predictable. As the temperature went up and up, so did my water intake. I drank gallons of the bad-tasting brown water that flowed in the rare desert streams, but I would only pee out a couple cups here and there. With the thermometer at 90F and higher, I would stop in the shade of the rare tree, or under a bridge. I would do anything to get out of the direct rays of the sun. During the middle of the day I would try to find a spot of shade to sleep in, preferring the somewhat cooler hours of the morning and evening to ride in.
Yarkant is the old name of the city that the Chinese now call Yechen. This oasis marked one of the main stops on the southern silk road to Xi’an in North Central China. Today a large military base, with ubiquitous concrete buildings that stretch for miles in every direction, sits on the edge of town. Most of the women wore the latest in Uyghur Muslim women’s fashion -bright red, blue, and pink sequin encrusted dresses, making the women easy to spot in this bleak desert environment. But the main thing that interested me was the ice cream for sale. With an unending 24-hours-a-day supply of electricity came certain luxuries, like refrigeration. The shops carried an assortment of ice cream in flavors from a tropical fruit bar, to a frozen block of brown ice with baked beans embedded in it. Unfortunately I had mistaken the latter for some sort of chocolate ice cream bar.
Yechen marked the first turn I had to make in 1200 miles [2000 km] of ridding. It did not require anything too tricky. I watched the kilometer markers on the side of the road count down to zero and made a left hand turn on to the last piece of road that would take me to Kashgar. From a little before Yechen the road surface had changed to asphalt. With a slight tail wind and paved road I could cover 100 miles [166 km] in a single day. That same distance in Western Tibet would have taken three or four days. The miles on this paved desert road became mind-numbing. For the first time on this trip, I just wanted to get to where I was going. For the months before, I enjoyed the process of moving ever closer to Kashgar even though it remained some 3000 miles [5000 km] ahead on the road. With Kashgar only a couple days ride away, I lost track of where I was and only watched the kilometers to Kashgar rapidly count down. I kept an eye on my bike computer to make sure that my average speed stayed high enough to keep on schedule. I stopped in the small villages for slices of watermelon and peach soda, doing everything I could to stay hydrated in the 90F heat. I was tired of riding, my entire body ached and I knew that Kashgar meant a place to rest and relax.
Life in the Civilized World
Once I entered the city of Kashgar, I headed straight for the Seaman Hotel. The guys whom I met back in Ali had informed me that the Seaman was a decent place to stay. It sat across from “John’s Restaurant,” where you could place international phone calls and get an endless supply of french fries delivered to your table. The Seaman actually occupied the old Russian Embassy complex. You could tell that the days of splendor and elegance had passed this hotel by long ago. When I got there the pool sat empty, while old age and gravity slowly peeled the remaining paint from the walls, but hot water flowing from showers and clean beds certainly made up for any deficiencies in the decor.
Over the course of the next week, I just rested under the shade of the umbrellas at John’s, eating french fries, ice cream, and Sichuan chicken. I knew that it would take a while to gain back all the weight I had lost in the past months, but I was anxious to start working on it. Most of the travelers in town had come up from Pakistan, traveling by bus on the Karakoram Highway. This rugged mountain road, which connects Pakistan and China, opened to foreigners in 1986. Nick Danziger tells an hair-raising tale in Danziger’s Travels of how he wrangled his way across the Chinese border from Pakistan to become the first Westerner to travel this road. He assured the Pakistani border officials that the Chinese had already given him permission to cross into China while he promised the Chinese that the Pakistani officials approved of his crossing. The Chinese police quickly pursued him a day or two after he crossed when the web of stories became uncovered.
While I stuffed my mouth with an unending stream of food, I saw a couple who looked somewhat familiar. Damien and Dominique called over to me. After a moment I realized that the French couple whom I had met in Western Tibet sat across from me. They told me how they just arrived in Kashgar. Only 48 hours before, they had left Ali. They had ridden with a crazy Uyghur truck driver that made a non-stop high speed trip from Ali to Yechen. Talking to someone else who had lived through some of the adventures that I had just emerged from excited me. We had traveled the same roads, they just moved at a much higher rate of speed.
During my stay in Kashgar I met many travelers who had just come up from Pakistan and wanted to travel the route across Western Tibet and on to Mt. Kailash and Lhasa. When word got out that I had recently come from that direction, groups of people formed who wanted to talk to me about the details of making the journey to Lhasa. I tried to give a realistic picture to people as to what the trip would entail, but I always tried to caution fellow travelers of the dangers involved. The most dangerous problem with traveling from Kashgar to Western Tibet is that the altitude increases too much, too fast. Kashgar sits at an altitude of only 4,000 feet [1219 meters]. Once you leave Kashgar you will most likely have only a couple days until you enter the Askin Chin, which sits at an awesome 17,000 feet [5182 meters]. If your truck breaks down in the Askin Chin and you have any kind of altitude sickness there is no way out and no way down. When you cross a mountain pass you can always descend quickly in case you get altitude sickness. Since the Askin Chin consists of a high altitude basin there is no way down. Every year one or two travelers either dies or comes close to death on the road through the Askin Chin. While I rested at Mt. Kailash I heard about a Japanese traveler who almost died in the Askin Chin. After I presented my view of what the journey would entail, most people decided not to travel on the road to Western Tibet but rather opted for a safer route through Qinghai Province and on to Lhasa. Nevertheless a small handful of hard-core folks started asking for even more details of how to survive the trip. Just about all of these people were headed to Mt. Kailash.