"The highest road in the world." The words grabbed my attention when I first read them. The road being described was the Xinjiang-Tibet highway in western China, and, like a fool, I thought this was an invitation to ride a bicycle along it.
Along with my sisters Audie and Saakje, I had done my fair share of travelling, and even of bike travelling, but this sounded like A Real Adventure, the sort of out-of-the-ordinary experience that we were craving for our first trip together since family vacations by car back in high school.
This trip seemed to have all the necessary elements for an adventure. For one thing, it was in a remote corner of the globe that almost no Westerner ever travels. For another, it was going to be physically difficult and demanding. The scenery promised to be spectacular. After all, we were going to be crossing The Roof of the World, some of the highest mountain ranges in the world. The road was officially off-limits to foreigners, so there was the additional thrill of being naughty and doing something forbidden. And finally, the goal, far-off Lhasa, the Forbidden City, was alluring enough that the tremendous effort of getting there would be worth it.
The winter before the trip, stuck in a grey and almost snowless Toronto, I read as much as I could about the area and about the history of Western exploration of it. I read about adventurers like Nikolai Przewalski, Alexandra Stevenson, Francis Younghusband and Ewai Kawaguchi, all trying to get to Lhasa in the face of Tibetan hostility and inhospitable nature. Audie and Saakje, along with their respective partners Serge and Luke, agreed that we would be worthy successors to these hardy explorers.
As a warmup, we spent a month and a half cycling and hiking through the mountains of the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Pamir ranges on our way from Islamabad, Pakistan to Kashgar, Xinjiang, in the far western corner of China. After 2000km of riding, 400 km of it over dirt roads and jeep tracks in unimaginably poor condition, we felt we were ready, physically and psychologically, for the second and more challenging half of the voyage: biking from Kashgar to Lhasa, 2800 km away.
After 22 broken spokes, 10 snapped bolts, two broken luggage racks, two shredded outer tires, innumerable punctures, a shattered bottom bracket and an unfortunate episode with a bus that left one of Saakje's handlebars shorter than the other, we felt that nothing could come our way that we hadn't already overcome. Even the various stomach ailments that had affected us all seemed to have cleared up by the time we left Kashgar.
Leaving Kashgar was difficult: we had grown used to a steady diet of Uighur bagels and cream cheese, Szechuan noodles and innumerable ice creams as we tried to fatten ourselves up for the lean kilometres ahead. The Sunday Market, a vast sea of 100,000 Central Asian faces in distinctive hats and headdresses, was such a photographer's paradise that we were tempted to stay another week to see it again. In the end, however, we packed our bike panniers full of instant noodles, tea, raisins, nuts and tins of fruit and set off.
The riding on the first few days was easy enough: flat and hot, skirting the Taklamakan Desert. Our only problems came with the vast and unruly crowds that we attracted whenever we stopped. Hundreds of curious locals would gather around us, hemming us in on all sides, and soon adventurous hands would dart out, trying to help themselves to whatever was loose. Accustomed as we were to attracting crowds in Pakistan, this was much worse and our tempers were quickly frayed. We ended up fleeing the oasis cities of Yenihisar and Yarkand as quickly as humanly possible, just to escape the huge, unruly mass of staring eyes.