Ray Kreisel - A Different Kind of Freedom

During the course of the next day, I passed many sources of water that were littered with the bones of animals. I searched for signs of campfires around springs indicating that Tibetans had camped there and drank the water. A yak skull right in the middle of a spring seemed to indicate that the water may not be drinkable. I did not want to risk it. I rode on still a bit thirsty.

In 1962, as part of Mao Zedong’s campaign to expand The People’s Republic of China, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army built the first road across the Askin Chin. The Askin Chin is a high altitude basin that lies between Tibet and the Muslim province of Xinjiang, China. Before ‘62 India controlled this area. The basin is so remote that the Chinese built the only road through the area without the Indians even knowing of its existence. Even today, the Indian government does not allow maps to be published that show this land as part of China, it must be labeled as a disputed area that remains part of India. At its height, the road across the Askin Chin stays at 17,000 feet [5182 meters] for more than 150 miles, making it the highest continuous section of road in the world. Needless to say, no permanent settlements can be found for hundreds of miles to the north or the south. When the explorer Sven Hedin traveled in this area at the turn of the century, he did not encounter another human being for eighty days. Every couple of days another of his pack animals would die from the extreme cold and from the lack of food during his crossing of the Askin Chin. Throughout my year of research before this trip, I could only find two written accounts from people who had traveled this area, but I was never able to find any photos of it. Since the Askin Chin remains a untraveled and mysterious region, it has always held a special place in my mind. It continued to be the one part of the trip that I could never fully plan for.

Since the whole world was my toilet, finding a place to relieve myself never presented a difficult task. As I pulled my pants up one day, I looked down at my legs for the first time in a long while. The last time I had taken all of my clothes off was back in Shigatse, more than a month before. During the course of the last couple weeks I noticed that either my body had shed a few pounds or my belt had stretched. The thinness of my legs surprised me. I knew that at this point that any fat left on my body had been consumed during the previous months. I had spent too many days living in a hypoglycemic state and burning muscle tissue for energy. This did not quite imitate an Oprah weight-loss program but, in the end, it became a little too effective.

Domar marked the last town before the heart of the Askin Chin. I had looked at this town a hundred times over on many maps before I left home. I had followed the line of the road with my finger, out into the middle of the Askin Chin, into the Kun Lun Shan Mountains and then finally to the edge of the Taklimakan Desert (translation: “You go in, but you don’t come back out”). But those were all just maps, they were not reality. The reality of crossing this area on bike represented something extremely different. It excited me. This was part of an area that I had never traveled before, that very few people have ever traveled. The refrain from an REM song came into my head again over and over, “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. Yes, it’s the end of the world.” I really felt like I was starting a ride that would take me off the edge of the map into a new unknown world, off the edge of the world. After a half day’s rest and a couple hearty meals, I started off on another trip to nowhere.

The land around me had a purity that I have never seen before, purity in color and terrain. The rocks that covered the mountains around me shined with every shade of purple, green, brown, orange, and red. Each of the colors carefully blended into the next, with occasional patches of brilliant white snow. The unending line of telephone poles that follow the road created the only intrusion on this landscape. Since Ali, the poles recorded my past and pointed the way to my future. The poles lead to only one place, Kashgar. That was where I hoped my future also lay. At times I could see the black wooden rods off into the distance, I would start to ride cross-country because I knew that I was headed in the right direction, leaving the road to take its own course. When I rode across the desert without even a dirt track to follow, I had an sense of totally unrestrained freedom. There were no lines, no paths, no tracks to follow. Nothing constrained or controlled my movement. It was a different kind of travel, a different kind of freedom.

It was a sure sign that this was a difficult section of road, when so many truck drivers stopped to offer me a ride. Normally most of these guys act like pirates, but on this day many seemed genuinely concerned that I would not be able to complete the trip across the Askin Chin on my own. They cheerfully informed me that they would not even charge me to ride in their trucks. The other mildly alarming sign was the increase in small grayish-black tombstones on the sides of the road. It seems that the Chinese Army just buries their dead on the sides of the road, since it would require at least a few days’ journey overland to get out to the “civilized world.” During the course of my travels in Western Tibet I had seen these tombstones before, but as I got closer and closer to the heart of the Askin Chin, the frequency of the stones kept increasing to the point where I passed one every mile or two.

I knew I was getting up there in altitude when after the brief descent from a high pass my altimeter read 16,500 feet [5030 meters]. When a truck driver hollered out that the next pass exceeded 6,000 meters (just under 20,000 feet), I knew that he must be wrong. I knew that the highest motorable passes in the world did not surpass 18,500 feet [5604 meters]. After I climbed to the top I spotted the source of the driver’s misinformation, a concrete marker with “6700m” (22,000 feet) painted on the side. After closer inspection I realized that it had originally been written “5100m” (16,750 feet) but with the aid of a little extra red paint someone had changed the “5” to a “6” and the “1” to “7”, making these truck drivers think that they were truly crossing the highest motorable pass in the world. Even at 5100 meters it remained 2,000 feet [609 meters] higher than the highest mountain peak in the continental US.

Riding on flat ground at 16,000 feet [4878 meters] did not present that difficult of a task, mainly because I had already lived above 14,000 feet [4268 meters] for the last two months. But I knew that the climb -no matter how small it seemed- over the Jeishan Daban Pass would push me to the limit. This pass separates Xizang Province (Tibet) from Xinjiang Province. It stood at just under 18,000 feet [5487 meters]. I had walked higher than 18,600 feet [5670 meters] on the kora around Mt. Kailash, but I had never pedaled my seventy-pound bike that high before. I could see the road work its way up a drainage on the ridge ahead. Even for a Chinese road it climbed steeply. When I began the ascent, a convoy of Chinese Army trucks started working its way passed me. At this altitude the trucks could only climb one or two miles per hour faster than what I crept along at. The big difference was that I had to stop every hundred feet [50 meters] to get my breath back.