Ray Kreisel - A Different Kind of Freedom

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.

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.

During my entire trip my bike computer kept a total of how many miles I had traveled along with how many vertical feet I climbed, giving me the total combined uphill climb. During a conversation on the phone with my brother back in the USA, one of the Chinese guys in John’s examined my bike computer. He flipped it over and pulled off the battery cover, resetting the mileage back to zero. In an instant the electronic record of the distance that I had traveled disappeared. I relayed the event to my brother, he thought that I would be furious with the Chinese guy who erased my bike computer. I knew that there was nothing that I could do, it was gone.

Kashgar marked the end of the difficult part of my trip. I knew that anything after Kashgar would constitute more or less a “vacation ride.” The Karakoram Highway goes south for 450 miles [750 km], winding its way through the Western extent of the Himalayan and the Karakoram mountains. The road took more than 20 years to build by both Chinese and Pakistani workers. Every day landslides, washouts and collapses continue to plague the road. But compared to the route I had just traveled, I knew that it would make for a relatively easy ride. In recent years even a couple of commercial companies ran organized mountain bike trips down the Karakoram Highway. Throughout this length of road both food and basic shelter would always be easy to find.

I guess by normal standards a 500-mile [833 km] mountain bike ride from Kashgar in far Western China down the Karakoram Highway to Gilget, Pakistan would make for an exciting extreme adventure, but for me it meant just the opposite. In Kashgar I found a guidebook that described the route in detail. Most of the ride ran through a land foreign to me. The people who live in this part of Western China are Caucasians, mostly Uyghur, Kossacks, and Tajiks. I did not know their culture or their language. Fortunately for me, there were still enough people around who spoke Chinese for me to be able to know what was going on.