Around China in 100 Days

[Roadrunner]

Xiewu to Shiqu – Day 93

We were on the road just after 10am, aiming for Manigango, 315 kilometres away on the S217.





As we approached the Qinghai/Sichuan border we started to climb a pass and my engine started spluttering and losing power, much worse than usual. I was concerned that there was something seriously wrong with the carburetor or fuel lines, but pushed that thought to the back of my mind. Lulu zoomed past me, as I assured myself that it was just the bike dealing with the altitude again.

We made it to the top of the pass at 4700 metres, and were into Sichuan, a province Lulu and I had been many times before. This made me feel very close to home now, and even though I was already late getting back to work (I was supposed to be back on the 6^th of June), and I was fatigued from the lack of rest days since Charklik, I didn’t want it to end. I took one look into Qinghai from the pass, and got on the bike to leave Qinghai behind me.



Continuing through the Hengduan mountains, with its snow covered valleys, white tents and yaks still there. Not much changed at the border.



We stopped at the Serxu Dzong temple which looked as though it was being renovated. Even though he was a bit shy , young monk volunteered to show us around,













I nearly got bitten by a guard dog again, but monks saved me again and threw rocks at it.

We were running low on petrol as we got into Shiqu (also known as Serxu Xian). We looked around for a Sinopec or Petrochina but had to settle for a local station as it was the only working one in town. As we pulled into the station, we saw an unusual looking fellow on a strange looking bike. A foreigner? It was Pat, a solo rider from Beijing who had scored a job in Kunming and also preferred to drive than fly.





It was a stroke of luck to meet him just by chance, as he was just about to leave, and we had only just arrived in time. a couple of minutes either side and we would have missed him completely.

It was 5pm and we were only half way to Manigango, after doing just over 100 kilometres. It was too far to make before nightfall, so we made a trip to the local monastery to see if we could stay the night, but they don’t allow women to stay on the grounds.



So we found a nice (a little pricey) bingguan out the front of an army office and had Sichuan food for dinner again. It was good to have a native English speaker to blab to, and talk about the ride with. Lulu’s English is good, but there are plenty of ways I could (and had, many many times) mix up my meanings with her. He also had plenty of interesting stories and had come to Shiqu by almost a completely different way from us.

[Roadrunner]

Two's up on cryptographicide. Roadrunner, that's a heck of a story and from trying to imagine myself in your shoes at the time, I feel exhausted!
Amazing photos and videos. It must have been an effort to stop and take them all so thanks for all the hard work.

Cheers! Lulu was the one to have the foresight to take the time to take pictures and video. At that point nothing mattered more to me than to get to the end of the road.

[soberpete]

At that point nothing mattered more to me than to get to the end of the road.

Haha. I think I'd feel exactly the same way. Afterwards, however, I'd regret not stopping to take a few snaps.

[Barry]

Having read all your posts so far, I'm still surprised you didn't dump some luggage (read female) along the way!

I would like to do a no-GF trip this year, sure it's useful to have a Chinese speaker with you but…

[bigdamo]

You where lucky they let you take photos inside the temples.I have never been allowed to take photos inside Buddhist temples but I have long since given up asking as a sign of respect.

Hope you didn't point your feet at anything while inside.

[Roadrunner]

Having read all your posts so far, I'm still surprised you didn't dump some luggage (read female) along the way!

I would like to do a no-GF trip this year, sure it's useful to have a Chinese speaker with you but…

There were a couple of times where we both thought about separating, and it took a fair amount of willpower to keep things together. I signed up for a Lulu-and-I round trip in Chongqing, and I intended to finish what I started, even if it proved to be a less than optimal riding team.

I also felt some responsibility to get her back to Chongqing safe and sound, because I was the one who got her into this potentially dangerous drive in the first place.

I recently did a four day, Chongqing-Kunming bike trip by myself, and enjoyed it so much. There is definitely something to be said about the solo ride. Pure freedom

[Roadrunner]

You where lucky they let you take photos inside the temples.I have never been allowed to take photos inside Buddhist temples but I have long since given up asking as a sign of respect.

Hope you didn't point your feet at anything while inside.

They were quite happy to let us take photos at the places we visited, but we may just have been lucky with the people that we met.

I wasn't too clear on the whole cultural-no-no foot-pointing thing until I looked it up. I thought you meant that it was culturally inappropriate to stand flat footed and point a foot in the direction of something.

Taken from a post from blogspot:

In most Asian cultures (and I'm not talking east Asian, I'm talking all of Asia) as well as cultures with a strong Asian influence (for example, many European Muslim countries) the feet are considered dirty. Stepping over things, pointing with the feet, or placing respected objects on or under the feet is a huge no-no.

This can be a bit confusing from a western standpoint, since we don't have that association. I think almost every westerner working with Tibetans (myself included) has nudged someone with their foot, pointed with a foot, stepped over a book, stepped over a sleeping child, or stepped over food during a picnic--something like that--and been greeted with looks of absolute offense and horror. This is one that we all learn the hard way. But while the food/child/book rules are a bit harder to grasp, the religion one is pretty obvious.

No worries there. I tend to avoid touching anything when I'm visiting a temple, and certainly not with my foot.

Cheers

[Roadrunner]

Shiqu to Manigango – Day 94

We woke to another cold morning. I collected the washing I did the night before from the washing lines and we packed up the bikes.

We finished breakfast and at 10am and all three of us emerged under dark grey clouds. Since we were all heading in the same direction, we joined Pat's ride and he joined ours. As we left Shiqu, it started to snow. It was going to be another cold day on the bike.





Snow turned to rain, which made things even colder. (Photo taken by Pat)



The roads alternated between asphalt and slippery mud, slowly getting harder to drive on as the day progressed.
We didn’t find anywhere to eat for lunch, so we had to dig into our healthy rations of roasted peanuts and processed sausage during a dry period.



It was great to have Pat around, and also to have another cameraman to get some photos of Lulu and I in the same shot. (Photos taken by Pat)





We drove past the Dzogchen Gompa and it’s surrounding buildings. The gompa is one of the most important monasteries of the Nyingma schools of T*betan Buddhism. It also marks part of the old T*betan kingdom of Kham (We had been traveling through Amdo since we got into Qinghai), historically an ethnically and linguistically diverse region.

We had dinner at a small, isolated hamlet beside a hot spring, while some guys splashed around sans clothes. One of the guys came up to us after dinner (with his clothes back on) and asked us where we were going in very good, Indian accented, English. He explained that he had studied English in India, at McLeod Ganj, one of my favourite places in India.

My back tyre started giving me trouble again and I had to pump it up while Lulu and Pat drove on. Pat came back after noticing that I wasn’t there. A couple of kilometres down the road and my chain broke at the master link, with one end getting caught in the front sprocket casing, which was a problem. I had an 8mm spanner, but the shape of the casing gave no room to fit it. I would need a socket wrench, something I didn’t have in my rudimentary tool arsenal. I was in trouble. Luckily, Pat was there to help. Lulu, however, was nowhere to be seen. (Photo taken by Pat)



Pat went off to find someone who could help, and I decided to push while I waited for him. Manigango was at 3800 metres and we were above 4000, and about 30 kms from the town so I thought that it would be a good idea to push the bike and see if I could wheel it down the inevitable incline. It wasn’t so smart an idea after all. I was in mud, pushing a 150+ kg loaded bike up a not-so-steep but muddy hill, in 4000+ altitude. It was cold. It snowed three times. There was less oxygen getting to my muscles and I was gasping for breath in no time. I looked at the river flowing along the bottom of the valley in the gathering darkness. It was flowing away from the direction I was going in, downhill. I would be pushing uphill for a long time before I would find any way down. Not good. I should have checked that before I pushed myself into exhaustion. As I turned a corner in the darkness I could also see the lights of trucks far off snaking along a road, in the sky! I was looking up at another pass. A mountain was between myself and Manigango.

Pat came back. There was still no sign of Lulu (which was strange because she would usually come back to find me if she noticed that I wasn’t behind her), but there was a house 2 kilometres up the track. We figured it would be best to tow my bike up the hill with Pat’s bike. We put the bags on his bike to lessen the load and he went back to see if he could find a tow rope. I kept pushing because I would have gotten freezing cold if I didn’t stay active.

It was pitch dark by the time he got back. I had pushed the bike 200 metres. We tied the tow rope to the forks of my bike and the luggage rack of Pat’s. He started up the engine with the kick-starter (hard to do in mud, balancing a big bike next to you) and we slow-walked the bikes up the hill. It was too slippery to drive, and dropping the bikes would drain us of the little energy we had. We paused to take breathers every 200 metres, and for trucks that cautiously edged around the slippery bends. By the time we got to the house I was a zombie, with frozen hands and mud clumps for feet. The young Chinese guy welcomed us into his shack, stoked up the fire with yak dung and offered us warm peanut milk. It was incredible how much pleasure these simple things brought us. I slowly warmed to human levels.

I was worried about Lulu. We had no reception on our cellphones (and I didn’t have money anyway, as I had discovered after leaving Shiqu that morning), so we couldn’t ring her to see if she made it through to Manigango or not. Knowing that the roads could be dangerous up to that pass and possibly onwards to Manigango, I set about worrying myself with scenarios of her crashing, injuring herslef and being unable to flag down any passing cars for help, while softly falling snow lulled her to sleep.
We asked our host if there was any way we could get a ride to Manigango, or just into cellphone range, so we could call her and make sure that she was okay. The owner of the house wasn’t happy about being woken up, but agreed to drive us to for 200 kuai after he was told about how concerned we were.

We left the bikes in the courtyard of the house next to the shack and piled into his small white, 2WD car. It was a very bumpy, uncomfortable ride through the muddy mountian tracks, with nothing but darkness at the edge of the road, conjuring images of precipitous drops to certain doom if the car slid more than a metre or two.

5 kilometress after we crossed the pass, we got cellphone reception. Lulu answered her phone after several rings and, with a slight hint of irritation, asked “what do you want?”. I was relieved, but also fairly pissed off. She had been asleep and oblivious to the serious worrying we had been doing. I hung up the phone. “Okay, so she’s fine”.

We needed to stay in Manigango to pick up the tools we would need to repair my bike, so we asked our driver to take us to a hotel. We pulled up to a large courtyard with barking dogs chained across the concrete. We had to wait for the manager to come out and get us past the dogs and as we walked in, to the side of the stairwell, we saw Lulu’s bike. She was staying there too.
We swapped stories about our evenings. She apparently got to the top of the pass before she realised we weren’t behind her, and because there were two of us, she assumed that we would be fine without her. It took her three hours to get up and down those muddy slopes in the dark, so I could understand that she didn’t want to drive back and find out what was going on, but we had been in this kind of situation before. It’s always better to stay together. She had been trying to contact us though. She had even asked a friend in Beijing to put money on my phone so she could call me.

We found our own room and I had the deepest sleep of the trip.

[Roadrunner]

Manigango: Bike rescue – Day 95

Goal for today: rescue the bike, again.

The first, and possibly most important, achievement of the day was getting out of bed. I felt like I nearly broke myself trying to push that bike up the mountain. My clothes weren’t dry from the day before, and it wasn’t a nice feeling to put them back on. Hopefully they would dry at some point in the day. No hope for my boots though.

We got Lulu up, found some breakfast, and made plans for the day. Pat and I had to go back and grab our bikes, and Lulu couldn’t fit the both of us on her bike, so she would take a day off and explore Manigango.

We found an 8mm socket wrench in less than 15 minutes of asking around. It cost about 20 kuai. The cost for not having a socket wrench would amount to over 300 kuai. It pays to have the right tools.



I was also a little concerned about the petrol level in my tank, so we walked 2 kilometres out of town to the nearest petrol station to get spare fuel in case what I have is not enough. I didn’t want to abandon the bike again.



Lulu suggested we try to hitchhike to save money (Lulu and I were low again), but pretty soon we gave up on this plan and just took one of the mini-van bus/taxis that sped through town. We tried to haggle it down, but settled somewhere around 80 rmb.

The van drove up and over the pass and we could see in daylight the road/mud track that we had taken in the pitch black of night. We were right to be scared to take this road at night.



10 minutes was all it took to fix such a small problem, but the problem was impossible to fix without the right tool.

My back tyre was flat again, and I had to take time to repair the inner tube. I wasn’t in a hurry. I knew we would stay in Manigango again that night.

I fixed the tube, put the wheel back on and about to pack my bags bags on the bike, when Pat came to tell me that the valve was stuffed, and leaking air. I didn’t have a completely new inner tube for the back wheel, but I had saved the one that had a small puncture in the Tian Shan. I took out the tube and found the leak. I had no rubber glue for the patch, so I tried the superglue that I had in my bag. I was a little concerned about how corrosive this stuff could be to rubber, but gave it the benefit of the doubt. (later I found that it would have been a better idea just to use the patch by itself)。



We said thanks and goodbye to our friend. He was a Han Chinese who believed wholeheartedly in the principle of karma, which is why we had received just great hospitality and help. It would have been so much harder without him.



The climb up the pass didn’t take so long, but it was hard to control the bike in the slippery mud. It was worth the effort because the view from the top was exceptional.





My back tyre started to deflate again and I went back to the foreshadowing technique that had worked so well so far. I got out my bike pump and as I tried to attach the hose, it snapped into three pieces. Apparently it was too cold for the budget plastic it was made from to handle and it had frozen. I would have to find someone with a pump. Luckily, it was all downhill from there. We tried to wave down a car that will sell me their pump. No luck.

Pat said that he would drive to Maduo to buy a pump and bring it back, while I pushed the bike down the mountain and continued to try and flag down motorists to see if I could use their pump. One van I stopped had a guy that spoke English quite well. He had studied in my hometown, Auckland, which was completely out of the blue.



A Tibetan motorcyclist with his dog in a basket strapped to the back stopped. He asked me whether I liked Tibetan Buddhism and started pumping it up for me. He said that he would follow me to make sure I was okay. It lasted for about one kilometre before it went completely flat. My motorcyclist mate said that he was going to Garze that day and he could buy a new one there, “would you like to buy this one?”. Okay. I handed over 80 kuai (I think they sell the same pumps for 80 kuai new, but I wasn’t complaining) and had a rather large and respectable looking hand pump. I pumped up the tyre again and I was ready to go.



However, its usefulness would soon run out because a little more down the road I had to start pushing again because the inner tube wouldn’t take any air at all. Then the tyre itself started to come away from the rim. I was almost at the bottom of the hill and figured that I should be able to get a signal and call Pat and tell him that I had a pump so he didn’t have to spend any money on a new one. I tried climbing a hillock, but there was still no reception. I turned around and an empty white lorry had stopped beside my bike and they waved me over. “Do you need a ride to Manigango?”. “Haha, hell yeah, how much?”. “How much do you say”. “Say 30 kuai” I said. “Hop on”. Awesome luck again. I guess it was so cheap because they were going that way anyway and thought they could save a bit of petrol money. Or maybe it was because they saw I was in trouble and genuinely wanted to help.

I had to straddle my bike and hold on to the side rails to keep the bike steady on the bumpy roads as there was no rope to tie it down with. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

I tried calling Pat once I was in cellphone range, but he wasn’t answering. “He must be driving”. The driver started tooting maniacally at something on the road and I screamed out “PAT!!!” at the top of my lungs as he whizzed by. He turned around and I could almost see the grin on his face.

It was high moment, riding my bike on a moving truck, through beautifully raw scenery, passing waving Tibetan families sitting out in the fields, feeling that the moment’s troubles had no meaning.

The truckers were going to Garze too and I could have gone with them that day, but I wanted to ride it. Got the tyre fixed at the repair shop that they dropped me off at, and the days problems had melted away.





Later that night I sat in a restaurant and had a couple of beers with Pat, talking nonsense until they closed up and we had to leave.

[Roadrunner]

Manigango to Garze – Day 96

After getting up fairly late, we had thoughts of driving up to Derge, one of the three ancient centres of T*betan culture (along with Lhasa and Xiahe), but had to shelve them as it was 110 kilometres away on mountain roads. One day’s ride away for us. So we would go to Garze, county capital, to get the bikes looked at for the first time since Xiangride, and then push on as far as we could, thinking Luhuo would be a good stop.

Pat had left earlier because he was low on time, and would only be following our route until Garze. He tried to sneak out without waking us, but Lulu stirred first. “Get up!”.

As we were packing, some friendly locals who were interested in what we were doing came into our room and sat down on our beds, just watching us.



There were many more red robes than the day before in Manigango. Apparently it was a day off for the monks at the monasteries, so many monks came to town.

We were stopped by a checkpoint on the way out, and the officer asked us, a little quizzically, where we were going. The road out of Manigango was mostly asphalt, but had some very rocky parts which slowed things down a bit.

We drove through another beautiful lush valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It was a beautiful morning drive with beautiful weather.



We stopped for a break beside a village set into a hillside, playing Buddhist prayer music, prayer flags fluttering in the wind hanging off a massive rock. Thunder rolled over the mountains and angry clouds boiled over the passes as a storm moved in quickly from the south. It was amazing how quickly the weather could change. We got our waterproofs on, but we both still hadn’t been able to find waterproof gloves, and Lulu had been improvising with bags tied around her hands to keep the water out. I didn’t have any and couldn’t be bothered so I just had to manage without them.



We managed to outrun most of the storm but got a good cold dousing for 15 minutes.





We got into Garze, 3.5 hours and 90 kilometres later.



We found the Lifan shop after asking around town. After calling Lifan, they asked the franchise owner to make them as good as new, if possible, so that they could make it to Chongqing. They got to disassembling both bikes after 17,000 kilometres on Chinese roads.

The bracket keeping Lulu’s seat off the back mudguard had broken in two (I first noticed this on the Xiangride-Maduo road), her fork seals had come off and the forks needed to be realigned, her battery needed replacing and so did her headlight and she finally got her front mudguard reattached after more than a week without it. My bike needed the air filter cleaned out, the carburetor adjusted and both sprockets replaced.
Both bikes got new chains, new Kenda back tyres with proper tread. There was probably a range of other smaller things that needed doing too, but those were the main jobs. They offered to adjust the carburettor on my bike for the altitude, but it would be a waste of time because we planned on being off the plateau in a couple of days.

It was amazing that they were still running considering what we had put them through, day after day for over three months.








All the workers in the shop were from Chengdu, and the only T*betans we saw were those who came in to buy parts or get a service.

The boss bought us a nice Sichuan takeaway dinner at the shop while they continued to work on the bikes. It was getting late and I started to think about staying in Garze for the night and moving on early in the morning.

They finished the bikes at about 5pm and mine was driving like new. They did an excellent job.

We found a nice, plain room before darkness fell. We parked our bikes by walking them down a narrow alley behind the guesthouses and into a courtyard surrounded by buildings topped with Tibetan style eaves. The owner unlocked some sort of garden shed for us and after we wheeled them in, advised us to lock the bikes. It seemed a little excessive, especially as there was a dog on a leash outside, but we did it anyway.

Lulu wanted to go find a hot spring, still thinking of the hot spring she missed out at the Wencheng temple, but after doing a little bit of writing I was too tired to be bothered. “Maybe tomorrow”.