Training for next year's expedition: first man to cycle solo to the South Pole.
Gravelly moonscape on the track between Qumahe and Budongquan
Bike takes a breather while I cook some noodles.
Blogging it from China to England on a bicycle - Edward Genochio on 2wheels
Training for next year's expedition: first man to cycle solo to the South Pole.
Gravelly moonscape on the track between Qumahe and Budongquan
Bike takes a breather while I cook some noodles.
This is not a particularly extreme example, but you get the picture: the track surface "folds" into a series of waves which make for very uncomfortable riding (if you have a nice hard racing saddle and no suspension) or a fun, roller-coaster ride (if you have a moon buggy).
First pass out of Qumalai.
Motorbike at the pass - note baby keeping warm, strapped to front.
Coming down the pass.
Spot the herd of antelope (2).
Bird. (Any twitchers out there who can help me out with a more specific description?)
But what the hell. There it is, clear as an Athens sunrise before they invented the internal combustion engine.
Distant memories of "schoolboy Greek" tell me that the sign reads "Thiaphiesenizi", and if that means anything in Greek, or English, or Chinese, or any language at all, then you can call me Zorba.
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*Anyone remember the good old days when Honest Zhou at the Bank of China used to give you those little monopoly-style fen notes when you changed money - even when the fen (1/100th of a yuan) had ceased to have any value? Sadly they don't seem to bother these days. Sic transit gloria money?
Thereafter, the deal was this: 20 km flattish uphill to the pass, then descend, descend, descend all the way to Golmud. This is the Qing-Zang Gonglu, the Qinghai-Tibet highway, paved and in perfect condition.
Too tired to eat last night, I began the day with empty legs and the 20 km to the pass were slow and tortuous. A flat rear tyre didn't help. I couldn't find a hole; the tube just seemed to have given up and split along a seam.
The Kunlun Shankou (pass) is signed as 4767 metres.
In Nachitai, the guesthouse was full; I found a bed in the Kunlun Mountain Spring mineral water bottling plant, which I will tell you all about another time.
Snow overnight in my campsite.
The last river crossing, 40 km before Budongquan. After this, the fun starts. (See previous diary entry.)
The Kunluns - last photo before the pain started...
Track-road-tyre-truck interface.
The road keeps to the slightly higher ground to the south of the main, boggy river valley, climbing and descending one hill-shoulder after another; the side-valleys between are wet and get harder to cross later in the day when the sunshine begins to soften the mud and snow and ice.
The rivers are mostly unbridged but manageable - a month later and it could be a different story.
Much of the landscape is utterly barren, bare gravelled earth with nothing growing on it; it looks like a glacier or the surface of the moon. Antelope watch me and fly up the hillsides, their feet seemingly not touching the ground, white tails bobbing; pika fat-bum around, sprinting, scuttling, sending up dust trails like miniature motorbikes.
My back tyre starts to bottom out; I can't find the puncture but stick a new tube in, watched by a pair of long-billed sparrow-types near whose burrow I have set up my temporary garage.
Noodlin' up; not sure what happened to my face.
Two passes. Unbridged river crossings, but still cold enough to keep the rives mostly frozen, open water no more than 20 metres or so across. The large river, the red-silty Qu Ma He, is bridged just before the track reaches Qumahe Village.
I come close to dying, again, but not for any of the reasons that Asmund might have predicted. The problem: carbon monoxide poisoning. I find a nice warm room in Qumahe; at the centre is a yak-dung stove, on which a cauldron of yak-hooves is boiling up for the dogs. I assume they will be done by bed-time. Not so. The hooves boil away all night; they don't smell great, but then neither do I.
The CO levels rise though, and I don't sleep much - every hour or so I take a stride into the frozen night to gulp in some fresh air.
Qumahe Village has a few shops and even a Muslim restaurant run by a guy from Xining - what persuaded him to leave the big city and run a business out here I don't know. Maybe he makes good money - the place is certainly popular with the Tibetan locals. No electricity pylons, no telegraph wires reach Qumahe, though. It is wonderfully cut off - although they've got a satellite phone installed now and a set of solar panels that generates enough power for each household to run a low-energy lightbulb.
One shop sells the best moon-cakes in China. It's worth the trip.
Four passes in total today; the first was the highest, the third scarcely a ripple.
Pikas, giant Tibetan hamsters (OK, not that giant - a fair match for a fair-sized guinea-pig) are everywhere, scuttling fat-bummed between burrows.
In several places the road crosses broad sheetwash gravels which would be tricky after rains; for now, everything is safely frozen up and the gravels are dry. Broad, open valleys; a few motorbikes, no trucks or cars. Road surface not too bad today, not much washboarding. Surrounding hills low and rounded, reds and browns and yellows, snow on north-facing slopes. The sun quickly burns the snow off other slopes.
Beautiful valley between Se Wu Gou and the Se Wu Gou bridge, the hills on the far side folded and knotted in the evening sun and shadow.
Se Wu Gou itself is an eerie, deserted ghost-town, half-demolished, rooves gone but walls still standing, a Tibetan Pompeii.
Antelope on the climb to the second pass. Yak herds all along, wonderful beasts, turning and trotting off with big-bodied grace, tossing heads and tails, horns and hooves held high, great furry bodies like Chinese acrobat-lions.
The bridge over the Tongtian He (Yangtze).
Leaving Rong Po Zhen, a bright clear morning after overnight snow. It got worse.
Start: Yushu (Jyeku), Qinghai, China
End: Rong Po Zhen, Qinghai, China
Distance: 73 km
Time: 6'27"
Avg: 11.2 k/h
Max: 51.5 k/h
Total: 10315 km
Total riding days: 123
Riding hours: 1140 - 1850
Hauled myself out of Yushu, over a 4600 metre pass into the Rong Po valley, with its lake, its black-necked cranes, its trans-Himalayan migratory geese, its relentless chasing dogs, etc.
I didn't get out of town in time. Yesterday's tailwind had turned to become the familiar westerly by the time I got on my bike.
Looking back down the valley to Yushu.
The first pass out of Yushu on the road west to Qumalai (Qumarleb).