Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle Read online

  After an hour of this bouncing madness, I had to stop and shake my wrists out from the pain of squeezing the brake levers. I leant over and touched the sidewall of the rim. It was red hot. I got off and checked the pads. I had already gone through two front pads on this trip and, because of an uneven adjustment, had dished the rim on the front wheel. I gave the pads a quick tweak and continued on.

  Beyond the tree-lined hills, I could see Litang in the distance, fed by an open, brown, lonely road. It was arid; I could not see crops of any sort, only yaks dotting the vastness.

  Litang was a dusty old town with wide streets – another Santway but with more people and one of China’s highest towns at 4014 metres (even higher than Lhasa). Chinese business abounded, lured by financial incentives to resettle here. I was the only foreigner among rough-and-ready-looking men sporting leather jackets, long hair and silver daggers around their waists as they swaggered down the streets. I was in what was once known as Kham (the Chinese renamed it Sichuan). Not surprisingly, the people here were called Khambas, a sub-group of nomadic Tibetans that inhabited the highland plateau from the foothills of Sichuan to the high altitudes of Lhasa. Unrivalled in horsemanship, the Khambas had for over a thousand years maintained a reputation as fearsome warriors, fighting other clans, robbing settlements and trade caravans. Lastly, they had a 17-year war against the People’s Liberation Army.

  So why, in all my infinite wisdom, did I end up throwing one of these beefy warriors through a chair?

  Well … I was staying at the International Hotel – a dusty, beaten place housing sour Chinese door-bitches who begrudgingly opened the door to my room (they were the only ones with the keys) – when familiar thumping techno music woke me up from a long afternoon sleep.

  ‘The Vengaboys?’ I groaned. I just had to investigate.

  In a bar two doors down from the hotel, women danced with each other while Tibetan men in James Dean-style leather jackets looked on. They invited me over, and it wasn’t long before I was plied with drink. Conspiratorially, we repeated an understood fact.

  ‘China no good,’ whispered a wide-shouldered man. ‘Dalai Lama very good.’

  One of them looked around and put his finger to his mouth.

  ‘Ssshhhhhsshh! China no good. SSSHHHHHSSHH!’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I agreed. ‘SSSHHHHHSSHH!’

  ‘SSSHHHHHSSHH!’

  He looked around again and made a gun gesture with his fingers. ‘China. BOOM!’

  I was surprised to learn that the Khambas, with their war-like reputation, were some of the most devoutly religious of all Tibetans. At one time, they had one of the largest monasteries in Kham, but it was destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, along with 250 others in Tibet. The Chöede Gompa is one of the remaining monasteries in Litang and was built for the third Dalai Lama. When I visited the monastery, a tall statue of Buddha towered inside, rumoured to have been carried on foot all the way from Lhasa itself.

  Now thoroughly drunk, I encouraged the men to dance with the women. Like schoolboys they shrank away, but I persisted, and soon they were all laughing and giggling while I showed them a few dance moves.

  And then I did it.

  I made the mistake of trying to get the biggest man in the bar to dance. There he sat, beer in hand, dagger at knee, dragging on a tiny cigarette as he observed the melee with squat indifference.

  ‘Come on!’ I grabbed him by the hand, which was the size of a rock and required both of mine to grip. I tried to lever the brute out of his chair, but he remained seated, shaking his head.

  ‘Ah, come on!’ I said and tried again, this time throwing my back into it. He came up halfway out of the chair then fell heavily back onto it. CRUNCH! The leg of the plastic chair split clean off, and he went right over with it.

  Shit.

  I helped him up. Thankfully, he didn’t look overly upset.

  The madam of the bar, wide-shouldered and with a face like a shovel, made a gesture that indicated I was not welcome back. When I motioned to protest my innocence, two of her heavies pointed to the door. I followed their aim out into the frigid dark air.

  30

  XINDUQIAO – KANGDING

  Mid-November

  I stopped behind a stonewall and sat down, hiding from an icy headwind. I took out some munchies, which were now a sad collection of broken sesame-and-peanut brittle tagged with bits of yesterday’s baked potatoes and old newspaper. Still, this didn’t put me off. I gnawed round the paper and, when that was gone, I whipped out a plastic-wrapped frankfurter sausage.

  Perhaps I was eating a little too eagerly for, when I looked up, six men were staring at me. An old man broke from the group and started making sucking noises at me.

  ‘Chá?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chá?’

  ‘Oh … right! Teeeeaa!’

  He motioned towards his garage, and sat me by the fire, where he gave me some rusty hot water with black bits floating in it. Again I was in the situation of only being able to explain the rudiments of my trip and unable to gain information about my hosts. Though, this didn’t stop me from becoming noisier. I had somehow fallen into the habit of articulating each action with a sound effect. Stir-fry was ‘WHOOOH!’; to boil was a gurgling sound; September 11 was ‘BOOM!’ then ‘AARRGG!’ What got me, and I shouldn’t have been surprised, was that they repeated it back at me.

  ‘So, that was WHOOSH, GURGLE, CLICK, CLICK! What about an entrée of WHHHAAH-BOOINNG?’

  I was some way out of the town of Xinduqiao, freezing in the hard air. I had stayed in a small restaurant-cum-hostel the night before, trying to sleep. The sudden barks and jingling of chains from big woolly dogs drew startled screams from drunken men stumbling through the cold darkness. The men slurred back and threw rocks. The dogs barked even more.

  Early that night in the small but friendly hostel, I alternated between writing in my journal and watching a young Tibetan boy repeatedly whack his mother on the head with a set of keys while she tried to knit. On his last attempt, she caught him on the downswing and whacked him back. Oh, how that boy howled! I got steadily drunker, my notes becoming increasingly illegible, while a group of Tibetan boys stood behind me, watching every pen stroke, trying to decipher the scrawl that was now somewhere between bent English and Arabic script.

  I didn’t have much cycling to go. Chushi, the Tibetan guide in Zhongdian, had been wrong: the distance to Chengdu was 140 kilometres less than he had scrawled on his map. It wiped off three days of cycling, much to my weary relief.

  The morning was fresh and icy. Leaving my garage hosts behind, I jumped back on my bike with gusto. I smiled and sang as a headwind froze my teeth. Well, actually, I whined, bitched and complained all the way. Somehow that helped. I couldn’t believe that Mark, the New Zealand cyclist whose biscuits I had shared, had put up with these kinds of conditions for six weeks.

  An hour later, I was hiding from the wind under the veranda of a shack while the owner, a squat Tibetan woman, fed me noodles.

  While I downed the noodles, I watched a sleeping duck being woken by the curious snout of a hairy black pig. The duck flapped up and quacked, then spun round and bit the pig on the snout. The pig squealed and ran across the road, where it settled into eating potato skins that had been strewn around.

  Two Isuzu cars stopped, and the Tibetan woman started hosing down the brakes. A fat man with gold teeth got out, slapped me on the shoulder and (surprise, surprise) made lewd gestures, indicating that I should screw my kind hostess with some degree of savagery.

  The woman squirted water at him, laughing, before going back to hosing down his steaming brakes.

  After moving on, I only had three kilometres to climb, but it took me an hour to get to the top of the pass, the wind so strong I ended up getting off and pushing. Once I was over the pass, a huge peak – the Gongga Shan, 7556 metres – rose above me like a big blue-white tooth. The valley ahead opened up before me; it was already dusted with the beginni
ngs of winter snow, which was now falling and hitting my face like bullets as I bounced down the road.

  Ahead, a convoy of army petrol trucks – the same ones that had passed me on my way to Litang – was winding its way down the mountain as if being slowly digested by the road. It squeezed along until it was expelled on to the flat, open spaces of the Sichuan Province.

  I zoomed past. The soldiers cheered. I waved back.

  At a small town, I stopped for lunch, groaning at a mountain that I would inevitably have to climb and its endless switchbacks. I ordered some bāozi and as I sat outside on a rickety stool, I could hear two women arguing in the square – one a head taller than the other. This drew a curious crowd: some standing holding their plastic bags of shopping, rooted to the spot; others stopping their cars. Perhaps the village had been waiting to see this spat for some time, and I imagined that these women had been having some feud for months or years and it was all coming to a head now. Was it ‘This is the last time you take my stall space!’ or ‘This is the last time you undercut me on noodles!’ or ‘You stay away from my husband!’?

  Whatever it was, the women put on a good show, not at all shy of ‘losing face’. The pitch of their voices rose and fell, when the smaller woman said something in a sharp staccato burst that tipped the taller woman into a red fury. The taller woman launched herself at the smaller woman who held her ground and they collided and struggled in some kind of aggressive Tai Chi dance. Then they stopped, continued arguing, fingers jabbing at each other. The strangest thing about all this was that there was an old woman sitting between them, caught in the crossfire, and pretending to be oblivious while knitting an orange scarf. Was this fight over who caused this woman to drop a stitch?

  Eventually, the taller one was dragged away by another older woman leaving the crowd to laugh and yell abuse at her.

  Up the hills and down switchbacks, I made Kangding by dusk. Snow continued to fall, now more heavily. My left shoulder was on fire, my feet were dead and I could barely feel my cheeks.

  Kangding was bigger than I had imagined. It was a mini-city with high–rises. Two rivers – the Yala He and Zheduo He – surged through the centre of the town. I had no idea where to sleep, so I searched for a hotel. I tried one place and was allowed entry initially, until two Chinese men in leather jackets hulked past and told the women at reception that I had to go somewhere else.

  The women explained this eagerly to me in Chinese, and, when I didn’t understand that, they both thought it prudent to write it on a notepad for me – in Chinese!

  ‘Well,’ I said, smiling and shrugging my shoulders at the note. ‘It’s all … Chinese to me!’

  I cycled through the main drag alongside the river, then made a left turn down a less busy street and found myself in front of a hotel. Staff members were bringing themselves bowls of hot casserole from across the courtyard, snow sprinkling their black coats like heavy dandruff. Too tired to fight the price or look for somewhere else, I coughed up 80 yuan ($AU20) for a room I hadn’t even seen. A surly woman with a chunk of keys led me upstairs to a room containing two beds, a television and … a hot shower!

  I hadn’t washed for three weeks, and this was the one thing I had been thinking about for days. I let the warm water roll over my face, caressing me as I let those 20 days of cycling grit and cold roll down the plughole. I lay on the bed with the aim of resting briefly, but then awoke suddenly the next morning, looking wildly around the room as if I had been robbed.

  31

  KANGDING – CHENGDU

  Late November

  BAM!

  I was in the air, flying over the handlebars for a brief, perplexing moment.

  WHOMP!

  I smashed hard onto the concrete. I rolled over in agony; a sick, sweaty pain. I looked up to see a Chinese man wearing glasses and a suit cycle past, dodging my sprawled mess as if a spread-eagled foreigner were something he came across every day.

  A guard waltzed out of his booth and helped me up, and, like the goat herder I encountered on the way to Xiangchen, started moving all my joints around. A small crowd from a nearby restaurant sauntered over and began talking in soothing tones.

  What I had hit was a ten-foot pole stretched across the road, just one foot off the ground. I had attempted to pass through a multi-lane tollway, and as with many I had passed through before, I had made for the far lane, the one reserved for cyclists. It was unusual that they had blocked it at all. Adding to the impact was the fact that I had sped up, making use of the flat road towards Chengdu.

  As if to re-enact my fall in Mini-Me style, from out of nowhere a toddler came running up to the pole as if trying to tackle a high jump. He went straight over and hit his head on the concrete then wailed uncontrollably. His mother came rushing out from a shop and picked him up.

  The guard indicated that I should have gone around the lane like everyone else.

  ‘Yes … I know … but I didn’t see it …’ I said, dazed. My wrist was killing me; I hoped it wasn’t broken.

  This was the fourth time I had come off the bike in two weeks: the broken rack, the yak, and the day before when I had prepared to stop outside a tunnel to put on my head torch on. As I slowed, I clipped a gutter and ended up flat on the ground just in time for my friends, the convoy of army petrol trucks, to drive past my head, missing it by a few feet. They, somewhat predictably, cheered.

  Scarier than having my head turned into ratatouille was a tunnel: it was four kilometres long with no lights. It had been built to circumvent the constant landslides caused by every skerrick of land on these mountains being cleared and over-farmed.

  My head torch led the way through the darkness. I was terrified of being squashed by the big trucks that growled past me, honking and flashing their lights. But there was something worse out there … at the last second, I dodged a large hole in the road. It was a drain without a cover and was so wide I could have disappeared completely into it. As I continued, I could see that none of the drains were covered, and I passed each one nervously.

  But I still wasn’t out of trouble. I rode straight out of the tunnel and was forced to dodge rocks that were flying out in front of me. I braked heavily and a man shouted out from above. Workers above the tunnel were throwing rocks the size of my head – they were widening the road.

  From there, I had a nice, breezy descent – until I rode straight into this pole across the road. Rubbing my arm, I picked the bike up and continued on.

  Just to make sure that my arm wasn’t broken, when I arrived in Chengdu – a huge mega-city – I went into a well-trodden backpacker bar, Paul’s Oasis, and decided it was high time to get drunk and pick up women. That would, I figured, be the best thing for it.

  However, and to my surprise, I had to dodge Jason first, who had just returned from Jiuzhaigou National Park and was in another of his precocious moods, drinking and smoking his face off.

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Buy me a beer, you cheap Canuck. And give me one of your cigarettes.’

  ‘Fucking convict!’ He disappeared to the bar.

  I got talking to a beautiful young woman, Stella. Alas, my hopes were dashed in an instant.

  ‘I’m celibate,’ she said, her flat Australian accent cutting me down.

  ‘Celibate?’ I said with a measure of disbelief. I cleared my throat. ‘You know, there’s a cure for that affliction. I know a guy …’

  ‘You don’t understand; I’m a born-again Christian. I’m not having sex anymore, until I get married. I haven’t had sex for two years and I feel so much better for it.’

  ‘How is that … possible?!’

  I explained this to Jason.

  ‘What? She’s celibate?’ He took a long drag of his cigarette, and then, with some horror in his voice, ‘It doesn’t grow over, does it?’

  Inspired by another species that refused to fuck, the next day I went and checked out the pandas.

  I squeezed through the piles of Chengdu traffic
and the grey smudges of fog out to the Giant Panda Breeding Centre. A large bronze statue of a panda stood out the front. It looked like the ghoul out of the movie Scream.

  Inside I walked through the Giant Panda Museum and viewed one of the many dioramas of the natural world. It seemed that the artist they had employed to do the ‘life sized’ models of animals hadn’t quite worked out what ‘sense of proportion’ meant: elephants had been carved into odd brick shapes, sabre-tooth tigers had wooden poles for teeth, and a moose had huge hands for antlers while the rest of its body was the size of a rabbit.

  Outside one of the enclosures, I bumped into an attractive American woman, Zoe. She was a zookeeper from the Atlanta Zoo and was here for a four-month term to study the behaviour of pandas. A beeper went off every minute to tell her to tick a box with various codes on her clipboard.

  ‘“LV” means leave,’ she said. ‘That means that if this one moves at least a metre away, it has left the group.’

  I looked at the pandas. They weren’t exactly energetic – two slept and huddled up to each other in a corner while another lay slumped in a tree. Only one panda was walking up and down the enclosure; it had a strange gait, its hind legs lumbering behind it, swaying, and swinging like they would’ve been more suited to a gorilla.

  I skipped the preliminaries and got straight to the matter.

  ‘I hear they copulate 25 times an hour.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m not sure how many times, but it’s quick, which isn’t much fun for the female. During oestrus, the females go crazy, displaying behaviour to entice the males.’

  ‘What kind of behaviour?’ I recalled a photograph in the Giant Panda Museum of pandas copulating, the male drooling over the female, smiling to the camera like a 1970s porn star. The female looked out the window, bored.

  ‘The females do this by lifting their tail up and sitting on the male. The males are a bit slow on this. I mean, the females are way ahead of them. But they eventually get the point.’