Tibet

28 June – China (Tibet-Sichuan) – ~160 miles

Final day in Tibet… and it gave us a fitting goodbye.
Three passes – 5,090m, 3,926m, 4,360m.
Some beautiful scenery,
a high road following the near-top of a ravine,
and then 40 miles of Chinese roadworks.

Chinese roadworks are fun… lots of torn up road, gravel, dirt, mud, dust, traffic, for 40 miles, but no rules. Just overtaking trucks because I can ride on the dirt/broken-stuff faster than they can on the tarmac; ducking around and under diggers; LandRovers who think they’re the best and fastest thing on the road (to be put back in their box by an over-eager Tiger-rider); and just general chaos. So much fun.

Ended up in Batang, Sichuan. Only casualty of the chaos was one chap losing a pannier when a 360-digger turned around and knocked him sideways… no major damage.

Happy Birthday Mum.

27 June – China (Tibet) – ~260 miles

Another day starting out damp, and therefore not a huge amount of fun.
But – some lovely valleys, road following the river, and the still beautiful sight of the hills/mountains enshrouded by cloud. Another 4-thousand-and-whatever metre high pass, and some lunch at a basic road-side “cafe”.

And then… the road starts getting interesting… going up each side of a valley, a few hairpin turns on one side of the gorge/valley, then cross over to the other side, a few hairpin turns over there. And that just keeps going, and going. Some of the turns were unfortunately surfaced with polished concrete… meaning I came very very close to my first “drop” of the bike… but somehow managed to recover. And then – the road committed to one side of the gorge, with long twisty bits punctuated by the hairpin turns. And peeking over the side, one suddenly realises how high one has climbed in a relatively short time. Very, very high. At the near-summit/viewpoint – some spectacular views of probably less than half of the road just taken – but that’s enough.
The “Zig-Zag Mountain Road with 72 Turns” – as the informational sign names it. Spectacular. Some people have been claiming it was better than the Everest Base Camp ride – and I don’t want to argue with them, as I’m undecided myself. Everest was just a constant relentless barrage of hairpins. This was a little more variety, and as one person described it – perhaps a more “natural” road. Anyway – awesome.

After an icecream and some iced tea at the not-quite-summit, it was another 80 miles to just cross the pass, get back down to reasonable altitude, and find our brand-new hotel in Zuogong/Zugong. As it really is brand-new – finished last year, nobody had been here before, the notes on how to get here weren’t particularly accurate, and I ended up taking streets that obviously didn’t exist the last time the GPS maps were updated. As is seen fairly often in China – this looks to be an entire suburb which has been built-from-scratch in the last 18 months. Odd, impressive, and terrifying.

26 June – China (Tibet) – ~142 miles

Lovely ride today – started a little wet, and going over the first ~4,500m pass – clouds were super low… which made the road rather damp, but the scenery – beautiful. Green hills, with the tops hidden by cloud. Very reminiscent of the artier Kung-Fu movies

And, lots of animals on the roads – yaks, and long-horned cows.
Tunnels, with yaks taking cover just in the entrance/exit… rather difficult to see.
Drivers who certainly aren’t used to the quality of road plus vehicle-speeds.
At one point I stopped at a nice little scenic spot, with two cows sitting off the road, nice and peaceful. Two cars full of locals turn up – and immediately bother the cows (rather, very young bulls) until they stand up… and then usher them onto the road. Very odd – it seemed deliberate – but perhaps just to get them out of the nice safe off-road grassy area where they were – so that the locals could take photos? In any case – traffic in both directions was disrupted for quite some time, but… the guys got some nice photos doing kung-fu poses in front of the scenery.

Spending the night in Bomi – where again my room is much much larger than my London apartment. And where I only recently realised that only 100m away, there is a very steep green wall up to the clouds, reminiscent of the scenery thus far today. So… probably about time to see if I can find a restaurant with a view of that.

25 June – China (Tibet) – ~253 miles

Left Lhasa this morning, to start the long road out of Tibet, over the famous Sichuan-Tibet Highway. Took a wrong turn fairly early on, and ended up on the motorway/expressway – which is forbidden to motorcycles. Stayed on that for about 25 miles (no options to exit) – without anybody stopping me.
Over a 5,000m altitude pass, rather ho-hum nowadays.
Stopped for a cup of tea at a little Tibetan teahouse, which also had posters of the Cordyceps ‘mushroom’, the “super mushroom” we discovered some years ago – apparently this area is a source for it. The guy showed me a plastic shopping bag half-full of the dried stuff, and then I bought a single fresh cordyceps for 50 yuan. Not cheap stuff.
BTW – I had a “yak meatball and caterpillar” soup last night, which had three smaller ones in it… and considering one of the benefits is supposed to be increasing oxygen intake, last night was the first time I’ve struggled to get to sleep with the altitude/low-oxygen-levels.

Overall, the day’s ride was rather pleasant – the aforementioned 5,000m pass, lots of miles following a river, etc. But I was super tired – falling asleep at times – so probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I could/should have. Eventually I pulled over, lay in the shade of a tree, and had a bit of an afternoon nap. Waking up twice as the free-roaming cows came dangerously close to trampling me. But eventually reached our destination of Linzhi safe and sound, and hoping for an early night.

22-24 June – China (Tibet) – ~304 miles

So, after the emotional and physical highs/strains of Mount Everest – it was a relatively boring long day just getting to Lhasa. First day in quite some time where there was actual traffic to deal with – and a little too tired to really cope with what that means here (trucks overtaking each other – roaring towards you – flashing their headlights as they expect YOU to get out of the way). And then the city traffic of Lhasa – which was a bit more “fun”, once you bought into it… just weaving through everybody, ignoring red lights, riding like a local on their omnipresent silent electric scooters.

And then – 2 days of tourism. Potala Palace – we all went as a group, as it needs to be pre-booked. What I didn’t realise… once we got inside the ground-level complex, we all needed to go up to the actual Palace itself together, as a group, with a guide, through a checkpoint. And not realising that, I’d very quickly dropped out of the group, to avoid the constant prattling of the the guide. So, after I’d visited everything down on the ground, I tried to go up to the palace, and was firmly refused. And then discovered there are no exits down at the ground level either. After some time, I eventually escaped… and not really too bothered about going up to the actual Palace… I figured the best thing about the Palace was really the view of the sheer scale of the thing from outside anyway…. confirmed later by those who did tow the line, and went up with the group/guide.

Group dinner – as 2 more riders finish their trip here… excessive drinks had, and spent some time on the roof of the hotel, just watching the traffic.

Today – souvenir hunting… the one thing I really wanted was that most obvious of tourist tat which one normally sees in every single shop… a simple cotton t-shirt, with the local tourist attraction (Qomolangma/Mt-Everest) on it. Lhasa… does not sell tourist t-shirts. Hundreds of shops selling all sorts of other tat, generally buddhism-related stuff (prayer flags, prayer knots, robes, etc)… but I saw a total of 6 touristy-type-t-shirts in the entire city. None of them mentioning that glorious mountain.

20-21 June – China (Tibet) – ~303 miles

Awesome.

The last two days have just been leading up to, and then visiting, Mount Everest. And, wow. In every respect, just absolutely amazing.
Firstly – yesterday – just some riding to get to Dingri, our base for visiting Qomolangma. And while I’m sure there was some interesting stuff yesterday, I’ve forgotten it all after today’s experience…

Riding – wow. Just, awesome. I’m not exactly experienced, but a lot of the guys here are saying that compared to Stelvio Pass (apparently one of the best) – this was many-many times better.
All I know is – I loved it. And, for the first time ever, dragged a foot-peg on the road… on knobbly tires. I’ll upload a screenshot of the map for the road once I get the chance.
Somebody quoted “200 hairpin turns”… I genuinely don’t know if that was an exaggeration.
Just… wow.

The Mountain. Well… I made a little bit of fun about Mt Kailash giving people spiritual feelings and what-not. And Everest – yeah, just another big rock with some snow on it. But goddamn if I didn’t feel goosebumps, shivers, a wee bit of a glow, and a couple of eyeball-leaks on the first sight of it. And, many times subsequently.
What a magnificent big bastard.
I wasn’t the only one suffering from the dust of the road when we stopped at the first decent viewpoint. And when we finally got to Base Camp (tourist Base Camp, not proper Climbers’ Base Camp, and… via bloody electric bus for the last 8 miles, because apparently in this very small area China does give a shit about the environment.. despite many bribe attempts and pleas to let us just ride that last 8 miles)… I spent about an hour more than everybody else just sitting there, looking at this goddamn mountain, towering over us when we’re already sitting at 5,200 metres. I also read some of my book, and made a tower of rocks.
While the remaining Scotsman wore his kilt, I wore the traditional New Zealand black-woollen-singlet, Red-Bands (in jandal-form), and a hat that in hindsight could pass for Fred Daggs’.
And, had my first attempt at a “live facebook video” – with zero preparation/practice/or-even-forethought – just spur of the moment “let’s see if this works”, and some random mumbling – don’t know if I even did it right or got the Magnificent Big Bastard in shot at any point-in-time.
In short – Just… wow.