Latest from my travels: With photos: j2westcountry.tumblr/ Wednesday 12th June - No Pun Intended image I’m so glad to be in Urumqi. It has to be the best Chinese city I’ve been to so far and the most eclectic province (by Chinese standards, at least). Maybe it’s because I’m so close to the end of China or that there is a greater deal of diversity but I think Urumqi is a really cool city. The food is amazing! Due to the government’s migration encouragement over the last 20 years, the choices of regional Chinese food is abundant. All the best food I have had on my journey so far is available here, and more. The guidebooks and websites don’t do it justice. Perhaps I have a greater affinity with Urumqi because of the pain and suffering I put my body through to get here. But ever since we saw the first road sign for Urumqi saying 915km, we finally felt like there was light at the end of the tunnel. image For the last month myself and Nick have been pushing and pushing, thinking each day could not get any worse, gritting our teeth through it when it always did, until we finally came down that long valley hill at 5am on a Thursday morning into the beautifully noisy capital city of Xinjiang province, a welcome late night bustle and a far cry from the monotonous desert highway stops we had become so used to. Many days awaiting parcels and visas have passed since then, and I’ve now been to the airport twice for two separately fond farewells. image So I’ll start where we left off in my last post, when we had just entered Xinjiang, a province about the size of France and Germany put together, home to the second lowest land depression in the world (Turfan basin), the city furthest from any ocean in the world (Urumqi) and the most amazingly delicious melons than I’ve ever tasted in my life. After our mad all-night dash from the Gansu border to Hami, we decided to try and take the next week a tiny bit easier. Not that much easier though. We were still pushed for time as Nick had to get to Urumqi to get a flight to San Francisco before the end of May. During our day in Hami, I had done everything in my power to prevent my bike from getting more punctures. I changed my back tyre which had been worn out, to a Michelin tyre. It wasn’t quite as good as Schwalbe, but it was wider and brand new, and a temporary solution before I receive my new tyres that are being sent over from the UK by my parents, unstoppably helpful as they are, as always. Imagine my frustration though, when 30kms out of town I get another puncture. image I don’t know what I have done to offend the Chinese cycling gods in a past life, but it must have been something of Lance Armstrong proportions, because I have suffered non-stop bad luck with punctures. Their occurrences have become so regular over the last month, either due to mechanic’s incorrect installation (I’ve become an expert, so it’s not me!), slow flats from former holes that were leaking or hundreds of tiny staple like pieces of metal along the roads in this region of China, the innards from old blown out lorry tyres. I’ve become so used to changing my wheel, it doesn’t even affect my morale anymore, it’s just a calmly performed functional routine that needs to be done, like putting in contacts or wiping one’s bum. A man from Schwalbe offered the advice that I need to look where I am going when I cycle. Thanks for that, that also applies to walking, running and general movement, and is something I’ve been doing since I mastered a cognitive understanding of my immediate surroundings back in the eighties. I am, of course, extremely careful about observing my oncoming tracks, as anyone who’s had 16 punctures in 2 months would be. But unless you have superman’s eyesight, it is quite hard to spot random splints of metal on a highway road, even in the broad daylight desert sunshine, let alone at night. So the grand total so far is 16, which is above average, but at least it has been in one particular area of China, rather than the whole way through. I think the issue really is about my weight, I need to cut a little more from my baggage, but it’s difficult to do that when you’re carrying your home with you. The new wider tyres that are on their way in the post should also help a lot. image A late night arrival after the first day of cycling after Hami meant we didn’t emerge until late the next day, waking up in the small pleasant and peaceful Uighur town of Sandaoling. After spending a couple of hours looking for someone to mend my spare tubes (as I was out of tubes and out of patches) we took some photos of the town and sat and ate ice cream with some friendly Uighur men we met, one of whom spoke the best English I had experienced on the whole trip. They also seemed so much more laid back and relaxed than people in the East and after chatting with him for quite a while, we realised as it was getting on for 7pm, that we weren’t realistically going anywhere that night. Even with the late sunrises, we would have barely got back on the highway before having to turn on our headlights again, so we checked back into our cheap hotel room. image The next day we put our determination helmets on and decided we really needed to push now, no stopping until Urumqi. We’d had enough breaks and were feeling pretty energized. The weather had been very nice and calm on our day off in Sandaoling, so we expected the same. Nothing in the world could stop us from pushing on now! Nothing except for… the strongest winds on earth, bastard hills and food poisoning. That day we saw a horrible long incline with achingly strong headwinds and another puncture. We didn’t get nearly as far as we had wanted, and around midnight we stopped at the toll booth service station that had a very small cluster of very basic shops and restaurants (the only place with signs of human life for the whole day). It was up at the peak of the mountain (around 2000m) where the wind was strongest and coldest. We had gone from 35 hot degrees in the Uighur town, to 8 cold mountain degrees with a chillingly strong wind. After briefly having some questionable tofu and egg dish, we sat listening to the glass doors rattling and looked at our possible options. Our theory that the nighttime eliminates the wind went out of the window. Before the difference had been like night and day, but now, up a mountain it was a different situation. Should we continue into the pitch black, cold and very windy unknown until we get to where we assumed there to be one hotel, or check to see if any of the decrepit looking restaurants by the toll booth (one of which we had just eaten in) had a place to stay. After about 10 minutes of cursing the cold we found that a roadside shop had a weird B&Q kind of flat-pack-built shed attached to the back of it, with rooms, and beds. No shower or toilet, but there were some in a room down the hall in the same building, which was like 5-star luxury compared to other service stops we’d stayed in. Anything that gave us shelter from the howling cold wind was more than sufficient for us. And it was lucky for Nick that we did. The questionable tofu and egg we had eaten should indeed have been questioned, as Nick spent most of that night running back and forth to the toilet at the end of the corridor. Somehow I was lucky enough to avoid it. Needless to say he was out of action for the whole of the next day, so we spent the next day and night on the rural mountain pit stop, I mostly just reading or perusing the tiny motorway shop and Nick sleeping off his horrendous experience, his face turning a healthier shade of colour each time he woke up. Food poisoning up a mountain is a pain in the arse but at least we had shelter. image The next day was pure misery. As we set off from the top of the mountain, Nick mostly recharged from the day before and myself overly charged from boredom, we assumed the wind would soon die down as it was mostly downhill from there, and the mountains to our north would give us a little shelter from the northerly wind. How wrong we were. Eight hours later we were still pedaling as hard as possible, in the easiest gear available, moving slower than a fat snail on Jupiter. There were parts where we were getting physically pushed backwards off our bikes. At one point it took me about 10 minutes and several attempts just to get back on my bike without getting blown backwards or into the buffer rail of the hard shoulder, or worse, towards the traffic. Even later as the sun went down and we had a long 13kms of downhill road, the wind battered us diagonally in front and dangerously to the side (towards the traffic) so we had to carefully watch our balance as we pedaled desperately down what was meant to be an enjoyable reward for the mountain’s uphill struggle from two days previous. As we arrived in some sort of civilization 180km later at around 4.30am it was pot noodles for dinner again, and a very welcome bed in air conditioned surroundings as the temperatures had shot back up to unbearably hot again due to our descent. Could it get any worse than this? image image Yes it could, we found out two days later. The next day we had been lucky enough to have a lot of downhill with little wind. The scenery changed, and we passed some lush looking vineyards leaned over by jagged mountain landscape in the distance complimented by little traffic and a warm wind behind us that cooled a little as it got darker. Sadly, as the previous day had knocked us out for the count until the early afternoon, we had set off late so we missed what looked like some amazing valley scenery in the moonlight. Still, the downhill ride on the highway, cool wind from the river below and the image of crystal clear desert stars as a ceiling to the dramatic mountainous valley walls made it one of the most pleasant days in a very long time. It gave us hope, that this perhaps would be what it was like for our final 180km push to Urumqi. Our final day of riding, we left optimistically after the one nice day out of twenty. Surely, nothing could be as bad as what we had been through. Cue the wind farms. image Around 30km outside of Turfan, our last stop before Urumqi, the highway, our only option for this particular stretch, which we had been on for the last 20 days, decided all of a sudden to change. It went from having a comfortable three lanes each way (two for the traffic, one emergency hard shoulder lane that we cycled in) to having a narrow two lanes (one for everything, and one for everything overtaking everything). We hoped it would only be like this for a short distance as the wind was dangerously strong and blowing us directly left towards the traffic. Sure enough, 7 hours later, we were still struggling through what was honestly one of the hardest and most stressful challenges of my entire life. The wind was stronger and more consistent than ever before, the surface was dilapidated and bumpy, the barreling trucks were giving us barely enough space at stony edge of the road, our water levels were low due to the blazing sun’s heat from the day, and without a shop, shack or shitty service station in sight, we were losing light by the minute as the day drew to a close. We had been putting in maximum effort all day and got minimum outcome. As the final scrap of light from behind the distant mountain fizzled out, we had to get off the road as it was simply not safe enough anymore. My morale was broken and I felt sick from a mixture of dehydration and sunstroke. After a few moments of dry heaving, whilst Nick waited for me, I had to try and lie down, anything to get the wind out of my face that was battering my state from bad to worse. The ground was so jagged and stony, like a pebble beach where all the pebbles had been filed down into squares or rectangles or other uncomfortable shapes. They were so large and pointy and abundant, it was like lying on a bed of upturned plugs (for anyone who isn’t from the UK, stepping on an upturned 3-pinned plug is one of the most painful things a Brit can endure in their lives). When I finally got myself together, we attempted to push our fully loaded bikes over these punishing rocks in the pitch black, wind still taunting us from the side with no clear break in our path, and no sign of life other than the loud grunt of trucks and cars speeding past us on the road. We must have been pushing for about an hour and there seemed to be no hope of the road splitting into three and no inkling of a rest stop in sight. It was the hardest point of the trip so far, as we were completely out of options. All we could do, aside from trying to flag down a speeding truck in the windy darkness, was try to push ourselves to safety. image And then, amazingly a stopped car came to our rescue. Two Muslim guys who looked like they were of Hui ethnicity must have spotted our reflectors and my head-torch as we were pushing our bikes in the shallow ditch that was 10 metres from the road. They couldn’t speak a word of English, but they could see from our worn-out looks and the desperate situation that we were in need of some help. They gave us water and sized up our bikes and luggage against their 5 seater hatchback. It clearly wasn’t going to work, but the driver was on his phone and appeared to be arranging some other sort of transport. In our dazed and desperate condition, we weren’t really sure what was going on but were thankful that our prospects had changed from the dismal state they were in 10 minutes before. He conveyed to us in his language and gestures that someone could pick us up if we waited there for around an hour. At this point anything seemed better than trying to push a 30kg bike over sharp rocks for an unforeseeable amount of time. Clearly, from the looks on these guys faces, we could tell that there would be no change in the road’s layout or condition and we were in need of help. So I dug out my camping mat and Nick dug out some heavy clothes which we dropped on the ground and collapsed onto respectively, as we waited in the ditch in the middle of the enormous desert. image Sure enough, about 45 minutes later, a small open-back truck stopped and two little guys got out and hauled our bikes and luggage onto the back. In my mind it was a moment akin to the ending of the movie 127 Hours when James Franco is rescued after hacking off his own arm with a jubilant loud cathartic soundtrack and muted on-screen cries of despair, hope and joy. In reality it was more like an episode of 999 (the shoddy nineties BBC public safety show), where two idiots get stuck in a windy desert. image I’m not entirely sure how far they drove us, maybe 30 or 40km, but it was far enough to get us out of the enormous wind-farm and over a nice stretch of uphill. Part of me felt bad about this, but the majority of me was overjoyed to be out of the hell we had just been through. At the end of the day we had been screwed. When they dropped us off at a safe point, our morale had been restored and with our second wind we were on our bikes again. I still felt too sick to eat much, but I was at least more hydrated at this point. We cycled on until 5am when we arrived in the Urumqi, and to our delight we found the city was still alive at this hour. We dismounted our bikes by a bustling outdoor BBQ restaurant, where we sat and tucked into 4 amazing skewers of the lamb kebabs that this region is famous , folded up in a toasted naan bread, watered down with about 6 cups of Chinese tea. The sense of relief was incredible as we had finally made 2000km from Lanzhou through the most torturous part of China, to Nick’s final destination and a week of rest for me as I wait for parcels to arrive and a visa to be processed. image image The day after our early morning arrival in Urumqi, I saw Nick off to the airport where we said our goodbyes after a month or cycling through some of the most tormenting conditions we’d both ever experienced. I really appreciated his company and will miss his permanently friendly attitude, his positive demeanor and the assortment of terrible puns I endured over the past 4 weeks. As a tribute to him, I tried to fit as many bad puns as I could into this blog post. But unfortunately most of them were so bad that I couldn’t justify leaving them in. There are still a couple in one or two paragraphs… see if you can spot them. Anyway, it was great to ride with such a good mate, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time. image After Nick’s departure I knew it was going to be quite hard to adjust to being on my own. That’s why it was perfect timing for Sujung to come and visit again, for which I am really grateful! She made the long trip across from Seoul to spend the weekend in Urumqi. After we’d had a fairly busy weekend in Xi’an previously, we decided that we would do very little this time, but stay in the hotel for the majority of the weekend. Luckily for us, a special deal booking in the nice hotel that we had made didn’t go through properly, but the extremely nice man behind the desk, after seeing our frowns at the prospect of having to find a cheaper hotel, offered us the daily rate at a cut price, and even upgraded our room to a executive floor. It was by far the best place I have stayed in on this trip so we made the most of it by barely leaving it all weekend. Her departure was more positive than the last time, as we have both adapted to the increasingly long distance that this trip creates, and we know we will see each other in a few months time in Turkey. image The week since my second goodbye at the airport has mostly been just waiting around, exploring the city, buying supplies and fixing up my bike. Eating has also been a priority, in a city that offers such good food. I have lost about 7kg since the start of this trip, so the last week has been a good opportunity to put that back on. My living quarters are not as glamorous as my weekend with Sujung, but much more agreeable than some of the spots I’ve laid my head in the last month. After this, it’s going to be mostly wild camping, which I’m really looking forward to as it will be less money spent every day from an already dwindling budget and finally a justification for this incredibly heavy load I’ve been carrying with me over the last 3 months. Hi-di-hi Kazakhstan! image
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:17:38 +0000
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