Mr. Lee introduced himself in excellent English, as I sat down in front of his desk. I showed him the permit that the Darchen police had written for me. I explained that I needed a visa extension so that I could get back to Lhasa to meet my wife. I thought he might have more sympathy for that story than for the illegal activities that I was actually involved in. On the side of his desk sat a few different English short story books, alongside those rested books of Chinese poetry. Mr. Lee informed me that he had taught himself English. It was all too obvious that he was an intelligent man with endless spare time. By this point in my trip, my clothes had not been washed for at least a month. Layers of dirt covered everything I had. “You look like a sportsman. Are you riding a bike?” Mr. Lee inquired. I quickly replied, “No. Before I had been riding a bicycle, a few months earlier on this trip in a different part of China.” I knew that if he found my bike that he would have to confiscate it. I would not have the same good fortune that I had down in Darchen. A few days earlier Dominique and Damien told me that Mr. Lee had stopped them in Ali. During a conversation over lunch they mentioned to him that they thought of riding bicycles out to Ali from Lhasa, but in the end decided that it would be too difficult. Mr. Lee politely responded, with “Well, if you would have ridden bikes to Ali, I would have been forced to confiscate them.” With this conversation floating though my head I knew that there was no way that I could allow him to know that I possessed a bike, otherwise my trip would be over. After a short discussion with his boss in the other room, Mr. Lee told me that he would be able to give me a visa extension for one more month, but I would have to stay here in the Ali Hotel for the night. I thanked him greatly for the extension and started to leave the room. “Where is your luggage?” he asked. “Oh, I dropped it at another hotel down the street. I’ll go pick it up now.” I answered. Being a polite man, he said “I can help you carry it back here.” After I refused his help three times, he finally relented.
I spent the rest of the afternoon buying supplies for the journey across the highest section of road in the world. I stocked up on dried fruit, dried fish, peanuts, raisins, noodles, chocolate and “761 Army Biscuits.” “761 Army Biscuits” are one of those rare food products that I have only seen in Western China. They come in a simple rectangular package a few inches across with a dark green figure of a Chinese solider on the label. The translation of the label reads, “761 Compressed Food, Contains: protein, sugar, fat and calories”. On my first trip to Tibet it took me a month or two to figure out that 761 biscuits were edible. I had always passed them by when I saw the military looking packages in the shops, thinking that they were some kind of spare parts or fuel. Each pack contains four baked flour and sugar biscuits with the consistency of small dirt bricks, but they are indestructible and last forever and eventually became one of my food staples. Most of the packages that I purchased during the summer of 1994 had a manufacturing date of 1989 stamped on them and I don’t think that they even contain any preservatives.
Once again, I knew that I would have to skillfully ration out my food to make it across the Askin Chin. As darkness settled in, I returned to the hotel where I had locked my bike. The owner happily allowed me to remove my bike from her hotel, because she knew that she would receive a fine if the police found it. In the darkness I pedaled as fast as I could to a side door of the Ali Hotel. Once I made sure that no one occupied the hall, I wheeled my bike into my room. I quickly taped some pieces of an unused map over the hall window, so that no one could see inside my room. With a little work I fit my bike underneath the bed.
I had planned to stay another day in Ali, to rest, eat and make a feeble attempt to gain some weight, but like so many times before other factors cut my rest day plans short. In the early evening I had rapidly fallen asleep. Later the knocking of a large Chinese man at my door woke me up. When I first awoke I had no idea what time it was, I thought that it was only 10 or 11 o’clock. I opened the door and we exchanged a few words. Once I realized that it was 3 A.M. and my visitor had drunken too much, I shooed him out of my room, telling him that I felt very tired and needed to get back to sleep. After a short 10-minute rest, the visitor returned to my room and banged on the door again. I yelled out that I needed my sleep and that he should go away. For some reason unknown to me, he proceeded to loudly pound on my door for the next 40 minutes, yelling that I should open the door for him. During that time I heard someone else in the hall, speaking in Chinese, about the American on a bicycle. Once I heard that, I knew that somehow people had discovered that I had a bike in the room, and by morning Mr. Lee would be made aware of the situation. After shouting at these men at the top of my lungs, they finally left, enabling me to get a few hours sleep. I knew that I had to leave town before sunrise, which was only a two hours away.
No matter how much I disliked getting up early, sunrise always signaled one of the most beautiful times of day in the desert. I made a quick stop in a Muslim restaurant for a few round loaves of bread and boiled water, and then started the climb out of town. The road wound up passed an army camp and on through the trash dump. For the next couple of days, I kept a watch on the traffic that came from Ali. By the time I saw the dust trail of a vehicle in the distance I would carry my bike off the road down into a ditch or behind a few low bushes. I could not afford the risk of Mr. Lee or his boss catching me only a day’s ride from Ali. I had lived in the silence of the desert long enough to “feel” when a truck approached. The first indication of a distant truck starts as a ultralow frequency that I would feel in my entire body, much more of a sense than an actual sound. After looking around, I could usually spot a narrow cloud of dust miles in the distance rising up into the sky. That would allow me a few minutes until the truck passed where I stood.
In my hurry to leave town I did not fill up all of my water bottles. As it turned out, more than 40 miles separated Ali from the next source of drinkable water. When I saw the nomad tents out in the distance I knew that luck had come my way. For the last couple of hours I had struggled to keep turning the pedals to get closer to some place where I could find water. When I left Ali, I also left the Indus River valley. For the first time in almost a month I was not riding in the massive valley that lies between the Himalaya and the Gangdise Range of Tibet. The mountains that I rode in had a familiar feel, they were the same rocks and peaks that I had seen two years before in Ladakh, on the other side of the border in India. According to my map it was only 40 miles to the old historic border post with India that traders had crossed for hundreds of years.
In most of China, just about all road construction is still done by hand. That means that there are large crews of lower class workers with picks and shovels who actually build the roads, moving dirt and breaking up boulders with steel and muscle. These workers usually live in small bamboo and plastic shacks on the side of the road. In Tibet the workers all come from Sichuan and other Han Chinese provinces where there are more hands than work. They come to Tibet and Xinjiang Province for the summer to make money on a road crew. When winter returns, they retreat to Chengdu, and other warmer locations in central China.
As I approached Rutog, I first rode through the construction camps. The workers on the sides of the road chatted with excitement upon seeing a foreigner in this barren land. Most Chinese think life in far Western Tibet is like some kind of hell devoid of all culture and civilization. They all smiled and waved, a few people yelled out “ni qu nar?” (“You go where?” in Chinese). Only ONE road cuts across far Western Tibet, it continues across the Askin Chin, then on to Xinjiang Province and finally arrives in Kashgar. When I replied, “Kashgar!” there was still a bit of shock on their faces. I knew that most of them must have thought that I was somewhat crazy to be out there to start out with, but to say that I planned to ride my bike to Kashgar confirmed any doubts.