By the time I stopped my bike and got a chance to look around in one of the small shops, a crowd of 30 to 40 people had encircled my bike and me. The Chinese shopkeepers all tried to act calm and cool, like it was no big deal. I am sure that they had all seen many foreigners before in other parts of China. Meanwhile the Tibetan kids buzzed in a wild frenzy, so excited that some strange “inji” had come to visit their town. As I moved from shop to shop looking for jarred fruit and dried noodles, the entire crowd moved with me. Everyone speculated what my water bottles contained, some thought that they held gasoline for my engine, but others thought they held alcohol, maybe to numb the pain of traveling through this harsh land. The bike computer on the handlebars was the other object of great fascination and speculation. When I demonstrated that my bike computer could tell me how many kilometers I had traveled and what the current altitude was it left everyone dumbfounded. After a couple inquiries I discovered the location of the post office. I had learned much earlier that in order to mail anything from remote post offices like this, I should carry my own postcards and stamps. The post office had been closed but because I was a special guest of sorts, they opened it up for me, pushing a six-foot-high [2 meter high] file cabinet out of the way so that we could enter the office. A couple months after my return to the USA, the card that I had mailed from Rutog actually arrived in Seattle. That postcard’s own journey around the planet would have been a tale worth listening to.
It took about an hour and half for the police to find me. These guys did not represent the sharpest law enforcement officers in the world. I had been talking with the owners of a Muslim restaurant when the police walked in with their belts full of small silver bullets. It reminded me of a scene out of a Wild West movie, the only problem being that I had the role of the outlaw on the run from the law. After all I did wear a red bandanna around my neck that I often covered my mouth and nose with, looking like quite the Western outlaw. The two Tibetan policemen asked me in Chinese, “ni de huzhao” (“Your passport”). I switched to my normal play dumb with the police mode, and pretended not to understand what they said. They both talked among themselves in Tibetan, saying a few things about my stupidity, and how I should have special paperwork to be there. Finally after about fifteen minutes of getting nowhere, they started to insist that I accompany them to the police station. This was not something that I wanted to do. I wanted to come to some kind of resolution there in the restaurant. Reluctantly, I pulled out my passport. I heard the head guy say to the other that this was not even a passport. Even Mr. Lee back in Ali had problems reading my passport. Trying to figure out which of my Chinese visas was the most current confused him. Finally I showed them the page in my passport that had my new visa extension from the police in Ali. I knew that they would be able to read the characters for “Ali,” and would therefore know that I had visited Mr. Lee and that he granted me permission to continue my trip. I continued pointing to the stamp from the Ali police, saying the Chinese name for Ali. I hoped that since the Ali office was the regional headquarters they would not be able to question a stamp I had gotten there. Once again, after I managed to tire them out with a certain pretense of stupidity on my part, they decided that I could go on. After all I was headed to Kashgar, the closest legal place for foreigners, even though it was 700 miles away.
In 1948, Lama Govinda and Li Gotami crossed from the Ladakh region of India to the then independent country of Tibet. They described this epic journey to Mt. Kailash in the classic book Way of the White Clouds. Lama Govinda was one of the first Westerners to ever become an ordained Tibetan Buddhist Lama and bring some of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to the West. Years before I read of his explorations of a massive lake called Pangong that spanned the Ladakh-Tibet border. Many pages in the book depicted the ever-changing blue, black, and green colors of the lake and the surrounding mountains.
After my encounter with the police in Rutog, I decided I should get out of town and not press my luck. It was just a few more miles to the shores of Pangong Lake. The shoreline seemed like a restful spot where I could take a day off, and do some reading and napping. The only problem was that Lama Govinda mentioned in his book that the water was contaminated and not drinkable. On the other hand, the famous modern day Himalayan walker, Hugh Swift, in his guidebook on this area stated that he found the water in the lake to be drinkable. My mind started to wonder, would I even know if I drank contaminated water, or would I just go to sleep one night with a belly full of poison water and not wake up the next morning. I rode on a bit more and found a fresh water spring on the shoreline. I did not want to take the risk of drinking from the lake.
When I looked at my watch it read July 4th, Independence Day. I took a moment to reflect on my home and the land of America. Whenever I left the USA, one of the places that I came to appreciate the most was my homeland. Not until I lived under marshal law in Lhasa did I start to truly understand the nature of the political and religious freedoms that we Americans enjoy almost unknowingly. I always knew that when I walked the streets of Lhasa my US passport afforded me certain privileges that the Tibetans around me will never have under Chinese rule. I have always been pleased by the fact that I came from a country of foreigners, a land of asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees and descendants thereof.
I spent my holiday reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, the only book that I carried with me on the trip. During the course of months on the road, I read and reread sections of this wonderful book about Annie Dillard’s explorations of the woods and streams around here home in rural Virginia. She told tales about totally different sorts of adventures than what I was experiencing in Tibet but I think that at points in time we arrived at similar mental states. The lives and deaths of the bugs, insects and small animals that inhabited the region near her home taught her an enormous appreciation of the complex and interdependent web of life on this planet. Both of us also came to understand time from a much large scale, a scale of thousand and tens of thousands of years rather than the minuscule span of a human life.
During the course of the next day, I passed many sources of water that were littered with the bones of animals. I searched for signs of campfires around springs indicating that Tibetans had camped there and drank the water. A yak skull right in the middle of a spring seemed to indicate that the water may not be drinkable. I did not want to risk it. I rode on still a bit thirsty.
Leaving Tibet
“And in the stress of modern life, and the progress of man’s monopolisation of the earth on which he lives, it is beautiful to some of us, of whom it may be said the highest state of inward happiness come from solitary meditation in unperturbed loneliness under the broad expanse of heaven, to know that there are still some spots of isolation where human foot has never turned the clay and where out of sight and sound of fellow mortals, we may even for a time shake off the violating unnatural fetters of harassing Western life.”
Edwin J. Dingle, Across China on Foot, 1910
In 1962, as part of Mao Zedong’s campaign to expand The People’s Republic of China, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army built the first road across the Askin Chin. The Askin Chin is a high altitude basin that lies between Tibet and the Muslim province of Xinjiang, China. Before ‘62 India controlled this area. The basin is so remote that the Chinese built the only road through the area without the Indians even knowing of its existence. Even today, the Indian government does not allow maps to be published that show this land as part of China, it must be labeled as a disputed area that remains part of India. At its height, the road across the Askin Chin stays at 17,000 feet [5182 meters] for more than 150 miles, making it the highest continuous section of road in the world. Needless to say, no permanent settlements can be found for hundreds of miles to the north or the south. When the explorer Sven Hedin traveled in this area at the turn of the century, he did not encounter another human being for eighty days. Every couple of days another of his pack animals would die from the extreme cold and from the lack of food during his crossing of the Askin Chin. Throughout my year of research before this trip, I could only find two written accounts from people who had traveled this area, but I was never able to find any photos of it. Since the Askin Chin remains a untraveled and mysterious region, it has always held a special place in my mind. It continued to be the one part of the trip that I could never fully plan for.