The soldiers surprised me when they reported that the US soccer team was doing well in the World Cup Soccer Match. They were proud of the fact that they possessed a satellite dish, and were able to be part of the “Global Village” by watching MTV and the World Cup Soccer Match from the middle of the Askin Chin. Someone asked me to stay for the evening, so that I could watch MTV with them. I decided to move on. I thought it might have been too much culture shock to watch Madonna and Michael Jackson on MTV.
After another day of riding, I rounded a corner to see what looked to be an empty truck parked on the side of the road. Once I passed the first truck I could just make out another one on the horizon. Only later as I sat inside the cab, did I learn that this second truck was made in Hungary and driven by an older Chinese man, while the first truck was Chinese-made and driven by a Uyghur man from Kashgar. Both of these vehicles had broken down just a couple miles apart. The problem was that they needed replacement parts that could only be bought back in Yechen, Xinjiang, about 300 miles [500 km] away. Both drivers had already waited for five days. They thought that it would only require three more days before a friend returned with the needed parts. This land remains a long ways off from Federal Express and next-day air shipping. Everyone also had a corresponding different level of expectation and stress in situations like these. Just to complicate things more, major road construction blocked the Mazor pass, located 200 miles [333 km] ahead. This pass only opened to traffic three days a month in each direction. I knew that I would not make it to the pass on a day that it officially opened in my direction. Being that I traveled on a bike I hoped that I would be able to make it through anyway.
The older Chinese truck driver went out of his way to make sure that I had hot tea to drink and noodles to eat. I knew that he had an extremely limited amount of food left and little fuel for cooking, so I tried not to consume too much of his resources. The simple meal of noodles with a little chili sauce tasted wonderful. Unlike all the noodles that I had been eating, these had been properly cooked in a pressure cooker. Most all the truck drivers that travel in Tibet carry a full-size pressure cooker with them because they often become stranded on the side of the road for a day or two or spend the night camped out just off the road. They also carry a small blowtorch gadget that can be used to cook with. The blowtorch burns the same fuel as the truck engine. When it is lit, it roars like a demon from hell, with flames a foot [30 cm] long. It is often just aimed at the side of a pot of water or a pressure cooker to make boiling water for tea or noodles. Truck drivers also use the torches to weld metal parts of their trucks that have broken. In times like these I was happy to have my own independent transportation no matter how difficult things got. Each morning when I awoke I decided when and where I would travel, the decisions of other people never constrained me. I controlled my own movement, my own destiny.
Entering the Mountains of Darkness
As I climbed out of the Askin Chin, I entered into the valleys of the Kun Lun Shan Mountains. This range forms the northwest edge that separates the Tibetan plateau from the great Taklimakan Desert. I had shown my Chinese maps to many people along the way, trying to find out where I would be able to buy food and supplies. I knew that reality and maps often did not match. Some of the towns shown on my maps had been deserted many years before.
Hongliutan was the first settlement I entered after the Askin Chin. It consisted of more of an abandoned military base than an actual town. Most of the buildings were falling down, with windows broken and doors missing, but most importantly there was a place that I could buy food and get a bed to sleep inside. What passed for restaurants looked like broken down third-world shacks, a mix of plywood, sheet metal, and sheets of plastic all held together by a few strands of wire. Despite the run-down appearance I was interested in only one thing, a bowl of rice and some cooked vegetables. Han Chinese women from Sichuan Province ran both of the two eating establishments in town. For the last few weeks I had seen only a couple of women, this part of Western China was a land of male military personnel and truck drivers, not one of women, children and families. One of the things that I enjoyed the most about places I have traveled in the third world is the dirty snotty-nosed kids who run wild in the streets and villages. With kids it does not matter what language you speak as long as you can juggle or balance a stick on your nose.
“Lung” was one of the Chinese words that I did not know. Two Uyghur road workers tried to explain to me why it was a bad idea to sleep by the side of the road. I had stopped by a small stream to fill up my water bottles and take a break, when I met two young guys who spent their days fixing bumps and potholes on the roadway. Each member of their crew has responsibility for maintaining a few kilometers of the road. It looked like these guys were just relaxing by the creek and snacking on their daily lunch ration, a couple of pieces of hard bread in the shape of bagels. When I told them that I felt tired and was thinking about camping on the side of the road, they insisted that I must keep riding my bike, because the “lung” would descend from the mountains during the nighttime. They described some sort of animal that lived high up in the mountains. During the nighttime it descended to the valley to eat the sheep that grazed by the river below. They finally said that it would be okay as long as I carried a gun to shoot the “lung.” They seemed surprised when I told them that I did not own a gun. I had a feeling that I destroyed their image of the rough and tough American who carried a gun wherever he went.