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Published: November 29th 2007
The road east from Horchu was bad and we were climbing up towards the high pass of Maryam La. Those two nights were really cold, but the scenery was great. A big salt lake surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of kiang (Tibetan wild ass). That morning we were able to act as hosts as we shared a cup of tea with a nomad guy who was walking across the vast wide valley, presumably to get to the houses on the far side. As we got close to the pass though we were greeted by yelling happy children, part of nomad families, but even these people were packing up their tents and preparing to move lower down. Winter is coming and up here you always have to be prepared to move. The sparse grassland can not support permanent settlement, either the area will be overgrazed or there is just not water all year. Many houses we pass are closed up and their streams are dry. They wait for the water to come again and then people and their herds of yaks will follow.
Over the Maryam La the landscaped changed, now the magnificent chain of the Himalayas stretched to the south
of us. One day we had beautiful sand dunes to cycle through and in the background a snowy chain of mountains defined our horizon with a big blue lake reflecting some of this and yaks dotted around. The views were great and the cycling enjoyable. Although the road was still pretty atrocious we really were having a great time, the weather was now really warm in the sun and we no longer had awful headwinds to battle. There were more villages around and loads of yaks to say hello to as we cycled along. Now the yak really is a strange beast, it could look really scary; tonnes of hairy beef stampeding towards you, topped by huge sweeping horns - however when one gets even the slightest glimpse of us they look terrified and run off in a skittish fashion. They really have not realised their potential. I have heard however that the huge wild yaks in the northern part of Tibet are a completely different kettle of fish, there is certainly some wildlife around which needs a respectful distance, not to mention the yeti...
The kilometers flew past, days of happy cycling filled with ubiquitous instant noodle lunches
Give Me Your Hair!!
An old man in Dargyeling who wanted a peice of Robin's hair. In fact the whole village wanted some.and dinners, but now we were in the land of tsampa so we enjoyed the hearty barley "cement mix" for brekkies. Although tsampa/champa was the staple food around it was all imported from the east, since we were still well over 4000 metres and nobody even tries to grow any crops up here, just hardy sheep, tiny goats, yaks and sturdy furry ponies.
The 5,200m Maryam La marks a big watershed, and as we descend to the east we are following the headwaters of the Brahmaputra, in Tibet called the Yarlung Tsangpo. It is only after we cross a huge grassy plain, the town of Paryang and another pass that we finally reach the mighty river we last saw in Assam many months ago. It is already a big river, and we follow its shiny blue waters out of the hills and down to another plain with awesome views south to high Himalayan peaks. We camp on the sandy banks of a river looking south and check the map, due south from here is the Kingdom of Mustang in Nepal, and an ancient trading route runs along our river to Mustang. Judging from this Robin reckons the enormous bulk
of a mountain way south in Nepal must be Dhaulagiri, an 8000'm peak. To the east of this is part of the Annapurna range.
Another day, another pass and we are aiming for the village of Niugu to find a guesthouse, as spending over an hour scraping ice and frost off the tent each morning is something we can do without if possible. Heading downhill on the rough dirt road we are confused by an army truck coming towards us with an enormous cloud of dust behind it, way more than usual. It is only at the last second as we try to cycle past we realise the truck is dragging something along the road, somehting much wider than the truck itself. Erika swerves out of the way and I have to crash into her to avoid being mangled by what appears to be a huge bundle of fencing being dragged along the road. When the dust finally clears we realise this is some bizzarre idea to clean the road of loose sand and rocks, except most of the loose stuff simply settles back, and in the meantime the fence-rake has loosened a good 2 inches of what was
previously compressed road. Great. We struggle onwards but it is painfully slow and hard to ride on this new road surface and we soon abandon the attempt completely and pitch our tent near some yak-hair nomad tents in the valley, grateful for every truck we hear in the night that is hopefully making the road ride-able again.
In the morning we are put to shame by our neighbours who are also moving; the whole family manage to pack up their huge tent, furniture, stoves etc. and load it onto a tractor in about half the time it takes us to break our tiny camp and load our bikes. In our defence they did have a lot of helpers. We push on towards the town of Saga, a long days ride ahead. Early in the afternoon we notice the tyre tracks we have been following for days look really really fresh, and look up to see another cyclist ahead. We quickly catch up with Patrick, a German friend we had met previously in Pakistan and Kashgar. He is cycling a fair bit slower than us, but we drop to his pace and exchange stories of the road. Soon we pass
Descending Maryum La
Along the headwaters of the Brahmaputra. a gompa high on the hill above the road and having abandoned any attempt to reach Saga we stop and climb up to the monastery. We spend the night in the nearby village of Dargyeling and enjoy a feast of tsampa, yak meat and potatoes.
As we set off in the morning for the short ride over a small pass to Saga another cyclist appears in the village! Janne is from Sweden and his bike is only half as loaded as ours, yet he is carrying full mountaineering kit. As we ride we hear some of his amazing tales of cycling far off-road into remote corners of Tibet and summitting previously unclimbed peaks, it makes riding along the 219 seem somewhat easy and boring by comparison.
We spend a day resting in Saga, chatting to Patrick and Janne. We decide not to pay for a shower, despite it being 15 days since our last one, as we will only have to put the same disgustingly dirty clothes back on afterwards. This is proven wise after Patrick has a hot shower and instantly falls ill.
The Fight: We had hoped to use the internet but they want to
The Great Himalayan Range
Across the West Tibet Plateau. Not a bad place to camp eh? charge us a silly foreigners price. Erika's best attempts to persuade them to charge us only locals price backfire and things get very out of hand - punches are thrown, a window is broken and 2 hours are spent in the police station. It all turns out OK for us though; the (Chinese) internet manager is very pissed off as he gets no money for his window and his friend who got violent is in serious trouble with the police, sitting sobbing with a bloodied face on the floor of the cop shop. The police have not even taken our names, so we escape pretty lightly in the end. Interestingly the police chief is Tibetan, while most of his minions are Han Chinese, which is not what we would have expected from the rumours about Chinese authoritarian control in Tibet.
Unlike the image portrayed in numerous kung-fu flicks, these Chinese guys were crap fighters, only managing to slap like a bunch of girls (sorry, actually I have met many girlks who are much more vicous fighters then these guys, but you know what I mean....). After getting in the way to stop them attacking Erika, Robin just lets them repeatedly
punch and kick him without responding, until the police arrive. There are now about 50 witnesses so they hadn't really been very clever either.
From Saga the 219 continues east over 2 more passes to reach the town of Lhatse and the super-duper asphalt "Friendship Highway" that links Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal. We leave the 219 however, turning south onto even rougher roads that will take us towards the high Himalaya. Leaving town we cross the Brahmaputra and start uphill to yet another pass. The landscape is of low, brown, desert-like rocky hills. The second pass of the day is a killer, a long and very steep climb on a bad road and I am really tired. My legs just cant keep up and I have to stop to rest every few hundred metres. Worse still is the imbalance with my mind - after a rest day I had expected to be fresh and the ride to be easy, but the opposite is the case. This would have been easier if we had not stopped in Saga. I conclude rest days are as dangerous as showers!
The Wolf: Eventually we reach the top of the pass and
have a distant view to some white peaks, but between us and them is a large expanse of sandy brown desert dotted with salt lakes. As we make our way slowly and painfully around the first of these I notice a shepherd dog skulking along, half hidden by the lay of the land, between us and the lake. In the distance we can see some nomad houses and herds of yak and sheep so we don't really pay any attention to this dog. After some 10-15 minutes more of hard riding I look more purposefully at this dog and sense something different - it is interested in us but also very wary, more like a wild animal. I check it through the binoculars and can't quite believe what I am looking at - this is no shepherd dog, this is unmistakably our first ever wolf!! We spend several minutes checking each other out before the wolf decides we are neither that interesting nor a threat, and it slopes off towards the lake to hunt pika. We ride on in a jubilant mood, our tired legs forgotten for now. We camp a few kilometres further on by a fresh water stream
in a howling gale. Shepherds have their black yak-hair tents nearby and are corralling huge flocks of sheep for the night. Some come to say Tashi Deleg and look at our strange tent, but we decide not to mention the wolf to them.
The next day we are still tired and have to push south again, into a fierce headwind. Slowly we draw closer to a big range of snow-dusted hills and a high pass over them to another town. Our route turns west again here though, onto an even rougher road, crossing rivers with no bridges and a small pass before dropping suddenly into a previously hidden narrow gorge. The gorge is lined with deep erosion gullies and scars and the rock is a psychedelic mix of purples, pinks and yellows. It is an amazing place. Our track takes us down this gorge at a fast pace, bumping all over the place on rocky sections and then pitching us into deep soft sandy parts, a true mountain biking trail. We climb up out of the canyon and contour around a hillside until we have an amazing view out across an enormous pale blue lake - Paiku Tso, yet
another of the sacred lakes of Tibet.
As if this view wasn't good enough, a few hundred metres later we turn another bend and are dumbstruck by the sight of the Himalaya close up at last. Ahead is the enormous Gang Benchen, almost 8,000m high, and from it stretches a long line of high, amazingly shaped ice peaks, culminating in the still distant Shishapangma - the only one of the worlds 14 peaks over 8000m to be fully inside Tibet/China. Despite the fact we are now heading west again the wind conspires to blow in our faces still, and it is with some effort we cross the sandy plain between the lake and the mountains to arrive at an isolated truck stop. We intended to stop only for water, but we are shattered and in the guest room we find a drunken party in full rage; loud singing and one guy is up dancing causing mass hilarity to everyone else. We are made to join the dance and then they offer us a bed in the dorm for the cheapest price we have ever had. The decision to stay is easy. From our room we even have an amazing
Back on the Brahmaputra
But its along way from Assam.... view to Gang Benchen. There is no food but we have our own, and there is endless good cheer so we have a nice night. The drinking guys are on a truck going to buy sheep near the Nepali border, and after several hours of drinking and once it is almost dark, they decide now is the time to fix their engine!
The next morning we feel completely refreshed. The wind has shifted and is now coming straight down of the glacier above, but it helps to push us westwards towards Shishapangma. The mountain dominates us all day, growing ever larger as we cycle up to it and then around the northern edge. We have lunch by the village of Siling, nestled tight underneath the foothills of the worlds 14th highest mountain. We are so close the main part of the mountain is actually hidden by the steep brown foothills, but as we cycle onwards in the afternoon it re-appears. The valley is slowly narrowing and ruined mud-brick towers and fortifications start to appear, obviously the entrance to this valley was well guarded in the past. As we glimpse the scar of the Friendship Highway ahead we reach a
huge chorten in the middle of the track. We don't understand its real significance but for us it marks the end of the 'wild west' of Tibet; the boundary between the high, isolated plains we have been crossing and the deep, more heavily populated valleys of central Tibet that lay ahead. The fact the chorten has dozens of long sticks draped with prayer flags tells us the land is about to change - there are sticks and wood to spare somewhere near here. We say goodbye to wild Tibet and prepare to join the Friendship Highway, a route well travelled by tourist jeeps.
Cycling Information: if you are planning to cycle this route then we have made a detailed roadbook which you can downlaod from
cyclingnomads
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Mimi
non-member comment
Many, many thanks
Erika and Robin, This and the previous post are brilliant. I so very much enjoy your engaging descriptions and fantastic photos. The western part of Tibet is one of the very few places in the world I have not visited nor even read about. You are my first reading. Thank you for a good one! Be well and cheers.