It all began on a Ruahines trip in ’93 with Allan MacLachlan, who was just back from a Karakoram Highway expedition with Keith Strode-Penny. They had biked from Pakistan to China, finishing at Kashgar. I’d never heard of the Karakoram Highway or Kashgar, but they sounded romantic. Dave Turnbull, world cyclist extraordinary, agreed. “We’ll do that sometime”, we said. Years went by, kids left home, the tandem Apollo became part of our bike fleet, and Ann got the bike-touring bug. Chris Peterson said “Can I come too?”
In mid September 2000 we pedalled away from Islamabad airport, wobbling with the unaccustomed weight of panniers and calling “Asalaam aleikum!” to bemused passers-by. A red sun hung in the eastern sky, seeming to promise safe travel and adventure.
Islamabad is a spacious, leafy city, purpose-built as Pakistan’s capital. In the youth hostel we took cold showers as an antidote to the gasping, oppressive heat, then ate in a nearby bazaar and crashed, jet-weary, till mid afternoon. Then we went in search of Faisal Mosque, built by Shah Faisal of Saudi Arabia and reputed to hold 100,000 male worshippers. Ann stayed with the bikes while, shoeless, we men climbed steps to a two hectare forecourt paved in white marble. The call for 5 pm prayers was going out. One young student, eschewing prayers, sat on a parapet deep in his textbook on the principles of marketing.
That evening we made the acquaintance of Ahmed Din, from the village of Murtazabad in Hunza where we were heading. “You must call for a cup of tea”, said Ahmed. On learning of Apollo his remark was “You pedal together? So lifelong real partners you are!”
Next morning a man in a white shalwar qamiz introduced himself as the national secretary of the Pakistan Youth Hostel Association. “Where are you going?” We were about to get breakfast in the bazaaar (having made our morning brew on the primus) before riding to Rawalpindi. “But no” he said, “you must have breakfast at my house”. A walk through well treed suburban streets took us to the home of Afzaal Hussein Agha, retired from a senior public service post. Nine cars stood in the drive. Agha welcomed us into his sumptuously furnished sitting room, then introduced his attractive daughter in law Hina, who has a degree in political science and history . We had missed meeting her school-bound children by a few minutes. Hina’s husband was in Ireland, training as a surgeon.
In general, Pakistan’s women are not much in evidence. One evening in Rawalpindi we counted men in the street, and got to 30 before seeing a woman. Later we saw girls’ schools in Hunza where the female-friendly Ismaili sect of Islam prevails and the Aga Khan Foundation funds girls’education. But from puberty the female head is covered and the face partially or sometimes fully veiled, and life in public (and interaction with foreign cyclists) belongs to men and boys. Hina was a delightful exception.
After photos outside (“why not spend another night in Islamabad? My driver will take you to Rawalpindi”) we left Agha’s house and turned our wheels towards ‘Pindi. Midday, with blistering heat, had arrived, and it was a relief to feel wind in our faces. The distance between the two cities is only 18 km, but it was enough.
As we came to the outskirts of ‘Pindi, traffic slowed to a crawl in a cacophonic kaleidoscope of noise, smell, colour and exhaust fumes. Few streets carried names, so our navigation was by nine parts intuition and one part good luck.
Next day we walked to Rajah Bazaar, where six streets, alive with commerce, converge. Men came up and shook our hands, saying “Welcome to Pakistan, from what country do you come?” Often we were treated to chai (sweet milk tea). Once we asked a wizened fellow with a portable charcoal-fired boiler, if its purpose was chai-making. “Yes” was the answer, “and you must have some!” Payment was refused, but a bystander said “I shall pay”.
We left Rawalpindi early to avoid the heat, and the day’s ride – 35 km west on the ancient Grand Trunk Road to Taxila, – was done by nine. Taxila has historic association with the many invasions of this land from north and west. Najib, a cheerful young Afghan, showed us round the “remains”, excusing himself from time to time to pray. As darkness fell we walked the main street of the second century city of Sirkap below the hill on which Ashoka’s palace once stood. Thunder, lightning and rain enlivened the evening.
From Taxila our road took us through marble hills, crowding into a green valley where lemons, corn, and loqats grew, and goats and buffalo roamed the verges. Men chipped marble into blanks from which others turned bowls on engineers’ lathes in dusty sheds.
About midday the rain returned, and in searching for my parka I realised my down jacket was still in Taxila, now some 30 km behind. A bus pulled up. I clung to the outside at the rear door until the conductor propelled me through a press of bodies to a seat near the front. Later I was put by the driver, whose field of vision was only a few centimetres across, so decorated was his windscreen (and the entire vehicle, inside and out). Above the dash hung a bunch of plastic grapes, of which the largest lit up whenever the brakes were applied. Two hours later I rejoined my companions, who had been given chai in the workshop of a door-maker with an urge to migrate to New Zealand.
Next day we had chai served by the armed guard at a village bank where we cashed travellers’cheques. Camels were tethered by the road, which now rose steadily making a long stiff climb in the heat of the day. The outer defences of the Karakoram, perhaps?. As we crested the last rise into Abbottabad, an old man at the roadside called “Welcome to our country!” His town’s leafy streets, a St Luke’s Anglican church, wide-eaved, single storey government offices set in gardens, and soldiers drilling to band music on the parade ground, all seemed echoes of the Raj.
In narrow-laned, crumbling Mansehra we wanted to book rest house accommodation at Chattar for that night. At Police HQ the officer in charge sat us down for questioning and offered chai. When he had satisfied his curiosity he detailed a young policeman to escort us to the office of the Department of Communications and Works, a kilometre away on the outskirts of town. No, said the Communications and works official, you must ask the Deputy Commissioner (of what, we never discovered). So back with the young constable, in increasing heat, to the D.C.’s office near the police station. The constable commandeered a taxi for the last few hundred metres. The DC’s PA sat us in his forlorn, dusty office and explained that his master was in a meeting for the next ten minutes. He gave us a sheet of foolscap and asked us to write a letter of application to the D.C., which we closed with “I thank you for your time in considering this application”. The P.A. scrutinised this and then put it aside. The ten minutes became half an hour, and Ann excused herself. The office was like a Te Papa reconstruction of one from 1940’s Wellington, or perhaps Dickensian London. I.T. was represented by two telephones and by tape-bound files which an assistant delivered and removed on demand.
To my embarrassment the constable put his head in and asked if he could go. I’d quite forgotten him.
At last another functionary ushered me to an ante-room of the office of the D.C. himself, where people were going in and out. An old man with a stick entered, led by his grandson, but would not accept my seat. A handcuffed miscreant waited, chained to a policeman. At length the aide emerged and beckoned me to follow. When we were at a respectful distance he said apologetically “I am very sorry, the Deputy Commissioner says the rest house at Chattar Plain is booked for tonight . Will you take tea?”
The episode had consumed an hour and a half and provided employment for two or three people, and given us a glimpse of Pakistani bureaucracy.
We climbed from Mansehra through pine forests, arriving tired and sweaty at a new motel at Chattar Plain, which at 1700m was blissfully cool. In the morning we met the owner, a delightful, sincere man of Pakistani/Welsh origin, who had spent 20 years in the U.K. We discussed Islam and Christianity. “Basically it is the humanity, not the religion. But what gives us the guidance, that is the religion”. Everything, including our meeting him, is predestined, he said.
A long descent brought us to the valley of the Indus. This great river and its tributaries were to be our companions for the next two and a half weeks. It was a moment of deep emotion when first we glimpsed the Indus shining in the afternoon sun, its water brown with the silt of glacier-fed catchments in the heart of the Himalaya and Karakoram, and charged with the history of millennia.
For three days the river ran through a deep gorge, while high above it the Karakoram Highway roller-coasted on ledges blasted out of the rock. This was the collision zone of India and central Asia. Here the earth’s crust is pushed up faster than glacier and river can wear it away. The landscape is vertical, and beyond the furthest reach of monsoon rains. The parched valley walls, with scattered scrub and wiry grey weeds, reflect the heat like an oven. But flat-roofed mud and stone houses, and incredible terraces of corn irrigated by races from side torrents, cling to the mountains a thousand feet above the river, whose water rushes uselessly by in the depths of its gorge.
Late on the third day the Indus swung east. The valley became broad and open, and as bare of vegetation as Mars. There was a desolate magnificence about it. In Shatial, a shouting rabble of small boys guided us down a dirt track to the rest-house, then festooned the railings of our courtyard while we mended the days’ punctures and tried to cure our Coleman stove, ill from a diet of Pakistani fuel.. Plumbing and wiring were in evidence, but no water or electricity. At bed-time, the rest-house manager wrapped his blanket around him and curled up on the concrete floor with his Chinese-made AK-47 with full magazine.
As we rode on eastward next evening, a prodigious snowy massif appeared ahead, glowing pink in the last of the sun: Nanga Parbat, eighth highest mountain in the world.
To see the 8125m peak at close quarters, we took a heart-stopping jeep ride from Raikot Bridge to Tato village, up a rocky track blasted out of the mountain and held up on shaky rock walls. Tato is a snow-melt oasis in the floor of a tributary canyon at 2700m (about 1300m above the Indus). 2500 people live there from April through November, growing corn and potatoes – which we later sampled as French fries. That potatoes from this speck of greenery should be exported in jeeps down the bare desert mountain and loaded into trucks for Islamabad, seemed to us incredible. In winter, when Tato is under snow, people who own land in the Indus valley retreat there. The 200 or so who remain, we were told, spend the cold months with “nothing to do but eat, shit and sleep”.
Two hours’ walk, to 3500 m where breath was short and a light-headed feeling set in, brought us to Fairy Meadows, named by German climbers in the 1920’s and 30’s. This flat-floored basin, once a glacial lake but now a swampy hollow rimmed by old moraine on which pine, juniper and birch forest grows, gives a sublime view of Nanga Parbat framed by trees. I had read Karl Herligkorffer’s book about the many German expeditions, and the great loss of German life, here. What a relief it must have been for the climbers – or those who survived – to come down to trees, pasture and running water after weeks on ice, snow and rock.
We camped and wandered the alpine meadows, then went down again to the turbid, rushing Indus in its barren trench.
The KKH now left the Indus and ascended the Hunza and Gilgit valleys to Gilgit, famous and main town of Pakistan’s mountainous Northern Areas (still notionally under dispute with Pakistan). The British had a significant presence here at the turn of the 19-20th centuries, and the town has many associations with the “Great Game” in which Britain and Russia competed for influence in Central Asia.
Beyond Gilgit, up the Hunza valley, tongues of glaciers spilt down the mountainsides. Little concrete lions stood on the railings of Chinese-built bridges, and the poplars lining the road and irrigation races were turning yellow. The ubiquitous apricot trees were stripped of their harvest but still in leaf; and crops of spinach, corn and cabbage throve in the glacial silt. This silt and everything it touched was grey with mica from the Asian plate (we were now north of the collision zone); and the water, including that from the taps at our hotels, resembled the metallic paint which at home is used on railway bridges.
Under low cloud which admitted no view of the mountains, the sign at a chai house said “Stop here, make snap of Rakaposhi”. We saw two cows fall over a bluff and tumble 150 feet in a shower of rocks and dust. They picked themselves up and stood still until we were out of sight. But overriding all was our concern for Apollo’s back tyre, and the almost paranoid feeling, nearly always right, that it might be going soft.
A tandem needs plenty of tyre pressure. In extreme heat, this means trouble. For the last week Apollo had been plagued with punctures of every conceivable kind, caused by tiny thorns picked up in roadside gravel, failure of old patches, seam failures, and most worrying, tyre sidewall failures. We made serious inroads into our companions’ spare tyre (Dave had the only one in the party) and tubes. Phil, a cyclist we met in Gilgit’s friendly Mountain Refuge, gave us another tyre. Were it not for this generosity, Ann and I would have had to abandon the journey. Just above the town of Karimabad stood Baltit fort, and behind it, the Ultar valley winding skyward to a hint of peak and glacier among the cloud. We toured the fort’s dusty, cavernous earth-floored rooms. The Mir (king) of Hunza now has a new palace nearby; but mirs lived in this structure of stone, clay and interwoven timbers until the 1940s.
Our guide respectfully indicated “Mir’s reception room”, “Mir’s storeroom”, “Mir’s kitchen”, “Mir’s dining room”, “Mir’s gun room”, “Mir’s guest room”, and finally, on the topmost level, “Mir’s bedroom”, with a tall black telephone that looked ready to sprout arms and legs. And outside on the roof, under an awning edged with little turned finials, was the Mir’s carpeted sofa whence, in old photographs in books on Hunza, a sepia Mir surveys his kingdom. A slide projector showed us a succession of blurred Mirs, the more recent ones wearing quasi-British military rig. Pakistani food had taken issue with my stomach, and I feared my I might disgrace Kiwidom in the Mir’s demesne; but during the slide show my nausea passed.
We walked around steep morainic hillsides where smiling women gave us newly picked apples, and corn and spinach grew on the terraces, to Altit. Here another fort grows straight up out of the granite cliff, as old as the other but unrestored and disintegrating and even more charming. Ikramali, aged 11, showed us round after his grandfather had taken our fifty rupees. The range of rooms was the same, with the addition of “Mir’s toilet”, which would have done an eagle proud, and unsolicited views of the backyards of Altit village. Ikramali laughed at my jokes, so I told him he will one day be an important man in Pakistan, which is quite possibly true.
From Karimabad we rode on through a great gorge such as one might find in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, far from any road. Ahead, an immensity of rock and mountain dwarfed our friends, crawling along a road that seemed a mere scratch on the cliffs, high above the river. The rock walls seemed heaved up from the very base of the crust, contorted and shot through again and again with great veins of intrusion.
So we came to Passu, where a glacier creeps almost down to the road. On a day walk we crossed the river on a long suspension bridge decked with thinly dispersed sticks. Chris and I climbed to alpine meadows at Abdegar to look down on the trio of glaciers, Gulkin, Passu and Batura. I stopped when the altimeter registered 4000m, where every step was an exertion and my head was light and breath very short. Chris, less affected, climbed further. Meanwhile Ann took a low route back to the town, recrossing the river by another bridge downstream.
That night Anna and David, from Wellington, biking the KKH in the opposite direction, lent me their pliers for a last futile effort to resuscitate our sickly stove, choked with Pakistani carbon. Soon, distances between hotels would be more than a day’s ride. We faced this most difficult part of our journey with no means of cooking, and should have to depend on whatever charity we could find.
At Sust (3100m), Pakistan’s northern frontier town, mountains pressed in on all sides. In the long and only street, fuller of pedestrians than of vehicles, Ann searched for food that could be eaten without cooking. One acquaintance thus made said he would gladly join us as expedition cook (“you will need hot soup”) were it not that he had to manage his hotel.
We pedalled off towards the Khunjerab, still two and a half days away at our plodding pace. The valley narrowed to river, road and rock, and we came exhaustedly to Dhi, Dhe, or Dih, an outpost manned by the Khunjerab Security Force and staff of the Khunjerab National Park, whose head was a proud sixty and had lost a finger fighting India. The National Park men gave us a room and shared their cooking fire, fuelled with twigs from nearby poplars, the last trees we were to see before China. Wandering the roadside were the Mir of Hunza’s two camels, here for the summers. One of these creamy-brown animals took time out from nibbling thorny bushes for a tickle under the chin, then followed me down the road. These were neither the first nor the last camels we met; but they were the friendliest, and for Ann and me they cemented a love affair with these agreeable beasts.
Our last night in Pakistan was at Koksil. To reach it we gained 700 m up the valley, fighting tiredness, for we were now at just over 4000m. Here the Khunjerab Security Force, whose ten men are the sole reason for Koksil’s existence, came to our culinary rescue with bits of yak meat cooked on their stove fired with Chinese coal, and lent us a room and a kerosene burner. In the night the little stream which was our water supply, and the water in the bottles on our bikes, froze. The perspiring heat of Rawalpindi seemed far away indeed.
Friday 13 October was Khunjerab day. We pedalled slowly up the dreaded switchbacks into thinner and thinner air, with buses and pantechnicons from China coming the other way. At last the gradient eased in a field of old moraine from departed glaciers, where yaks nibbled sparse vegetation. Soon after midday we were on the pass, highest public road in the world at 4730m, short of breath but so relieved! A lonely KSF man came out of his concrete box to check our passports. We had seen his breakfast sent up from Koksil by his colleagues flagging down a passing vehicle.
Ronald, a Dutchman, was riding a 1953 Royal Enfield, bought new in India two years ago. On hearing of our pneumatic woes (which had struck again that morning) he gave us motorbike patches, several of which were to be used before Kashgar.
We rode down into China. At the police checkpost a young man in sparkling olive uniform checked our visas while camels grazed outside. There followed a bone-chilling descent into icy wind. We stopped at a road maintenance depot to put on more clothes and fix another puncture. Said John: “Where there are Han Chinese, there’s hot water”. Chris went in to put this to the test and returned beaming with a full thermos flask of kai shui. The men invited us inside to get warm by the stove, but would not allow us to stay. It was getting late
In the last daylight we stopped at a cluster of mud and stone huts in a broad valley. It was starting to snow. There were no trees. Chris and Ann collected yak dung and splinters of wood, and Chris mustered all his firelighting skills to create a tiny fire on the doorstep from which Ann delivered tea and soup before bed. We had crossed the Khunjerab.
In the night I was violently sick.
After many hours, sunshine crept down the slope towards our hut, and a white world revealed itself. In late morning when the first traffic had started to pass and the road was clear of snow, we continued an easy, rolling descent, past men wearing black hats with ear flaps, watching their yaks beside frozen streams. Back from the road were yurts, with smoke coming from them, and women with bright headgear who turned away, not returning our waves. It was a brown, open land, with only the telephone poles marching beside the road for company.
We came to the police post at Pirali, in hope of kai shui. A man in uniform wrestled with a huge labrador and sat on it while he chained it up. He did not want to know us. Outside, shiny display panels showed tourist leaflets and pictures of modern industrial China.
At the next town we tried the police again, showing them the words for “stove” and “broken” in our Mandarin phrasebook. The officer in charge motioned us into the courtyard and then into a dining room where the remains of a just-completed meal were cleared away. Green tea, yoghurt, rice, vegetables and salad appeared. No payment was allowed. Both our spirits and our faith in human nature were mightily revived. Though my share of the meal was soon to find its way onto the road verge, I remain grateful to the policemen at that town whose name I cannot even remember.
We hurried on through mercifully gentle down-valley riding, Chris and Dave taking turns to pump Apollo’s front tyre (I was too weak) every three kilometres, to Dabdar, in the shadow of the Pamir Mountains. Dabdar’s houses and businesses had walls and gates towards the road, and its peoples’ minds seemed walled and gated to the idea of welcoming tired, sick cyclists. We wheeled our punctured tandem from one faint prospect of rest to another. There was no hotel. At length Chris found a man who let us camp among the donkey droppings by the village well, and gave us a flask of kai shui. I went to bed as soon as the tent was up, and slept better than I had for a week.
At the well at Dabdar, Providence sent us Mike, from Vancouver, and Reginald, from Belgium. They were well and cheerful, and had cycled in two days the distance that had taken us four, and they had stoves that worked, and were willing to share them.
Next day we followed our new friends to Tashkurgan, rolling gently down the great wide brown alluvial valley with the Pamirs to our left. The huge snow peak of Mustagh Ata, topped with a white plateau and partly hidden in cloud, hung in the haze ahead. Willows softened the landscape as we neared the town.
We officially entered China four days after leaving Pakistan. At the customs and immigration post, delighted officials swooped on Apollo and took turns riding him round the yard.
Tashkurgan was a scatter of nondescript buildings on the plain at the foot of the Pamirs, 120 kilometres into China from the Khunjerab Pass and at the more lung- and head-friendly altitude of 3200m. The town, altogether dwarfed by its surroundings, seemed as though its absence would make little difference other than making the valley tidier. But to us, five days from Pakistan’s last outpost, this was civilisation. We revelled in the modest comforts of the Ice Mountain Hotel and the nearby public showers.
People conducted conversations in mid-intersection with little regard for traffic, which was mainly bicycles and those load-carrying variations on the theme of bicycle which the Chinese use so well. Chinese? Only just. Thirty kilometres to the west was Tajikstan, part of the USSR until its 1991 collapse. Smartly dressed Tajik women with flat-topped hats and high heels walked the streets of Tashkurgan, inspecting flamboyant carpets and bedspreads and hideous childrens’ clothes on sale in the open air.
Ann stocked up on food for the last leg of the journey. Mike’s frame, which had seen multiple adventures in India and elsewhere, had cracked, so he found a welder to patch it for the last 300 km to Kashgar. We rode off secure in the possession (thanks to Mike and Reginald) of two working MSR’s. At the gas station where we filled our fuel bottles a traveller from Urumqi was so impressed with our adventures that he paid for the lot.
In a rising head wind we skirted the Tagh Arma Basin. Real grass (a novelty) grew on one side of the road, while on the other stood rows of identical new concrete houses, arrayed in the dust in military formation as though in response to a command from Beijing.
Our goal was a deserted hut 45 kilometres from Tashkurgan, mentioned in our guidebook’s notes for cyclists. The gale increased and filled the air with dust so the sky was dark and we could see only fifty metres ahead. With dust in our teeth and hair we rode into the storm in tight line astern, sharing the pace like racing cyclists and grateful for the strength of Mike and Reginald. At length the wind eased and we came to our hut, with a stream beside, under Mustagh Ata, whose snowy slopes vanished upward into cloud.
Our last hurdle was a a 4100m pass. We climbed to it through a brown moonscape of moraine. Then we sped down to a well watered vale, calling happily to yak- and goat-herders riding bedstead bicycles and Suzukis and Yamahas, or sitting at the roadside. Thus we came to the lake Kara Kul, at 3700m. Sunlight caught tawny olive grass sweeping up to the snow on Mustagh Ata, and rows of brooding glaciers crept down, valley by valley, from snowfields hidden in the cloud.
The hotel, with a row of numbered yurts and a hostile manager, was expensive and filthy. A young man came to our rescue, and led us around the lake shore, driving his goats, to the mud and stone home of a Kirghiz family. Here lived a weatherbeaten old man and his wife and adult daughter, who did the work. Their living and sleeping platform was carpeted and cushioned, possessions were crammed into tiny cupboards lining the walls, a tiny stove fuelled with yak dung stood near the door, and a ghetto-blaster occupied the sill of the only window. Outside, the young man repaired a puncture in the back wheel of his bike. We could relate to that.
Grateful for our good fortune, we sat around the stove eating fresh-baked bread and drinking salted yak milk tea, while the women brought out bags of camel hair and scarves and hats and trinkets, in hope of sales.
In the morning we turned our wheels down a long valley to the north. After two hours the valley became broad and open and gave every appearance that we should be following it for some time. Unexpectedly the road swung right, and we found ourselves descending a gorge, plunging through the mountains in steep curves where traffic laboured the other way in low gear. In twenty-five kilometres we lost a thousand metres of Karakoram altitude. Arnold Heine later told me this is called the Ghez defile, and that Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman came this way on horseback, before the road existed, perhaps on their way to climb Mustagh Alta.
Next day the last hills fell behind, and we were on the great plain of Central Asia. I wanted Tamerlane or Ghengis Khan to be galloping alongside us with upraised sword; but all I could see was empty grey gravel fading into haze on both sides of the road. There was no clue to the immensity of the plain, and no feeling of romance.
But should I have expected romance, pedalling over that dry plain? Perhaps, I thought, I shall find it at home when I read again about Kashgar and Urumqi (where we were going), and about Tashkent and Samarkand (where we were not). At the age of fourteen I read about Samarkand in Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches, and it seemed to epitomise all that is remote and mysterious and difficult of attainment. Perhaps for that very reason, I thought, it is good that we are not going to Samarkand; for it should inevitably disappoint. Romance is in the mind.
We came to where the plain was irrigated. Donkeys pulled little carts along a road thickly lined with poplars; and behind the trees, walls with great double doors hid courtyards and homes and made us wonder about the lives of those within. As the afternoon drew on we became tired and counted the distance posts and did little mental calculations which said this would be a hundred-kilometre day. We passed through towns where children were going home from school and the bazaars had bicycle shops and places where you could rest a while over tea; but we had no time for that because we must reach the fabled city before nightfall; and we hurried on.
At last the road widened into a concrete freeway with lanes at the side for bicycles and donkey carts; and the glitzy towers of modern Kashgar beckoned us, just as the trees and greenery of this oasis once beckoned Marco Polo. Our ride to China was done.
In the foyer of the Chini Bagh hotel we shook hands and congratulated one another. It seemed the right thing.
The Karakoram Highway had its difficult side: nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, altitude-induced headaches, breathing and sleeping difficulties, loss of appetite, hacking coughs, chapped lips, bodies unwashed for five days at a stretch, freezing nights, punctures, a stove that wouldn’t go, and dust and finely divided animal dung that got into everything. I don’t regret it, but I wonder if I shall go back.
We met a Japanese man in the Mountain Refuge in Gilgit. He had bought a bicycle in Kunming, China, and cycled across Tibet to Kashgar, then down the KKH. His hair was shaven so he looked like a Buddhist monk, but immensely powerful and strong. Even Phil Bike, who had already crossed the Khunjerab twice, was mightily impressed with him. Anyway, now when I look at the map of Tibet and the red line across it tempts me, I just remember the Japanese man and am satisfied that he has done it. And instead of cycling across Tibet I shall take my tent and camp in the Tauwharenikau or at Totara Flats, where everything is green, and I shall dip clean water from the river and not filter it, and sit on a rock, and while the billy boils I shall read the travels of Sven Hedin or Peter Fleming, and I shall have seen enough to know some of what they write about.
Imagination can do the rest.