This morning we've got approximately 40 clicks into Amdo. It's a pretty good ride and we're eating up kilometres. Most of the way is downhill following a river.
We're barreling down a long straightaway, the kind of road that begs for top chain ring and all muscle on the cranks. The road is broken up a bit. The suspension shocks--air/oil with dampening--are diligent with the undulations, but at this speed a lot of jolting gets through. Suddenly my handlebar bag launches off the bike.
Yu Fangkun and Gao Ceng come barreling down the road and we wave them on -- no need to stop. Several minutes later, we're still collecting the bag and fastening it on when Gong Jianping comes along. "I'm going ahead," he shouts as he screams by us. This is good downhill and he needs to make whatever progress he can, it's understood.
After a short while we're on the bikes and getting back up to speed. We're among foothills on the southern flank of the minor Tanggula mountains. This river valley will usher us out of them.
Along the way we spot a figure in the road up ahead. It's Gong Jianping, off the bike and dealing with a menacing dog. He is standing behind his bike, trying to retrieve a shovel from his bag. The dog is baring teeth and barking. It's going to attack.
By this point in the trip something strange has happened to Brice and I. The sight of a threatening dog is cause for jubilation: we relish the confrontation. "Oh yes!" we scream. "Yes! A gou!" (Gou means dog in Chinese.) We arrive on the scene and go on the attack. "You f***ing bitch! Yeah you! F*** you!" We are off the bikes and grabbing stones, hurling them. It leaves. We'll no longer back down in the face of a gou. In fact, we wonder when one of them is going to make a fatal error in misjudging our zest for the fight.
The three of us mount the cycles and press on. After some time we're ahead of Jianping and we reach the two guys, off the bikes and switching into rain gear. They wave us on and we continue the descent to Amdo.
Eventually the terrain opens into a basin and here we'll find Amdo. It should be the biggest town we've seen since Golmud. It will have a post office, decent stores and restaurants. And it is our first town in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Until now we've been in Qinghai Province, otherwise indistinguishable from the TAR.
We've been wondering whether crossing into the TAR will present a legal difficulty; maybe the police are stricter in the TAR than in Qinghai. But the border between the two was back on top of the Tanggula pass, and we've come sixty or more kilometers from there without a hitch.
We get to the edge of town and see further on some taller buildings and a radio tower. This is Amdo. We are uncertain what to do. We're at least an hour ahead of our friends. It might not be obvious where to find us if we do go into the center of town. And yet it's overcast now and windy, so quite cold. Standing around in these conditions isn't a great option.
“Hell with it,” we decide. Let's go into town, get our maps stamped, and we'll look around for the guys afterwards. We are carrying maps of China. At every post office (there are few) we ask the clerk to affix the local cancellation.
We cycle into town and catching us by surprise is a checkpoint, about 200 meters ahead. “Shit.” Our first instinct is to retreat and wait for the men; we got through the last checkpoint fine with them. But we're in the middle of the road and well within sight of the checkpoint. They've probably already noticed us. So we can't kid ourselves thinking we'll slip through. And there's no way around this checkpoint.
Our feeling is, "we can't stand around in the middle of the road drawing attention to ourselves." We've already stepped halfway into this, let's go through with it, come what may. We should go through nice and easy, like we've done nothing wrong. To speed through would be to act like criminals.
The same butterflies I left near Golmud are back in my stomach now. We proceed through the checkpoint and I notice the policeman, reading a newspaper, look up at us. He watches us but says nothing. His uniform has a blue button on the lapel, with a steering-wheel symbol on it. These are transport officers. Nobody says anything or tries to stop us.
Now through the checkpoint, we casually cycle for the center of town. We reach it and find out the whereabouts of the post office. As usual, rock-scissors-paper decides who goes in for the postmark and who stays out with the bikes. I lose and Brice goes in.
Standing still in a town in a remote part of China is a guarantee that crowds will surround you. "How much does your bicycle cost?" and the questions start rolling off people's tongues. The bikes are too expensive in local currency terms, so we tell them a smaller number or we repeat the story from 1995, which was true at the time but isn't now:
"They were given to us by the manufacturer. We'll take pictures with them in interesting places and the company will use these for advertisements." Brice is riding a Canondale M400, a 20" aluminum mountain bike with Deore XT components. He has Rock Shox Judy long-travel downhill forks. I am riding an aluminum Trek mountain bike with Deore LX components. I have Manitou cross-country forks. We both have Rock Shox suspension seat posts and special saddles with a groove down the middle to relieve pressure on the main vein. Each of us rides Mavic X221 rims and IRC Mythos Slick tires.
Where are you going? (Lhasa.) What will you eat? (We'll put food in the panniers whenever we can.) Where do you sleep? (Often at dao ban's, but we have a tent and sleeping bags.) Can you give me a pen? (Sorry, didn't bring any extras.)
Brice emerges from the post office with today's postmark on both maps. The words are written in Chinese characters and Tibetan script: Tibet Autonomous Region, Amdo City, August 9, 2000.
We cycle back the way we came and ask some old men if they've seen our companions. Brice notices that one of these old men, Tibetans, has a Mao pin on his collar. "No, we haven't," they tell us.
We find our friends on the main intersection of town and begin looking for a place to feed. There's a small, very simple restaurant that specializes in steamed buns and boiled dumplings. To Brice and I, this is heavenly fare. But it's also northern Chinese food, and these guys are very much southern Chinese. If there's one thing Fangkun likes to eat, it's rice. He's not a "steamed bun" kind of guy. (In general, Chinese living north of the Yangtse River eat wheat as a staple -- whether baked or as noodle. By contrast, the staple in Hangzhou as in most places south of the river is rice.) But Fangkun is also a flexible person and easy going, so he'll make the most of northern food. We eat some meat-filled steamed buns and two bowls each of meat-filled boiled dumplings.
A beautifully dressed woman has been peeking in the restaurant and wandering about outside it. Over the objections of her timid sidekick, she agrees to pose for a photo.
We set back on the road and the weather takes a turn for the worse. A big storm is coming our way from across the valley and it's just a matter of minutes before it reaches us. Knowing this, Gong Jianping, Yu Fangkun and Gao Ceng stop to put on rain gear. Brice and I cycle in Gore Tex. We might not stay as dry as these guys, but we are spared the hassle of putting on and taking off clothing. The rain gear is insufferable once out of the rain, Gore Tex is not.
The leading entrails of the storm smack us. As always, it’s the wind first. The jackets, and especially the guys' rain ponchos, become sails and the cycling is all the more difficult. We crawl at a 6 km/h pace across the valley to the foot of Shen-Ge-Li-Gong Pass.
At the far end we reach a bridge. Its guardrails offer mainly psychological protection from the elements, which now include cold rain, but scant protection is better than none. I cower in the lee of the guardrail and hope the storm will blow over quickly. Here we wait for the guys. They reach us and Gong Jianping also cowers in the lee of the rail, we're all getting drenched and chilled to the bone.
In minutes the storm passes and the weather turns for the better. Everyone takes off rain gear and jackets, ready to break a sweat going up this pass. It is going to be steep.
Right away we are in the smallest chain ring. (The gears in front, by the pedals, are called "chain rings;" there are three. The smallest one is the lowest, or easiest. We call the gears in back "cogs;" there are eight. The smallest one is the highest, or hardest.)
The scenery is terrific. A steep road, ours, clings to the mountains we're climbing, on the right-hand side of the scene. These mountains front a long, pasture-like valley, green and strewn with gentle streams. There are a few yurts scattered about. On the far side of the valley is Amdo.
The climb is so steep that our comrades dismount and push the bikes. Their weight is entirely on the rear rack and their center of gravity is high, so it's more difficult to climb; they are also carrying more than we are.
The road follows the contours of the mountains, occasionally curving in towards them where a stream has carved out a gully. We turn such a corner and see halfway up the slope across the gully the carcass of a truck that had careened off the road higher up the mountain.
A little further up on our right is a branch gully with some yurts and idyllic grass meadow. Here we stop for a photo. A mini-bus pulls up and out come a group of tourists. Western. French. A few approach and we chat.
We continue up and reach the blind corner where the truck careened off the road; the guard rail is completely destroyed. The way people drive up here, it is not surprising to see accidents like this. We just don't want to be in the way when they happen.
We encounter some yurts and dogs toward the top of the pass. By now we know what to do about dogs: take them on. At the top of the pass, 4944 meters, we pose for photos amid prayer flags. Gao Ceng and Fangkun arrive and join us for the photos. We try some with the automatic timer.
There is a rapid descent but not to the altitude of Amdo; we remain on higher ground. We bump into more dogs. They are on both sides of the road and start running for us, menacing. We brook no compromise with them. We slam on the brakes and spring from the bikes. Cycles lying in the middle of the road, we run straight at the canines, verbally and physically assaulting them.
Soon we come across a Tibetan on bicycle going the opposite direction. An old, iron bicycle missing a pedal. We stop to talk and try each other's bikes out.
There are hills now, up and down without credit for climbing, and again there is rain. Rain at this altitude is cold and chills you. Brice has had about enough of the inclement weather but deals with it in a positive way: humor. "Now it is time to FACE THE RAIN," he tells himself in a professorial monotone. The group is a bit scattered now, Brice stopping for photos and Fangkun and I hammering it a bit through these hills. It's a good chance to talk.
Yu Fangkun worked most of his life in a state-owned factory, where his salary was low but the government provided for most of he and his family's needs. The factory housed them, educated their daughter, gave them access to health care, all without regard for the enterprise's bottom line. But in a market economy, which China is rapidly becoming, such enterprises cannot compete with foreign-invested or other private-sector firms, where efficiency counts. As a result the central government has been subsidizing state-owned enterprises like Fangkun's, all over China, at first with appropriations drawn directly from the state budget but now through lending by the state-owned banks, drawn out of the massive deposits of ordinary Chinese households.
With commendable prudence -- especially in light of Russia's experience -- China has been slowly weaning the state-owned enterprises off of subsidies. "Strategic" industries will remain in state hands, but the rest are slated for change. Slowly, viable firms are being sold in part or in whole to the public or to big investors; hopeless firms are being liquidated. Fangkun's factory belonged to the latter and he saw the writing on the wall. Rather than wait to be axed, he started his own business, or "jumped into the sea," as Chinese put it. He owns a high-end audio/video retail store in Hangzhou.
"How's business?" I ask.
"Bad. The economy has slowed and people are simply not spending. They are depositing everything in the bank." Uncertain where the ongoing economic reforms will take them, Chinese are preparing for the worst by stashing their earnings in the bank, where they are paid a derisory interest rate. People are no longer counting on the government to see them through old age and to educate their children, so they're saving for it. It's probably a positive, if painful, step. But the downside is a lack of consumer demand, which hurts business people like Fangkun. China has amassed such a stunning production capacity, and consumer demand has been so low, that prices have actually been falling for several quarters.
Fangkun and I stop atop a rather pleasant hill for some water and a breather. The rest of the group is somewhere behind us. He pulls out some delicious food and we snack. As we do so, a shepherd is walking toward us.
If you stop within a few kilometers' radius of a shepherd in China, they will start heading for you. We have an interesting conversation with this guy. Fangkun can't make it clear to him where "Hangzhou" is. It's even harder for the guy to understand what I am. A Chinese? (No.) An ethnic minority (like him, a Tibetan)? Well, kind of, I guess.
This isn't the first time I've bumped into ethnicity in China. For most adults there is no mystery, it doesn't merit a second thought. A European or other non-Chinese is simply a foreigner, or "outside country person" in Chinese. If the foreigner is white, well, he's a "white person." If black, then a "black person." But children, still seeing the world with curiosity and unashamed to clarify perplexities, often wonder the same thing as this Tibetan shepherd does.
"What is your ethnicity?" a little Uygur girl asked me in Lanzhou on our trip five years ago. (Uygurs themselves are an ethnic minority in China; their features are European and their language is derived from Turkish.) I struggled a bit with that one and came up with the answer: European. Not good enough: "yes but what ethnicity are you?" She wanted to know which of China's hundreds of ethnic minority groups I belong to.
Fangkun and I part ways with the shepherd and push on for the last several kilometers of this day, expecting to stop at the next dao ban we come across. It should be near, and the day has been long, between the wind, the steep pass, the rain and the rolling hills.
The dao ban rests in a medium-size valley where there is enough grass for grazing sheep and horses. We roll into it and ask about accommodations. "Bad timing" is the response we get from the work crew. There is going to be a huge to-do here tonight, a party with dancing and singing. Work crews from dao bans up and down this road in this vicinity will be on hand.
The three other men show up and we relay the news. We step into a café out front of the dao ban for some refreshments and a chance to think about our next step. The café offers to let us sleep on its benches. Fine. Now everybody is fixated on food. We've spent a load of calories on the road today and these must be replenished.
"Can you make us some buns?!" our Chinese friends demand of the waitress, who is already a bit cold and unpleasant with us. (No.) "Well can you make us some bread?!" (No.) "How about some mutton stew?!" (No.) I guess it's a cultural thing. To me, these guys are coming off as irritating, bossy and obnoxious.
"Hey, hey. Relax!" I suddenly blurt out. "One thing at a time. We've got our yogurt, and if they can do anything else, we'll get to that later." Brice is a little shocked at my outburst. Perhaps these guys have lost face.
One of the café managers turns out to be a decent guy and sees that we're basically ‘in need’. He offers to cook us some rice from his own stash. We gladly accept. We eat this with instant noodle, "convenient noodle" as the Chinese call it, for some flavor.
Near bedtime, we spread out among the benches and it turns out that my spot is where one of the waitresses would normally sleep. This is cause for uproarious laugher from the café staff and embarrassment for the waitress. She presumably stays with friends that night. All the same, I get the best sleep of the trip to date, the absolute best sleep. Nothing feels better than a fantastic night's sleep.