The Mad and the Bad

A photo-free postscript, I’m afraid. I left Osh after five pleasant days relaxing at a very nice guesthouse in a quiet neighbourhood, occasionally getting lucky enough with the water (meaning both running and hot at the same time, and not too brown) to have a bath in the splendid room I had. I ate what I could, but it’s hard to get much of an appetite for Kyrgyz food, and I had a lucky escape when I drank a litre of tap water the evening I arrived. I had forgotten to ask my usual question which had saved me up to that point, which is “do you drink this water?” and do what the locals do. I had minor runs, but my Spanish friends, the couple I had ridden with through the backcountry to Osh, they had major problems and had to endure an overnight taxi ride to Bishkek and a flight home with fevers of 40 degrees. I ate breakfast in the gueshouse and dinner at the same Turkish restaurant every evening, the ONLY clean restaurant in Osh and the only freshly-cooked food that I could find.

I left Osh on a burst of restlessness and feeling that some minor malady was wearing off and that after five days I should be in great shape, but I rode like an old dog and as I began to walk the only and easy pass of the day, I realised whatever I had was settling in, not going away. Just when my thoughts turned to the usual ‘too old for it’ whingeing to myself, a retired Swiss couple with a fine layer of dust all over came down the the road the other way to stop for a chat. They told me the bigger pass, which I would have to ride the following day, had a layer of dust over an inch thick on it, making it hell to ride, especially with trucks for company. I went over the easy first pass, exchanged less than friendly gestures with a car trying to overtake into my space and dropped down through the dust for miles, down far lower than I would have liked, to a small town off the road (and so away from the dust and truck noise) where I asked around for a homestay. A young girl took me to her home and I was offered the verandah to sleep in. It was the most simple home I’ve stayed in, everything looking wretched and filthy, a grandmother looking after a two-year old, himself covered in dirt, and old food was soon brought out from under a cover of some kind and served up. Mother and grandfather showed up, granddad wearing the traditional Kyrgyz Kalpak (hat) and jam jar glasses. I should have photographed him, he was an absolute classic but I feared they would have twigged that I was just having fun, the sort of photo that gets sent round the internet. Dinner was bread, just plain flat bread, and rice. Oh, and tea. All shared with the same hands and spoons Kyrgyz style… oh I’m starting to whinge again. Breakfast would have been the same, except I broke out my muesli, the stuff of pass-climbing champions.

I spent a long day on a steady climb, the kind you hardly notice except that the bike doesn’t seem to be running as freely as usual, but seeing the river flowing towards you, you know you’re knocking off some metres against that 3600m pass looming ahead. I stopped to camp in a village at the foot of the pass, it was a beautiful setting with wide views of the valley behind me, the whole village involved in bringing in the hay and had a flat stretch of clean grass in front of the house of a very contented looking old couple chatting away, and a small clear stream next to it. Perfect. The price was to have to entertain the kids for much of the evening and put up with smoke, dust, truck-horns and dogs all night. And the little buggers who threw stones at my tent while I was in it reading. They got bellowed at. I would probably have done a bit better had I continued up into the valley as there were a lot of nomads camped up there and it was flatter than it had looked. But still would have been a dust bowl, I should think. The pass was a piece of cake though, I had slowly climbed 1000m or so the day before and the pass only took two hours. The other side was short, too, so I would keep the altitude gained. I met a Slovenian biker on the way down, another stranded cyclist unable to get a China visa, on his way to Bishkek, having already made a bus trip there and back, to fly out and over China.

Then a lunch stop in Sary Tash, much like a ghost town lying facing the Pamirs at the gap in that wall of mountains where the Pamir Highway comes through. It’s little more than a village, the kind where nobody needs to have a sign saying ‘magazin’ (for ’shop’) above the door, though one or two cafes had signs. I had lunch at the only guest house in town and bought five eggs, a mad choice when I was about to ride one of the worst roads in the world, but I was desparate for something different to eat. I’d had it with bread and chocolate, instant noodles and so on. And I’d worked up a great yearning for properly cooked scrambled eggs after having them fried to death for me every single time in Kyrgyzstan. Can they never learn anything? Will they only ever have one kind of bread, I mean, forever? I wrapped the eggs individually, plastic-bagged them, and put three on one side, two on the other in jacket pockets, so if I kept my weight not too heavy on the saddle and let legs and arms take the strain, they’d be OK.

The Irkeshtam road is indeed a tough road, but partly because it’s so exposed. The east-west valley is known for bad weather and having this stony road raised about ten feet above the valley floor only exposes it all the more to wind. The view of the Pamirs, broody in cloud cover and fresh snow, is fantastic. For about 50km the road runs straight, then rises gradually to a pass you don’t even notice, then looks like an easy ride down the ridge. The odd thing is why the road follows the top of the ridge down. I wish I were a geographer, but ridges surely only get to be ridges because they are made of hard rock and this is the worst I’ve ever seen that was called a road. The downhill, and it’s quite rideable if you have a very strong bike, sees the trucks reduced to walking pace, and more than the usual number of mechanical casualties by the wayside. The stones are as big as football size and well-embedded. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done but I picked up a fair old speed going down, it seemed, forever. A little Kyrgyz checkpoint, giggly teenage soldiers, one of whom jokingly poked his AK-47 in my stomach when it was time for me to go. I had to pull rank (age) and tell him sternly that was not a toy or thing to joke with. And finally some paved road, hopefully the unpaved stuff is pretty much over! It was about 7 o’clock, getting dark and had been spitting all day, and cold too. I was ready to camp but the only river around was a red river, impossible to drink from. But just a few kilometres more I rounded a corner where a fresh, clear stream ran below the road and I turned off and found a great spot for my scrambled eggs feast, unwrapping each egg carefully in anticipation of a few broken ones, but hey – I got five good ones!. Or so I thought. I used the powdered flavourings from my last egg noodle packet as seasoning, and the little sachet of oil to grease the pan, and cooked a wonderful dinner, eating the dried uncooked noodles while cooking the eggs. The eggs aren’t half as good as they are up in northern Kyrgyzstan, it’s all dusty down south and the chickens must get as poor a diet as they do, well probably everywhere from here on south and east until New Zealand.

It was a pitch-black night, the kind that is safest of all for wild campers, no dogs, no trucks, but another night of coughing and bad sleep and ominous stomach pain. I knew to jump out of the sleeping bag as soon as I got the warning signs. This was no place to lie in and sleep it off, either, I’d just about run out of food. I was weak and had to force myself to do everything, taking it all one step at a time, as in “in five minutes, I will put everything in this bag. By 8.30, I will leave”, and did. I had to walk up the slightest hill towards the Kyrgyz checkpoint and sat down on the road a few times after hurried runs to the side of the road, but I made it to the top, looked back upon Irkeshtam, and rolled down to leave Kyrgyzstan. I went over to the customs and border control building, left my bike outside, went in and got customs clearance, went out and round the other side to get my passport stamped, queueing among the tiny, swarthy truck drivers, and went out. I was clear. A few hundred metres down the road I stopped to put a jacket on touched my handlebar bag momentarily – camera gone! I turned round and found unexpected strength to go back uphill and back into what they call the Zonya. I knew I stood next to no chance, but even less chance if I did nothing. I had got on well with the customs guy, who spoke good English, and another guy who liked to practice English who operated the weigh scales (a graduate, this was the only job he could get; he once worked in construction in Russia for $200 a month, 12 hour days, 7 days a week). I insisted in talking to the big boss and after a short time he gathered all his men round and ordered a search. Then he ordered all the truck drivers’ bosses to come over and they got a very stern lecture (though perhaps for my benefit, it was interpreted for me) that they wouldn’t be allowed any more privileges, like bringing unregistered people in the trucks, any more if the camera was not produced. I spoke and offered a hundred dollars, claiming, with a little truth, that this was a month’s work gone, work that was intended to develop Kyrgyz tourism, and that I wanted the card more than the camera. Then twenty soldiers arrived and another big chief from further down the valley. He ordered a search, but it looked to me as useless as the search the Roman guards made in Life of Brian. Mostly everyone was sitting around for three hours, but they really did lock the gates at both ends for three hours just for my camera. I intimated several times that I thought one of the border guards themselves would have had the best chance of taking it, but that was dismissed as totally unacceptable and impossible. I couldn’t push it too far, though I really felt it to be the most likely case as they were standing round the entrances and the little truck drivers would never dream of touching something so strange. No one wants trouble in a border zone. And so I couldn’t ask them to search the guards themselves – these guys are Kyrgyz, I don’t know the form there and I too was locked in, and not having eaten all day, was as desparate to get out as anyone.

So I pushed off in the middle of the afternoon and the truck drivers didn’t seem to hold it against me by yelling or running me off the road. They have long queues at each country’s border, whereas a cyclist rides past and gets VIP treatment, relatively speaking. Certainly the equivalent of what passes for the VIP lane at Heathrow, anyway. A clock on the proud-looking Chinese customs post declared Beijing time- two hours ahead, and so much so that locals use Xinjiang time, ie two hours behind Beijing. Beyond customs, a Chinese border scene from the Wild West, dust flying around, men standing spitting, grubby knocking shops for truck drivers with broken plywood doors, filth everywhere. The cluster of buildings was itself enclosed and the exit hard to find, but round a corner I found a man with an empty pickup truck not wanting to go back to Kashgar empty…

It took seconds, especially when I looked at a packed bus filling to over-capacity. I paid $40, but it’s 280km and a hard road indeed for a sick cyclist. Uphill for the first 5km or so (I would have to have walked), then perhaps twenty km until drinkable water and then sporadic water and food after that. My first Bactrian camels, though… It could have taken me days and I was low on food and lower on strength. You have to know when to fold, and I was never happier, or at least more relieved, than spending that $40. Nor more certain. Clean sheets, aircon (not really necessary), a bath no crummier than many a London bath, and I could begin to recover – and Kashgar is not a bad place at all for a few days and when I am ready to eat, the food certainly looks far better than Kyrgyz food. For now it’s the backpacker fare of fruit and yoghurt and banana pancakes. The Uighurs are my latest Muslim nationality, they are still the majority in what I’ve seen of Kashgar, and mostly very pleasant too. A surprising number speak some English. They have a colourful folk culture and one or two buildings and features here and there that suggest a richer and more glorious past. They can go to school and be taught in their own language, though many want to learn Chinese while speaking Uighur at home. The food is still nan but with far more influences than in Central Asia (some call this Chinese Central Asia, as it used to be East Turkestan for a short time) and the numbers and some words are the same, more or less, as in Turkey.

And what of me? I’m still sore about the camera loss, especially as I’d taken some shots specifically for the book under Chris’s strict guidelines (I wasn’t able to shift the clouds off the Pamirs to reveal their full beauty though) and those shots from the last week were the only ones not backed up. Theft always makes me feel a fool for letting it happen, and there’s a feeling of being violated too. Yes, flog’em and hang’em, there’s too many of them anyway. But I digress. If not for the camera, I was on the mend. The runs is passing, the cold will go, and my knees are a bit tender but what a perfect time to give them a week’s rest. You can run on empty for a while but you can’t ignore knee pain, though this is rare for me. I need to loosen the muscles up a bit to free up my knees, I think. And for the rest of the week, wash dust off my bags, clean my bike, true the wheels again, go and see the lake, see the Sunday market tomorrow and perhaps lighten the load by finishing off David Copperfield.