The Tibetan Monks - Ping Liang to Jia Yu Guan

22nd of October 2019, Day 70 - 3430ish km

Day 54 - Got randomly invited into someone's home and was greeted by Marx and the boys

Since Ping Liang, the hotel situation has chilled out a bit. I haven't had a police party in my room for ages. Gansu is a long province, the last point of civilization before I dive out into the wild west. If a hotel can't work out what to do with my passport, they just pocket the cash,  and usher me quickly into a room without doing any pesky bookkeeping. I won't tell if you don't.

With the hotel weight lifted from my shoulders, I can relax and just enjoy the cycling, which has been brilliant. This section is the most mountainous part of the China journey. Every morning I climb up and up at a snails pace. The gaps in between inhabited places have been getting larger and larger too, so I'm often climbing 40+km late into the afternoon, before barreling down the hill on the other side, racing the sunset as I search for signs of humanity. My average daily kilometer-age is up to 75, and the other day I churned  out my first 100km ride. Quite frankly I feel like a cycling god. More on the 100km day later.

Day 61 - Tibetan prayer flags on the mountain ridge

On my way to Lanzhou (Lan Joe) I had my first repeat roadside rendezvous. I re-ran into a young guy on a motorbike, who I had met previously on the way to Ping Liang. He had joined the Chinese army at the age of 17, making him very polite and straight-laced. Insisted on calling me sir the whole time, made me feel very old. But at 24 he had hung up his uniform and was motorbiking around China. In the 3-day interim between our two chance encounters, he had already made it up to Qing Hai lake and was on his way back home. It made me extremely jealous of how fast you can go when you have a motor rather than two tired legs lugging you plus your own weight in bags up a mountain every day. When it was time to get back on our way, he very out of character gave me a bro-fist, before telling me, Don't swim in the lakes. They are sacred, and the locals have very big knives. Extremely specific advice, I wonder how he found that one out.

Day 53 - Soldier boy posing with his motorbike

The Monastery

Lanzhou is in a deep valley, which means a gargantuan climb on the other side. Wiser cyclists than me usually go round and skip it entirely when taking this route, but there was a very important thing I wanted to do there. Ever since arriving in China, people have been telling me I have to go to Tibet. I would tell them that I can't, its in the complete wrong direction unless I take the lower route through Pakistan and Iran. They'd laugh. Yeah... that doesn't sound easy. But you should, though. Tibet is so beautiful.

I still can't justify going to Tibet, but I've managed to fit the lite version in. The southern part of Gansu used to be the Tibetan province of Amdo. In Xia He (She a her) there is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery called Labrang. It is one of the few left open to the public in China proper. Still quite far out of my way, but you can get a 4-hour bus there from Lanzhou. I figured it was be worth the climbs on the other side, to put the cycling on hold for two days to go and do some spiritual-ing like a real tourist.

Now most of China is culturally dominated by the Han, with small spatterings of Muslim mixed in. Mostly at noodle shops. In the UK, you know you are at a good Italian restaurant if it's run by Italians. In China, the Muslims make the best noodles, usually fresh and by hand right there at the shop in front of you. You can tell them apart from Han noodle shops because the decor is green rather than red, and very occasionally there are some Arabic signs floating about.

Day 57 - Muslims and a Tibetan chillin on the sidewalk

Xia He is something else though, even before you get into the Monastery. The Han, Muslim, and Tibetan are all mixed in together, about as close to a cultural melting pot you are gonna get in China. After two months of cultural monochrome, I found it quite overwhelming. By far the most interesting place I've been to just sit and people watch.

The Tibetans are just out of this world. I've never seen anything like their style before. The guys wear double sized loose coats with sleeves that come down to their knees. They often wear them with one side down, held up by a red sash. Apparently it's so they can pull it up over their heads while herding the flocks in winter and still have their arms covered.

With the coat, cowboy boots and cowboy hats, especially the women. But not the big Texan ones, more like the hard leather ones you see in South America. They look like cowboys, but also completely different - a livestock culture that developed in a unique way due to the cold mountain winters. Almost all Tibetans carry prayer beads which they slowly finger through their hands as they walk, counting the daily mantras. They are darker and tanned, with beautiful round faces and rosy cheeks from the mountain wind. That is, when you can actually see their faces - everyone is wrapped up in scarves to keep out the cold.

Day 58 - Keeping warm while waiting for prayers

Then of course, there are the monks who come down into the town to do a little shopping, constantly pulling their red and purple robes up around them to protect their bald heads against the wind. The Monastery itself is much bigger than I expected, but I should have guessed. It has more than 2000 monks, and they all need somewhere to live. It's more of a town within a town. The outside of the grounds is lined with the longest path of prayer wheels in the world. The Tibetan Buddhists don't limit prayer to spoken words. The physical act of spinning the prayer wheel is enough to put the message out into the universe. It's why you often associate Tibetan Buddhism with prayers written on multi-colored flags, their fluttering mantras carried by the mountain winds up to whatever holy deity happens to be listening.

At 3 pm there is an English tour. Unsurprisingly I was the only one there, so I ended up having a one to one look round with a monk who spoke the best English of anyone I've met in China so far. There are six different schools in the monastery. Astrology, Medicine, Scripture, that sort of stuff. Luck would have it though that my guide was from the school of Philosophy. I knew my Masters wouldn't be a complete waste. We ended up strolling around the grounds, generally ignoring the ornate decorations and temples around us, instead debating various different topics. What is Happiness? When does a life start and end? What does it mean to be good? What is a person? What is the self? The last two got us going cause I just so happened to write my dissertation on the topic. It broke down, though, when we got down to the more fundamental dogmatic stuff. See for him reincarnation and karma are givens that need no proof, and when I questioned whether we really had a soul, he said No, we don't have one soul. We've got six. Definitely some leaps in logic going on there.

Day 57 - My man on the inside

Then we got talking about the Monk life. He seemed irritated by basically everything that took him away from studying. The Tibetan word for Monk is "Trapa", which literally means "student", and "Lama" means teacher. The Monastery has only been open to the public for a few years, and he said it's been very disruptive for the Monks. No one can concentrate in lessons. They take four vows when they become a Monk. Never kill. Never steal. Never lie. Never marry. I asked him if his vow to celibacy was difficult to keep. He said it's very hard. But who has time to study when you have to look after a wife and a family? Many of the PhD students I know appear to agree with him.

Then near the end of the tour, I had the absolute pleasure of seeing him play the foreigner card. A Chinese guy interrupted our conversation to ask a question, and in English my monk answered "Sorry, I don't speak Chinese." Which I know for a fact is not completely true because he told me he's very good at Mandarin. I guess the "Never lie" vow doesn't quite stretch to annoying tourists. Maybe it's less that he can't, and more that he doesn't particularly want to.

The next day I planned on going to morning prayers at 6 am, but my bed was too warm and cozy so I slept in. Thankfully the monks are extremely pious and have lunch prayers too, which I managed to catch. Magical stuff, it really felt like I was seeing something out of a fantasy film. From about 11:30 they slowly started to collect outside on the steps, swaying backwards and forwards to the beat, wearing their yellow hats that look like mohawk haircuts. Deep humming from inside the prayer hall, with a thousand voices joining in, rhythmically repeating the same mantra. Then two guys on the roof blew on horns to call them inside. I wasn't sure if I could go in to see, but the local Tibetans decked out in finery, carrying yak butter offering candles started to file inside. I, in my dirty rain gear and trackies, snuck in behind. You couldn't take photos, but you wouldn't really want to. It would have ruined the other-worldly sanctity of the moment. Didn't stop a few of the monks from pointing at me and grinning when our eyes met.

Day 58 - No photos from inside but I snook one in the doorway. The Tibetans give the monks names of people they want prayed for wrapped in money, then the names are read out during prayers.

After prayers, I headed to the highest point in the Monastery, where you can see the whole grounds nestled between the river and the mountains. As I stood there gazing down on the houses and temples, wrapped in the holiness of the divine experience I'd just had, a monk burst out a doorway into one of the yards, hiked up his robes, and took a shit in the garden. Happy to have seen the duality of man condensed into two striking moments, I let that be the full stop on my Tibetan experience and got back on the bus to Lanzhou.

Good Karma

From that point on it seemed like my luck had turned around. Cheaper hotels started letting me in again, the gray skies evaporated to be replaced by glorious sunshine, and luckiest of all, I met Jian. Maybe I'd gotten some good karma from the Monastery trip.

Day 59 - Adventurers swapping stories

Jian is another tour cyclist, a Chinese guy going the other way round, through Tibet and the desert, then back through Xin Jiang (Shin Jee Ang) where I will be spending my last few weeks in China. He had been cycling for 134 days, with a whopping 10,000km under his belt. Clearly he's much fitter than me. As he should be, he's only 21. It was lovely to find someone else on a similar journey. Made me feel less crazy, or at the very least less alone in being crazy. He pulled out a bag of pears and apples, I pulled out sunflower seeds and biscuits, and we had ourselves a little mini picnic on the side of the road. We must have sat there chatting for over an hour, talking about everything. The isolation, the feeling of being on the road, how impossible it is to have a girlfriend while traveling. He said he only ended up feeling really lonely recently, as the Chinese celebrate a big family festival in August. I imagine I will feel the same around Christmas.

Day 65 - A crazy guy walking to Chengdu lugging this giant solar panel cart all the way. He's live streaming the whole thing

My luck then did a 180 on me during Day 65. The 100km day. I read the blog of two guys who had done the Yongchang to Shandan run in a day and one of them was old, so I pigheadedly assumed I can do the same. The weather has turned cold, but the sun keeps you toasty. Being this far up in the mountains all day with the cold and sun and wind has turned my face dark with pink cheeks, just like the Tibetans. The morning starts well and by lunch I'm out on the grassy plains, moving up towards the mountains tipped with something suspiciously resembling snow. Hopefully it stays up there a bit longer. I can do many things, but I can't bike through snow. As the slope starts getting steeper the wind picks up. It blows directly into my face, threatening to throw me off down a hill on one side, or into the trucks flying by on the other. Quite possibly the toughest climb so far. I don't get to the peak until late, and it's a very round mountain so I don't particularly fly down the other side like usual.

Day 65 - The view from the top doesn't quite capture the wind

By now it's 6 and I'm still 30km from Shandan. That's when I make the slightly unwise decision to not camp and press on. The sun is going down, but I figure I can make it.

I get to a closed section of the G312, where some guys are stopped in a truck. I ask them if I can get through. Ke yi ma? Ke yi. Which vaguely means "You can", and I took to mean, "Yeah, go for it!", but later realised it in no way implies "You should". Language is a nuanced thing. By now it's pitch black and I can hardly see. Whole sections of the road are impassable, so I end up going into dirt tracks on the side multiple times. Eventually, I come up to some lights. It seems they are doing some late night repairs on the road. I pass a few vehicles and workers, but no one bats an eyelid, so I figure I'm fine. It feels hot all of a sudden, and there is steam coming off the road. All at once I realise the giant vehicles are rollers, and I'm slowly sinking into fresh tarmac, leaving a trail behind me through the newly pressed road. My luck has run out. A guy notices, his face slowly turning from surprise to disbelief and finally resting on disappointment. He wordlessly shooed me onto the dirt path on the side, before calling out for the rollers to stop. Of course now I have hot tarmac all over my tires, and I'm in gravel, so my wheels become completely covered in little rocks. I don't think this was what they intended when they said "become one with the road."

Day 65 - Right before the sun set on me

I limp through the final 10km, spraying gravel bits all over the road behind me, then stop at the first hotel I see. They clearly aren't allowed to have me, but it's 9 pm at night and they want the money, so they take 100 yuan and hide me away in a back room. So far no lasting damage to the wheels, but galvanizing your tires with tarmac won't be catching on any time soon. 100km in a day. Won't be doing that again in a hurry.

Day 66 - Riding alongside the ruins of the Great Wall

Day 66 - It's really Great

Camping

I did on one occasion decide to dust off the tent and camp for the night. As long as you can do without a hot shower, it's the perfect accommodation. No hassle finding a hotel, it's free, and I get to see the sunrise. The next leg really is out in the wilderness, so there will be a lot more camp days to come before the China chapter of my adventure comes to a close. As long as I don't get eaten by wolves out in the Chinese desert, I'll see you on the other side at Urumqi.

Zai jian.

Day 67 - First camp in China, hidden from the road by the bushes