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By the time I got to the Guesthouse I was cursing myself. Why on earth did I buy that half a kilo of sugar? As I was paying for it I already knew that I didn’t need it because the day before I had bought some honey from one of the women selling it by the roadside.

My panniers were already heavy enough with all those just-in-case things I have with me. Why do I carry so many just-in-case things? Is it my attempt to live this nomadic life  by the standards of my sedentary life? or Is it my way to make ordinary this extraordinary journey? or do I need all those things to feel safe?

It was quite clear that I didn’t need to carry so much food in a country like Kenya where there are small roadside stalls and shops everywhere selling everything I need for my daily living, not to mention the cafés with cheap, delicious stews and milky sweet teas that I have become addicted to.

After Ethiopia, Kenya felt like a rest. The contrast between the two countries was staggering. From the  moment I crossed the border I entered a different world where people helped you with a smile and didn’t ask for money,  children waived as I went by shouting “mzungu” (white skin) and the prices remained constant.

One thing that strikes you right away about Kenya is how clean it is. Plastic bags were banned nearly a year ago with strong penalties to those disobeying the ban. The results are incredible, the roadside is clean, there are no plastic bags flying on trees, there are no more ‘flying toilets’ (people used to defecate in a plastic bag, tied and knot and and then threw it away) and people talk about how plastic is bad for the environment. I wish more countries followed Kenya’s lead.

Although roads are clean, the same could not be said of some guesthouses that looked seriously dodgy, particularly in small villages. When I felt my health would be better served by staying in my tent, police posts and police stations became my default camping spots. Their hospitality was fantastic. I was always received with a smile and given water to cook and wash with and in a couple of occasions they even gave me an empty room to sleep in.

Police posts provided continuity to the changes in landscape and people as I crossed the country. In the North I was struck by the traditional costumes of the Samburu people and their colorful jewellery. Sheperds would come onto the road dressed in full regalia with big machetes hanging round their waist and looking quite fierce as they demanded water, sometimes quite aggressively. I learnt to scan the scrub for livestock and listen carefully for the sound of the bells around the cattle’s neck. I would then get ready to throw one of the small bottles of water that I carried in my handlebar bag  as soon as I saw the sheperds coming towards the road and quickly make my scape.

In Samburu county I went to Umoja Women’s Village, a women only village set up 28 years ago to provide refuge to women victims of domestic violence, rape and female genital mutilation. The women make their money by selling traditional jewellery and by running a nearby campsite. They used to have cows but after the village got raid by cattle thieves it became too dangerous to own animals and now they have none.

I stayed in one of the village huts. The hut was built with sticks and dung and had some plastic sheeting in the roof for waterproofing. It was very dark inside and at night small coppery crockoaches took over the place. It was sobering to experience the environment in which these women live and to be invited for tea at Rose’s hut and see how little they have and how they live one day at a time buying enough sugar and tea for that day. They don’t need just-in-case things, for them safety is about being together, away from their abusers.

The meaning of what it means to be safe came up again to my mind during a big climb towards the Equator, in an area with huge farms protected by electrified fences and a tea shop that would be perfectly at home in Kent whilst  marginal farmers grow potatoes and corn in the barely five meters that separate the road from the electrified fence. That small piece of land where they could grow food was their safety.

By the time I got to Nairobi something had shifted inside me, I relaxed and trusted that the road would meet my needs – a small cafe would appear at the right time, a place where I could pitch my tent, company when I needed it.

And it did! It was really nice to meet Guy again at Jungle Junction, a well known overlander campsite in Nairobi. Guy is travelling from London to South Africa on his motorbike and I had met him twice before, the first time in Gonder and the second in Addis. He was the one that saved the day by giving Amaya a lift to the airport on his motorbike when it was apparent that a taxi would not materialise.

It was bliss doing all those ordinary things that normally I do by myself with someone else without  cultural or language barriers: deciding what to have for dinner, shopping, ordering take away pizza and cooking together.  I was tired and needed some down time and when best to have it than when there is good company.

By the time Ieft Nairobi I was re-energised and when round a corner I was regaled with the most amazing view of the Great Rift Valley I had to stop to take it all in. The view was breathtaking but it was the realisation that I was in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley that was joyful and overpowering.

The next few days were filled with the same  childlike joy especially at Kilimandege House, the place where Joan Root, the film maker and conservationist, lived and died. Sitting in her baranda at dusk I saw giraffes, hippos, zebras, water bucks, dik-diks whilst in the day monkeys came into the kitchen to steal bananas.

Kilimadege House is a magical place where the animals roam freely without the restrictions of electric fences. The house is being lovingly restored by Joseph and is an oasis of peace. It was very special to see Joan’s bedroom where she was murdered for her commitment to conservation but also where dreams and plans for the wonderful films she created with Alan Root were born.

Maybe it was my new state of mind but things just got better and better – a meeting with Asier, another basque cycling in this amazing continent, pink flamingos in Lake Bogoria, majestic acacia trees, camping in a school where the girls were totally amazed by the whiteness of my feet and kept on touching them, the beauty of Kerio Valley, spending time with the Cheptebo community, dancing on the road with an older woman selling bananas, talking politics with a widow-mango-grower…

As for the bag of sugar? I hope it is being enjoyed by the old man to whom I gave it to after he helped me push the bike for a few meters in a particularly steep stretch of road.

 

 

 

When I opened the door of my room I saw that it was raining again. It was only four in the morning and it was still dark. “The rains are early this year” that is what everybody is saying. The rains transform the paved streets of Addis into chocolate streams and the feet of countless people convert the unpaved ones into sludge. Wim’s Holland House, the overlanders’ hostel that had been my Addis home on and off during my time in Ethiopia, is in one of the unpaved ones.

I pushed my freshly cleaned and oiled bike through the mud until I reached the paved road and rode to Meskel Square, where Foxtrot and I were to board a bus to Arba Minch, a town four hundred kilometers from the Kenyan border. From there I was planning to get local buses all the way to the border,  too scared to cycle in this country.

When I entered Ethiopia I was already feelings pretty apprehensive having read and heard accounts of other cyclists. Everybody talked about dozens of children running alongside you shouting “YOU, YOU, YOU” followed by “MONEY, MONEY, MONEY” and how some of them delighted in throwing stones at you. Tired of the harassment, the majority of cyclists end up getting buses at some point. Even those who cycle all the way through the country talk in terms of “It wasn’t too bad, the stones only hit us a  couple of  times” or as Teresie, a young Norwegian I met in Khartoum told me  “It was OK, the rocks were quite small and only once a herder used his cattle whip on me as I went by. I was furious, picked up a stone and and followed him only to see that he was about to throw a huge rock at me”

All those stories were playing in my mind when I reached the border at Metema. I hadn’t even crossed the border when I was approached by Ethiopian young men wanting to “help” me cross, get money and get a SIM card expecting payment for their “help” It took more than fifteen minutes of  assertively saying “No thanks” for them to get the message and leave me alone.

Not even thirty minutes later, at the ATM, another young man wanted to know whether my card had worked, whether I had Visa or Mastercard and whether he could help me get money out. I could sense how I was begining to build invisible barriers around me and how I was closing down. All it took was for a local to tell me as way of warning “don’t camp in the bush in Ethiopia, you are no longer in a Muslim country” for me to realise that what I was feeling was fear and I hadn’t even started to cycle.

By now I am used to having butterflies in the stomach caused by the excitement mixed with apprehension of entering a new country but I had never felt fear and I knew that unless I managed to control this emotion, it would dominate my experience of the country.

“Open your mind Blanca, open your heart” I said aloud to no one but myself as I pedalled along but however much I tried, I could feel the anxiety drying up my mouth each time I approached a  village. Predictably, I was instantly surrounded by children  shouting “YOU, YOU, YOU” followed by “MONEY, MONEY, MONEY” some of them grabbing at my panniers and although I was spared the stones, I managed to get myself into a real bad estate of mind.

It all came to a head when on the third day I saw a group of older teenagers walking in the middle of the road. I was going downhill and decided to maintain the speed, thinking that they would get out of the way to let me pass but when I saw that they weren’t going to move I pressed the brakes and one of them punched me in the arm. It didn’t hurt much but the little confidence I had left just drained away there and then.

As luck would have it, two Englishmen I had met a couple of days, earlier went pass on a pick up truck and offered me a lift to the nearest big town which I  gratefully accepted.  That was the end of cycling in Ethiopia for me.

The visit of my daughter Amaya was a godsend and the perfect antidote for the blues that were setting in. Together we explored the magical chuches of  Lalibela, stood at the mouth of  a volcano, walked through solidified lava fields, saw salt caravans, looked in awe at the incredible landscape of the Danakil Depression, slept under the stars, drunk honey wine, rock-climbed to reach one of the Tigray churches, trekked in the Simien mountains, explored local markets and talked  non stop.  I felt bereft when I saw her disappearing riding on the back of a motorbike on her way to the airport.

Alone again I decided to explore Harar, a Muslim city in the East of the country, closed to the border with Somalia. It was comforting hearing the call to prayer once more and walking the narrow streets of the walled city.

In Harar they feed the hyenas at night outside the walls of the Old City. According to the locals, they started feeding the hyenas during a 19th-century famine, when the starving animals began to attack livestock and humans and the practice continues until today.

In the dark I took a bajaj (tuk tuk) with Sisay, a local guide, and through bumpy dirt roads we went in search of the hyena man. We found him sitting in a stone with a basket of meat and bones at this side and over dozen hyenas walking around him. The man was whistling and making throaty sounds to get the animals closer. I sat on a rock next to him and he dangled a piece of meat just above my head. One of the hyenas used me as a prop to get to the meat. I could hear the wet chewing of the animal just by my ear,  feel her hot breath on my face and smell her foul breath. It was both scary and exiliariting, a unique experience.

It was in Harar where I met Mengistu, an orthopedic surgeon who had studied for 14 years in Cuba and thus spoke perfect Spanish. When I arrived at his house he opened the door with a big smile in his face. Mengistu is one of those rare young professionals who has returned to work in Ethiopia to contribute to improve the situation of ordinary people in the country whilst a lot of his friends stayed abroad working all over the world as anything but doctors.

Mengistu’s wife, Magaris, made coffee,  my first coffee ceremony in Ethiopia, the coffee slowly roasted over red charcoal and then pounder with a pestle and morter before being brewed in one of the special Ethiopian coffee pots.

I wish I had been able to meet more people like Mengistu and Magaris, maybe if that had been the case my experience of Ethiopia would have been very different. As was, I found it a challenging country, I got very tired of the constant hassle, of people’s rudness and aggression, of being overcharged (in a disproportionate way), of the harrassment everywhere I went.

And yet, when I got to Arba Minch I changed my mind and decided I  wanted to cycle the last few days in the country. I took a couple of buses from Arba Minch to a town called Yabelo to get closer to the Kenyan border and then started cycling. I was enjoying the ride but as it was getting late and I had run out of water  I decided to stop a vehicle to get to the nearest town, a place called Mega. A minibus stopped and the driver told me that he was driving all the way to the Kenyan border. I couldn’t resist the temptation and there and then  I decided I would stay on and go to the border.

When I sat on the crowded minibus I was overcome by a sense of relief and a lightness of heart that I hadn’t felt in weeks, a smile filled my face and I felt happy. I was leaving Ethiopia!

 

 

 

 

“Tap – tap – tap” I could hear them landing in the tarpaulin that I had spread under the acacia tree to lie down and scape from the unforgiving sun. I had my eyes closed and didn’t have the energy to open them or to move, even though I knew that if I did they would all go away.

Heat had been my constant companion since I entered Sudan, it was to be expected as it is early summer in this part of the world. In Wad Madani, as I was getting closer to the border with Ethiopia, the thermometer was reaching 46 centigrades at noon. Nothing and nobody moved and the smallest shade was always occupied by a person or an animal, even the long shadows of the electrical concrete posts were crowded, people neatly squatting on a long line along them.

When I got to Wad Madani I booked myself in the poshest hotel in town, the promise of air conditioning and good WiFi too appealing to let it pass. The comfortable bed and the cool water from the fridge an absolute treat.

My night at the Wad Madani Imperial Hotel could not have been more different from my previous one spent in a village family compound. The sun was setting and I couldn’t find an obvious place to camp. I was beginning to get a bit anxious when I stopped at some water jugs to fill up my bottles. A couple of women were filling up too and I asked them whether they knew of a good place to pitch my tent, they pointed at the scrubland across the road but it felt too exposed so I decided to take the plunge and knock at the metal door of the compound next to the jugs. After knocking several times a woman opened the door, she looked at me, smiled and called a second woman.

The second woman was Tagua, she was  dressed in an stripy orange and black wrapper and had her little daughter resting on her hip. Tagua had lively eyes, and easy smile and spoke three words of English which instantly made her the interpreter. She readily agreed for me to come into the compound and before I realised I was surrounded by women and children.

The compound was encircled by a high cob wall and it had four or five square boxy buildings inside. Each one was a one room small cube, some were made of cob, others of bricks and they were building a new one of breezeblocks. Plastic sheeting was attached to wooden poles at one end and at the roof of the houses at the other to  provide shade to the beds scattered in the ground underneath it. A spotless common latrine sat in one corner of the compound.

The children were keen to help me put the tent up, so many little hands were making it a bit messy . Just at the right time the call to prayer arrived and they all disappeared for long enough to give me time to finish the job on my own. I was nearly there when I heard a chorus of “Blanca, Blanca, Blanca”  approaching from the other side of the compound. It was no time before I the women were asking me questions whilst the children thought it was great fun to jump inside my tent.

The women were all very different. There was Taiga, proud of her knowledge of a few English words and the status that gave her being able to ‘talk’ with me, then there was Umahmed always with the headphones on, very much the party girl, humming to the music in her ears and dancing in her black clothes with pink and blue embroidery, Ufag Ahmed Umkamal trying to be aloof and ignore my presence but the fist one to bring a chair to watch me setting the tent and Sutanifur, an older woman on a tie dye wrapper in blue and orange, offering me food and drink.

It had been another hot day on the road and every inch of my body was covered in a film of salt. I needed a wash and Tagua taking control took me by the hand to her cube house an showed me to a concrete extension, gave me a bucket of water and closed the metal door. I took my clothes off and had the most delicious wash listening to the women chatter outside.

When I came out some of the women were lying down in their beds so I thought I could have some time on my own but it was not to be. They came back with me to the tent and watched me whilst I made tea admiring my stove, watched me whilst I eat peanut butter inspecting the tub and delighted that they could read the jar of my Khartoum bought spread. Eventually they all left and I crawled into my tent and had the most wonderful night sleep.

The next day I had to face the extreme heat again. Khartoum and my time with Ann felt like light years away although it had only been four days since I had left the city. I met Ann though a Khartoum Women’s Cycling Group and when she wrote to offer me her place to stay I was delighted. I ended staying with her for one week discovering how much we had in common, planting trees with the children of her school, going for the Wednesday evening women’s ride, doing some radio interviews, meeting some Spanish expats and cooking the first Spanish omelette of this trip.

Khartoum was truly very far away in this environment where the sun seemed to have bleached the colour out of everything, only women’s wrappers and mosques providing a respite for the white dust.

In the North of the country I could still find some golden sands but here it was dust, scrubland and unbearable heat.

Since I had entered the country I had found jars of water everywhere, under trees, in specially made water shelters, outside shops and houses. Whithout that freely available water and in this heat, it would have been impossible for me to cycle through Sudan.

The generosity in the availability of water reflects the generosity of the people of Sudan. Everywhere I went I got welcoming smiles and offers of water and food. I got help pushing my bike when it got stuck in the sand and got my meal paid on my last day in the country when I was totally stuck for cash.

I never felt threatened or unsafe in a country that for a long time has lived and still lives with conflict, violence and war. In Sudan, millions of people have been displaced and the influx refugees from neighbouring countries mainly from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad, Central African Republic and South Sudan added pressure to their already limited resources. The economic situation made worse by the comprehensive US sanctions only lifted in October 2017.

Life is hard for ordinary people, inflation run at 35% in 2017. Acute petrol shortages generates queues kilometers long at petrol stations,  yet someone had the generosity to siphon petrol from his car to my fuel bottle to enable me to cook in spite of my protestations and the fact that he had been queueing for over four hours and had a few more to wait before the tanker arrived and some petrol was made available.

And feeling safe enabled me to enjoy the country and its people, camp in the middle of nowhere and go to sleep under an acacia tree whilst dozens of grasshoppers kept me company.

 

 

 

 

 

Tempers were getting frayed. A sandstorm was raging in the desert and dozens of cars and lorries had been stopped at the police checkpoint just after the Aswan Old Dam. The road was closed because it was too unsafe to go in the area. I parked Foxtrot and sat in the shade to wait for the road to open.

The officer in charge exercised his authority with much shouting and gesticulating each time one of the lorry drivers approached him and tried to question the stoppage. By now I’d been sitting for more than three hours and I wondered how long they had all been there.

The sandstorm had started the night before as I was cooking my dinner in the roof of the dilapidated hotel that had been my Aswan home for a few days. I saw the cloud coming down the Nile and descending over the city, a thick fog made out of the finest desert sand was switching off the street lights as it advanced. Soon it was impossible to see more than a few metres in front of me and I retreated to my room with its yellowish paint peeling of the walls and the very dodgy wiring.

It had been unusually hot for this time of the year, the mercuy reaching 40C most days and the heat in the room was oppressive. I switched on the Air Conditioning and the old unit sprang into life filling the room with the sound of a car engine but the temperature barely shifted. What a difference this place was compared to Hannah and Trudi’s  beautiful apartment in Luxor where they had let me stay for a few days.

I was pondering about this and about the unconditional friendship I had been offered in Egypt by people I knew and people I got to know, when an offer of marriage woke me up from my reverie.  The most senior officer at the Checkpoint was standing near me with Am, the policeman in charge of looking after me. Smiling I asked what was the offer on the table, ‘three camels’ the man said. I feigned utter disgust and sounding extremely offended declined the offer explaining that I was worth much more than three camels. He laughed and very quickly up the stakes to 1000 camels. The bartering would have continued had he not been called away to deal with yet more lorry drivers.

Some lorries started to move and the officer looking after me said “you need to go back to Aswan” I smiled sweetly and very calmly told him I was not going back to Aswan the look on his face was one of “Oh no, this woman is trouble” I told him I was not in a hurry, had a tent and could sleep right there until the road opened. “You can’t sleep here, it is the police” he said “Well, I’m not going back to Aswan” Out came the phone and a call was made, no doubt to one of his superiors, and as if by magic I was allowed to go on.

I took to the road with gusto but it was very hot and I had lost more than 4 hours waiting for the road to open.I was determined to make it to a police checkpoint where I was planning to stay the night but a quick mental calculation told me it wasn’t  going to be possible. To make things worse there was a very strong cross wind and when a sudden gust put me on the other side of the road I felt shaken. I was lucky that there was no oncoming traffic as a collision would have been unavoidable. Reluctantly, I accepted a lift from my escorts. Foxtrot was loaded on the back of the pickup truck where it would be looked after by three young officers and I joined Captain Mohammad in the front, my feet resting by a machine gun and a water melon.

Luckily, I was dropped at the place where I had planned to stay and a young man took me under his wing. He chose a good place to pitch my tent away from the wind and where he would keep guard overnight, showed me were the toilets and the kitchen were, what was the right tap to get water for tea and generally made my feel welcome. The others, after the excitement of my arrival, carried on messing about either their guns and dusting their bullet proof jakets. It is amazing the ease with which they handle their weapons, the paint gone and the metal shiny from so much touching.

They invited me to eat with them but as I was too tired, they made me agree that I would have breakfast with them. Breakfast was simple but beautifully cooked: a small pot of refried beans, a salad of salty cheese and tomatoes and copious amounts of bread. I eat little as I was conscious of how little food there was and how these young men must’ve been ravenous.

For once, I was able to leave unaccompanied, such joy to cycle on my own and to experience how people related to me differently, lorry drivers blew their horns in salute and one reversed at full speed to offer me a water melon. I vividly remembered the day when I realised how much the constant police escorts had prevented me from  interacting with ordinary Egyptians and how much I missed that interaction. It was the day when I was on my own and had stopped at a village for something to eat. A group of villagers approached me, a man in a donkey cart with his children, a smiley teenager and a man who was a teacher and spoke some English. I was having a really good time talking to them when all of a sudden they all scattered in different directions, I couldn’t understand what was happening until I heard the familiar sound of the police car engine. Clearly they couldn’t be seen talking to me.

My every move was watched, they stopped when I stopped, they watched me whilst I drank, eat felafel, took pictures… Every now and again, childishly, I tried to get some minutes on my own slowing down to nearly a halt, knowing their engines would stall and that they would have to overtake me and wait for me a few hundred meters ahead and as soon as they did and were out of my sight I would stop and look in wonder at the silent desert without the sound of their engines in my ears.

“It is for your safety” they would tell me and they were always polite, smiley and good humoured. When I saw several enormous electricity pilones knocked down to the ground by the massive sandstorm that had left Abu Simbel without electricity I realised that there was some truth in that statement on the day I sat in the shade for four hours getting an offer of marriage and waiting for the road to open.

My time in Vietnam started in Hanoi.  I settled myself in a hostel in the old town whilst waiting for my friend Kath who was to join me for a couple of weeks. The day was grey and as I stood in a corner of the Old Town I watched in disbelief the chaos around me: hundreds and hundreds of scooters going in every direction hooting incessantly, street sellers in their conical hats shouting to attract customers, colourful stalls full of Tet (Vietnamese New Year) merchandise,  people walking, looking at the stalls and shopping in preparation for the Tet celebrations, cafés, eateries…

Walking at dusk around Hoan Kim Lake, a famous lake in the centre of town,  were a sacred turtle used to live, I  thought of my daughter Emma who lived in Vietnam for a year and how she would have walked around the same lake  and seen the same sights 12 years earlier and all of a sudden I felt really close to her.

I was getting impatient about seeing my friend Kath. On the day of her arrival I sat in the hostel with my eyes peeled in the glass doors looking for the car that was bringing her and Jitterbug, her trekking trike, from the airport.  I couldn’t wait to see her face and her smile and then she was there and we hugged and it was as if we had seen one another only a few days before.

Many people would have felt defeated by the challenges life had put in the way of Kath, breast cancer and debilitating osteoporosis that lead to a series of bone breaks and surgeries and the possibility of never walking again. But Kath is no ordinary woman, looking into her eyes I could see her indomitable spirit coming through, the utter determination not to let her injuries get in the way of her dreams. She was always passionate about riding her bike and as she is unable to ride a ‘normal’ bike anymore because of the risk of falling and more bone breaks, she got Jitterbug and the two of them were thirsty for adventure.

We talked and talked, we had so much to catch up on. I got news about her daughters and family, our common friends and inevitably her work and how it is pretty much taking over her life. As the director of Women into Construction, she has made the organisation a success, but it has become a trap and keeps demanding more and more of her. Listening to her,  I was glad to be out of that trap, to be on this journey of discovery on my bike which is why I was surprised to feel something akin to regret at not being part of that ‘productive’ world anymore.  I have never been happier, the best of me comes out when I’m outdoors and on the move and yet ingrained in me must be this idea that I’m not being ‘productive’

For three days we cycled through the industrial heartland of Vietnam, dust and continuous hooting as our constant companions; through my rear view mirror I could see Kath relishing the ride in spite of the ugliness of our surroundings. In the evenings we found cheap guesthouses where we cooked our meals and made sure everything was out of reach of the rats that as big as cats were roaming around.

Everyone was enthralled by Jitterbug, they thought it was hilarious, laughter and finger pointing greeted Kath everywhere. In a country where the bike has been the mode of transport until relatively recently, Jitterbug was a magnet and anytime we stopped Kath was surrounded by people wanting to have a go on it.

It was exciting to finally be on the local boat that would take us to Cat Ba Island. The boat sailed through the most amazing of landscapes, karst tower after karst tower raising out of the sea. The ride with no traffic across the island amidst limestone formations and forests in the falling light of the evening was breathtaking.

After I left Thuy and Nam and as I continued down the Ho Chi Min Highway on my way to Phong Nha to visit some famous caves I  thought about how in spite of the difference in the lives of those three young women, they also had a lot in common –  their strenght, their strong desire to improve their lives and how very hard they worked for it.

The highway went up and down, to the west the Trường Sơn Range and Laos. As I rode along it so much hit my senses at once that I didn’t know where to look –  the villages, the emerald green paddy fields, tea plantations, Christian churches, buffaloes, the scooters carrying anything and everything from pigs, wood, grass, cages full of ducklings and chicks to other scooters and even a full size chest freezer. I loved the cows too. One day I had stopped for lunch by the side of the road when I heard a lorry hooting loudly to some cows that were in the middle of the road, the animals looked lazily at the lorry and didn’t move so amongst much hooting the lorry had to stop. I laughed – Cows 1 – Lorry 0!!

Slowly I arrived in Phong Nha located in the central section of the highway. Forests and caves made it the perfect place to stop for a few days with Jace and Ana also cycling in this part of the world.

 

My next destination were the Vinh Moc tunnels, a maze of tunnels built to protect the villagers from the relentless bombing that took place there. According to a documentary that I saw at the tunnels the USA dropped 9000 tons of bombs in the area between 1966 and 1972 or the equivalent of 7 tons per person living there. The intensity of the bombing is stamped in the landscape, bomb holes everywhere around me. My skin had crawled every time I saw a badly affected fields but nothing prepared me for the tunnels. Dark and narrow where one could barely stand up they had been home to more than 90 families who disappeared under ground whilst bombs rained relentlessly on them and continued with their lives until they could come out again to work on their fields. Whilst walking the 2 Km of tunnels I felt a powerful mix of sadness and admiration. I imagined the villagers huddled in the dark tunnels, the smell of the latrines and of the bodies damp from the rain and sweat mixed with the smell of fear. I also felt their pride and defiance, digging with rudimentary instruments their underground village, singing, continuing with the schooling of the children. Each time I came to one of the many exits I didn’t want to go back inside but I made myself do it and stay with the feeling. I was glad when I finished my visit.

The documentary I saw showed the contribution of the local women to the war effort and some of the extremely dangerous missions they went on. During the Vietnam war women worked alongside men providing  manual labor to keep the Ho Chi Minh trail open, working in rice fields to provide food for their families and the communist troops. Women were enlisted in both the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong guerrilla insurgent force in South Vietnam. Some women also served for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong intelligence services. They fought in combat with other soldiers.

Today over 72% of women have a job outside the home, they make some 70% of the agricultural labour force and over 50% of the overall workforce and yet the gender pay gap is high (nearly 20% on average) and according to the International Labour Organisation this gap is rising. The figures mirror what I saw,  scores of women working in the fields, in markets, in food stalls, by their houses cooking and doing domestic chore, looking after their children.

What  I saw was a country full of strong women!

 

 

 

By the time I crossed into Laos from China I had been on the road for 464 days. I was really looking forward to being in South East Asia – a gentler climate, lower altitude and above all a cycling companion. I was to meet Karen in Luang Prabang and we would be cycling together for 8 weeks. It was a leap of faith, I really didn’t know Karen, I had talked to her for half an hour at the first UK Cycle Touring Festival a couple of months before I set off on my trip.  I remember sitting together at the closing session,  I can’t remember what we talked about only that the conversation was easy, comfortable and fluid and on the strength of that we agreed to spend time together on the road.

Excited and apprehensive is possibly the best description of my feelings. I had been on my own for such a long time. I wondered how set I was in my own ways, in all the routines I must have developed without even realising. Had all the thinking I’ve been doing about myself changed me in the way I relate to others? I was worried too about money. On a short trip or a holiday you want and can give yourself treats and I’m very strict trying to stay within my budget in my long haul journey and as a result my standards for the places I eat and where I sleep are fairly low. In the distance Karen was wonderfully reassuring. Full of of those thoughts I cycled to our encounter, already enjoying in my mind the ease of communication, the sharing of the moment, the camaraderie. I was ready for company.

I loved my first few days in Laos, cycling through the tropical forests and mountains in the North of the country. Everywhere I looked was so lush and green as if the earth had let go of all inhibitions and delighted itself creating this verdant place full of huge trees, enormous climbers, gigantic ferns and bamboos, big butterflies. I was captivated by it all and also by what I couldn’t see but knew was there. I could see evidence of the life boiling in the forest everywhere, in the shrill mating call of the cicadas in the trees above my head, in the multitude of dead snakes and giant centipedes on the road and in the sudden movement of the bushes as I went pass.

Every now and again I passed small hilltribe villages, hamlets of stilted houses made of woven bamboo and grass roofs. Women sat in their verandas working on complicated cross stitch embroideries and excited children with big smiles ran to the road shouting Sabaidee (hullo), a welcome word I will hear thousands of times during my stay in the country. Some of the villages had small shops, identifiable by the yellow crates of Beer Lao stacked outside where I was able to buy a cold drink but a lot of the time I had to rely on the odd roadside stalls outside isolated houses selling a small amounts of local produce. I stopped in one of them selling big pomelos, a woman and her four small children were sitting by the house and even before I had a chance to ask for the price of the fruit she offered me two small bananas. I was touched by her generosity, looking at her living conditions I am sure she was part of the over 23% of Laotians living below the poverty line. I thanked her, bought one of her pomelos and sat in her yard to eat it whilst she did her needlework and her bare foot, wild haired children watched me open eyed from the safety of the inside of their hut. Soon, a car stopped and after some negotiations she came back delighted, counting money, by sign language she told me they had bought five fruits, she told me that a few times which made me think this was quite an event. Encouraged by the sale she quickly refilled her stall and came back to the hut with a big gappy smile.

The day before I met Karen I was offered hospitality by a young man who had returned to his village to help his family with the rice harvest. We went down a small path to his house where I met his mother, slight and delicate looking but carrying heavy sacks of rice. After she finished storing the newly harvested rice I went with her to water her vegetable garden, quite an involved job. First she had to climb down a very steep path to a waterhole to switch on a pump attached to a complex system of hoses, then she coupled and uncoupled the hoses until all her small plants were watered. Before going home all the work had to be done on reverse. Whilst we were watering the garden, her husband was in the river trying to catch our dinner.

Dinner was lovely, sticky rice from their fields, wild ‘chicken’ caught in the forest and, as his father had had a lucky day, a freshly caught fish chopped up raw with fresh herbs and lime. Family ties are very strong in Laos and form the basis of much social interaction, the extended family of my host came to watch me eat dinner. I felt very self conscious as they all pointed at me and nodded approvingly each time I put food in my mouth.  One of them picked some of the khao niao (sticky rice) and like an experienced sommelier sniffed it, put it in his mouth and gave his verdict: “good rice”.

 After dinner I was shown to their indoor shower room, a concrete enclosure with a squat toilet, a tap and a bucket with a scoop. In a country were the majority of rural households don’t have running water and washing takes places in the communal tap, having an indoor shower room is a real luxury and they were incredibly proud of it.  And then a bed was made for me, a matt on the floor covered with a mosquito net, a pillow and a blanket made the most comfortable bed ever.

I left the village after saying goodbye to my lovely host family. They had been up since 4.30am the mother cooking more sticky rice and the father fishing. I followed the Nam Ou river downstream on its way to meet the Mekong and soon saw big dam building works part of the development of a seven-dam cascade by China’s Sinohydro Corporation to generate hydroelectric power for an energy hungry society. The human and environmental cost is enormous. Communities of diverse ethnic minorities that have relied for generations on the Nam Ou and surrounding forest resources for food, income and spiritual well-being will be significantly impacted by the dams. In total, 89 villages are expected to be displaced. Will the village I had just stayed in be one of them? and What will happen to the way of life of the family of the village and thousands like them? How many endangered species will disappear?

Pondering all of this I arrived in Luang Prabang and met Karen. Sabaidee,  Sabaidee!!!  What followed were 8 wonderful weeks of cycling, laughter, camping, friendship, exploring and much more.

We spent the first few days together in Luang Prabang, the capital of the first Lao Kingdom in the 1300s. Luang Prabang is an atmospheric place that we explored to our hearts’ content in between poring over maps, planning our route,  getting everything we needed and giving Karen the time she needed to acclimatise.

Getting used to the rhythm of the road with Karen was easy, she is such a considerate, easy going, generous soul, I couldn’t have hoped for a better companion after my months of solitude.  It was so nice to have someone to turn to and be able to say: “look how beautiful”, someone to share the ordinary everyday things with.

On our first night on the road, we camped and I slept like a baby, didn’t hear the night time visitor that disturbed Karen, seemingly interested in her sky blue Roberts bike.  What difference it made to my sleep being with someone else!  In the morning a guy approached our tents insisting on offering me money whilst pointing to the inside of my tent. It wasn’t until Karen pointed it out and I read other accounts of women that I realised he was after early morning sex.  He was quite harmless but I it was just unbelievable!

 Beautiful landscapes of rugged mountains, huge karst towers covered in jungle, rice fields, lakes and ponds full of water lilies, villages and side roads of red earth regaled us all the way to Vientiane where we met again with the mighty Mekong which we were to follow all the way down to the border with Cambodia.

I had read in other peoples’ blogs that in Laos it was possible to sleep in  Buddhist temples, we didn’t know how that would work out with us being women. In Laos  it is considered an offence for women to touch a monk, his robes, or to hand anything to a monk directly. In many instances a male friend or family member will be used as an intermediary or lacking that a plate or some other item will be used and then placed on the ground for the monk to use. This posed a problem for us, how would we ask for permission to stay? We developed a drill – before going into the temple compound we would put on long sleeves,  Karen would get out her phrase book, open it in the correct page and leave the book on the floor but this didn’t seem to be very effective so in the end we went for the sign language approach whilst at the same time showing a photo of our tents which worked much better. In this way we spent some wonderful  nights in the temples.

In one of those nights we arrived at a temple by the Mekong where the initial answer to our request to stay was a negative.  It was quite late by now and it was getting dark. In Laos the change between light and dark is sudden, night falls upon you in an instant  and we knew we would find it difficult to find a place in daylight so we insisted and finally someone agreed that we could stay. We chose what we thought was a discreet spot to pitch our tents at the back of the temple trying to keep away from what we fondly called the ‘breakfast club’-every day soon after 6am villagers came to the temple to offer food to the monks. From our tents we used to hear them praying and then sharing the food and respectfully keeping out of the way.

No sooner we had finished setting out tents when a small  man with a checked shirt arrived in a motorcycle, from his air of authority we deduced that he must be the village chief. In no uncertain terms he told us to move our tents, carefully chose the new location, watched us set up and advised us to lock up bikes and finally left. The light in the Mekong was wonderful and we moved closer to the river to cook our evening meal.  Two soldiers, with guns over their shoulders came over. By signs we understood that they didn’t want us there, they kept on pointing at the river and Thailand just across it. One of them, the officious looking one,  asked us where we were going  (we were going to Savannakhet) and very agitated he got on the phone. He shouting ‘falang, falang Savannakhet!!’ down the phone (falang is the term used for foreigner and we had heard it thousands of times on the road) We knew he was talking about us but had no idea what he was saying. He asked to see our passports and went back on the phone, so much gesticulating and agitation, more ‘falang, falang Savannakhet!!’ and more pointing at the river and Thailand. We had no idea what he was saying so our minds started to fill in the gaps: “that night there was going to be a raid on illegal emigrants coming over from Thailand and we were just in the path of all the activity” or was it that they thought we were trying to cross over to Thailand illegally?

We moved back from the river and went back to our dinner when villagers started to arrive and encircled us watching our every move and pointing at the ingredients of our meal. They got very excited when they saw the garlic and the ginger – ‘falangs use the same ingredients as us!!’  we imagined they saying. And then they paid great attention at the way we were eating.

The evening had been totally surreal: village chief, soldiers, Thailand, illegal emigrants, falang, falang Savannakhet, dozens of villagers watching us cook and eat. We felt part of  a monty phython sketch and the evening wasn’t over yet!

The women proudly showed us some beautiful flower displays that they had brought with them and urged us to go with them to the river. Just then the monks went in procession to the spot where the soldiers were supposed to be guarding the border and started chanting. The dozens of villagers gathered around us went to the Monks,  lit the candles in their flower arrangements bringing them to live and in an orderly way went down the path to the river, deposited them in the water and watch them to float downstream. Some of them pointed at the moon,  at that point the penny dropped and we understood that we were in the middle of the November Full Moon festival!!  Teenagers arrived in their scooters with offerings to the river; thousands of moths flew around the search light illuminating the path to the water; Karen had the children in stitches…It was a happy, happy night and when they all left and the temple became silent, we were left with a warm happy feeling and the November full moon.

When we got to Savannakhet there was a surprise in waiting –  Dietrich, the Swiss cyclist with whom I crossed the border to China from Kyrgyzstan was there. In China he had told me how much he loved the Mekong but I had never expected we would have meet again.  It was wonderful to see him and be reminded of his dry humour.  Also,  it was fascinating to see how the monks in the temples were more approachable when we were with a man.

On and off we cycled together all the way to Si Phan Don, also know as 4000 islands, an island archipelago in the border with Cambodia. We rented a little hut in Don Det with hammocks outside and rested there for a few days. The perfect ending to our Laos adventure.

When we got to Savannakhet there was a surprise in waiting – Once again I met Dietrich, the Swiss cyclist with whom I crossed the border to China from Kyrgyzstan. He had told me how much he loved the Mekong but I had never expected we would have meet again. It was fascinating to see how the monks in the temples were more approachable when we were with a man. On and off we cycled together all the way to Si Phan Don, also know as 4000 islands, an island archipelago in the border with Cambodia. We rented a little hut in Don Det with hammocks outside and rested there for a few days. The perfect ending to our Laos adventure.

 Getting a bus from Chengdu for some of the way was the only way to cover the over 2000km to the Laos border with more than 3,500 metres ascent in the 28 days left on my visa. The town of Litang is located at an altitude of 4,014 metres (13,169 ft) among open grasslands and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Its actual altitude is about 400 metres higher than Lhasa, making it one of the highest towns in the world.The thought of getting there by bus from Chengdu at only 500 metres of altitude was most attractive!

After three weeks off the bike in Chengdu and Hong Kong I knew I had lost all the acclimatisation I had gained during weeks and weeks of cycling above 3000 metres and with some mountain passes of over 4,600 metres ahead of me, I was glad there was no direct bus to Litang and I had to break the journey and stop at a town called Kangding (2,900 metres) where I could begin to re-acclimatise.

Something I have loved about China is the daily dancing in the square in the evening. Everyone, young and old take part. In Kangding they was dancing in two squares and I had the chance to put to good use my ballroom dancing skills by asking local women to waltz with me much to the amusement of the locals.

On the way to Litang the bus climbed and climbed going through Tibetan villages with their fortress like houses, once again the yaks made their appearance, older people with weathered faces sat by the road constantly spinning their hand held prayer wheels and women combed their long hair outside their homes, thin plumes of smoke coming out of their chimneys. I was back in the Tibetan world.

Litang felt like a place in the middle of nowhere. This sleepy town was the birth place of the 7th and the 10th Dalai Lamas and very much at the centre of Tibetan resistance to the imposition of the communist rule in the region and as a consequence was heavily bombed but life now had no obvious reminders of those days.

One of the rituals that was forbidden from the times of the Cultural Revolution of 1960s until the 80s was the Sky Burial practice.  Visiting one of the local sky burial sites was my lasting memory of Litang.  It was nearly dusk when I went there with three French cyclists lodging in the same hostel as me. We threaded our way through the narrow streets of the village to an area in the mountainside covered in prayer flags, our breathing laboured due to the altitude. Rubble, discarded plastic bottles, old shoes and other rubbish scattered around; I could feel myself reacting to these surroundings, surely this environment wasn’t respectful of the dead. We reached the prayer flags but could see no evidence of sky burials. It was getting darker and the lights in the village below were coming on as we headed to a pile of stones on a slope to the side of the flags. To start with we came across a knife here and a feather there and then we saw big piles of discarded knives, scissors, axes, rocks marked by sharp instruments and a big block of wood whose scars made clear what it had been used for. Hundred of small fragments of human bones and feathers were scattered in bold spots in the grass. I shuddered, imagining the macabre feast that took place in those spots and then I remembered the words of the Zoroastrian couple I stayed with in Yazd (Iran): “Sky burials are a beautiful act of generosity, giving the human body back to nature”. I realised that for the second time in less than one hour the deeply engrained Catholic belief system of my upbringing had got on the way and I made a conscious effort to look at the place and the whole ritual with different eyes but I just couldn’t. It was time to get back to the hostel.

Over the next few days I stayed above 4000 metres plodding up to high passes. On a particular day I was delighted to have crossed a pass that was nearly 4700 metres high without much difficulty, I was tackling the second one of the day when the headwind started and I realised how close I was to the limit of my physical capability, I couldn’t stay on the bike any longer and I had to push my way through the second pass. I still had more than 10 kilometres of ondulations between 4600 and 4700 metres to the nearest village and I couldn’t go on, I had to stop and camp but where? All there was around me where big boulders and lakes. Eventually I saw a tiny piece of grass by the side of the road and pitched my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag. It rained non stop all night, in the tent it was like being inside a drum and in spite of being exhausted I found it difficult to sleep.

The following day I got up ready to climb the highest pass of the trip, 4716 metres. Soon it became clear I would never reach the nominal targets had given myself. It was then that sitting by the side of the road I met Pablo from Zaragoza in Spain How nice to meet someone with shared language and culture! We sat together for a while sharing stories and soon enough we decided to hitch a lift to the pass and if not successful camp as soon as possible. After a couple of failed attempts a tractor stopped and took us both and our bikes 10 kilometres up the hill towards the pass. Switchback after switchback the tractor climbed impossible gradients. It would have taken me hours and hours of pushing and half heartedly cycling to have covered that distance. It was the most wonderful of feelings to be standing on the muddy tractor’s cart, breathing its petrol fumes, seeing the cooling water spluttering out of its noisy engine whilst holding onto the bikes for dear life and seeing the village at the bottom of the valley getting smaller and smaller in the mellow light of the evening. I was exhiliariated, thrilled, happy. The moment was just perfect, I didn’t need absolutely anything else.

At the pass it started raining but as we got lower down it stopped. We followed the most beautiful valley and found a good camping spot. Scrambled eggs with Chinese sausage, a beer and great conversation finished off an excellent day on the road. As I was going to sleep I made the decision to take a bus to Shangri-la and miss out on the last really big climb in China. Rationally I knew it was the right decision but I couldn’t help feeling a pang of disappointment at having to make it.

From Shangri-la I cycled to Tiger Leaping Gorge which was as spectacular as its name promised.  The gorge it’s one of the deepest and most spectacular canyons in the world. It gets its name from a legend that tells how a Tiger jumped from one side of the gorge to the other to scale from hunters. I had come down a steep hill when the gorge came upon me all of a sudden and it took my breath away. To see the Yagtse, the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world,  the mother River as the Chinese call it, squeezed into such a  channel only 25 metres at its narrowest point was awe inspiring.

 

I was at a much lower altitude now and able to cope with the ondulating terrain enjoying some beautiful old towns and wondering around their markets.

 

Feeling more energetic, I now could cover  longer distances on the bike fuelled by the food from small stalls which looked pretty dirty but as the food came from huge cauldrons of boiling stock I wasn’t too concerned about the state of the places.

As the daily distances got longer I found myself entering a meditative space – thinking a lot and at the same time not thinking at all. I revisited moments and situations if my life from the safety of time and geographical distance,  occasionally getting ‘light bulb’ moments that helped me understand myself a bit better.  I remember one day when I was sitting in the courtyard of an old Chinese house in a town called Dali,  a quiet, peace space with pots of azaleas and fuschias around a gold fish pond.  In my mind I went to my London garden and I saw myself planting ivy underneath its huge fatsia shrub,  adding clumps of colour with big pots of bulbs and annuals. I realised that the love of and for my daughters,  for my family and friends; the knowledge that my house and garden are waiting for me give me the deep roots I need to feel safe enough to be a nomad for a while.

As a nomad it is my second harvest time.  I was in Romania this time last year,  thousands of kilometres away,  in China,  I’m witnessing the same frantic activity: peasants harvesting the crops,  ploughing and feeding the fields, lighting fires to burn the scrub,  bent over by the weight of the huge bags of grain they are carrying on their backs. Scenes that have been repeating them unchanged for centuries.

The time for my visa was get tight so I caught my very last Chinese was to bring me 300 kilometres from the Laos border to a town called Jinghong. Once again a new world opened up,  this one full of tropical vegetation,  golden peacocks decorating the roofs,  Buddhist temples and statues of elephants and gorgeous Botanical gardens but then each part of China has been very different –  the Kasbah like old town of Kashgar,  the mud Amdo Tibetan villages,  the tents of the nomads in the grasslands,  the ochre and yellow Muslim houses of Gansu,  the fortress like towers and curvy tiled roofs of Si han,  the wooden houses in the rice fields near Guilin,  the castle like Kham Tibetan houses,  the stone courtyards in Dali and Lijiang  and now the golden peacocks of  Xixuangbanna. Like everywhere I’ve been,  this is not a homogeneous country,  houses,  people,  food it all points to difference.  It is these difference that is making my trip so fascinating  and yet it is what we have in common as human beings that is making it possible,  the ability to connect with the hundreds of people I’ve met in the 2,340 kilometres I’ve cycled in this country.

I was leaving Jinghong and had stopped at a bike shop to fix the mudguards of my bike damaged in my last bus journey. I asked directions to my next destination from the shop owner and totally blasse he answered: “Follow the Mekong” so off I went to find the mighty river. For quite a few kilometres, silently and with excitement, I repeated the instructions in my head: “Follow the Mekong”, “Follow the Mekong” what incredible directions I’ve been given, I thought, for him they may be quite ordinary, the same as for someone in London to say “get on the M25” but they conjured up all sort of exotic images in my mind.

Laos is somewhere near following the Mekong…

 

 

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And it really did feel like I was in a different China!

As I started the descent into Chengdu changes started to happen, imperceptible at first – in the villages Chinese flags began to appear next to the Tibetan prayer flags until they eventually replaced them completely; the yaks disappeared from the mountainside and with them the delicious yak yogurt stalls by the side of the road also went; people’s faces changed as did the clothes they wore.

I reached a place called Wenzou after cycling through fields of ripening tomatoes, orchards of plums and other fruits. After weeks of being deprived of fresh fruit, I kept on stopping at road side stalls and having a feast.

In Wenzou,  for the first time I had problems finding accommodation, the first 7 hotels I went to didn’t accept foreigners but eventually I found one that did. Apparently the reason for this has to do with their ability, or lack of, to scan your passport, Visa page and last entry stamp and report it to the police. In the end it was just a question of doing the rounds.

Wenzou still has bike taxis, the first ones I’ve seen and a lovely market full of plums. Markets are still my favourites places. I love their activity, their noise, the smells and they are the perfect place for people watching.

The road followed the valley of a tumultuous river. The area had been badly hit by a huge earthquake in 2008 which killed over 69,000 people and destroyed homes and infrastructure. After the earthquake, a new expressway linking the area of its epicentre with Chengdu had been built but I followed the quieter old road which went through villages and towns that once must have been prosperous with the trade generated by the road. Now, they looked sad with rows of empty roadside restaurants looking at me through their locked, dirty glass doors. I thought about the months of dust and noise the villagers had to endure during the construction of the expressway after having suffered the horrors of the earthquake and whether they were aware that they were witnessing their own demise.

I was really happy in the small, traffic-less road when some building works funnelled me into the expressway. Before I realized I was crossing tunnel after tunnel, more than 25 Km in total, with several over 5 Km long. Tunnels are scary on a bike, they are narrower than the road, dark, dusty, with bad road surfaces and they are noisy. The noise is  the scariest part, I could hear the big lorries from a long way away, the loud noise of their engines echoing in the tunnel. Each time I  waited for the sound of their horns as they warned me about their presence. The sound, even though I leaned to expect it, had an instant effect in my body – I would tense up, grab my handlebars really tightly and forget to breathe. After a while, like Pavlov’s dog, my body reacted in that way as soon as I heard them coming and before they sounded their horns.

I was glad to see the end of the tunnels but what I didn’t expect was to see lush tropical vegetation – huge bamboos, enormous creepers with big yellow trumpeted flowers, butterflies the size of birds. In two days I had descended more than 3000 mt into a subtropical world.

My next town before Chengdu was Dujiangyan, famous for its 2000 year old irrigation system. The town has many bridges to cross it’s many water channels. The water runs at high speed and crowds of people sit on the bridges to cool down, taking advantage of the draft created by the water. I walked for hours before sitting in a small restaurant in a side street where I chose the food by the pictures in the dirty menu I was presented with. I didn’t have a clue  what I would be getting, it was beef and soon I felt the tingly feeling in my mouth one gets when the chemicals in the Sichuan peppercorns get to work: a mixture of heat, tingliness and numbness, not unpleasant but really strange.

The following morning I heard music and saw people dressed in white and pink gathering outside the local Confucius Temple, curious I went to see what they were doing. It was one of those magical moments – soft Chinese music, the gentle movements of the Tai Chi practitioners, their delicate hands, the concentration in their faces, the heat, the humidity, the noise of the cicadas in the trees, the backdrop of the temple. It felt I had indeed entered a different world, an ancient one with lots of history and tradition. I was relaxed and at peace and could’ve sat there the whole day listening to the soft music and watching the harmonious Tai Chi movements.

When I arrived at Rae’s house, my Warmshowers host in Chengdu, she was so welcoming, so generous that I felt instantly at home with an old friend. She introduced me to other cyclists that had stopped for a while in the town to fill up their coffers before continuing their journeys. Once more I was part of a small community in which conversation was easy and points of reference shared. It was only then that I realised how much effort I made to communicate on a day to day basis, even for the simplest of things.

I left my beloved Foxtrot with Rae an Tilly (Rae’s bike) to go to Hong Kong to get another Chinese visa. I always find it really hard to be separated from her but it had to be done!

I caught a train to Guilin, I wanted to see the river Li and the rice terraces, the stereotypical images of China. It was a long train journey but I enjoyed the spectacle from the window – the tiny villages surrounded by bamboo and eucalyptus forests, their wooden houses with tiles roofs, the peasants in straw hats collecting tea or carrying loads balanced at each end of a bamboo pole, the wooden boats floating in the rivers, the enormous banana trees, the ripening rice in the paddy fields…

Life inside a train compartment in China is busy with constant comings and goings to the boiling water tap to make tea and cook instant noodles, people glued to their smart phones watching films in their tiny screens,  others clipping their toe nails whilst children run around and make demands of the adults as the ‘little emperors’ the one child policy has made them into. All the while, the trolleys keep going up and down the train selling their fares which changed depending of the time of the day – rice soup and dumplings in the morning, hot meals at lunch and dinner time and fruit and snacks throughout the day. You can buy anything in the train, including toys and power banks!

Guilin was a lovely city built around the most dramatic limestone karst hills with two lakes at its heart, spectacular pagodas lit up at night representing the sun and the moon and a lively food night market.

I climbed one of the hills in the middle of the town, Old Man Mountain, to get a better view of the city. It was really hot and humid and on my way down I stripped to my underwear and joined the locals for a swim in one of the lakes. Being in the water made me think  of my friend Kath and how much she would have enjoyed this. At that moment I had an overwhelming desire to have a companion to share all these experiences with. It’s wasn’t that I felt lonely but…

Guilin was a base to explore the ancient town of Daxu, over 2000 years old and founded during the Qing dynasty, Daxu was a commercial hub due to it’s proximity to the river Li. Very little is left of those busy days, old Daxu was quiet on the rainy day, no tourists and only a few locals going about their daily lives.

Guilin was also the base from where to go to the river Li. I loved being an ordinary tourist for a couple of days. I even took an organised tour to the Longdi rice terraces!!!!

One more train and a ferry and I made it to Hong Kong. Arriving there was a bit of a culture shock, neon lights, people, shops, Marks and Spencer!!!! Friends, old and new, all from the 4 Deserts family, rallied around to help me. Four different families gave me a roof over my head, treated me to fish and chips, cheesecake,  curry and dim sum. With them I went to walks in the Peak and a Moon Festival party in a Hong Kong rooftop. With Free to Run I went for a hike with refugees around one of Hong Kong reservoirs and was able to see first hand the amazing work they do. I loved staying with them all and they made a stressful time waiting for my visa bearable.

After 10 days in Hong Kong I got my visa and I was thrilled. That very day, after saying goodbye to my friends, I took a flight to Chengdu, got back to Rae’s and got reunited with Foxtrot again.

Part two of my Chinese journey could commence.

 

During my  11 days in Osh I hardly moved from the hostel. I  was so exhausted that, at the beginning, I seriously wondered whether it was time to go back home.  However, as days went by and I felt more rested, the urge to get back on the road returned and on the 8th of July, exactly a year after I had left London I was on my way to the Chinese border.

One year!!!  How fast it seems to have gone. During that time I have experienced the pass of the seasons.  I have seen the crops ripen on the fields,  be harvested,  be sown.  I have felt the rain,  the wind,  the sun and the snow in my skin.  I have seen huge rivers,  high mountains,  and big deserts.  I have heard lots of different languages and seen the features in people’s faces change.  I have tasted lots of different foods and I have enjoyed the generosity of many people from many countries…These experiences are changing me – my body has changed,  I don’t know whether the lines in my face have increased with the exposure to the elements,  whether my skin has sagged but I know I’m the fittest I’ve ever been; I know that emotionally I feel more calm and at peace with myself. Of course I miss my loved ones,  fiercely sometimes,  but I wouldn’t want to be anybody else or be anywhere else. I feel the richest woman on earth and immensely grateful for the chance I have to explore this beautiful planet. 

I cycled the remaining 70 Kyrgyz km that separated me from the Chinese border in brilliant sunshine,  amongst beautiful mountains dotted with nomads’ yurts and slept my last two nights in Kyrgyzstan in those yurts.

Crossing the border took the best part of a day. On the Kyrgyz side, heavily armed militarily personal checked my passport several times and on the Chinese side I had to cross  three checkpoints. In the first one they checked the visa.  After a three km ride on a road as smooth as silk with  barbed wire on one side and the river on the other I arrived at the second checkpoint where all the panniers were x-rayed and  their content examined by a zealous young official and I was packed into a taxi that would take me to the third and final checkpoint 150 km away where finally I got the stamp in my passport –  I’d  made it to China!

I was with Dietrich,  a Swiss cyclist I met in Sary Tash and together we cycled down a broad empty avenue into what felt like a ghost city – huge buildings,  huge roads and not a soul in site. After being refused in a hotel we found one that accepted foreigners and settled in.  After such a long time in the mountains it felt strange and exciting being in a town.  At the supermarket, I felt like a child in a toy shop!

Kashgar greeted us the next evening after a long ride through the desert. Kashgar,  such evocative place,  an important stop on the ancient Silk Road, its history stretches over 2,000 years. It’s a real shame that not much of its old town remains having been bulldozed down to the ground to make way to the big modern city.  What remains though is magical and I enjoyed getting lost in its narrow streets,  wondering in the huge Sunday bazaar and eating in its night market.

I couldn’t leave Kashgar without visiting the Sunday animal market. When the crowded  local bus that was taking us there started  overtaking  dozens of small vehicles with sheep, I knew we were getting near the market.

The market was amazing. Noise,  dust,  people trading.  At the  entrance of the market  the food stalls were teeming with customers having soup served from huge cauldrons of boiling liquid. Groups of sheep were tied to wooden posts nearby waiting to be slaughtered, no hiding what you are eating in here!

Rows and rows of animals were in display waiting to be sold,  people were trading noisily,  the buyers looking inside the animals’ mouths, the sellers carefully trimming the wool  in the bottom of the sheep to display their fat deposits. A truly fascinating place.

Urumqi was my next stop.  A night bus took Foxtrot and me there and from there I took a train to Xining from where I started cycling to Chengdu. Sending the bike as cargo was really  easy but I felt quite anxious being separated  from it. Buying my ticket was another matter,  I queued for over one hour at the only counter with an English speaking member of staff. I was amazed at the patience displayed by everyone in the queue,  specially as these people had had to show their ID several times to police and military personal.  Urumqi has a very  visible police presence ready to crush any Uyghur insurgency,  armored vehicles and armed  military are everywhere. It reminded me of the streets  of the Basque country when I was  young.

I said goodbye to Dietrich and got into the bullet train that would take me to Xining were I got reunited with Foxtrot and started in earnest exploring China on a Bike.

First I went to Qinghai Lake, the largest in China,  located over 3000 meters high in the  Tibetan Plateau.  The lake and the sand dunes around it were beautiful but I found the Tibetan Disneyland with its flags,  archery,  camels,  horses,  quads,  karaoke noisy and invasive. Anything is a business opportunity here,  even the rapeseed flower fields have an entry fee and they are full of people having their picture taken amongst the flowers.

From the lake I continued climbing,  crossing high passes of nearly 4000 mt covered in prayer flags.  This is so different from the Pamir, so much more welcoming –  grasslands and nomads with their herds of sheep and yaks everywhere.

One day I camped next to some nomads’ tents I woke up to the sound of sheep insistently rubbing against my tent.  They just wouldn’t go away and smiling I wondered whether they thought the tent was a big mound of grass to munch on!   It was very peaceful outside,  the sun was coming from behind the mountains, yaks all around,  small little mice with big ears were everywhere coming out of their underground tunnels and small birds were hopping around.  With a hot mug of coffee and snuggled up in my warm sleeping bag I felt totally contented.

Miles away, physically and emotionally from my London home I thought about how different my life there was from that of the family of nomads next door and how much unnecessary stuff I’ve accumulated throughout the years.  Their tent was so simple,  a solid fuel stove took center stage in the tent,  it’s flue sticking out through a hole in the ceiling.  There were no floor coverings on the well trodden wet earth.  The furniture  was sparce,  a double bed and a single bed standing in  brissblocks,  two small cupboards,  one of them with what looked like a battery to power the single bulb hanging from the ceiling and a a sort of TV.

The night before I had sat in the small bed whilst the father of the family dozed on the big one. Unable to speak the language,  I  sat and watched the woman lighting the cooker with yak dung cakes,  using a piece of rubber as the ignition.  The cooker resisted being lit and she only  succeeded after several attempts. Then she busied herself tidying the tent.  The china went in one cupboard,  but only some of it,  the other remained in a plastic bucket with a lid. Vegetables were piled in one corner whilst in the opposite corner the bags of yak dung cakes sat; all the while the little mice were running around undisturbed. By now the tent was full of smoke from the failed attempts to light the fire. After a while I left for my tent and as I was going to sleep I could hear them chatting and I found the sound of their voices really comforting.

The Tibetan Plateau is always at its best bathed in the early morning light, its golden, misty quality making making everything look just beautiful. In the Amdo region, one of the three traditional regions of Tibet,  I rode through grasslands and high passes crowned with hundreds of prayer flags, some of then had big burners smouldering with the embers of juniper branches and in all of them I found little pieces of paper thrown out of the windows of cars as offerings.

Motorbikes have replaced horses here and whole Tibetan families, in their traditional costumes, go from A to B on them. The sound of motorbikes can be heard everywhere, shepherds use them to guide their herds of yaks, people carry harvested crops, water, babies… they are everywhere.

I went through towns and villages and I encountered the Yellow river, the third longest in Asia and the sixth in the world, still close to its origin and  small but impressive.

My wheels were taking me to some of the holiest monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism. The path to the monasteries could not have been more beautiful, emerald green grasslands packed with flowers, honey sellers in their tents by the side of the road, yaks happily munching, women milking yaks, children playing…

Longwu Monastery in Rebkong is one of the major monasteries of the Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) Tibetan Buddhism, the sect of the Dalai Lama. It was founded in 1301, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and now has been rebuilt and is home to hundreds of monks that engage in lively philosophical debates. I loved witnessing one of the debates with the sound of thunder from a brewing storm in the background.

Labrang Monastery in Xiahe home to the largest number of monks outside of the Tibet Autonomous Region, it is Tibetan Buddhism’s most important monastery outside the Autonomous Region. The place was packed with Chinese tourists but at 5am when I went to listen to the early morning prayers of the monks I had it for myself.

Langmusi was my final monastery stop in Amdo. It was in Langmusi where I became aware that something had shifted within me since I finished the Pamir Highway. In my mind, I had made it into such huge milestone in my trip that, right from the beginning, it was forever present. It was like if a part of me was constantly worrying about whether I would be able to cycle it, to meet the self imposed deadline of May/June and now that I had done it, I could relax and slow down. Suddenly I was no longer in a rush to get anywhere. So when the opportunity to stay an extra day in Langmusi and visit some local hot springs came up I grabbed it.

I arrived at the hot springs with Kfir, Eithan (two travellers I had met first in Xiahe) and Joanna a Polish woman travelling with her three young children. The building that housed the women’s pool was a big concrete square with columns inside.

As I entered the pool room I was hit by a sulphurous smell coming from a big pipe filling the pool. About 60 women of all ages sat inside the water on the slimy and slippery wooden boards that made the bottom of the pool. Many of the women sat bare breasted, their turquoises and amber necklaces hanging from their necks as a sign of their wealth and status. Women were massaging one another, rivulets of dirt and dead skin falling in the water, others were drinking that same water with cut out plastic bottles, whilst at the same time, others were nursing their babies, chatting or helping the old and frail to get into the pool and yet others were praying. Children, like children anywhere in the world, splashed in the water and shrieked with delight the sound of their voices echoing in the space.

There were no changing rooms, just a concrete bench around the pool room where piles of Tibetan outfits and some wonderfully colourful trousers with matching tailored jackets and turban like head dresses sat in disarray. The water was too hot for me so after a little while, I came out to sat in the bench amongst the clothes and enjoyed watching the women and children.

My next stop was Song Pan. I had been there before with eldest daughter Emma in 2007 and I was expecting to find the quiet small village from where we went horse trekking. Nothing further from the truth – restaurants, yak meat sellers, neon signs, shops, hundreds of Chinese tourists. The sleepy little town had gone forever. It was, however, the perfect place from where to explore the spectacular Jiuzhai Valley located right on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The park receives over 36,000 visitors a day in high season and I was dreading being amongst so many people. I was lucky, Chinese tourists don’t like walking very much so I had big expanses of the park to myself and quietly enjoy its beauty.

Not having had enough with Jiuzhai, the following day I went to Huanglong Park, smaller, more intimate and less crowed, I found its travertine landscape exquisite.

 

The parks were my farewell to the Tibetan Plateau, they were like the grand finale of and spectacular firework display.

Back in Song Pan I started the long descent into Chengdu and Han China.