Double-Dipping in the Desert

'Why am I doing this to myself?' It's a question that's reared its ugly head a thousand times over the last couple of weeks. Because the truth is: cycling hasn't been a whole lot of fun since I left Kashgar. Of course, I knew that my little excursion through the Taklamakan Desert wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park. That's how it goes with deserts: they tend to be pretty unforgiving places. In fact, the name Taklamakan is Uyghur for 'enter but do not come out,' and even today, despite the brand-new strip of tarmac that cuts through this godforsaken wilderness, that's precisely what will happen if you're not careful. Conditions here are so harsh that most of what you think and do during a day is directly related to survival. Water gets you a long way in that respect, and it's become a bit of an obsession. Before Kashgar I never carried more than 2.25 litres at a time. I've now cranked my water-carrying capacity up to 8 litres, and I never miss out on an opportunity to top up my depleted reserves, even if it means stopping to buy a single pint-sized bottle.

The long and not-so-winding road

However, the hardest part of traversing the Taklamakan Desert is not the lack of water, nor the heat, not even the ferocious headwinds that seem bent on blowing me back to Kashgar. It's the mind-numbing monotony of it all. Whoever designed the Taklamakan took a fancy to the no-frills approach. Unlike Iran, there are no rippled sand dunes to gasp at, no mud-brick villages and crumbling caravanserais to explore. It's grey and pebbly—the kind of greyness and pebbliness that tends to lose its charm after a day or two. Other than the black beetles scurrying around my feet during breaks and the lorries that roar by when I'm back on the road there is hardly anything for the eye to cling to. The little human life there is caters to the needs of people on four wheels: a petrol station every 200 kilometres or so, a layby where truckers gather to buy noodles from a man in a shack.

Being exposed to this kind of emptiness for days on end does funny things to your mind. Desperate to fill the void, it dredges up half-forgotten conversations, faces from the past—almost anything will do. I don't know how many times I've roamed the streets of my hometown, sat down again in my old room, reenacted all those awkward scenes that come with first love. I've made lists of all the vegetables I can think of (in Dutch, English and Spanish) and of the kids I went to school with (name and surname). I've gone back to the first section of this trip, trying to think of all the places where I spent the night. (I keep getting lost after Saint-Pierre-de-Cernières.) I've X-rayed my conscience, analysed my shortcomings, walked the roads not taken. Once you start there's no stopping.

This qualifies as a village on my map

When I grow tired of these games I switch on my mental jukebox. Of course, I could also take out my very real iPod Classic, which holds every song I own, but, being a masochist, I feel that real music would smooth the edges of an experience that's meant to be rough. Besides, I promised my grandmother not to listen to music while cycling, and it's bad form to break promises made to grandmothers. My mental jukebox sometimes shows me bits from my favourite TV-series. The mere thought of Seinfeld's George Costanza defiantly double-dipping his tortilla chips is enough to have me chuckling like an idiot. But most of the time it simply sticks to music. There is a drawback, though. I don't always get a say in what's playing. The Girl from Ipanema can suddenly segue into a Bach cantata, and then, just when I'm humming along contentedly, a radio jingle bursts in: 'Liever Kips-leverworst dan gewone leverworst, papapapapapapapaaaaa!' Another gripe is that it's not very strong on lyrics, so a song usually ends before it's properly begun: 'Roxanne / You don't have to put on the red light / Those days are over / You don't have to something something to the night.'

Before you start thinking that I may be losing it, let me tell you that these hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of emptiness have led to one or two moments of lucidity as well. When I'm not mulling over the past or fiddling with my mental jukebox I'm often dreaming of what lies ahead. Beijing is just around the corner, I realised the other day. The end of my trip... 'Hurrah!' my behind chimed in. 'No more saddle sore!' The rest of me also seemed pretty pleased at the prospect of wrapping it up. To be honest, I'm actively looking forward to my return, to be reunited with those I love, and I'm not saying that just because the past few weeks have been so challenging. If anything, life after this trip will be just as challenging, albeit in different ways. What it comes down to is that I'm eager to move on, to find out what else I can get out of this short life. And all it took was a ride across the desert to figure that out.