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.

An Afternoon on Venus

'Stop, stop, stop!' my body screams. 'Push on, push on, push on!' my mind commands. I check my bike computer. Forty-eight degrees Celsius, another thirty kilometres to go. As the former figure rises steadily, the latter simply refuses to show a significant drop. Once again I give in to my body's desperate call for a break. I prop up my bike against a low cement wall and take a swig from the bottle of peach juice I've been keeping in the back pocket of my cycling jersey. It's vile. The sun has heated it up so much that 'refreshing' isn't the first word that comes to mind.

It's a day of extremes, and a very strange one at that. I'm crossing the Turpan Depression, which at 154 metres below sea level ranks as the third-lowest place on earth. That may sound exciting, but the funny thing about depressions is that there isn't a whole lot to see. They're not like mountains, which are visible from afar and can only be conquered with a great deal of effort. Conquering a depression requires no effort whatsoever. It's just a matter of cruising down and, well, that's it. The staying-alive bit that follows is where the real challenge lies.

Add a bit of water and grapes even grow in hell

It's hard to describe the heat that dominates life in the Turpan Depression. As long as you stay in your air-conditioned hotel room it's just about bearable, but out in the desert it doesn't take more than a minute to realise that you really shouldn't be there. It isn't so much the power of the sun that's overwhelming. Rather, every little thing around you seems to be radiating a heat of its own. The sand, the rocks, the mean little shrubs: they're all out to roast you alive. The relentless winds that sweep across the depression seem to be coming from a gigantic blow-dryer just beyond the horizon, parching your throat and eyes, turning the sweat on your skin into a crust of salt. Here in the Turpan Depression I realise that until now I've never experienced real heat. It feels extraterrestial, like an afternoon on Venus. It's heat redefined.

I crawl back on the bike and, slightly delirious by now, frantically swat at a question that keeps buzzing around my head: if crossing the place nearly kills me, what will it be like to climb back to the rim of this furnace?

Technical Issue

Two days before my health decided it needed some time away from me, I asked myself one of those silly questions that have a way of turning against you. Suppose something had to go wrong with either your bike or your body, which would you choose? Easy, I told my imaginary interlocutor. My body, of course. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the body have this astonishing ability to cure whatever ails it? Don't go expecting it to deal with anything as cataclysmic as a brain hemorrhage, but the common flu or a nasty gash in the head are no match for the magic powers of your body. Just give it a couple of days and you'll be as good as new.

Now try that with a bicycle. 'Flat tire? Oh, let me just put it against the wall, it'll sort itself out.' If anything, that tire will be only flatter after a day or two. In fact, for its well-being my bicycle is wholly dependent on me, a clueless quack who can hardly tell his bottom bracket from his crankset. Just imagine what my poor bike must have gone through when I tried to fix my very first puncture. Having turned the patient upside down, I actually started taking snapshots of the rear wheel because I wasn't sure whether after removing it I'd be able to figure out how to put it back again. I guess it's like being wheeled into the operating room only to hear the surgeon say, just before the anaesthetics kick in: 'Don't worry, sir. We know how to cut you open, but we're still consulting the textbooks on the sewing-up part.' Not very reassuring.

Now, it's true that I've progressed since those early days. It takes me less than thirty minutes to turn a fully-loaded bicycle with a flat tire into a fully-loaded bicycle that's good to go. And, having reversed the sprocket on my Rohloff hub, I even managed to realign the chain tensioner. But some things never change. Strange sounds emanating from unidentified parts of the bike still give me palpitations. And when I'm unable to come up with an immediate solution to a technical issue, part of my mind is already working on an exit strategy: get bike on bus, book flight, go home, forget about the whole thing.

By contrast, I hardly ever worry about that other machine: my body. It's there, it always does what it's supposed to do and it never gives me trouble—apart from the occasional bout of traveller's diarrhoea and, quite curiously, a different skin rash for each country I'm in. Another plus is that it's low on maintenance. Just stuff it with calories, give it the odd scrub and make sure it's in a horizontal position at the end of the day. And—very important to those weight-conscious round-the-world cyclists—there's no need to carry any spare parts.

And then, as I rode into Korla, that trustworthy machine came to a sputtering halt. Rather than one or two parts, it felt as though my entire body needed replacing. There was a dull throb in my head, my neck and shoulders were locked in a painful clasp, my legs were filled with porridge and I was feeling low on sugar, salts and, above all, morale. It had been a long and hot day through the desert, though no longer or hotter than any other day. Still, caught in Korla's afternoon rush hour, looking for a place to stay, I found myself wondering if this is what heatstroke feels like.

A miracle of the human body I haven't mentioned is that it is capable of pushing back its own collapse. Mine got me to a hotel, where it managed to drag thirty kilos worth of luggage up six flights of stairs. Then, having closed the door behind itself, its defences went down. Fever jumped at it from a dark corner, and, just before I slipped into a twelve-hour nightmare marathon, news reached me that my bowels had decided to join the revolution.

And here I am, dealing with the aftereffects not of heatstroke, as it turns out, but good old dysentery. Which is not as dire as it sounds. Every hour or so my bowels perform some kind of Chinese contortion act, which is a sure sign for me to potter off to the shared toilets down the hall to turn one of the cubicles there into (quite literally) a bloody mess. But I'm not complaining. At least the bike is fine.

The Chopstick Shtick

'China is a land of contradictions,' a fellow traveller I met in Pakistan told me. I must have been immersed in the food that was spread out before us, because, unfortunately, I don't recall a single one of them. Not that it really matters; I can't even get my head around the one that I've stumbled upon myself. It's something I like to call the Chopstick Shtick and it goes like this.

Tentative beginnings in Tashkorgan

Each time I sit down in a little eaterie for a bowl of noodles, which has replaced rice with lentils as my main staple, I can't help but notice a little smirk on the face of whoever it is who's serving me. I've learnt to ignore this and focus on the food instead. I pick up my chopsticks, examine the bits and pieces that float around in the broth and set to work. Within a few minutes a faint snigger will make itself heard. Now, try as you might, but it's really hard to ignore this. You know that when you look up to find out what the hell is so funny, you're done for. All you can do is keep eating and pretend you're deaf until the moment the sniggering becomes unbearable and you cave in. This is the cue for the imp at your elbow to step forward and start commenting on the way you handle your chopsticks.

Personally, I think my chopstick skills have improved greatly since I entered China. I've never been a great chopsticksman, to coin a new phrase, but within days I found that the better part of that bowl of noodles actually ended up in my mouth rather than in my lap, and that's not something to be sniggered at. Today, I pick up the flimsiest shred of meat without even batting an eye.

For the Chinese, that is not enough. They see a foreigner with chopsticks, and for some reason that tickles them tremendously. A few days ago, one of the customers of the noodle place where I was eating started tutting and then demonstrated with great relish how it's done. He dived in, lifted half of the contents from his bowl and then gave me a triumphant look. 'Who eats like that?' I said. 'No one eats like that. You could never stuff all of that into your mouth.' Clearly, that was not the point. In fact, my indignance only added to the hilarity that spread across the joint like wildfire.

Working on my slurping technique

I looked around. People were using their chopsticks in the same way I did, with a great deal of slurping thrown in for free. As far as I could tell I had mastered the art of eating with chopsticks. Their thoughtless criticism was simply uncalled for. I tried to console myself with the thought that at least they hadn't brought me a fork, as some of the really sadistic noodle place owners like to do.

I'm not quite sure what the deeper implications of all of this are. But I think I've hit upon a pattern. Last week, looking for a bike shop selling tubes of a particular type, I asked a man on a street corner for directions. 'Xiūchē diàn,' I said. Bike shop. I could have asked for directions in Dutch or even in Klingon for all I care, and the reaction would have been the same: a blank stare. 'Xiūchē diàn,' I tried again as the man began to edge away from this stranger speaking in tongues. Then I showed him my little phrasebook and indicated some Chinese characters. 'Aaah, xiūchē diàn,' he exclaimed, and his expression changed instantly. To my amazement, the phonemes that left his mouth were exactly the same as the ones I had uttered. I swallowed hard. His subsequent directions were lost on me.

Now, what I want to know is: is the above an example of the impenetrable humour that the Chinese are famous for? Do they get a special kick out of messing with a foreigner's head? Or am I simply blind to the finer subtleties of Chinese culture?

Kashgar in 6 Shots

Most countries turn their nose up nowadays, having had their fill in the past. In China, however, good old colonialism is very much en vogue. And it's not happening in some remote overseas territory no one has ever heard of, but right here, in China itself.

The thing is, China is home not only to the Chinese—or Han Chinese, to be more precise—but also to dozens of ethnic minorities. Some of these are well-known and well-loved the world over. Take, for instance, the people of that region in the southwest whose name shall not be mentioned. You know the place: mountainous area where chaps prance about in red dresses and a certain silver-haired American actor appointed himself as Minister of PR.

North of this region lies Xinjiang, a vast desert-like province the size of Western Europe. Xinjiang means 'New Territories', and, knowing that it holds enough oil and natural gas to fuel China's economy for a long time to come, this is exactly the way Beijing treats the place. Meanwhile, Xinjiang's Central Asian minorities—Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and, especially, Uyghur—increasingly find their culture swamped by Han Chinese moving in from the east. Before the communist takeover in 1949 the Uyghur population made up 90 percent of the province's total population. Over the years, that number has dwindled to well below half. Unsurprisingly, mass migration has led to cultural dilution. Tensions came to a head in 2009, when severe riots in the city of Ürümqi left 200 people dead.

In Kashgar, the divide between the Han and Uyghur populations is painfully real. Minarets are dwarfed by modern highrises, underground shopping malls pull in customers from the street-level bazaars, and the characteristic houses in the old town are being razed to make way for the kind of faux-historical architecture that Han Chinese tourists are so fond of. Attempts have even been made to sanitise Kashgar's famous Sunday Market, where for centuries people from all over Central Asia have converged to buy and sell pretty much anything you can think of. But this is one part of the country that the Han Chinese have yet to conquer. The brand-new pavilion where a couple of traders have decked their stalls with garish souvenirs is swallowed up by the real market that surrounds it—a sprawling orgy of colours, smells and sounds that will never die down.