“You know you are entering a war zone?” Pause “On bicycles.” “Yes.” “Aren’t you afraid?” “No.” Eyebrows up. “Have you cycled in a war zone before?” “No. But we cycled two days in the jungles of Laos where the anti-personnel …
Category Archives: Bicycle Touring
3
We’ve looped back to cross the Donau River again from the Inn River, a bit of Austria, and some little visited country in the south of Bavaria. The canal provides us with an interesting way to return to the Main …
We’ve often said on these trips abroad that we would like to stay in one place for a while and get a feel for the place and the people. To give the locals a chance to get a good look …
Leh is a Shangri-La with a storied past and an uncertain future. Once the center of great kingdoms and a crossroads of trade routes, Leh is now the focus of rapid growth and diminishing resources. Situated at the crossroads of …
While working on New Bohemians today I ran across this previous post. The quote from Jorge Luis Borges evoked memories: they flashed across my inner travel screen, not in pixels, but in soft amorphous remembered images, scents, labored lungs and heart, sweat soaked, cold shivers; wind cooled and sun warmed. Smiles from faces never to be seen again… I thought I’d re-post. Share.
Colorado in late September. Two best friends, a comfortable motorhome, two bicycles, mountains to pedal up and peak Colorado color. Life is good.
We startled at the flash of a photographer in the middle of the 3,000 foot tunnel before realizing it was Bob, giggling and testing the features of his new camera. Stopping at Frostburg for the night, we enjoyed some trail side pizza—delivered to Turtle in the parking lot—as Mike’s treat.
There have been a very few times in my life when time seemed to slow, if not stand still, and this was one. I could see the car headed for us broad side, in slow motion, too late to brake, to late for our acceleration to help. Neither the driver or us even considered involving the police: He because he was Brazilian and has known all his life to distrust them, and we because we had been warned not to involve police in anything, not even an injury accident.
I hurried Bob along, holding my oversized chocolate cookie, as the stranger called out “I won’t hurt you!” Suddenly, Bob turned sharply and defensively and soon learned the man was just asking for food. He gave over some of his cookie and the man thanked him. Now I know why we haven’t understood people who we thought were asking for money. I’ve been trying to figure out how people can afford to eat here and now I feel really bad that we’ve been ignoring them.
Claire’s video of our ride through Canyon del Pato and the Rio Santos:
by Bob and Claire Rogers It sounded like a parade, a particularly raucous parade. It seemed to be on the same alley as hospedaje Nana, in Huaraz. We love a parade. This parade, this band, was very special, from Jardin …
When we travel on our tandem in difficult places, like Tibet, and SE Asia, keeping the bike clean is the last thing I’m thinking about at the end of a hard day: food, a place to get horizontal and sleep are first priority, maybe changing money, buying food for the next day, trying to understand your host, the market vendors; all this before sunset since it’s often cold then, or sometimes not the best time for a gringo to be wandering the streets. So this is often when the derailleuer looks like after 3 or 4 thousand miles.
As you can see this hub had some major abuse on our last adventure, in particular pushing for twenty kilometers while lost for two days on an old branch of the Hoh Chi Minh trail in Laos. At least it didn’t run over a bombie and blow us all up; these part would have been really scattered then. After cleaning, I forgot to take a photo, the parts were clean and smooth again, ready for another go at some more mountains, this time the Andes, and probably a bunch of bad dirt roads. That’s why I paid big bucks ($150 or so a long time ago) for a great hub (not a sponsor, we have no sponsors) The hub body has over 18,000 miles on it, and we are on the second set of paws and springs. Not a bad deal.
I am beginning to dismantle Zippy, world touring tandem, in preparation for our next self supported tour, this time South America. Before each tour, I completely dismantle Zippy for three reasons: to find our which parts need replacing so I can order them and fix the worn parts, catch any impending failures of frame, rims or drive-train, and to re-familiarize myself with every part. Since many of the places we tour are hundreds of miles from a proper bike shop, I have to be able to fix pretty much anything. Anyone who owns a tandem will tell you tandems need more attention than single bikes; I might have to rebuild the hub somewhere in the high Andes, or the middle of the Amazon basin, while being munched on by ants and mosquitoes and critters we’ve never seen before.
Some times a variety of events make trains the best choice for long distance cyclists. We no longer have anything to prove by riding every inch of the way across the U.S., or around and across other countries, continents. Been there, done that. We are now travelers, who happen to believe bicycle is the best way to see the world. However, there are other transportation methods that have a place in our hearts. Some of best experiences have been traveling by train.
Long bicycle tours can sometimes lead to what looks like a dead end, like ending up in a Mekong River border crossing between Vietnam and Cambodia. The road forward was a path. In this case it was more practical, and more fun, to travel in a multi-modal manner. The four-hour river boat ride into Cambodia cost us $10 and was filled with images of life on the Mekong we would have missed from the shore.
From supposedly reliable intelligence, Abrams was able to follow the progress of troops and supplies south, and judge where and when the North planned to attack over the border into Vietnam. To paraphrase from A Better War, Lewis Sorley: Troops advanced south in waves 500 to 600, moving at 12.2 kilometers per day, mostly by foot, the trucks saved for supplies and ammunition. We were able to move perhaps 60 Kilometers on the unimproved section, partly because our load was not on our feet, but on our bicycle, and partly because we had no backup supplies; we had to get out of that jungle in short order.
It was the beginning of another physically challenging day, frosty, clear, with wood smoke on the air. But that wasn’t it. The roadhouse we stayed in the night before had a mix of police and interesting locals drinking lots of beer and eating many fascinating dishes. The architecture was beautiful. The temple just before the village seemed to hang, glowing white in the thin air, from a cliff. We almost got lost, nothing new. No. It was something else.
Video of Bob Rogers and Claire Rogers riding their tandem bicycle through Tibet and SE Asia
Our risk was nothing compared to the average Laotian farmer, wandering children, firewood gathering women, who know their next footstep can mean death, or for some worse, maiming, in a poor country where everyone must contribute.
Some facts: 270 million of these bombies were dropped on a country the size of Utah. Of the more than 50,000 people killed or maimed by the bombings, 20,000 have occurred after the end of the war. An average of one person a day is killed or maimed in Laos now, nearly 40 years later.
In late 1995 we were riding our tandem, Zippy across remote Rio Grande, West Texas. We were 30 miles from any town, enjoying the warmth and sun, racing winter in New Mexico. A seventies era car passed us slowly, dented and rusted, and pulled over on the opposite shoulder a hundred yards ahead. Being alone, on our bicycle for about 11,000 since leaving our home in Washington State six months before, we naturally looked carefully at unusual cars and unusual behavior. As we neared the car, a man in his late 60’s emerged from the car and waved us down. He looked harmless, even cute, so we stopped and smiled as he approached with his antique camera, and took this picture.
So sad to hear of the crowd disaster and all the deaths in Cambodia. In our three weeks or so in the country we found the people to be hard working, cheerful and generally happy despite sometimes difficult living conditions. Like most Southeast Asians, they love their festivals, and the Water Festival is most beloved. This is an unusual occurrence and should not deter anyone from visiting this wonderful country. We’d go back in a minute. เทศกาลน้ำ
Finally we waved and pushed off, our 26 inch prayer wheels spinning out thousands of goodwill messages up his mountain; but I think we might have missed the point. The farmer and his wife live Shangri-la, not just in it, but they are Shangri-la. They are poor, but well fed, and the circle of their days allows for a break when tired, a visit with passing strangers, the rhythm of weeding, or wall building when they feel like it, and the song of bird and stream as accompaniment to it all.
This is a re-post from about a year ago when we were still on the Tibetan Plateau. We re-post it here for those who might have missed the original. If you wish to read the complete posts of In Search of Shangri-la, click on the link under Adventures at left.
We’ve called this often grueling trip from Chengdu, the Back Road to Shangri-la. A few days ago, we entered the high gate to the garden of Shangri-la. We topped out above 15,000 feet each day, and often stayed there for hours.
There will be more mountains to come, and some will probably seem harder than this one. Zippy is making strange noises from the drive-train, and we fear we have put him under too much strain this time.
We are sometimes tired, but feeling stronger every day. We’ve reached that magical three-week point in a long challenging bicycle tour, when we are in the zone, when we feel pretty much ready for anything.
people think of the Tibetan people and the Tibetan Plateau as being only within the lines drawn by the Chinese government, the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Both the Plateau and the Tibetan people are spread over several other provinces. The government encourages Hans to move into Tibetan lands with various incentives, and by building new cities deep in formerly exclusive Tibetan lands. But the fingers of Himalayas we crossed to climb the Plateau, and the difficulty in building and maintaining roads, have kept this part of Tibetan land Tibetan.
We used Bob’s jacket printed with a map of the world on it to try to convey where we were from, where we’d been and where we planned to go. I have no idea if they’d ever seen a map before. It doesn’t really matter to them, their world is an isolated village along a road between two passes and 50 kilometers from the nearest town. It sounds romantic: going to sleep to the sounds of chanting and waking to the sounds of milking. But these women’s lives are a gritty existence that our culture hasn’t known for generations. Hauling wood, water, and food up the ladder to the living space, making butter and curds, grinding grain, hand washing clothes, keeping the fire going, cooking… Mundane, routine, weather-dependent, smoke-filled and layered with years of grime.
We were in the middle to nowhere for three days, climbed more passes than were supposed to be there, were never below about 14,000 feet and bad weather surprised us. The road to Shangri-la is always filled with life and surprise.
Follow the whole story over the next three posts.
we’re eating pork now, or any kind of protein for that matter, and we eat whatever vegetables they bring us. At the grocery stores, we study and poke the packages and hope they’ll sustain us through a night of camping. Yogurt and cookies (a whole roll) is a before bed tradition of carbohydrate loading. …push a pedal stroke for us, we’ll need it; tomorrow; (tonight for you) we climb 7,000 feet to well over 15,000 feet and hope to get down in elevation to find a camping spot low enough to allow for sleep, before dark.
Though the mountain was crowded with lots of construction workers, it was somehow comforting to have some of the road crew trying to beckon us over to their fire to warm up. They didn’t seem to understand that our lightweight clothing was plenty for as hard as we were working but that we would cool down if we stopped. Much as we would have liked to have tea and a visit, we had to keep moving. We got many cheers, thumbs up, much misinformation and even a push from two road monitors.
Yesterday we rode Zippy to the highest elevation ever for us. We started at 8,500 feet in Kangding and topped Zheduo Pass at 13,900 feet in 35 kilometers, or 21.7 miles, all under construction/repair. For our Olympic Peninsula friends, that’s like taking the Hurricane Ridge Road, raising the sea level start to 3,000 feet above the Ridge, loading 80 pounds on your tandem before beginning. Oh, I forgot, put 1,000 people and hundreds of trucks and equipment on the now gravel/dirt/broken concrete road.
We are getting into Tibetan prefectures and seeing the dress and features of the minority population. After a 13,000 plus pass tomorrow, they will no longer be the minority. We are already seeing prayer flags flying, and old women turning prayer wheels as they walk, men dressed in huge leather cloaks with cowboy style hats and daggers. Everyone is friendly, and the air is finally clear!
We have various obstacles as cyclists in America, but in Tibet the challenges are different that your usual yahoo yelling obscenities or throwing bottles. You move forward slowly, and the sea of black horned quadrupeds part like the Red Sea for Moses. After their passing, it is best to keep a close lookout for Yak bombs.
One year ago today we rode our tandem in Chengdu, China traffic in preparation for our journey across Tibetan China and through Southeast Asia. We are beginning a series of re-posts remembering this adventure. Follow us as we remember, or better yet, go to the link at left, In Search of Shangri-la and read the whole four months.
We got on the, still unfinished, Kettle Valley Railway (rail trail) bypassing Kelona and on to Penticton. The Myra-Bellevue Provincial Park is the most spectacular section of the trail, with 18 trestles and two tunnels in an 8.5 kilometer section.
By noon our mountain bikes were loaded and we were off. The traffic was not bad, the hills fairly long. We saw the mountain (hooray!), two caribou, a family of ptarmigan, a snowshoe hare, and a huge set of grizzly tracks. We arrived at Sanctuary River with plenty of time to organize our camp and stow our food safe from bears, and from attracting bears. No bears.
This is not the Buddha. The complexity of religious imagery in Southeast Asia is staggering to the Western mind. As we meandered the region at twelve miles per hour on our tandem bicycle, we saw so many depictions of religious beings that we will be years sorting them all out, if we ever manage the task.
Life is measured best not by the number of breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away..
It appears the volcano in Iceland is not going to go back to sleep without causing mankind to take notice of the disruption possible. Thousands of flights have been canceled by the the ash cloud ejected from the eruption under a glacier. The ash is even more destructive to air traffic because some of it may be turned to glass by the ice before being ejected high into the air.We’ll just have to wait and see if this will last for weeks and cause major economic disruption in North Atlantic and European transportation, or fade away quietly. I wouldn’t bet on either.
This view is probably familiar to many in my generation who served in Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It was taken, looking north, from a headland jutting out into the South China Sea, forming a barrier to weather, and no doubt troop movements, between South Vietnam and North Vietnam. Hai Van Pass, Vietnam.
ruins near Angkor Wat and Buddhist Monk, photo by Bob Rogers, bob rogers and claire rogers the new bohemians, newbohemians
There has been no Internet in Far West China (Xinjiang) since the violence between Han Chinese and the native Uighurs. Some reports have as many as 500,000 Hans leaving Xinjiang since the violence, and the Chinese government now allowing Hans to sell to anyone other than a Han if they leave. This could put a big time kibosh on the governments’s plans to flood the remote province with Hans.
Bob and Claire Rogers have moved their Shangri-la, 2009 Asian Adventure blogs to a First to Last blog format. Relive their adventures from Tibetan China through Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.