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We thought that sending a package from Almaty, Kazakhstan was pretty entertaining back in 2005. We’d heard it was relatively inexpensive to send from India, so yesterday we gave it a try. We waited patiently in line as people crowded …
Category Archives: Travel Narratives
Because of our most recent travels in Asia on our tandem bicycle, I have developed a new interest in the Vietnam War, really the Indochina War of my youth. My draft board called me in 1964. I presented myself, got on a bus and taken for a physical and mental evaluation. I was just out of hospital for a bleeding ulcer. They didn’t know how to cure ulcers in those days, and they knew military food would kill me: 4F. I have always had some survivor’s guilt, partly because I have seen the toll that particular war took on many of the surviving draftees. The vets I have shared this feeling with have said I didn’t miss anything, and to let it go. I think I have. Maybe traveling there, seeing the land and the people involved has had something to do with my coming to terms with those feelings. My appreciation for anyone who fought there is deep. It was one helluva place to have to fight a war.
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.
We`re hauling only one pound of tea on our aluminum horse built for two, a tandem bicycle we’re riding along the same course as an ancient trade route between the Tibetan Empire and the Chinese dynasties. Our cargo includes another 69 pounds of gear weighing us down as we angle up switchbacks and pound through potholes and washouts. Why would we subject ourselves to this arduous endurance test? To glimpse one of the most treacherous and lengthy trade routes on Earth. At least that is how the route was described by Jeff Fuchs, in his 2008 book, The Ancient Tea Horse Road: Travels with the Last of the Himalayan Muleteers. Fuchs has revived interest in the route after scouting its remaining traces to find clues to the people who last walked it.
This family took us in, hungry, tired, near hypothermia at nearly 15,000 feet elevation in Tibetan Sichuan, China. We are still thankful.
Tomorrow we begin six months of travel in our motorhome, Turtle. We begin again another volume of the Turtle Chronicles; motorhome travel and the discoveries it brings. This is not the full on adventure our bicycle tour In Search of Shangri-la, but a mellow exploration from Tucson to Alaska and back, the crooked long slow way, with lots side trips by bicycle, hikes to discover new sights, and as always, making new friends. Join us, and look for my essay in Escapees Magazine. I’ll give you a heads up and a link.
Zippy shrink wrapped and ready for China. The wheels are in two other boxes, along with tools and sharp objects, a third bag will carry tent and sleeping bag for the high mountains. We’ll carry cameras and the computer in …
We rode our tandem a few thousand kilometers across and through the middle of Australia, through the Kimberly, in the far northwest. The Kimberly region is the size of California with 41,000 residents. Think of that. We rode for two to three days without seeing human habitation. There are bulbousbaobab trees and bush fires on the land, crocks and huge snakes in the billabongs and camels stomping around the tent in the night. Lovely.
We arrived in Broome probably the most remote town in the English speaking world, just in time for our anniversary, so it holds a special place in our hearts. The coast there is like all the coasts in Australia, spectacular. But the Kimberly coast is special for it’s remoteness and the austere red rock beauty and beautiful, but often violent weather.
The bags are going to look like a clown pretty soon, if she keeps putting on patches. I asked Bob why they don’t get new bags. He said they are sentimental about the bicycle and the bags. New would be nice, he said, but these bags have memories; every tear and scuff has some meaning to them.
We leave September 1 for Chengdu, Sichuan, China to begin a tandem bicycle tour of SW China and SE Asia. We begin in Chengdu, Sichuan, where the earthquakes killed thousands last year. We will visit some pandas and probably visit our first important Buddha statue before heading into high country where the Himalayas transition from the Tibetan plateau, giving birth to all the great rivers of SE Asia. After a long crossing into Yunnan, we will drop into the sub tropics of Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and end probably in Bangkok, one of our favorite cities.
in our single hard bed room, I drink a cheap Georgian beer and gaze out the window at the Soviet era apartment block through the waning rain and gathering gloom. It is a tableau of a former, not yet liberated, life under Communism: clotheslines, mops, jugs of home-made wine, rust-bleeding concrete balconies; a babushka beats on something like wool, shreds it and hangs it to dry; a woman finishes hanging clothes, they sag the line in the soggy air; another babushka drinks wine and eats bread and stares into the mountains drifting with shards of stringy charcoal cloud; an old man limps the short length of his balcony repeatedly, as if exercising, indomitable spirit;