An epic riding day

Finally I get around to write about our epic riding day on the 7. May. Either there is no internet, or it is so slow that blogging is not fun. Or of course we are exploring new landscapes and are too tired to do anything else but drop into bed after a riding day. Anyways. Yesterday Boris and I went over the photos and tried to reconstruct what we had experienced on that very special riding day. It took us quite a while to remember everything.

On our journey from Markham to Baxoi - our first real riding day in Tibet - we started at around eight in the morning, knowing that we has set a very ambitious goal for the day with more than 300km of riding. Without exaggeration I can say:  It was a long day and every hour of the day had a surprise for us.

Our morning started with a ride through an absolutely stunning narrow and dry canyon. We were very lucky with the weather, it was a crystal clear morning and the colors in the canyon we drove along were amazing: The steep rocky cliffs showed colors ranging from iron red to green. On the cliffs small villages were located, surrounded be intensive green meadows. Pleasant for our eyes it was not so pleasant for our behinds however. The road through the canyon was the worst gravel road we had experienced so far. Basically one big construction site over 150km. We followed this canyon up to our first pass which took us over 4000m high.

In fact, we rode over four passes that day and I can't even remember the second one anymore, as it was also "only" a 4000m pass. The third one however was over 5000m high. We could see from far where the road lead up to the pass and we were all very excited to set a new altitude record. Up on top we felt really great, no headaches, only a little hungry as we had skipped the boring rice noodle soup for breakfast and it was already after 2 pm.



On our way down from pass number three we could not spot any village for lunch, so we decided to cook our own food. We stopped next to the beautiful stream that we had been following down the mountain and dug out our camping kitchen. Horst and Boris created a super energizing pasta Stroganov followed by real Lao coffee. What a feast. Well fed we continued our ride crossing through beautiful highland grass landscapes.

Afterwards we continued and rode through an amazing high plateau with grazing yaks and sheep and a snaking wide river. It seemed so unreal to ride through this landscape, which remided us so much of pictures from Alaska.At a quick stop to check that everyone is ok, Boris spotted our next highlight: Murmelis! Marmorts. They were everywhere on the medows and seemed to have just woken up from their long hibernation. As we rode along we spotted more than one hundred of these funny little animals.

And just as we had enough of the Murmeli-spotting game, we spotted a huge volture on the river bank hacking around on a dead animal. The volture was huge, I had never seen one so big from so close. However the bird did not enjoy our company that much and soon spread his powerful wings, took three hops and lifted off into the sky.





It was now nearly 5pm, still great weather, sun shine, and we were not ready at all to call it a day. So we decided to continue our super riding day and take another 4000m pass and try to reach our target town Baxoi, which was only 80km away. What a good decision. On pass number 4 we had a stunning view back onto the big highland valley with its snaking river. We all felt like we were standing on the top of the world. Simon said that every curve gave him such a boost of happiness which was hard to describe; basically hormones going absolutely crazy. This is how we all felt on that day being totally overwhelmed by nature's beauty, and (after the first 150km) the fantastic asphalt road.

The next surprise awaited after a few curves down the last pass: The road down into the valley! It was one big zick-zack mountain road with probably over 40 curves in total winding back and forth. The dimensions of this winding road were absolutely breathtaking looking from the top and made us exited. None of us had never seen something like that in the Alps before. With absolute pleasure we curved down the road, which was just only completed. With another 50km to go we continued through another steep canyon reminding us of Brice Canyon in the US with all the erosion and colorful rock formations.

It was getting late, the sun was setting and we had about another 40km to go to Baxoi. We knew that we would have to push it a little bit as there was no bigger town before there. We didn't really want to ride at night time as the headlight on Horst's bike had stopped working. But as we were forced to do so, Boris and I took the lead and Simon rode right next to Horst so that they could share the one beam of light.The next surprise was now ready to come. For the first time on our trip, the GPS location of our target town was wrong. When we turned around the last corner before Baxoi was supposed to come up, there was only darkness. No town in sight by far. We continued for about 2km and a small villages came up. But this could not be Baxoi!

We started to get a bit nervous as we were running low on fuel and really wanted to call it a day. So we decided to backtrack for several km as we had passed another town before which seemed a bit bigger and we thought that we saw a restaurant there. On the way back Horst's bike already ran low on fuel and he had to switch to reserve. We knew that we could not really go much further now. Back in the little tow we stopped at what looked like a restaurant. But it wasn't. It was a group of Tibetan friends haing a good time drinking beer. They were very hearty people and invited us in to join them for some drinks. It was a really funny situation, they coukd not speak english, only a little bit Chinese and of course we didnt understand a word of their Tibetan language. But we liked their beer and thei liked our candy and admired our bike clothing. They offered us to stay with them, but after a while got a bit nervous. I think it was because they are in general not allowed by law to host foreigners. But they told us with wild gestureds that not far from here, maybe 15km ahead. So we finished our beers and hopped on the bikes again. We slowly moved on in the dark and finally, just as we were told, Baxoi showed up in front of us... just moments before we really ran out of fuel.

Baxoi was of course a typical modern, charmless Chinese town with a proper "foreigner hotel", right next to the Police office. We enjoyed good beds and good food and dropped into bed at about 11pm, exhausted from the epic riding day.

View back from the fourth pass of the day