The Long Road Home

I’m now in Docklands, London, back at the office etc etc. It’s my first weekend being a normal person who has a DOOR KEY to a place they can go home to where you can put the kettle on or make toast or watch tv, and there’s a fridge and washing machine and so on. It’s lovely.

When people ask me about the trip, they often ask about what was really hard, or bad. It was pretty hard, well, very hard, sometimes. So I try to say
what it was like being so hot and so cold and ill and alone and tired with hills or headwinds or so thirsty or sometimes lonely, or scared. But of course it was also utterly FABULOUS, and working your way slowly along by bike in the wind and weather of each landscape, you see thousands of BEAUTIFUL things. It’s somehow not so always easy to explain that. When I read thru my own old stuff I wrote from the spring days in China and summer days in central asia etc, and looked at some of the photos and videos this weekend, I still can hardly believe myself that I was lucky enough to ride through all those places. I found lots of bits I’d sort of forgotten. So mainly for myslef I’ve jotted together a list of SOME of the most fabulous moments of the trip. It’s also an effort to show that although it was tough, the reward of seeing such places and meeting people there by FAR outweighs the bad bits. I do think I might write up a top ten “worst moments” too, but tonight I’m writing a list of some of the best…

I still think THE most beautiful and striking thing was crossing that pass over the Tianshan Mountains of Heaven south of Urumqi, northwest china. I suppose climbers must see that sort of thing all the time, but I have never seen anything like it. It was the one where my brakes and rims iced over and I got in real trouble actually, BUT it was fabulous - I’d climbed for two days, and when I finally reached the top of the pass, it was late evening, bitter cold, the last 10km all in deep shadow up hairpins zigzagging up the wall of ice to the top. You finally go over the top through a scary notch in the rock. Suddenly it’s not dark shadow anymore and you’re in a huge space of luminous blue yellow pink light. Ahead below me are snow-covered mountain tops just as far as you can see, lit pink in the sunset. You stand there cold and alone in the icy air. There was a bright white moon. You just could shout out loud it’s so beautiful. That was probably the most amazing moment of the whole trip.

There were loads of other beautiful things… Here’s a list of some…

Listening to mountain birds whistling cries in the roses and hedgerows along empty high hilly tracks east of Guilin

The cuckoos calling in every valley in Guizhou, south west China in spring, among the cornfields, fields of oilseed, and cypresses

A spring sunday in Chengdu in west China, sunny avenues, tricycle rickshaws with green awnings, tea houses with chairs and tables in deep shade
under climbing plants on trellises.

The evening sun as I climbed an empty road along a green tributary of the Red Water River in China’s Sichuan province, fabulous mountains, clover and purple vetch and flowering trees and wild grasses.

The 17th c mosque in Dujiangyan, Sichuan, China, with its pink roses, lattice screens, cobbled courtyard, and wooden pagoda above the prayerhall

Huge ice-topped black rock mountains, pine forests, and turquoise rivers in the Cham Tibetan region of northern Sichuan province, China. Wild horses on the hillsides, goats, massive black yaks, and huge birds of prey circling overhead, golden eagles or black kites, Tibetan people wearing trilby cowboy hats, travelling on horses, or galloping across the green.

Bells on pagoda eaves ringing in the wind at the city god shrine over Songpan, NW China, thin blue mountain air

Climbing through deep snow in Mountains of Heaven in late spring, silent except for melt water trickling through stones and crying of a few small birds, huge black kites above, and from time to time sharp cry of some furry brown animal like an otter trotting on snow then standing to watch me.

Riding across the northern edge of the Taklimakan desert in Xinjiang, listening to Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard ensemble, the music and the hot land and road under the huge sky just made my hair stand on end

Listening to distant calls to prayer from mosques down in Osh, south Kyrgyzstan heard from high on Babur’s House, a hill above the town

Camping near Zhabagly Aksu in southern Kazakhstan, by a small river, watching huge flocks of birds flap upstream at dusk, and then a warm yellow moon reflected in black river water after sunset.

The southern Kazakh steppe a huge plain of grass and corn and earth the colour of butterscotch.

Big old villas with tall louvre shutters along the roads of eastern Georgia, with grape vines on trellises, yellow stubble and blue mountains of Great Caucasus behind, hay carts, roses, blackeyed susan, fuschias.

The road from Borjomi in Georgia as I left the Lesser Caucasus mountains
and headed into Anatolia, a glorious valley of pine trees and oak trees and birch trees all ruslting and rattling in the wind, a green river, cattle on bright green meadows.

The high Anatolian steppe in northeastern Turkey, endless bare pale green hills, no trees, no fences, sun getting lower over huge huge open land, and me doing 60kph down long curves into the shallow valley in the early evening

Riding over the northeast Turkey high grasslands on a summer morning,
rough sweeps of wild flowers, dark blue spikes like lupins, purple thistles, yellow ragwort, purple vetch, white meadow sweet. Distant hills pale green pale blue, dark swifts with arc wings diving across the road above

Trebizond in eastern Turkey - cobbles, cafes, old wooden and plaster houses painted pink yellow green with red tiled roofs, gulls crying, the sea, Aya Sofya greek orthodox church with pine trees around it and blue blue sky
and sea

The Kostandagi Pass in eastern Turkey (again), stony roads above a vast beautiful empty landscape, bare hills, clefts, lonely valleys, silence except the wind

Alevi muslims playing saz mandolin and singing in ruined 15th hospital in Amasya, north east Turkey (again)

The fabulous rich turquoise of the Black Sea on Turkey’s northwest coast, deep blue further out, with patches of grey blurred rain.

Wind and birds at lonely burial ground with pines on low yellow hills of turkish thracian plain

Glorious deep woods of endless autumn beech trees in central Bulgaria, strands of mist, dripping, grey.

A men’s choir unaccompanied in the gallery of an orthodox church, Bucharest, Romania, deep deep bass and beautiful tenors

Hungary’s Great Plain, huge expanses of wild yellow grasses tossing in the wind and marshy green tussocks.

Pianos from open windows, and people practising trills on trumpets in Budapest’s old town

The roads in the eastern Czech republic in autumn, swinging gently up rolling hills, virginia creeper bright red, yellow oak leaves and yellow sycamore leaves, manor houses and churches, silver sun reflecting off fallen apples and white dog daisies and chamomile daisies…

I’ve missed out loads of equally lovely moments, but that’s my top list tonight, as I sit here in east london and think about some of the amazing things along the long road from Hong Kong to here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 11:57 pm and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.