Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  I felt the relief first in my fingers, unclenching from the handlebars, and next in my legs, which turned to slush. Technically the TAR was more than a hundred miles and several high passes away, but Kudi was the biggest bureaucratic hurdle on the way there. Because the checkpoint was in a narrow valley next to a roiling river, the Chinese authorities tended to assume people couldn’t sneak around it, which meant Mel and I could breathe a little easier on this side: if anyone saw us they’d assume we had permission to be there. Unless they happened to be police from the checkpoint, chasing us down.

  Eventually dawn lit the land around us, revealing mountains as rough as gnawed-down fingernails. The ragged peaks stretched on as far as I could see, a fury of forms. Rock turned to rust in the low-angled light and faded to umber and grey as the sun rose higher. A flock of dusty birds I couldn’t name swooped above the river, whose turbid surge was distilled at this higher altitude to a clear stream, its water no longer the colour and texture of chocolate milk. I felt thin and insubstantial as a shadow, but the day had barely begun. Around every bend in the road I braced myself for a police convoy, a glimpse of the plateau, a woolly mammoth. Nothing would’ve surprised me, for the world seemed less unknown than unknowable, wavering around me like a half-formed thought. Then I realized I was dizzy with thirst.

  I reached down for my water bottles, but the first was empty and I couldn’t find the second—probably lost in the turmoil at the checkpoint. I told Mel to continue on while I stopped to fill my bottle in a roadside stream. Because of the steady drawl of the water I didn’t hear the car pull over. I turned around and there it was, puttering with menace, some sort of government emblem on the door. When a chubby Chinese man in a crisp navy blue uniform got out I knew it was over, for the third time that morning.

  Without saying a word, the Chinese cop kicked my bike’s tires and tried to lift its frame. The heavy bike hardly budged. Shaking his head, he returned to the car and fumbled in the trunk. For an arrest warrant, I was sure, possibly handcuffs. Instead he returned with three crisp cucumbers.

  “Hello!” he grunted as he handed me the vegetables.

  “Oh,” I said, stunned. “Thank you!”

  Without another word he got into the vehicle and drove off.

  I caught up with Mel, who had been oblivious to my plight, and gave her a cucumber. She looked surprised, but a cyclist is never one to turn down a snack. We continued biking, munching as we pedalled, and by midday reached the bottom of a ten thousand–foot pass, the first step on the hypoxic staircase of passes climbing onto and across the Tibetan Plateau, where the average ground elevation is nearly as high as Mont Blanc. Lacking the energy and nerves to tackle the pass that day, we found a gully deep and wide enough to camp in and lounged there all afternoon, trying to ignore the imminent prospect of discovery by the Chinese police. Cucumber Cop had probably told his colleagues there was no need to rush, convinced we couldn’t get far on such heavy bikes.

  Instead, that afternoon, we were discovered by our new friends. I’d met Ben the previous summer at a hostel in San Francisco. After learning he was a bike mechanic, I casually invited him to join Mel and me on a cycling trip in China the following summer, and to our surprise, he did. We’d met Florian and Mattias, two German cyclists, in a hotel in Kashgar, and we’d biked as a peloton until a few days earlier, when Mel and I hit the road early and took an impromptu nap in the shade. We assumed the boys would catch up, see us dozing on the side of the road, and serve as our alarm clock. Instead, we woke at dusk not knowing if they were ahead or behind.

  After the checkpoint, we never expected to see them again. In fact, they’d almost ridden past our hiding spot when Ben spotted a curl of Mel’s red hair among the rocks. Confusing the ruddy flash for a camel, he stopped for a closer look and found us instead. Once we were reunited, Mel and I told them about our crossing—the truck driver! The shouts! The blind and desperate breakaway! Then we listened to their version.

  “We scoped out the checkpoint from a distance during the day,” said Ben. “Like you, we’d planned to go through at night, but then we saw these rabid-looking guard dogs!”

  “Me, I don’t like dogs,” declared Mattias, a thick Bavarian accent making his every pronouncement sound profound.

  “So in broad daylight we biked right up to the checkpoint—” said Ben.

  “Showed our passports to the guards—” added Florian.

  “And they waved us across,” finished Ben with a smirk. “No questions asked.”

  The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up toward the surface of something, a threshold or change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.

  My tires scrabbled for traction on the loose knuckles of gravel paving National Highway 219, the only road leading into and across western Tibet. After just two switchbacks we were high above our last camp, and I could see Ben and the Germans milling around below, dawdling as usual. Mel and I preferred waking and biking early, when the land came alive in the slanted light of morning and it seemed we had time enough to get anywhere by nightfall, Lhasa or the moon. Florian, Mattias, and Ben preferred to sleep late, boil enormous pots of sweet milky rice for breakfast, and amble onto the road at midday. We usually crossed paths again in the late afternoon, when they either caught up with us or found our camp.

  Mel and I biked up the pass side by side, barely speaking, sent into parallel solitudes by the effort of the climb. I’m not sure where I go when I spin wheels for hours on end like that, except into the rapture of doing nothing deeply—although “nothing,” in this case, involves a tantrum of pedal strokes on a burdened bicycle along a euphemism for a highway through the Himalaya. But in the singular focus of that task, the almost tantric simplicity of it—breathe, pedal, breathe—I took in everything at once: the dust settling on my skin, the ache and strain and release of my quads, the river glittering far below like an artery of light, a shining silver vein, surely not the same sludge-like flow we’d camped next to a few days ago. Ride far enough and the world becomes strange and unknown to you. Ride a little farther and you become strange and unknown to yourself, not to mention your travelling companion.

  “Nice face mask, bud,” Mel managed between pedal strokes. “Wearing enough sunscreen?”

  I grinned through a thick mask of sweat and grit and sunscreen, which I never rubbed in upon application, convinced it worked better as an opaque, unabsorbed gloss.

  “You’re one to talk!” I told Mel. “Your hair is growing its own hump.”

  I can’t remember exactly how we became friends, but I believe it had something to do with volleyball. When my family moved north of Ballinafad, at the age of ten, I was the bookish new kid in a school where Mel was universally adored for her unconstellated freckles and the red hair she hated, for her sidelong sense of humour and winning habit of throwing her head back when she laughed. We had little in common until gym class, where the two of us were among the few kids who dove to stop every spike, no matter how futile the reach, how unforgiving the floor tiles. Our team went on to lose every match for the next three years of elementary school—not just every game, but every set. I didn’t mind, and neither did Mel. The point of life, by our mutual measure, was to give it all we had. The only way we knew how to go was too far.

  Hence Tibet. An hour into the climb the sun glared directly above us in the narrow gap of sky not shuttered by mountains, so we stopped to reapply sunscreen. I smeared more on my face and Mel daubed some on her lower back, not so much to block it from UV radiation, for it was already shielded by her shirt, but to moisturize her skin, which was flaking away in bright red bit
s. The day before sneaking across the checkpoint, while bending over to sort and pack gear, Mel’s T-shirt had slipped up and exposed her lower back to the high-altitude glare, which fried the skin a few shades angrier than scarlet. She didn’t complain—Mel rarely did except to exalt her suffering in satire, a form of stoicism I admired and occasionally found insufferable—but I could tell she’d been riding stiffly to avoid twisting her seared torso. No easy task on a road paved in potholes.

  After moisturizing, Mel sighed in the quietly determined way that meant she was ready to get back on the road. I wasn’t. “Do you hear that? Is it a bird? Or maybe the boys?” I ventured, hoping to distract her into resting a little longer. A large part of why I love biking is how blissful it is to stop. “Hey, are you hungry?”

  Of course she was; we always were. Though we’d packed all the basic provisions we’d need for the next month, from oatmeal to instant noodles, our appetites far exceeded the carrying capacity of our panniers. The day before, we’d even contemplated eating the goat handed to Florian by a passing Chinese motorcyclist, who probably thought we all looked undernourished. Cradling the bendy creature in his arms, Florian, a gentle mathematician incapable of slaying more than differential equations, had gazed at the rest of us questioningly. Mattias licked his chapped lips. Ben nodded in a kind of drooling trance. The goat, in a shrewd move, levelled its sweet cudgel face and Elvis Presley bangs at Mel and mewled adorably.

  “That’s it, boys, give him back!” she said in a way that hinted she’d eat Ben and Mattias before allowing the goat to come to harm. A vegetarian who melted for anything four-legged and fuzzy, Mel had recently squandered half an hour of precious videotape filming baby goats frolicking at a gas station. Florian looked visibly relieved at Mel’s suggestion and carefully handed the goat back to the Chinese motorcyclist, who stuffed it in a burlap saddlebag and rode away. So now we sat on the shoulder of Highway 219 and ate stale cookies instead.

  “Typical,” Mel muttered after taking a bite.

  “What?”

  “Not a single chocolate chip.”

  Mel was frowning at her half-eaten cookie, whose glossy packaging had promised a dense cosmos of chocolate chips. I’d scarfed my own cookies so fast I’d barely noticed the lack. This wasn’t the first time we’d been duped by misleading advertisements in China. In the two months we’d biked through Xinjiang before steering for Tibet, Mel and I had purchased popsicles that claimed to be strawberry, watermelon, fruit punch, and chocolate in flavour, only to discover they all contained, without exception, the same tasteless puck of brown ice flecked with red beans. Beans! Who puts legumes in popsicles? And why on earth did we keep buying them?

  Perhaps out of the same reckless optimism that saw us sneak illegally into a land almost as oxygen-starved as Mars. Or the stubborn faith of pilgrims who repeat the same mantra, convinced it will eventually take them to a different place. Back on the bike, I pretended that the wheels didn’t travel the world’s surface so much as unspool it, and if I stopped pedalling for even a second it would all fade away. The mineral glitter of the mountains and the cloud-shot indigo sky and this road like a parade of detours was all a dream sustained only in motion.

  Three hours and as many false summits later, I knew we’d reached the top when Mel, ahead on the road, threw her bike down and started turning cartwheels. I was so light-headed and giddy I seemed to be cartwheeling while standing still. It was one of those rare moments in life when you measurably accelerate into a new version of yourself, become who you are by leaps and bounds. That I’d pedalled to an altitude I’d only previously visited in airplanes, and that I could still breathe, was a revelation, like discovering an extra lung or the ability to see in ultraviolet. I’d always hoped we’d make it to the Tibetan Plateau, still technically a few passes away, each higher than the last, but now, for the first time, I believed it.

  Mel and I celebrated over hot chocolate as we waited for Ben, Mattias, and Florian to catch up. The drink was a product of China, meaning its cocoa content was limited to the design on the packaging, but context alone provided ample flavour: anything tastes delicious when you’re high in the Himalaya with your best friend, utterly wiped but eager for more—more wending road, rough peaks, deep and indivisible sky. More of anything that goes on and on.

  The descent rather achingly met that definition. As we sped down the pass, every little bump and divot and pebble on the road blurred together into a pavement of pure concussion. Such is the price you pay to reach forbidden Tibet: pain in the legs, in the butt, and in the brain, which can’t conceive a coherent thought because all it knows is the jackhammer jolting of the body and bike to which it is connected. I’d known that climbing the pass would be tough, but I’d never guessed that coasting down it would be tougher. By the time we pitched the tent in the glacial rubble of a valley I had a throbbing headache. Bolts of pain arched between my brows. I collapsed in my sleeping bag, sure I couldn’t go on.

  Yet the next day I woke up eager to meet the oncoming rush of road. Maybe it was the resuscitating power of instant oatmeal mixed with peanut butter. Maybe it was the Nescafé 3 in 1 with which Mel and I washed down that glutinous mash. Either way, I set off each morning feeling strangely convinced that I was on the verge of some grand discovery, despite travelling a bygone trading route on the world’s most populous continent. This was hardly terra incognita, but it sure felt that way, especially when Mel and I biked up a seventeen thousand–foot pass a week later, the highest and least oxygenated stretch of our Silk Road yet, and barely came down on the far side.

  Suddenly the land was spread wide as wings, sloping here and there into mountains. No trees, no greenery, no colour anywhere, really, except for turquoise salt lakes glimmering in the distance like puddles of sky. The horizon was more hesitation than a hard edge, and every so often it spat out a dust tornado that would skim across the road in eerie silence just a few metres ahead of us, the flue curved into a question mark missing its point. Where on this spinning world was I?

  A place where mountaineers find fossil seashells on summits, where the flattest plains are higher than the tallest peaks in the contiguous United States, where the wind carries the tang of salt and every horizon has a distinctly oceanic fetch. Welcome to the Tibetan Plateau, the loftiest sweep of land on the planet, a kind of perfect compromise between heaven and earth.

  Mel and I happened to visit the plateau during a lull in its anguished modern history. It was the summer of 2006, a few years before the violent crackdowns against Tibetans in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, before the forced resettlement of nomads into bleak subdivisions, before self-immolations by monks and nuns became regular news. The Chinese authorities simply couldn’t be bothered with a bunch of wild-haired cyclists, though Mel and I knew this could change at any moment, which is why we were spooked when a military truck roared up behind us and dispatched a pair of soldiers.

  The men wore tinted sunglasses, black boots, and jungle-green army fatigues, which seemed odd camouflage in a landscape the opposite of lush. When they grabbed our bikes we feared the worst, but they only wanted to ride them. The soldiers took turns wobbling down the road, snapping photos of each other with their cellphones, breathing like they were blowing out birthday candles. After a few laps they gave us back the bikes and waved goodbye, apparently not caring that we were about to trespass onto the Aksai Chin.

  This particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively built a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than a thousand miles over the emptiest edge of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland. Hund
reds of Indian and Chinese soldiers died by grenades, machine gun, and mortar fire to claim a place Jawaharlal Nehru, then the prime minister of India, described as so barren “not a blade of grass grows.” Even today most of the Himalayan frontier between India and China falls in disputed territory, with big chunks of the border still a blur, as though someone had smudged the ink on the map before the labels and lines had a chance to dry.

  Not that the Chinese road atlas Mel and I carried revealed any of this, its pages greasy and almost see-through from being handled by sunscreened fingers. What the maps made clear, though, with a lasso of bold strokes, was that the Tibetan Plateau was unambiguously Chinese. This ownership contradicted the map the Germans carried, which diplomatically marked the Aksai Chin with dotted lines.

  We’re so used to thinking of nations as self-evident, maps as trusted authorities, the boundaries veining them blue-blooded and sure. In places like Tibet, though, the land itself gives those lines the slip. Borders might go bump in the night because they’re reinforced by guardrails, but also because they exist in only the most suggestive, ghost-like ways. At least that’s how I sensed them on the Aksai Chin—as a kind of haunting presence on horizons otherwise fenceless and patrolled only by wind. What if borders at their most basic are just desires written onto lands and lives, trying to foist permanence on the fact of flux?

  A sand tornado spun past me, trailing its skirts of dust. I inhaled the country and kept pedalling. Then I realized the vortex came from the Chinese military convoy speeding up behind us. We scooted over to let the vehicles pass, dozens and dozens of black jeeps in a long litany of exhaust. But even as I felt unnerved by the sight of soldiers patrolling the Aksai Chin, what chilled me even more was how I suddenly saw myself in them. “Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.