Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  ‘Very bloody Concerned!’ he spat into his beer, then eyed me suspiciously. ‘You’re not a journalist, are you?’

  ‘No. Cyclist. Was it really that dangerous there that you had to leave?’

  ‘No, not really. The bombs have a minuscule chance of hitting NGOs. It’s the fall-out from locals that’s the problem.’

  When I told him I was headed for Sost, way up along the Karakoram Highway, he said, ‘Do you know that you’re going through one of the most fundamentalist Muslim areas in Pakistan? And not only that, it’s only eight kilometres from the Afghanistan border!’

  I turned to ice, especially after he said I’d need to get on a bus and get a police escort through some of the tribal areas. What was I doing?

  ***

  The next day, business was as usual, except for one paranoid white guy on a bike. However, it seemed clear that Pakistanis felt that they were being coerced by the United States, and apart from Pakistanis’ general dislike of the United States, the Taliban had threatened neighbouring countries with reprisals if they acquiesced to George W Bush’s demands.

  Feeding on the growing tension, I could not stop sweating and fidgeting and looking over my shoulder, especially when big, moustached men called out ‘Hello, AMERICAN!’

  I was beginning to feel like a target, and sometimes when entering restaurants or packed mini-van-taxis, I found myself blurting out, ‘I’m not American! NOT AMERICAN! Australian! AUSTRALIAN!’ And then, when Australia became involved in the war, I changed this to ‘New Zealand, bro! FROM NEW ZEALAND … CHOICE!’

  I was still on my China idea. It was 800 kilometres away, over the mountainous Karakoram Highway. I figured I could probably do it in three weeks – surely enough time before the United States started bombing? Although, stuck in my throat was that fundamentalist Muslim issue that Phelan had mentioned.

  None of this washed with Alan, as his latest email showed:

  Three weeks won’t cut it! By the time you get to the Chinese border it will likely be closed. Not only that, there is talk of tension between India and Pakistan starting another war. That border may also be closed. DON’T BE AN IDIOT! GET OUT OF PAKISTAN NOW OR I’LL USE YOUR GROUP EMAIL LIST AGAIN!

  I decided that I was going to finish this trip, despite Alan’s warnings, though even externalities – ‘the universe’ as Antony would probably say – were suggesting otherwise: my new camping stove kept bursting into flames like a downed MiG fighter jet; my rear tyre was suddenly frayed causing the tube to stick out like a big, fat testicle. So I bought a Chinese-made tyre but the bead (the wire on the inside of the tyre) tore out as I pumped it up (I later bought an Indian tyre). Lastly, to add insult to injury, my Chinese visa was restricted to two months, which meant I wouldn’t be able to complete all of the trip on bike. Yes, something was conspiring against me and maybe I should’ve listened.

  The last thing that I had packed for the trip was … a gun.

  I know. Not very Buddhist but before you judge me let me point out that Dervla Murphy had cycled with a handgun and it had saved her bacon a number of times.

  My reasons were just as admirable. Sort of. Kind of. Nearly. Alright, not at all!

  You see, I wasn’t going to put up with stone throwing youths like I had when I first arrived in Pakistan and especially after what I read on the Internet in Lahore:

  ‘I had one kid throw a rock the size of my head,’ said a New Zealander. ‘It hit my front wheel, luckily. I got off and chased the little bastard. He could’ve killed me.’

  A German recounted a similar story. ‘I went to cycle off, and zis man tried to put a stick through my wheels as I rode. I fell off and hurt myself badly. Why they do this?’

  A man on two wheels, for some reason, sent some Pakistanis wild – like dogs barking at cars.

  So, in a dusty little hardware store, I bought a gun from a smiling gold-toothed gentleman in Rawalpindi, who was more than happy when I lied to him that I was going to India with it.

  Anyway, on my first day leaving Islamabad it came in handy. There I was, huffing and puffing up endless, steep hills, some 34 kilometres from Muree (a town only a short distance from Islamabad), when a group of boys of various ages were standing by the side of the road laughing and pointing at me. This had been happening all day – boys leering and saying God knows what. (Female cycle tourers of the world, I salute you!)

  As I neared, they suddenly went quiet, as if a schoolteacher had suddenly entered a rowdy classroom. I felt instinctively that they were going to do something unpleasant. And I was right. Just as I passed, I felt a pair of hands trying to push me off my bike.

  ‘Bugger off!’ I spun round. The culprit, a lad of about 14, dodged behind a friend. I shook my fist at him and kept riding. A stone flew past, just missing my ear.

  ‘RIGHT!’

  Furious, I reached for my gun in the back pocket of my cycle shirt and waved it about, giving it my best Quentin Tarantino:

  ‘YOU WANNA PIECE OF ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!’

  The kids screamed in terror and tore off in different directions, some throwing themselves down the rocky embankment below. I pulled the hammer back and took aim.

  POP!

  A plastic pellet flecked skyward before rolling impotently onto the road then into the gutter.

  Oh, come on! As if I would use a real gun!

  Days later, the children had their own revenge. Sitting in a hotel room, replaying the event and laughing to myself, I stupidly aimed the BB gun at the wall and pulled the trigger. The pellet ricocheted and hit me squarely in the forehead. When I tried to reload it, it broke.

  I was still some distance from Muree as the sun faded, so I camped on the lawn of Mullard’s uncle’s house. Mullard was a 17-year-old student who had approached me to stay with him. Just like Govinda in Nepal, Mullard waited until I had set up camp and got myself snuggled up in my sleeping bag before popping his head through to say, ‘You can sleep in my house if you like. Not safe here.’

  I declined. I wasn’t going to pack this thing up in the dark. Everything would be all right. After all, my bike was locked up to the security bars on his garage window. And by now I was tired of having to return answers to the usual questions that were asked of me (‘Why are you cycling?’ ‘Where are you going?’ etc.) and wanted a night of peace.

  However, I should’ve gone in with Mullard for I dreamed that night of a shadow behind a window staring at me. It scared me so much that I awoke briefly to the sound of clanging metal. I thought that a member of Mullard’s family must have been opening the gate … except there was no gate.

  In the morning when I went to unlock the bike, I saw white flakes of paint scattered like dried leaves around the bike. The rubber had been cut off the D-lock and chisel marks had left dints in the casing. I was shocked. It was the first time on my trip that someone had tried to steal my bike. In their last desperate attempt to get the bike free, they had given the frame a good yanking, which had woken me up.

  Mullard looked at the mess. ‘These are a simple people here. Some bad.’

  Later that day I arrived in the small hill station of Nathiagali, some 2500 metres up, on the Karakoram Highway. I had noticed military jets flying around this area all day.

  A Pakistani man in neat Western clothes approached me as I sat down at a chai stall. I asked him if he had heard any recent developments.

  ‘They have given the Taliban seventy-two hours to give up Bin Laden.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They will start bombing after this time.’

  There was no way I could reach the Chinese border before this happening. Panicking, I jumped on the bike and dashed down the mountain to the town of Abbottabad. (Now famous for where Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. I like to entertain the idea of him dyeing his beard in the mirror while my reflection cycled through in the background, startling him, thus spilling the dye all over himself. Alas, he apparently didn’t live here until 2005.)

  When I checked my email that night,
my inbox was again stacked with pleas for me to leave Pakistan. And news reports on the BBC only got worse: the border to Afghanistan was now closed.

  I decided I would take the bus to Sost, which was as close as I could get to the Chinese border. So the next morning as I waited at the bus station (well, a restaurant with a broken chair out the front of it), a middle-aged German man slipped off a bus that had just arrived.

  ‘Ze Chinese border is closed,’ he told me. ‘Half an hour before I get zere zey close it! Zey stop everyzing – trucks, buses, car, cyclists … everybody.’ He looked at me through his big glasses and smiling face. ‘Are you going to ze Chinese border?’

  We sat together in the dusty, rattling bus on the way back to Rawalpindi. Passengers fell asleep sideways on their seats; some chain-smoked, their arms going back and forth to their mouths like pumps. My new German friend was called Winfred.

  ‘Ze India–Pakistan border is ze only one open now and zis may close too,’ Winfred said. ‘I have to change my air ticket. It leaves from Beijing back to Germany. Ah! Zis is the third time zis has happened to me in zis country! In nineteen hundred and sixty-six with ze overthrow of ze king in Afghanistan, ze Indo–Pak war, and now zis. Ah, such a shame. So beautiful. You know, in ze sixties zhere were two places to go to on ze hippie trail: Kabul and Kathmandu. In Kabul zey would give you your hotel key and a block of hashish. Everywhere! It was amazing. Zose were ze days before ze king was overthrown.’

  Winfred was a keen traveller and carried only a small briefcase with him.

  ‘Zis has thirty years of travel experience,’ he said, patting it. ‘I don’t take much. I have documents and one change of clothes. Only eight kilos.’

  He opened it up and took out a lighter shirt to change into.

  ‘Zese documents here,’ he said, pulling out an IBM plastic pocket, ‘are details of ze highlights of ze day; what ze hotel was like, ze food. Very brief. Only one page. Every page counts, you know, with ze weight.’

  ‘Wow! How unGerman of you!’

  ‘Hah! Vot do you carry on ze bike?’

  ‘Well …’ and I told him, in great detail, every little thing I was carrying.

  ‘Zis …’ he looked at me as if I’d just loaded my entire luggage into his brief case. ‘Zis is too much. You need to have more discipline!’

  In Islamabad, Wilfred took the next flight back to Germany whereas I took a very comfortable air-conditioned bus back to Lahore full of, I presumed, middle-class Pakistanis as some of the women wore jeans and didn’t wear the hijab.

  While the movie ‘Independence Day’ played on multiple video screens above, a stubby American man in his 40s living in New Mexico, Todd, spoke at me in an endless monotone about the bombing being the worst since Pearl Harbour, that he couldn’t understand why anyone would attack the US of A, that people are so racist towards Americans, that Americans were the most law-abiding God-fearing people on the planet and that America never started a war that wasn’t right.

  His concerns weren’t helped when there was an explosion of applause from passengers as they watched the White House being vaporised by an alien ship.

  ‘Now that is just not nice!’ he grumbled. To cheer him up I said, ‘Hey, Todd. What if the big windscreen of the bus suddenly became the movie itself so that the driver had to drive through the corny plot, huh?’

  He grunted, then buried himself in a heavily censored Pakistani version of Newsweek.

  After staying the night at the nearly deserted Regale Inn, Malik looking most forlorn, the next morning I cycled the 25 kilometres back to India from Lahore. At Immigration, the very same official that had processed my passport when I left India was now holding it again.

  ‘Ah … we have met before, no?’ he asked as I whisked the bags off my bike for a customs check.

  I sighed heavily. ‘Yes.’

  He smiled into his chai as he re-stamped my Indian visa. ‘You much enjoying India to come back again so soon, yes?’

  ‘Well …’

  I crossed the border and that that ‘favourite thing’ happened – I got a puncture and within seconds I was swamped by hundreds of men.

  24

  AMRITSAR – HONG KONG – YANGSHUO

  September–October

  ‘You’re going to fawkin’ China?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On a fawkin’ bike?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christ! Don’t talk to me about fawkin’ China!’ said the lanky Lancashire lad, Gavin, wiping sweat from his brow as we sat in the Beer Bar Restaurant in Amritsar, chewing on Tandoori chicken. He eyed his drunken mate, Trevor, who nodded heavily with his beer.

  ‘We’ve just spent three months there just to make sure we wouldn’t have to do it again. The people are rude. It’s expensive, polluted. They’ve nothing much to see, and if there’s anything of interest they’ve got Chinese tourists running all over it and you’ve got to pay all the time for everything. They could have a plastic dragon in a bucket and they’d make you pay 20 quid to see it, for fawk’s sake. They’re bas-tards! I went to a tourist office in Xian and asked the guy if he spoke English – and, mind you, there are signs everywhere in English – and he says, ‘Méiyŏu’ (don’t have). ‘Méiyŏu’ is all I fawkin’ hear in China, and this is a tourist office! So we started nicking signs after that, started acting like bas-tards back to them, pushin’ in lines. You can’t go somewhere else?’

  ‘No. Well … you see, I’m trying to write a book called Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s got to have the “B” in it.’

  ‘Oh … I know! What about Bombay to Birmingham! “You awwwright there, choock?”’

  China wasn’t sounding promising. Not one foreigner I had met so far had had a good experience there. What’s more, Philippe, who had managed to get to Ürümqi in China’s far west before the Pakistan border closed, emailed me desperately with ‘They have no caaaaake!’

  No cake … oh, hell.

  Some books I had read had not exactly given a glowing report of China, either, claiming that the Chinese saw themselves as the centre of the world, did not accept refugees unless of Chinese blood, and maintained a dual pricing system for foreigners. And, finally, there was Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame who had described his experience in China in Last Chance To See: ‘They just stare at you as if you were a dog food commercial’.

  Staring. Not that again!

  Why indeed was I going to China? It sounded just like India.

  But the need to finish what I had started had sunk its teeth into me. I tried to console myself with the fact that, because I could only get a two-month visa, it would be a shortish trip. A train or bus would have to help me complete the journey in that time. Most of me felt relieved, some of me felt cheated.

  But …

  Who would have thought my first impressions of China would be formed while sitting with a beer in hand and enjoying a balmy night surrounded by limestone pinnacles and calm lakes? I was in Yangshuo, a small town in the Guangxi Province of southwest China. It was lush and green, and the air was clear. I soaked up the lazy days cycling through the old towns under sweeping roofs, climbing Moon Hill Mountain, which gave stupendous views of the valley, and gorging myself at the lively restaurant markets. Sometimes I would cycle further out of town and find myself on a farm sharing tea or a meal with farmers. Often I would go for a long swim in the Lijiang River in the midday heat. It was glorious. China was a godsend. Since I had arrived from Hong Kong everyone had been friendly and helpful, patiently listening to my faulty Chinese and giving me directions.

  And I needed all the help I could get. Getting here over the past month had been hectic.

  I had cycled from Amritsar to Delhi – a featureless experience along the flat Grand Trunk Road, clocking 150 kilometre days – then took the train to Calcutta (so jammed with cholesterol-coloured taxis that I was sure the city was going to have a heart attack) where the monsoonal rains
were so heavy that I had to trudge waist-deep through the foyer of my hotel to get to my room.

  Unable to get to China by land, I ended up securing a flight to Hong Kong, where I inadvertently got stuck. I had, en route, come up with the brilliant plan of shoving my tools and pedals down my bike shorts and wearing my trousers over the top, to avoid paying for excess luggage.

  How could I have been so stupid?

  I was caught by the metal detector, which binged excitedly as I went through it for the umpteenth time. I was forced to strip by two Calcuttan guards (one toting a machine gun), in front of other passengers. The guards confiscated tools, baulking at my clipless SPD pedals, stuffing them into envelopes and telling me I would be able to collect them in Hong Kong when my flight got in.

  Seven days later they arrived, me going spare over my lack of spares, and I took the next bus to Yangshuo.

  Unlike India, this touristy spot was divine: it did not have touts strangling my arms and my attention; the streets were free from rubbish; the air had none of the ‘China grey’ I had been hearing about in big cities and I was left alone pretty much most of the time.

  The days were bright and warm. People smiled. Cafés mushroomed with tourists dressed with bum bags and ill-fitting T-shirts. They gorged themselves on café mochas, fat banana pancakes and steaks and took guided tours.

  With all the comforts of Western life, it didn’t seem quite China, and I didn’t mind that. Especially as I was chatting to a cheeky and attractive waitress, Fulong.

  ‘You are a stupid!’ she laughed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I say you are!’

  Ah, how refreshing it was to be in a culture where women regularly insulted me. I had found it difficult in India, where it was nearly impossible to talk to women at any great length. Rather than the demure Chinese women I expected, they were quite the opposite. Women were out there driving taxis and rickshaws, farming, and running businesses rather than being shrouded and whisked away under the smoke of the nearest kitchen. They were pushy, mischievous, charming and sometimes violent to each other (in a village I had seen two women beating each other with sticks). What was all this business about not losing face?