Off The Rails

by Chris Hatherly

  For us, there was no free ride. Every mile cost effort. Out here, every metre was a struggle. The train had passed through like an alien spaceship in an uninhabited world. Like a time machine from the advanced, civilised future flashing momentarily through our basic, fundamental present.

  Tim gingerly prodded another dried biscuit of horse dung onto the stinking little pile of smouldering embers, then balanced a pot of water carefully on top. ‘Better pray that this track improves tomorrow.’

  We were up before dawn and back to pushing through the sand as the first shafts of sun illuminated the eastern sky. We gradually moved off the plain and into some low dunes which made the going even tougher – sandy and steep. But by late morning, we could see that the dunes were levelling out into a sort of plateau about a kilometre ahead.

  We stopped for lunch, having come, we guessed, about ten kilometres. It wasn’t nearly far enough in terms of our water supplies; but then, the terrain ahead looked more promising and we could only hope that the going would improve. I smeared jam on my last crust of bread and munched on it thoughtfully. I looked at Tim. He was absolutely feral. Ingrained dirt had turned his skin darker than the locals’, and a matted fox-fur collar that he’d added to his windstopper jacket hung limply next to his wild and equally grungy beard. He also looked gaunt and starving. He was staring intently at something near my feet.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ he said, salivating. ‘If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?’ I shifted my gaze down and saw that he was pointing at a small piece of bread that I’d accidentally dropped. The sticky jam topping was covered in sand and dust from the track.

  I looked back up, struggling to keep a straight face. ‘Why, sure! Help yourself. I’ve had enough anyway.’

  An hour after lunch, for the first time in a day, we were able to ride our bikes again!

  ‘Whooohoooo!’ I yelled in jubilation, as I rocketed along at a fast walking pace, then, ‘Ughhhh!’ I promptly crashed again in a patch of sand.

  We snuck under the railway where it crossed over another dry creekbed and made our way along faint tracks – still unused, but slightly firmer – until we saw a man on horseback. He galloped over, boggle eyed, and politely asked where the hell we’d just come from. We pointed out the route – our tyre and foot tracks were still visible on a dune on the far side of the railway – and he burst out laughing. His look said it all: you are crazy guys! Nobody around here uses that road!

  By mid-afternoon, we were sitting triumphantly on our cycles and munching greedily on a big bag of biscuits. We’d found the real road, and pedalled no more than a kilometre before a Russian-speaking driver pulled up alongside us. He told us that it was only another sixty kilometres to the border town of Zamyn-Uud and that the road wasn’t really that bad at all! This was good news, as the day before we’d lost our one and only map of Mongolia when it dropped out of a hole in Tim’s pack. Now that our position was pinpointed, we knew that we’d be at the border by morning.

  As we spoke, the driver offered us a sweet cream-wafer biscuit from a huge bag, and we’d absentmindedly munched our way through the lot.

  On a huge sugar high, we pushed on for several hours more. The going was hard and we still had to walk through many sandy stretches, but after the ordeal of the morning, and the day before, I felt invincible!

  We drank our last drops of water at three thirty the next afternoon as the shimmering township of Zamyn-Uud came into sight on the horizon. It was twenty-one days since we’d left Ulaan Baatar and we’d broken a score of records along the way. It had been our longest stretch without washing, as well as our longest stretch without contacting home. Although we’d forewarned that we might be out of touch for a while, our parents had apparently been worried sick. Our bikes had been heavier than ever before – up to ninety kilograms each at times – and at one stage, we’d been carrying enough water to ride completely self-sufficiently for three and a half days at a time. And to top all that? Well, through getting lost from time to time, we’d managed to pioneer a route across the Gobi Desert.

  Now, in the distance, we could see a long, glimmering fence stretching across the horizon. It was the border! Beyond that fence lay all the exotic mystery of China. If we could get our bikes through to the other side – illegal – and manage to ride – also illegal – then in a few short weeks, we would be in Beijing. Our very lifestyle would be breaking the law, but other foreigners had managed to cycle in China on conventional bikes. With luck we would manage on our recumbents, too.

  I tried to get my head around the idea. A few kilometres away was China! The whole time it had been so far off as to be no more than a dream. Could we really have made it this far?

  I looked into the distance and strained to see the Chinese border town of Erienhot on the other side. And when we reached it? Well, the past three weeks through the Gobi had been our biggest challenge yet, and I was ready for a smooth run home. I think that Tim felt the same way.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked him. ‘What do you think is in store for us over that fence?’

  Tim grinned as he replied, his white toothy smile emphasised by the grease streaks in his matted beard and the ingrained dirt covering all his exposed facial skin. ‘I’ve been dreaming about it for the past week,’ he said, happily. ‘I’d say that once we cross that border we deserve to find a long, flat bitumen highway and a big sign pointing straight to Beijing.’

  ———

  Four days later, the local train from Ulaan Baatar jerked to a stop at the station in Zamyn-Uud and spilled us onto the platform. We’d returned to the capital for a couple of days to wash, to contact home and to find a way to smuggle our bikes across the border. We’d wanted to book a train straight to Beijing, then jump off with our bikes at the first station across the border. But the Beijing trains didn’t stop at Zamyn-Uud, and that was where we’d left our bikes.

  So, clean and well fed, but none the wiser, we returned to the border town to see what we could manage from there. We stretched in the cold air of the platform and sauntered over to the baggage room to retrieve our cycles.

  The lady behind the counter peered at me suspiciously with complete lack of recognition. It had taken almost three hours of showering to scrub off all the dirt. Compared to the state we’d been in when we’d first arrived, we now looked as though we belonged to another race.

  I slowly packed the bags on my bicycle then wheeled it out of the station, directly onto the town square. We had Chinese visas and a freshly hatched plan. If all went well, this would be our last day in Mongolia.

  Zamyn-Uud was a dirty town bustling with busy traders. People rushed about and were sometimes rude. The kids were aggressive. We did a little tour of the shops, buying food and supplies that would see us over the border and at least a few days along the road, then set about searching for a taxi that could take us to Erienhot.

  In the end, a Chinese driver with a big van took us across the frontier. We negotiated with him through a Mongolian who could translate our few words of Mongolian into his few words of Chinese, and agreed on a price of US$50. We crammed our bikes into the back of the windowless van, and then, with a wave to the crowd that had gathered, we swung up into the cab and set off along the bouncy strip of bitumen towards the first checkpoint on the Mongolian side of the fence. The Mongolian guards were fascinated with our bikes and we had to spend half an hour dragging them out for a ‘customs inspection.’ Luckily, at the Chinese checkpoint, the guards waved us through with only a quick word to the driver. We were in China. It was amazing. They hadn’t even seen the bikes. After a month of worry, we had smuggled the bikes over the border.

  We were let out near the outskirts of town and the first things that struck me were the bikes. There were thousands of them. Little three-wheeled rickshaws wobbled up and down the streets while shopkeepers and messengers darted nimbly through the crowd on a range of two-wheeled racing machines. Outside of Ulaan Baatar, we’d seen perhaps a few dozen bicycles at most in al
l of Mongolia, yet here we’d seen a hundred before turning the corner.

  My second impression was that the entire town consisted of thousands upon thousands of restaurants! Tightly packed shopfronts lined both sides of the narrow streets, and above each door were the trademark dancing characters I’d seen only on Chinese restaurants back home. It was hard to avoid the impression that the industry of the town was entirely devoted to eating! On looking closer, however, it became clear that these shops sold a huge variety of things.

  I left Tim to fix a puncture and went for a walk down one of the streets. I glanced randomly into windows and doors and saw more things for sale than it would have been possible to buy in the whole of Russia. Shelves were overflowing with all sorts of tacky electronics. There were windows full of stationery, cookware and bedding. I came across one little shop that sold bikes and spare parts and ducked inside for a look. Packed onto the shelves between the narrow walls were all the things that we had simply not been able to find in the mega-cities of Siberia. There were thousands of patches and gallons of glue. There were chains and cogs – I even saw a gear-changer! I bought a few patches and some spare tubes, then headed back to Tim. We feasted on a delicious but indescribable snack from a nearby café and then, with the dreamed-of bitumen highway in clear view, we rode triumphantly out of town. Heading south. Heading for home.

  Crossing the border into China had worked another silent miracle that revealed itself not far down the road when we made camp. We’d just spent five days being civilised in the city and I wasn’t relishing the prospect of reverting back to the old horse-poo emu-parade and meals cooked on a pile of smelly dung. On impulse, I retrieved the stove from the bottom of my pack, banged it on a rock and gave it a thorough clean. I pumped up the pressure bottle then struck a match.

  It burst into life with a spectacular two-metre high blast of flame. But amazingly, rather than simply exploding and killing us both, as I was expecting it to, the flame soon settled down to its usual belching. It wasn’t functioning as the manufacturer had intended by a long shot, but at least it produced enough heat to cook a good-sized meal.

  The next couple of days flashed by in a blur, characterised by perishingly cold mornings, long days of riding along the bitumen and the helpless feeling of being almost completely without language. People in cars would stop to talk to us, and we’d stop in villages and small towns, but we could only sit in silence as friendly crowds full of eager questions gathered around. At first we were unable to communicate at all. It was only after a few days, when we’d worked out the words for Moscow and Beijing, that we were even able to tell people where we’d come from. It was some time before we learned how to pronounce the word for Australia! Before that, I guess, people had assumed we were Americans.

  A noticeable feature was the lifelessness of the countryside. Physically, the whole of Chinese Inner Mongolia looked exactly the same as the flat, dry desert of Southern Mongolia. Culturally – although separated by only a 100 kilometres and a fence – the two places were worlds apart. In Mongolia white gers dotted the horizon and herds of camels and horses ran free. Here the nomads’ homes were replaced by orderly cottages, and the only animals we saw were shaggy goats and sheep, penned behind rows of fences. We had scarcely seen a fence in all of Mongolia, yet here they were everywhere. The wild young men on horseback were now wrinkled farmers, putting along the road on loud, smelly, three-wheeled mini-tractors; the challenge of the endless sandy tracks had disappeared. Many of the people in the two Mongolias were related yet there was no sense of Mongolia’s wild, untamed freedom here. Inner Mongolia felt lifeless and constrained.

  The towns, on the other hand, were something different again. Their life and vibrancy was a stark contrast to the countryside. I found myself looking forward to reaching each new dot on the map in the same way that I’d longed only for the empty desert a few weeks before. The people seemed diligent and invariably friendly, and the bustling capitalism of the tightly packed shops gave me a reassuring sense of security that had been missing for most of the past year.

  We stopped in a large town about 140 kilometres from Erienhot and began eagerly scanning the shops for one that might sell hot food. We parked our bikes against the wall of a promising-looking restaurant and walked tentatively inside. We’d been hoping for a cheap noodle-house, but the moment we went through the door we saw that it was way too plush for such as ourselves. The chairs were upholstered and the tables even had place settings! We began to back out, but a waitress appeared and urged us towards a table. I resisted for a moment, but quickly gave in. We were starving and only two weeks from home. With a quick grin we let the waitress usher us to a table. We’d been living on a shoestring budget of three or four dollars a day for most of the past year, so why shouldn’t we spoil ourselves now? Tim grabbed one of the unintelligible menus and quickly perused the Chinese characters painted across the page. He broke into a beaming smile.

  ‘I’m going to have the second from the top on the right hand side of page three! How about you, mate?’

  ‘Yeah!’ I laughed. ‘I’ll have the one two below that then. What the hell!’

  We tried to order by pointing at our choices but the waitress frowned and took the menu. She disappeared then returned a moment later with a pad of paper and a pen. ‘Hallo,’ she wrote. ‘My name is Adeline. Welcome to China.’

  Wow, she could write English. I grabbed the pen and we quickly scribbled down an introductory conversation. Then to the serious business: it was time to eat.

  Adeline shook her head disapprovingly when we reached again for the menu. Carefully she formed some English words on the pad instead. ‘What will you eat?’ she wrote, then pushed the pen back towards us.

  ‘Something with beef,’ I wrote on the notepaper, hoping for a delicious stir-fry.

  ‘Something with fish,’ Tim added, and I grinned wryly. How could I have forgotten? He’d been reminding me about how much he missed his seafood for most of the past year.

  ‘And rice,’ I added, as an afterthought. I pushed the pad back to Tim.

  ‘And tea.’

  Fifteen minutes later, we could only stare open-mouthed as our meals emerged from the kitchen on two huge carving trays. Adeline had apparently not understood the words ‘something’ or ‘with’. One of the trays contained a huge leg of beef – a couple of kilograms at least – and the other held a gigantic steamed fish!

  Was this really their perception of westerners: big, fat, meat-munching machines? I looked at Tim and we burst out laughing. It was going to cost more than we’d planned to spend, but then, what the heck? We thanked Adeline with a quick scribble – ‘thank you’ – then happily carved in.

  An hour later, I staggered outside clutching a painfully bloated belly full of big juicy chunks of meat. The meal was a treat, I told myself helplessly as my insides growled with a long, loud gurgle. I walked over to my bike and confronted the crowd that had gathered. In a country where most of the billion citizens travelled by bicycle, the sudden appearance of our recumbents had been causing even more of a stir than they had in Mongolia and Russia. They were more interested but, at the same time, the Chinese had a different reaction, too. While more people stopped to stare, they stared politely and didn’t try to touch. Mongolian kids, in particular, had been the worst. They had invariably dived for the gear levers – flick-flick-flick-flick-flick – and we’d suffered more than a few broken gear cables as a result. Here the crowd was standing at a respectable distance, pointing and chattering curiously. Some of them had been waiting for a full hour.

  Adeline abandoned the diners in the restaurant and came outside to translate. She carefully wrote down questions on her little pad and we scribbled answers. She even came with me to one or two of the nearby shops to help buy supplies. We couldn’t find the macaroni, packets of soup powder and sardine tins that we’d been living on for most of the trip, so we settled on packets of instant noodles, instead.

  As we packed our bikes, the crowd gr
ew. A police car came to a halt beside us and a megaphone squealed into life. A crisp voice issued, barking commands. The crowd disappeared in an instant. People fled, vanishing on bikes, motorbikes, in cars and on foot. Suddenly we were alone. The police eyed us suspiciously before driving on. It was my first taste of totalitarianism. We turned to write goodbye to Adeline but she too had disappeared. Associating with foreigners, it seemed, was illegal, and now there was only the swinging door of the restaurant at the top of the stairs to show where she’d been.

  We cycled out of town but, somehow, we weren’t able to find the bitumen highway we’d been on earlier. We spent the night in a dusty paddock then set off again at sunrise. The wind was howling incessantly, not much warmer than the overnight low of minus ten, and blasting our faces and legs with stinging sand. It wasn’t until lunchtime that we found a way over the railway line, and it was late afternoon before we’d found our way back to the highway. We pushed our bikes to the top of the steep, sandy embankment and looked in both directions in dismay.

  ‘It hasn’t even been bloody built yet!’ Tim exploded. ‘This was meant to be our smooth bitumen road to Beijing and they still haven’t even finished it!’ There were big yellow construction machines shuffling around in the distance. I looked ahead, into the valley, and saw a section of the embankment drop out of sight before reappearing again fifty metres later. It seemed that they hadn’t built the bridges yet, either.

  We carried on, riding along the sandy tracks on either side of the embankment and sometimes, where piles of gravel and missing bridges allowed, up on the smooth, flat dirt of the embankment. Our slow pace was frustrating Tim. He was pining for his highway, but in a complete reversal of what we’d been feeling three or four months earlier, I was enjoying the challenge of the dirt; the slow pace suited me perfectly. It was 16 October, well into autumn and perilously cold, but I was due home on 1 November.