By early evening we were beneath the smog and closer to the city of Zhangjiakou. As we were discussing where to camp, a motorbike with two young men pulled up. I recognised them as the pair that had been following us for about three and a half hours.
‘Hey, come, my home, you sleep there,’ one of them said, pointing in the direction of Zhangjiakou. I thought it strange because it is illegal for foreigners to stay with Chinese locals unless permission has been granted. But the idea of sleeping in a bed and seeing the inside of a Chinese house was an inviting idea. ‘What do you reckon, Chris?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’ he replied, shrugging. Everything else had gone our way for the day, and this just felt like a well-deserved ending.
A few hours later our patience was at breaking point. It had already been a long day, but the extra thirty to forty kilometres through heavy traffic had taken its toll. What was more, we still didn’t have a place to stay! First the men had taken us to a house where an old man yelled angrily at them. Then they drove to an expensive hotel. After several hours of this, we began to question their intelligence. When we finally decided to cycle out of the city into agricultural land to set up camp, they were still following.
Just outside the city centre we stopped to say goodbye one last time. One of the men motioned that we should make camp on the concrete embankment of a nearby river. It was surrounded by busy streets and tall buildings. When I declined, he grabbed me by the arm. ‘No, you stay here camp! Money and no policeman. You go and very bad, very bad!’ he said, visibly angry and pointing at a police station across the road.
‘Sorry, I don’t understand. Goodbye, we are going!’ I replied.
They began to yell in Chinese. One man grabbed my shoulder to prevent me from cycling off, while the other sprinted towards the police station.
‘Bugger off!’ I yelled. I turned and thumped him in the stomach with my elbow. His grip relaxed and I pedalled away. I dropped over a kerb, swerved into the busy traffic and was gone, pushing at the cranks like my life depended on it.
‘Chris, let’s get off the road and hide. Let’s get off the road!’ I yelled. He was somewhere behind me, but in the pitch black I couldn’t see a thing.
Is that their motorbike coming? When will a police car give chase?
I called out to Chris again. ‘Well, let’s get off the bloody road then!’ came his reply.
I turned into the darkness and ploughed straight through a garden bed. When the wheels ceased to turn, I dropped the bike and ran blindly until my legs gave way. I fell clumsily into a ditch; Chris promptly followed.
We sat panting heavily and peeping above the line of the ditch towards the traffic. There was silence for a long time, until our heart rates fell back to a more leisurely pace. At some stage, a police car drove by with its lights flashing, and our ‘friends’ in tow.
At first we agreed to stay another half hour, but in the end even the ditch seemed inviting. It was just deep enough to lie in and be hidden from view. So, squeezed between a busy major road and a field of lettuce, we settled in for the night.
Morning came quicker than expected.
‘Hey Tim, wake up.’ Chris was shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes to see his face and the pale sky beyond. ‘Tim, it’s time to move. We’re already pretty obvious.’
My vision slowly cleared and focused on the heavy stream of traffic. There were donkeys and carts, cyclists, cars and even pedestrians. In the sitting position, I would have been visible from the waist up. People paused to gape before the banked-up traffic willed them on. It was no wonder; I was wearing only my rainbow coloured thermal underwear. More intriguing was my headwear. I had lost my beanie near Houqi and in recent days had taken to wrapping an old pair of thermal long johns around my head. It must have looked like some kind of bizarre turban.
‘Chris, mate, how do I look?’
‘Like you spent the night in a bloody ditch!’
We couldn’t help laughing. There was nothing to hide anymore.
Chris wet his fingers with some spit and attempted to give his face a wash, but just succeeded in smearing some dirt over his brow. ‘Time for breaky, hey?’ he said, with a grin.
‘Yep, let’s go.’
Zhangjiakou was a shock by day. The alleyways were congested with a moving sea of people. In one side street alone there was probably more commercial activity than in an entire Russian city. The pavements and squares were cluttered with crowds dancing to music and stretching in perfect synchronicity. And what’s more, there were bike highways, and we were two among thousands.
As a heavy rain set in we took refuge in a cheap noodle restaurant. After four hearty serves it was still pouring. Begrudgingly we returned to the bikes and within minutes were soaked to the bone; my waterproof clothing had worn out long ago. Miserable, but with a belly full of noodles to keep me warm, I put feet to pedals and followed Chris. We turned off in the direction of Beijing and didn’t stop for lunch.
The downpour did not ease and eventually the liquid bullets beat me into submission: there was no point in resisting. They penetrated everything. My skin felt as soft and fragile as soggy cardboard. Water streamed down my back, my chest and the underside of my legs. It collected in pools in the sleeves of my jacket and the cuffs of my pants.
We passed through busy little towns where the buildings were blackened with coal soot, and smoke stacks billowed thick grey smoke, which merged with the low clouds. As the unseen sun dimmed, the clouds drooped and cloaked the earth in fog.
Just before the evening faded into black we turned into a small cornfield to make camp. I leaned my bike against a lone tree, and didn’t bother to look for cover. I just stood, unmoving. There was no escaping the discomfort. The tent was soaking, my sleeping bag was drenched and all my clothes were soggy. I pried a pocket open to find the swollen remains of a Chinese biscuit and lifted it slowly to my mouth. Chris stood nearby, up to his ankles in a puddle. He was trying to shrink into his Gore-tex coat and hide, but it clearly wasn’t working.
I took a quick look around and just hung my head. I started shivering. Our little cornfield was besieged by a railway line, busy roads, factories, cluttered brick homes and giant power lines. A heavy clanging noise came through the fog from a nearby factory, and every few minutes a loud explosion boomed. A thousand cars, motorbikes, trains and trucks filled the air with a dull vibration that I knew would never quieten. The solitude of the taiga forest and the empty Mongolian steppe seemed worlds away. Long ago, I thought, there would have been a spirit to the land, but it had been wrung dry by the grip of civilisation and a heavy-handed regime. The sky wasn’t dreamy and the true landscape was masked by what man had carved out of it. There was little vitality, just a race to produce, develop and survive.
Clenching my fists, I tried to imagine life beyond this moment. What would it be like to throw away these shoes held together by the laces alone? To wear fresh, clean clothes, and not sleep in that dank tent? To wake in the morning and have a shower and rub myself dry with a towel? To store food in something other than rank old pannier bags? What was life like without the constant worry of getting a puncture or fixing the brakes? And what about life without meeting daily distances and the agony of tortured thigh muscles?
I tilted my face into the rain and let the drops hit my tongue. In all the discomfort, it suddenly occurred to me that I wouldn’t have it any other way. We had lived the dream and spent our energy. All that remained was the exhausted shell of our journey and the task of nudging it over the finish line. I had left my heart behind the moment we dropped off the plateau into this so called ‘land of the living’. Now that we had been through the hardship of living a simple life, my passion was spent.
Down here in the bustling plains, everyone rushed about, oblivious to the serenity of a campfire in the taiga, the humour of Baba Galya and the hospitality of our friends on Lake Baikal. They didn’t understand the luxury of stepping off the bike after a day’s ride and spooning in a mash of
sardines, potatoes and Russian soup mix. In the past year, they hadn’t wondered what it was like over the horizon, nor had they ridden off to find out. Here, we just looked like a couple of ragged tramps.
It made me acutely aware of just how lucky we had been. The million and one unique experiences had been more than just sights, people and places; they were pots of happiness and growth to hold close to the heart.
Eventually, we were brought to life by the intense cold.
‘C’mon, you lazy bloody New South Welshman, let’s get this tent up!’ I murmured in an attempt to rattle some life into Chris.
‘Yeah, all right. Gee, glad I’m not on cooking tonight!’ he replied, with a cheeky smile.
We went to bed in the wet and woke with the ugly task of sliding sopping wet socks back onto our feet. I climbed onto a bike that was in tatters. Many parts were held together by grey tape like a crude life-support system – the bikes and our gear should have died long ago.
Two days later we crossed a mountain range, saw the Great Wall of China at a distance and pulled into an apple orchard on the outskirts of Beijing.
All day my mind had flicked over fond memories: the shimmering lakes of Finland where I took a rowboat out in the morning fog and watched the waterbirds flutter off, leaving ripples in the glassy water. My first time in an abandoned village in Russia, where I had been transfixed by a white line of hooting swans flying over the taiga forest. I remembered the bitter cold and haunting beauty of my first winter in the Arctic, when it had dropped to –37 degrees Celsius. Then there was the meeting with Chris in Moscow, Baba Galya, Baikal, the BAM railway, and everything else that had filled my life in the past fourteen months. Alone with my thoughts, I didn’t feel as if it was just the end of a journey. It was the end of a way of life, and of two and a half years away from Australia. Now that we were so perilously close to finishing, I realised that relief wasn’t the overriding emotion. There were two others: a sense of achievement and a sense of great loss.
We worked quietly in the dull evening sun to set up camp and cook dinner. We were both deep in thought, quietly contemplating the gravity of the moment.
Although there was something comforting about having a gander down memory lane, I also found it unnerving – each and every experience was unique. Although I could think about the past, I could never truly experience it again. Rosy predictions of the future also seemed to fall short. As I peered into my last ever stodgy bowl of macaroni and canned sardines, it was obvious that although the mind could conjure up and recreate beautiful things, it was never as real as the moment. It is the ground upon which we stand, not that of two paces behind or in front. So quickly the taste of macaroni would fade; life wasn’t just about reflection and anticipation, but about continuing to push into new things.
And damn it! Maybe I really had changed, and I wasn’t just returning to the past. Australia, too, would be a chance to live and learn. And Russia would wait for me.
I set up the tent for the last time and rolled out my filthy sleeping bag. Then I lay down and closed my eyes next to Chris.
‘Only one more day of freedom, hey, Chris,’ I murmured.
‘Nup. Ten days until freedom.’
An Incredible Journey
Beijing
October 24 2000
———
Chris
I packed slowly in the grey light of dawn then sat on a half-rotten log next to a stunted apple tree. Tim was cooking breakfast – our last breakfast – and I was filling in the final few pages of what would be my last letter to Nat for a good long while. Tim served up and we ate, mostly in silence.
‘Guess this is the last time I’ll ever have to wash this pot,’ Tim remarked as he scraped the last granules of semolina from the corners.
I smiled. In my opinion, what he did to that pot every couple of days could hardly be called washing. ‘Yeah, I guess so. Are you taking it home with you then?’ I asked.
‘Bloody oath!’ he replied, emphatically. ‘This pot has some great memories. Some of the best times of the entire trip – my best memories, anyway – are of eating.’
‘Yeah.’ I laughed.
‘How about you? Are you taking yours home? It’d be a shame not to. Yours is a good pot.’ Tim’s question held a hint of sadness. I smiled for a moment as I looked at the dented blackened thing in my hands. The inside was tarnished and the outside was coated in layer upon layer of hardened black tar, a residue that had built up over the course of around 500 campfires. I found myself remembering some of the more memorable moments of our incredible journey. There was the one time, recently, when the stove had died for the first time and we’d been forced to burn horse shit. And another, back in summer, when we’d nearly started a bushfire. Then there was that time on the BAM – in the rain at two in the morning – the day I’d tried to alter our bikes. And not to forget that campsite a few weeks earlier when we’d burnt half a ton of wood while we sat up into the early hours of the morning arguing and yelling our heads off. And then – I laughed as I remembered it – the camp, early on in the snow, when I’d cut down an entire dead aspen tree because I needed a log to sit on. That pot sure did bring back memories, but they were memories that I’d have to store elsewhere.
I shook my head slowly and looked at Tim. ‘Nah, mate.’ I waved the pot in the air. ‘There’s a baggage limit on aeroplanes, you know. And besides.’ I measured him up with a steady grin. ‘I don’t think Nat would appreciate it too much if I took this home and tried to cook up a romantic dinner for two. I’ve already told her about us using it to cook our meals on horse poo.’ Tim laughed and I continued. ‘I reckon I’ll just have to go and get a new one. They’re about three bucks, as far as I remember, from Woolworths.’
Tim’s face darkened. He was a Victorian and this was an issue of contention. ‘You mean Safeway.’
I finished my long-rehearsed, almost automatic, morning routine with a new awareness. I shoved my sleeping bag into the rear pannier for the last time and let my thoughts wander.
We’d come through a lot this year, Tim and I. More than a lot actually. More than I ever could have imagined, but the journey had run its course and now we were returning home to different lives. I wondered if we’d ever travel together again. Tim seemed to sense this too, and he broke the silence, adding his voice to the few birds and the distant rumble of early morning traffic.
‘You know, I’ve just realised …’ I waited as he let his words hang in the air. His voice was neutral. I didn’t know what it was he’d just realised, but I could guess. He let the pause extend a dozen heartbeats and seemed to be considering the mood that hung around us like a fog. Then the moment passed and he broke into a smile. ‘You know that private concert of yours that you and your pot make every day when you’re eating?’
I scowled half-heartedly back at him. ‘You mean your hyper-sensitive hearing? Sure, what about it?’
He grinned with huge satisfaction. ‘I’ve just realised that I won’t have to listen to it ever again.’
We wheeled our bikes slowly out of the orchard and back onto the road. Beijing was big and there – a thick pall of pollution and the beginnings of a vast build-up of population. Our map was dodgy – just the photocopied corner of some large-scale atlas – but as far as we could figure, we had camped about fifty kilometres from the centre. We’d rung the day before and spoken to Helen, a British girl we’d met on our second visit to Ulaan Baatar, and she had agreed to meet us there – right there, in the very centre, Tiananmen Square.
For the very last time, I climbed onto my bike and flexed my fingers around the brake levers. Then, with a deep breath and a glance at Tim, I clicked my ragged shoes into the squeaking pedals and pushed off into the crisp morning air.
The morning was a tumultuous blur of traffic, shops and people. Beijing was the biggest city I’d been in by far, yet all of the millions of people seemed to be crammed into a tiny space, one on top of the other. It was like a huge, bulging city squeezed into
the shell of what was really only meant to hold, at best, a large township.
We became caught up in a surging crowd of cyclists. There were thousands packed across the road and taking up more lanes than the honking traffic. We darted forward, from one traffic light to the next, while the buildings on the roadside became taller and more sophisticated. We passed a McDonalds – the first we had seen in (I counted back) about 10 000 kilometres and over a year – but it flashed by in an instant and we were back to surging ahead with the crowd.
We didn’t have a map of the city and we had no idea which road we were on, but the direction still seemed good, and the buildings were getting more impressive and city-like all the time. We pulled over and sheltered from the muggy heat under a loudly vibrating overpass bridge. Neither of us had a watch – we’d been riding without knowing the time for most of the year – but experience and the first hints of fatigue in my legs told me that we’d been going for several hours already. It had all passed in a flash of sights and sensations though, and I’d been running on adrenaline the whole time. It was only now, as we stopped for a breather and to take a drink of water from our dirt-encrusted bottles, that my thoughts slowed enough to return to the mood of the morning.
Was it possible that only a few weeks ago we’d pushed for days through the heart of the desert without seeing another soul? Beijing was overwhelming and confusing, and as much as I’d so often longed for the end of the journey, nothing during the past year had prepared me for this mass of people. While I might have found the experience of Beijing exciting another time, right now it represented a huge transition, a new beginning and a final end.
I closed my eyes and wished I didn’t have to be there. Just a week from now, I’d be home with Nat, and only a week before we’d still been cycling. I longed for both, equally. I was yearning for the past. And the future! I just didn’t want the now.
For so long I’d been looking forward to everything that was waiting for me in Australia. But now, for almost the first time, I turned my thoughts to reflect on what I was leaving behind. I looked across at Tim and realised that this was very nearly the end. Soon we’d both be packing up our bikes and heading for our respective homes. Tim would be in Gippsland, down south in Victoria, and I’d be starting out on my new life with Nat in Canberra. We’d made a lot of tentative plans for big talks and presentations in the new year, but in reality, we were both returning to a good deal of uncertainty. I acknowledged, with a weird kind of pang, that it could be a long time before we saw each other again.
Off The Rails Page 34