July 8, 2018 — Jay Austin
It works out, sort of. I manage to half-fix the pump well enough to half-pump the tire. It already takes a few hundred strokes to properly inflate our two-inch tubes with our puny mini-pump, so working at half volume it takes a few hundred more. Twenty minutes later my hands are raw and blistered, but Lauren's wheel is once more ready for the mountains. (Five minutes later, once all the half-pumps are done, I figure out how to full-fix the pump.)
We summit the pass, eventually. We celebrate at the top and high-five with a cyclist coming in the other direction and speed along to Sary-Tash before dark. We descend into a gorgeous valley, catch our first sight of the imposing Pamir just behind the small town, and pull up next to Nathan, Sophie, and Romain's bikes outside a small guesthouse. The bikepackers spill out onto the porch. More high-fives. Who wants a beer?
We're all pretty exhausted from our three long days of climbing—over 4,000 meters in 180 kilometers—and anyway, we're at a high enough altitude (3,600 meters) that we need to start giving ourselves some time to acclimate. We take a rest day.
The guesthouse swells with cyclists. A few we'd met earlier and plenty more coming from different directions. Sary-Tash is something of a crossroads: fork right for Tajikistan, fork left for China.
While the road to Tajikistan is derelict and bumpy, the road to China is smooth and paved. The whole road to Osh, in fact, was all recently redone by the Chinese. China is in the midst of a well-publicized global trade expansion, building roads all over the world, and Kyrgyzstan is just right next door. Sary-Tash, though tiny and unassuming, is the gateway from China to Central Asia. Build a good road through Sary-Tash and your goods can reach Osh. Build a good road to Osh and your goods can reach Uzbekistan. Make it to Uzbekistan and, well, you're well on your way to the Caspian Sea. Make it to the Caspian and you're practically in Europe.
It's a big investment, and China isn't keen to let all that tar go to waste. These new trade routes from China's coastal factories to central Asia—folks are calling it the New Silk Road—must pass through China's remote, ethnically diverse western provinces, which have long felt intermittently ignored and persecuted by the ruling class. Some there don't think the government has done very much for them at all. Some there think maybe they should separate from China, and take their land with them.
Break off a chunk of western China and you've broken off China's path to Europe. The Politburo isn't willing to give up that access. And so in years the government has come down hard on its western minorities. We talk to some cyclists who have come that way and they describe something between an Orwellian police state and an active genocide. People think it's bad what's happening in Tibet, they say, just look at what's happening to the Uighur Muslims.
China doesn't want its new trade partners to hear about what's happening (nor, to be fair, do its new trade partners really want to know). Arrive at the Chinese border on a bicycle and your passport will be confiscated. You will be put in a cab and driven hundreds of kilometers through the desert until the first place the Chinese government has decided it is okay for you to see, and only then will you get your passport back. You are not to talk to locals and you are only to stay in hotels approved for foreigners. Every day you will pass a checkpoint—sometimes one, sometimes ten—and here you may wait up to four hours to have your documents and belongings inspected, and re-inspected, and re-re-inspected. Take a photograph of the wrong thing and you'll have your camera seized and your body thrown in jail.
And all this is what you might cal the special foreigner treatment.
***
So, no China for us. Nathan, Sophie, Romain, Lauren, and I roll out of Sary-Tash after a day off the bikes and fork right toward Tajikistan, toward big snowy peaks with heavy grey clouds overhead. It's gorgeous and it's daunting.
We stop for photographs and for pee breaks. We stopped on the road by a small group of children on donkeys who invite us into their yurt for some chai. We look at the clouds up ahead. Sure, we could go for some chai.
Yurts are temporary domed homes endemic to central Asia, and particularly the nomadic Kyrgyz people. They're made of wood and hemp and hide and fur, designed to be deconstructed in the spring and moved up to the cooler mountains in the summer, then brought back down in the fall and reconstructed in low-lying valleys during the brutal Kyrgyzstan winters.
Inside, they're surprisingly spacious and surprisingly warm. We've been guests in a few yurts during our time in Kyrgyzstan, and here, just a few dozen kilometers from the border, we know this will be our last. We introduce ourselves to the children and the quiet matriarch, sit down on colorful cushions on the ground, and take small, grateful sips of the warm, black tea put in front of us. The kids speak a little English, though not much, so our conversation lists from English to Russian to a bit of Sophie's Kyrgyz and returns, always, to the universal language of hand gestures and smiles.
While we chat with the children, their mother bakes bread over a small stove in the corner. She pours dough onto a pan and shovels dried cow dung into the first and the bread bakes, bubbles, and browns. хлеб, the eldest daughter says. Bread!
We are keen for some bread. It's been hard to find since leaving Osh, and these loaves both look and smell delicious. They come off the fire too hot too touch—the daughter fumbles them as she tries to break off of pieces without burning her fingers—and we all swoon at the crunch of the crust cracking apart. "I love the sound of fresh bread breaking," Nathan says in his charming French accent, and we all agree it's the Frenchiest thing one could say.
Hail begins to beat down on the yurt. The winds pick up outside and we're very thankful we're not out there on the bikes, but in here with this lovely family urging us to stay. We curl up in the corner and watch the goats push each other out of the way for the warmest spot next to the stove.
***
There's a no-man's land between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. A difficult, windy pass that no customs official wants to be stationed atop, so instead you get stamped out of Kyrgyzstan at a relatively low-lying 3,500 meters, travel twenty or thirty kilometers along a bumpy, muddy, winding road to about 4,300 meters, then plummet down to the Tajik immigration office somewhere around 4,100 meters.
It is a few hours later and the last bits of the yurt's warmth have left our bodies. We managed to buy some bread from the family (Russian translation: I'll have bread in bicycle; I pay you money?) , and so maybe that's still marginally warm in Sophie's rack sack. But it's now snowing, and we're at the Kyrgyz exit post, and warmth feels very far away. We discuss amongst ourselves whether to camp here or try a little further in the no-man's land. There's a downed hut just before the crossing and the guard is, we think, trying to tell us he'd prefer we camp there, and the downed hut has a roof and walls and a pretty view, so we settle on that and all dash inside.
There's isn't really enough space for three tents inside, especially because our tent is big enough to fit a circus. It's still early, so someone suggests we pitch our tent and we can all hang out inside until the storm passes. We pitch it up and the five of us climb in.
Five grown adults, and we all fit. We inflate a few sleeping pads and cover the floor with Thermarests. We unpack our sleeping bags and slide inside. I lie horizontally along the foot of the tent, like the family dog, while Nathan, Sophie, Romain, and Lauren lie lengthwise like the Willy Wonka grandparents. We are two traveling with a tent that accommodates five. It is perhaps our Americanest moment this year.
***
The snow stops. We cook dinner. The bikepackers set up their tents outside, insisting its easier than having us move our tent to make room. We sleep, and it's a clear, chilly night.
In the morning, we leave Kyrgyzstan, our home for this past month. We are stamped out of on country and waved along to somewhere in between. You may collect your entry stamp at the other side of this 4,300-meter pass.
We ride. Nathan, Sophie, and Romain pull ahead and we get caught in a swarm of twenty or so Czech cyclists on a supported ride through the Pamir. They dash by on their light, luggage-free bicycles and then it's just me and Lauren and the mountain.
We take it slowly. The road isn't so bad, but it isn't good either. We roll through the mud and bump along the stones and by the time we reach the steep switchbacks of the final pass, we're exhausted.
Lauren in particular is having trouble. We're at about 4,000 meters—13,000 feet—where the air is about twenty percent thinner than at sea level. Each breath brings in a fifth less oxygen than the body is used to. Some bodies handle that better than others. Lauren's, for the moment, is flagging.
There are a few options. The first, of course, is to just stop here. Set up camp and try for the pass in the morning. But sleeping at 4,000 meters can be difficult. At night, the heart slows and breathing slackens. The body gets even less oxygen. The best way to avoid altitude sickness is to sleep no higher than 400 meters above where you slept the night before. Stopping here, it would be above that mark.
The second option is to turn back. This is not a very tempting option, because the road we've taken is bumpy and uphill, and we don't want to cycle it a second (and later third) time, and also we've already been stamped out of Kyrgyzstan and not sure if we would have trouble getting back in. Plus, an ominous layer of clouds have rolled in behind us, so pedaling back to Sary-Tash means pedaling headfirst into a storm.
The third option is the only option we really consider: continue ahead. Continue slowly. We dismount and begin walking our bicycles up the switchbacks. Take a few steps. Take a break. Take a breath. Take a few more steps. Walk, rest, repeat.
We climb higher. Lauren's carrying more snacks and thus more weight, so we switch bikes and I heave hers ahead. I spot the iconic statue of the Marco Polo sheep in the distance (thousands of years this sheep has wandered around central Asia and for some reason it's named after the first Italian to come for a visit) and rush toward it.
I drop Lauren's bike at the pass and turn around to help her bring mine to the top. It's so blustery (tailwinds, fortunately) that the second I turn around the wind rushes so far down my esophagus that I get the hiccups.
I meet up with Lauren a few hundred meters down the pass and grab hold of my bike. We walk together to the top and spend a few minutes sheltering from the wind at the base of the Marco Polo sheep. About a dozen of the Czech cyclists are posing for photographs, shirtless and hooting, at the sign for Kyzyl-Art Pass. Even at 4,300 meters, bros gotta take off their shirts and bro.
Lauren is still having trouble breathing. Descent is really the only thing that's going to help. Still a bit out of breath, we get back on the bikes and race downhill to the Tajik border. It's not very far down, but it should be a good place to rest until Lauren catches her breath. We arrive and Lauren sits on the ground. She is shaking and hyperventilating.
Cycling is an intensive activity. You ride up a hill and of course you're out of breath. You're exposed to the elements and so of course you're hot, and sometimes cold, and once you stop you're most definitely colder than when you were riding. Oh, and plus, it's now snowing—of course it's snowing—and so there's certainly going to be some shivering.
But this time, with Lauren, it doesn't stop. The border guards serve her some hot tea and the mug shakes in her hands. I go into the customs booth with our passports, get our entry stamps, and when I come out she's still trying desperately to catch her breath. A small crowd is forming around and she's becoming less and less responsive. The border guards are looking concerned. Fellow cyclists are looking concerned. A few overlanders are shouting, panicked.
She needs to get down!
She needs to get down!