A Different Kind of Freedom - Kreisel Ray - Страница 31

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During my entire trip my bike computer kept a total of how many miles I had traveled along with how many vertical feet I climbed, giving me the total combined uphill climb. During a conversation on the phone with my brother back in the USA, one of the Chinese guys in John’s examined my bike computer. He flipped it over and pulled off the battery cover, resetting the mileage back to zero. In an instant the electronic record of the distance that I had traveled disappeared. I relayed the event to my brother, he thought that I would be furious with the Chinese guy who erased my bike computer. I knew that there was nothing that I could do, it was gone.

Kashgar marked the end of the difficult part of my trip. I knew that anything after Kashgar would constitute more or less a “vacation ride.” The Karakoram Highway goes south for 450 miles [750 km], winding its way through the Western extent of the Himalayan and the Karakoram mountains. The road took more than 20 years to build by both Chinese and Pakistani workers. Every day landslides, washouts and collapses continue to plague the road. But compared to the route I had just traveled, I knew that it would make for a relatively easy ride. In recent years even a couple of commercial companies ran organized mountain bike trips down the Karakoram Highway. Throughout this length of road both food and basic shelter would always be easy to find.

I guess by normal standards a 500-mile [833 km] mountain bike ride from Kashgar in far Western China down the Karakoram Highway to Gilget, Pakistan would make for an exciting extreme adventure, but for me it meant just the opposite. In Kashgar I found a guidebook that described the route in detail. Most of the ride ran through a land foreign to me. The people who live in this part of Western China are Caucasians, mostly Uyghur, Kossacks, and Tajiks. I did not know their culture or their language. Fortunately for me, there were still enough people around who spoke Chinese for me to be able to know what was going on.

The Kunjirab Pass demarcates the official border between China and Pakistan. Since the actual border line lies in an uninhabited region, neither the Chinese nor the Pakistanis have a border post at the pass. Each day a couple guards patrol their respective sides of the border. I received a Chinese exit stamp in my passport in the Tajik town of Taskargant. It is another 78 miles [130 km] until the Pakistani border post. When I thought about it, the concept of not officially being in either China or Pakistan seemed a strange idea. The notion of being some place but not residing in a country had never occurred to me before.

The last Chinese guard post consist a small building on the side of the road, manned by two PLA soldiers. The guard flipped through my passport and took my exit papers. I felt a little sad to be leaving China, it marked another step in the ending of my trip. A busload of Japanese tourists stopped on the side of the road next to me. They had paused to take pictures of the mountains around us, jagged snowcapped peaks that rose up out of the pristine grassy meadows. When a few of the Japanese heard where I had recently traveled, they offered me some candy and soda pop that they had brought with them from Japan.

At the actual border, two or three Chinese PLA soldiers with automatic weapons leisurely guarded the Chinese side, while a few Pakistani soldiers followed suit on their side. I stopped at the stone marker on the top of the pass for a short break and to celebrate what I had done in the four and a half months. I asked one of the Pakistani soldiers, “Could you please take a picture of me?” He certainly did not show much enthusiasm but finally agreed. Upon handing my camera back, he asked to see my Pakistani visa. I answered, “I am sorry but I don’t have a Pakistani visa, I want to get a 72-hour transit visa. I’m sorry but I have been in China for 4 and a half months. I was instructed that any Pakistan visa that I received in the USA would only be valid for 3 months. The Pakistani consulate in Los Angeles told me that it would not be a problem to get a visa at the border.” The solider was upset, because obviously he had too many people showing up at the border without a visa. He flatly told me, “You must return to China, it is not possible to enter Pakistan without a visa.” I knew that the only Pakistani consulate in all of China was located in Beijing, and there was also one in Hong Kong; both of these were more than 2000 miles [3333 km] away. That would mean that I would have to fly all the way across the country and spend a week in Beijing just to get a visa. I had no interest in doing this. I pleaded with the solider again, “Sir, I am very sorry that I don’t have a Pakistani visa, but at this point I no longer have a Chinese visa, so it is not possible for me to return to China. I know that it is not possible for me to get a regular visa at the border, but I only want a 72-hour transit visa, so I can take the bus to Islamabad, where I can get an official visa.” The discussion went on for the next 20 minutes. He continued to tell me over and over that I must return to China, that it was not possible to enter Pakistan. I was just about in tears, because after all I had been through, to have a border guard end my trip was not a pleasant idea. Finally he told me, “All of you Americans, French and British come here with no visa, it is not right. You must have a visa to enter Pakistan. You can cross the Kunjirab Pass, but you must go straight to my boss, who is at the next road construction camp and ask him if it is possible for you to enter Pakistan. When the immigration official in Sust, Pakistan heard about my journey, he made sure that I got a 15-day visa so that I would not have any visa problems in Pakistan.

Once I reached Gilget in Northern Pakistan the daily temperatures hovered around 95F. With the dramatic increase in temperature and traffic I did not have a great interest in cycling all the way to Islamabad, in central Pakistan. After I spent a few days looking into other possibilities, and cooler routes through Pakistan I came to the realization that it was time to go home. For the equivalent of a couple US dollars I purchased a bus ticket to Islamabad, the capitol city of Pakistan.

Like most cities of the world, Islamabad consists of a mix of the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor. While one group tossed their rubbish in large piles that filled the sides of the city streets the other group combed through the heaps looking for buried treasures or at least some scraps of food. In a well air-conditioned American Express office staffed by sharp-looking Pakistanis I purchased a ticket to Hong Kong, to start the long series of flights back to the USA.

During the course of riding alone for days on end in the desert I acquired a certain type of calmness and tranquillity in my life. All of that collided head on with the round the clock hectic life of Hong Kong when I arrived at the famous Nathan Road in Kowloon. When I staggered out of the taxi, a pack of vultures descended on me, hawking everything from hotel rooms to foreign currency. Everything that I carried had been designed to be transported on my bicycle. With my bike packed up for airplane travel I possessed more equipment than I could possibly carry by myself. I grabbed one of the young Indian men advertising cheap hostel rooms and handed him a few of my bags. The place he showed me looked decent, four bunk beds in a clean room, 10 feet by 15 feet [3 meters by 5 meters]. I just spent the last five months traveling through one of the least densely populated areas of the planet and now I was staying in one of the most densely populated.

After I dropped my gear in the room, I took the elevator down to the street to walk around a bit and find something to eat. As I walked down the wide sidewalks of Nathan Road in the early evening I felt like I moved in super-slow-motion while everyone around me flew passed at light speed. Hong Kongers talked on their ubiquitous cellular phones, answered pages from their electronic pagers and eyed the endless sale items on display in every shop window. The famous enormous neon signs of Hong Kong hung overhead. I continued to move ever so slowly, placing one foot in front of the other moving closer and closer to the harbor, while my peripheral vision blurred with flashing lights and frenzied movement. My harborside seat offered a respite from the activity, as I watched the moon shine down on the placid water before me.

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