The Start of China!

Our twelfth country and what an assault on the senses. For most of the group, this was our first taste of the world’s most populous country, and it left us reeling. The cacophony of noise, the masses of people, the smells of cooking wafting through the air, and the jostling as crowds pushed past us in the street. We were in Kashgar, probably the most legendary of the Silk Road cities and it didn’t disappoint. Having left our bikes at the border, we’d managed to reach the city by taking a bus from the border to the bridge, struggling across the remaining splintered girders and then getting on another bus on the other side, altogether a five hour journey.

While awaiting daily reports on the status of the repairs to the damaged bridge we explored the city. This province of China is dominated by the Uighur people who are Muslims and have more in common with the people of the countries we’d just passed through and even Turkey than with the Han Chinese. Our vocabulary of words we’d gleaned through the ‘Stans stood us in good stead as Salaam Aleikum was still the greeting here.

The bazaars and mosques were fascinating, the highlight being the famous Sunday Market and the livestock market, where hundreds of animals were gathered, tethered and then examined closely before being purchased and led away. Not a place for the squeamish but still great to see.
Finally word came through, the bridge was repaired, and we could collect our bikes. We wasted no time in picking them up, completing some much-needed maintenance and then early the next morning setting off once more.

At our first stop heading south fuel bizarrely was being served out of a kettle –a five litre kettle that had to be filled at the pump then carried over to the bike and poured into the tank, for some of us, this meant three trips with the kettle. For safety reasons, it’s considered too risky to fill motorbikes at the petrol pumps themselves, the bikes are not allowed any closer than 10 feet to the pumps, and in some cases, bikes weren’t even allowed within the compound.

Our journey into the remote and mountainous region of south west China was not without incident. Racer Boy Richardson and his other half Shotgun Shirley once more found themselves on the wrong side of the law and were actually taken into police custody along with another rider and a guide after they had inadvertently taken the wrong road. Meanwhile the rest of the group were halfway up a mountain, where one poor rider was repairing his third puncture of the day – a perished inner tube was to blame. One bike ended up on the back of a pick-up truck getting back to the town after an unfortunate fall on a sandy stretch. Our final stretch of tarmac also had some surprises in store for us with a couple of vicious sandstorms hitting all the riders.

Sometimes we come across the most unlikely scenarios, and we had one where the road was suddenly dug up between two groups of riders – a trench that was three feet wide and four feet deep was dug by a JCB. The second group of riders came to a halt and looked around. They spotted a steep bank at the side, borrowed some shovels and got to work to create a ramp to get the bikes around the obstacle. Fifteen minutes later and the final four bikes had progressed through. Naturally the first group of riders didn’t believe them until they saw the pictures to prove it.

We re-grouped at the town of Yecheng, staying in the strangely named Electricity Company Hotel for our last night before hitting the mountains. Inevitably discussions arose about altitude sickness and how to spot it- several coughs were smothered as we found out that a cough can be a key symptom, nobody wanted to miss out on the riding due to altitude sickness. Having conquered the mountains of Central Asia we felt confident our bikes would stand up to the Himalayas (but that was before we saw them).