Osh was a lovely place to prepare for the next stage of our trip, a former bastion of Silk Road glory, with a relaxed cosmopolitan atmosphere. The city suffered terribly during a series of riots in 2010, and there is still said to be tension between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz ethnic groups who share the space, but we saw little sign of this during our time there. In fact, our three-day stay in Osh gave us the opportunity to properly pander to our Western sensibilities for the first time since Baku. Somewhat shamefully, we ate pizza TWICE, sat drinking lattes in a wonderful wooden-tabled café, and spent many happy hours catching up on emails and watching Peep Show. But we also found time to visit the city’s more traditional sites. We climbed Solomon’s Throne for wonderful views across the city and towards the snow-covered Pamir Mountain range which dominated the horizon.
We wandered the maze-like alleys of the Osh Bazaar in search of a new inner tube, and returned laden down with nuts, spices and two new thermoses. And we spent one night sleeping in a traditional Kyrgyz yurt, although the experience was somewhat less ‘traditional’ than at Lake Song-Kol, as we shared our space with an angry Greek cycle tourer and an overly friendly cat.
Refreshed, revived and nicely fattened up, we set off for our last week in Kyrgyzstan, with the daunting prospect of three mountain passes to overcome before we could reach the Chinese border at Irkeshtam. Our climb up to the first of these began gently enough, and although there was some snow around, the road was clear. The last 10 km, however, ramped up to a deeply unpleasant 9% gradient which made our thighs burn and our tempers fray. But by late afternoon we had conquered the peak, and saw a wonderfully serpentine road unfurling below us, which we whizzed down merrily as our hands and feet froze, reaching a river gorge at its bottom.
As the sun dropped, we spotted a perfect campsite – an orchard on the edge of the river with flat ground and not a herder in sight. Delighted, we set up our tent and hunkered down for a somewhat chilly night.
We woke the next morning in a blizzard, with snow all around our tent and an icy fog shrouding the hills around us. As we descended to Gulcha, the last proper town before the border 200 km away, the weather got worse, we got wetter, and the road ahead disappeared in the mist. Facing a 3000m plus pass, we decided to be safe and spend the day in a guesthouse rather than risk getting caught in the snow. After a rather fruitless search for somewhere to stay, we were spotted by a boy racer in a white car, who insisted we follow him through the rutted streets to a hotel. Wet and cold, we had little option but to do so, and were delighted to find he was in fact the owner of a lovely warm homestay where we curled up and watched the snow fall.
The next day was bright and clear, and we set off happily along a stunning road which followed the river between wooded mountain slopes.
It was an incredibly beautiful spot, and we felt lucky to be cycling it and positive about the rest of our journey to China. But we should have known something was up when a motorbike tourer spotted us and began to slow – although friendly, they tend to whizz by bike tourers as we slog our way slowly up hills. But this one stopped, and his news was not good: the pass ahead was entirely blocked with snow and ice, with lorries broken down with their snow chains snapped, and no way for a cycle tourer to make it across. Hitching was going to be our only option if we wanted to get over the pass.
Disheartened by this news, we carried on our way, determined to cycle as far as we could before giving in. As we climbed higher, the air cooled considerably but the road stayed clear of snow for the moment, and we had begun to feel more positive again, when suddenly a lorry pulled over to release two cycle tourers from inside, who imparted the same information to us again: the pass was impassable without spikes or chains.
By now it was getting late so we decided to set up camp, and once again spotted an ideal camping place, although it involved crawling over a tree trunk spanning a river to reach a patch of woodland.
As we began to carry our bags over, a horseman rode up to Jonathan, shook his hand, and then began to point to the hillside, making increasingly frantic gestures to convey that some animal – bear or wolf – was going to come down in the night and eat us up if we stayed there. Alarmed that he had found it necessary to detour down to give us this information, but lacking anywhere else to pitch our tent, we decided to risk it, and spent a slightly fraught night thinking every rustle or crunch was a wolf on its way to gobble us up. Inevitably, these notoriously shy animals failed to even provide a howl, and we woke the next morning safe and sound if somewhat tired.
The road was steep from the start as we left the river and started to head further into the mountains. After 15km, we arrived at the last village before the pass and fortified ourselves with Cokes and Snickers under the watchful eye of a toddler who was keen to show us his own cycling skills.
As we set off, yet another vehicle pulled over, with the inhabitants – a group of geologists from Bishkek – again insisting there was no way we could get over the pass. By this point we had made peace with the fact we would have to hitch, but it seemed stupid to stop before we had to. As we left the village, the road began to climb in switchbacks up towards the pass which gradually disappeared into a white blur before our eyes: it had begun to snow.
We ground on stubbornly, but the warnings of those we had met had been pretty emphatic, and with the snow getting heavier we decided it wasn’t sensible to continue. A few minutes of waving frantically, and a passing van driver stopped for us. Unable to lower his ramp, he insisted we hurl our bikes over the top where they rested precariously in positions which threatened to bend their rims, break their spokes, and stop our trip in its tracks. Our fearful mood turned to dismay as he turned a corner to reveal the pass right there in front of us, snowy yes, icy yes, but definitely cyclable/walkable with a bit of care.
It was one of the hardest moments of the trip for us, as we watched the mountains unfurl around us from the front of the van, and knew that we could have cycled over them. We were frustrated, and angry that we had allowed ourselves to be swayed by the opinions of others. 10 minutes later, we pulled into Sary Tash and were dropped off. The bikes had luckily survived, although Harriet’s fuel bottle was carried off with the van into the depths of Kyrgyzstan.
The glorious view of the Pamir range in front of us helped our mood, and we gradually realised that with the information we had been given, and the fact it had started snowing, we had made the right decision to keep ourselves safe, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.
But, although we promised each other we would be sensible, we were now more determined than before to cycle over the last pass and down to the border. Some early morning snow and an icy road set us back a little, but we were soon on our way from Sary Tash to Irkeshtam.
The landscape was awe-inspiring: a huge expanse of white emptiness stretching onwards to meet the Pamir mountains.
During our first two hours, we saw no cars and only one farm, and the solitude was at times frightening: this, combined with the increasingly high altitude, made it more difficult than normal to breath. Nonetheless, we felt privileged to be there on our bicycles.
As we approached the last pass, we saw several lorries parked on the road ahead, putting on their chains. The reason for this soon became clear, as the road turned from pleasantly smooth tarmac to disastrously smooth snow with a thick layer of ice on top. We persevered, however, climbing off our bikes to push them up the steepening and increasingly slippery road. Then it began to snow. As the road ahead disappeared from view, we should have stopped. And when a taxi driver appeared on the road, told us we would not make it over and offered us a ride, we should definitely have stopped. But with thoughts of the previous day still in our head, we didn’t want to give in, and carried on climbing. By the time we realised how cold we were, how heavy the snow was getting, and how icy the road was, the taxi was long gone. All we could see ahead of us were two lorries which had slid off the road into the snow and were now stuck.
Luckily, as we wondered what to do, we saw a single building up ahead, the first since the outskirts of Sary Tash. Two men outside took pity on us, and invited us in for tea, bread and to warm up with their family. We gratefully accepted and hunkered down, incredibly thankful for their kindness, but amazed that anyone could live up here all year round.
After an hour or so, however, we knew we had to move on: a snow storm had been predicted the following day, and given how bad the road already was, it was feasible we might be stuck in their house for several days if we didn’t make it over the pass soon. Another attempt to walk up the road ended when the snow became heavier and started to whip in at a near horizontal angle, causing Harriet to fall over twice. In desperation, we waited for some vehicle to pass us. After one lorry failed to stop, we gestured even more frantically at the next one we saw and, thankfully, it ground to a halt. The driver opened the back doors, our bikes were piled in, and he indicated that we also would be travelling as freight. Installed in the back, with chains and rubble around us, we suddenly found ourselves locked in and unable to get out even if we had wanted to.
It turns out there are few things more terrifying that hurtling up and down ice-bound passes locked in the back of a lorry with no windows out of which to see. The rattling and vibrating was intense, and every corner seemed certain to hurl us over the side and into oblivion. After around an hour of this, the driver stopped, ushered us out to show our passport at an army checkpoint, and then returned us to our cargo doom for another bout of terror. But finally we made it to Irkeshtam, and were deposited in a bizarre no man’s land of trailers and wagons set up to serve the border and the truckers coming to and fro.
Our driver refused to accept any money for helping us out, and hurried off to the nearest café-wagon. We found another wagon where we would be able to sleep, which we shared with a group of young boys who had clearly found the vodka-wagon and were enjoying themselves. We spent a bizarre evening there, playing cards, sheltering from the snow and trying to make sense of the permanent transience which seemed to characterise Irkeshtam.
The next morning, we knocked the ice off our bikes and cycled through the Kyrgyz border. After 7 weeks and almost 2000km cycling it felt strange to be leaving this incredible country. Kyrgyzstan had proved to be harder than anything we could have imagined, not just the brutal gradients, high passes, and appalling roads, but also the isolation, cultural differences and restricted diet. However, these difficulties increased the sense of achievement we felt at the end of every day and were contrasted against the most spectacular scenery we had come through on the entire trip, and a people who were both deeply hospitable and respectful towards us.
Despite our melancholy at leaving Kyrgyzstan we could not contain our excitement at we cycled the 10kms through no-man’s land to the first Chinese checkpoint. After nearly 8 months we were finally going to enter China! Our bags were scanned, our photos investigated, and our marital status was questioned but all went well. Even so, we were not yet quite in China: bizarrely, there are 140 kilometres between the first checkpoint and the actual Chinese border, and we were forced to take an official taxi between the two. However, once we reached the second checkpoint, had had another scan of our luggage, received an entry stamp and negotiated a customs’ official who took a serious dislike to Jonathan, we were finally in China!
A swift visit to a small shop confirmed this as Harriet gazed bemused at a vast selection of shrink-wrapped meat and ice teas.
Elated we whizzed down the super smooth highway, and even a police checkpoint and puncture couldn’t dampen our moods. But as the sun began to drop, we realised that the highway was completely fenced in, preventing any exit to camp. And so, on our first night we reached the apogee of our vagrancy, sleeping in a motorway underpass with the roar of traffic overhead.
The next day we woke to see the road shrouded in an icy fog, which numbed our lips and left us talking like we had been to the dentist. Socks were placed on our hands, much to the amusement of the police at a toll booth, who informed us that we actually weren’t allowed to cycle on the highway, but allowed us to continue on to Kashgar.
We reached the city at lunchtime, and immediately loved the way it blended Central Asian and Chinese cultures and cuisines, delighting in a heavily spiced noodle dish while surrounded by mopeds and sheep carcasses.
Kashgar, and the surrounding Xingjiang province have a predominantly Uyghur population, and ethnic tensions have often boiled over into violence. This was apparent in the incredibly high level of security all around the city, with scanners in every shop and riot police stationed in public places. This made some aspects of our stay a little tense, but we found the city a vibrant and energising place to be, and spent three happy days visiting camels at the animal market, gorging ourselves on tofu and pomegranate juice at the night market, and wandering the alleys of the old town.
Then reluctantly and fearfully, we deposited our bikes at the train station baggage hall so that they could be transported over the western deserts to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where the Chinese leg of our journey would start. Fittingly it was on this, our very last cycle of the Central Asian part of our adventure, that we reached our milestone 10,000thkm.
