A hellish motorbike tour through China’s heavenly Tibet region: 4,300km of hills and chills
- Riding to heights of over 5,000 metres and shivering through temperatures well below zero, a writer survives two weeks of hairpin bends and Chinese officialdom
The thermometer reads eight degrees below zero Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) and my fingertips are numb. My lips are cracked and dry and my bowels are twisted; I haven’t been to the toilet for a week.
The tendons in my shoulders and upper arms feel like they’re about to snap as I draw on my energy reserves to prevent my motorcycle from slipping on ice. And at 5,009 metres (16,434 feet) above sea level, my head pounds from altitude sickness; even breathing is a labour in this snowy windswept pass through the Dongda Mountains, in the Tibet autonomous region of China.
I’m on a two-week, 4,300km (2,670 mile) ride to the Mount Everest North Base Camp, in far western Tibet, that began in Lao Cai, a small Vietnamese city on the Chinese border.
There I rendezvoused with 10 riders led by Tuan Nguyen, of MotoTours Asia, who has been running motorcycle tours in Southeast Asia for more than 30 years.
“Tibet is a special place: the history, the Buddhist culture, the landscape,” he says. “And it’s a mecca for adventure riders.”
Nguyen spent months organising the necessary permits and paperwork. But the border police at Lao Cai simply refused to let us ride his motorcycles across to China.