Element

Autumn heart.














To give you an impression of the last weeks of cycling through Qinghai and Sichuan, here some pictures.



I stayed at several monasteries, which was great. The monks, young and old, were very curious. The right-hand picture gives you the round-and-round feel that believers must have.



From Baima, a medium-sized town in southeast Qinghai, on, I entered a beautiful valley that apparently's called 'Red Army Valley' There are loads of beautiful Buddhist shrines and monasteries to visit. The weather wasn't very kind, but it did help me getting through as the check-points were unmanned. I'm not sure if this area's normally open to tourism, Baima is certainly not. Whilst having dinner a group of young police officers walked in, telling me to make myself scarce. At these moments my attitude is one of: "Fine, but I'm not going anywhere until tomorrow morning, so you can either let me finish my meal and let me stay the night, or you arrest me and we go to the station", with which I move my wrists against each other signing handcuffs. Then they say "No no no no no!" and we fill out the registration form and leave it at that.

The man in the right-hand picture is 66 years old and holds hail stones the size of marbles. He had never seen anything like it. They fell from the sky just after I had reached Shi Li, a tiny village along the northern Tibet-Sichuan road. With the stranger came strange weather. Luckily they didn't see it as a bad omen.



In Shi Li I ended up playing a drinking game with my hosts. Left: brothers in beer. Right: sisters in beer.



I left the place with a hang-over, as all the aces (point at a player, who then has to drink the content of the glass in the middle) went to me. "You are so very popular", my new Chinese friends would shout..

Reached the next town and treated myself to a delicious meal of green vegetables with peppers, mushrooms and rice. It was a beautiful inn, of which you can see the cook and the kitchen door on the pictures above.



That afternoon was beautiful. I felt in my element, a sunny autumn day.. There's not much that beats a sunny autumn day I find. A quiet, good quality road (for cycling), a slight hint of moldy leafs in the air, with every wind blow a rain of yellow leafs (that stuff in 'Hero' with the storms of golden leafs actually happens here), the sun on my skin, the alcohol burnt, the wind going through my cloths, mostly downhill. Fantastic.

I met this cyclist next to a bridge, where he was repairing his tire. There was so much tranquility and satisfaction in his person.. I sat down next to him and watched him mend the tire. He didn't want any of my cookies or apples.



I ended the day with this family. They were lovely and I was glad that I could help them out with the peeling of the corn stalks.



This is the farm house, a marvelous building made mostly out of nature stone. I slept on a richly decorated couch, underneath an enormous poster of Mao, next to the calender and some Buddhist paraphernalia. They had cats, a cow, a swine and I guess one or two mice munching through the giant pile of corn. That's why we strung them up, and hung them out to dry.

I met the monk on the day that followed. He was on his way to somewhere, lying down with every step.



A beautiful village with nice swines and the delicious moon cakes that helped me through a lot of the road in China.



Speaking of the road, the northern Tibet-Sichuan road I mentioned before is under construction at the moment and therefore very dusty and muddy (like the rest of China; I read somewhere that China now is comparable to the United States after civil war, end 19th century. It's immense, the amount of human, economic activity. With every turn you take you see people building roads, houses, infrastructure..).

The cabbage was taken off the fields. Glaring green in the bright sunlight.

The man cleaned my bike for free. It somehow feels much lighter to cycle a clean bike, than a filthy one.



And then came the moment I took my friend (that I started calling 'Karl', after the city where it was manufactured, Chemnitz, or Karl Marx Stadt) apart. This afternoon I brought it to the station and tonight it travels ahead of me to Beijing. Again my bike's actually faster than I am.