We are in for one very bumpy ride. This is the realization that Melissa, Ben and I have on our first day of a 123-day cycling expedition along the snarl of tracks that composes the Silk Road in northwestern China. We ride out of the smog-suffocated metropolis of Urumqi into the towering Tian Shan Mountains. Before the day is done, we manage to cover fewer than 30 kilometers, which produces some gnarly saddle sores.
As young wannabe explorers who wish we inhabited a world where maps still bore blank spaces, the three of us have come to China to deliberately lose ourselves along the infamous yet geographically intangible Silk Road.
For four months, we intend to live as nomads while exploring nearly 5,000 kilometers of China’s cracked and broken back roads, retracing an abridged section of the famed Silk Road through the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. And while Marco Polo relied on camels and caravans to get around, we have opted instead for the freedom of two wheels.
On day two, we begin crawling up Tiger Pass, the 4,280-meter summit of a road that switchbacks for mile upon mile through scowling, snow-capped peaks. The temperature plummets with every foot of elevation gained, and soon our faces are masked beneath a frozen slurry of sweat and snot. The wind picks up in proportion to the altitude; it comes with fangs. The pitch of the road steepens, and we spin pedals at a furious cadence to keep ourselves and our 80 pounds each of food, water, camping gear, clothing and spare bike parts moving in slow motion.
Prior to this trip, school and job commitments left us with scant time to train, but we naively figured that the simplest way to get in shape for riding some of the most torturous terrain in Asia was to simply suck it up and ride some of the most torturous terrain in Asia. The three of us are veterans of long-distance cycle tours across North America, and we are gambling on residual fitness from previous adventures. Our training for China consisted entirely of a strict regimen of fattening up in anticipation of a long, lean fast. Those stored calories will serve us well later, but for now, struggling into the Tian Shan Mountains, any excess weight only compounds our pathetic lack of stamina.
If our preparation for this trip was minimal, then Marco Polo took the ad hoc approach to the extreme—not that he had much of a choice. At the age of 17 in the year 1271, our muse Marco fled the familiarity of Italy for distant Asia, where he charmed Kublai Khan into appointing him as a diplomat, a role with duties that involved exploratory missions to far-flung destinations along the Silk Road for the next 24 years. From the Mediterranean Sea to China and across the Middle East, northern India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Xinjiang and parts of Tibet, the Silk Road was a flux of products, people and ideas along a metaphorical stream split with myriad tributaries.
Much in the same spirit, or so we rationalized to our parents, preparing for the Silk Road was impossible, unwarranted and, worse, the very antithesis of adventure. We wanted to experience a hint of how Marco must have felt confronting the unknown Silk Road, with its meanders and dead ends, its high passes and harsh deserts, its ancient villages and booming cities. This means intentionally disorienting ourselves in China’s faraway places and peoples, gulping down thin air for dinner and swallowing sand for dessert, and burning muscle to the bone with our pulses pounding to the rhythm of altitude, adrenaline and life itself along the storied Silk Road…
