This article is the third in a series I’m calling ‘Postcard from Tajikistan’, a lot of which isn’t actually about Tajikistan but is instead about what I was thinking about while we were cycling through it. (Find parts 1 and 2 here and here.) Afghanistan, China, the US, Sri Lanka, etc. This one’s (mostly) about the Belt and Road Initiative, and how it gets misrepresented in the western press.
A Chinese construction company is rebuilding the part of the M41 (aka the Pamir Highway) that runs from Qal’ai Khum to Rushon. Note: there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how to spell the names of all the towns. Some people write Kalaikhum, some write Qal’ai-Khum, etc. Rushon is sometimes written Rûshan (as in the title). It’s a hodgepodge. Here I’m mostly using spellings copied from a Tajik news website, with a few inconsistencies for fun.
The Qal’ai Khum–Rushon road is about 110km long, very winding and quite mountainous, and will ultimately reduce to 90km, because of the construction of two long tunnels. The project also includes a 490m-long avalanche gallery and 15 bridges with a total length of 634m.
Once that’s done, they’ll move on to rebuilding/renovating the road connecting Rushon and Khorog (163km), at an estimated cost of $200m, and the Khorog–Kulma (Chinese border) section (396km), for which $567m has been earmarked.
Obviously the temptation is to condemn news media censorship as typical of an authoritarian government, something that would never happen here, except it did happen here, very recently, when European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called for the censorship of two major news agencies. In February 2022, she announced measures to ‘turn off the tab for […] information manipulation in Europe’ by banning Russia Today and Sputnik, from broadcasting in all of Europe.
And the narrative that China cancelled Sri Lanka’s debt in exchange for control of the Hambantota port is both oversimple and misleading. Still believed by many despite being thoroughly discredited, it was summed up neatly by former US attorney general William P Barr, who claimed that Beijing ‘load[s] poor countries up with debt, refusing to renegotiate terms, and then tak[es] control of the infrastructure itself’.
According to The Atlantic’s research, it was in fact a Canadian company that carried out the initial feasibility study for the Hambantota port project, followed by a Danish company. In 2007, Sri Lanka’s government approached the US and India for help building it, but both countries said no. Eventually, China Harbor won the contract, with China Eximbank agreeing to fund it.
Seven years later, the port was haemorrhaging money, so the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) signed a deal with China Harbor and China Merchants Group to have them continue to develop, and to operate, the port for 35 years. In 2015, when Rajapaksa was beaten at the polls by Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than it did to China.
In 2017, Sri Lanka paid a total of $4.5 billion in debt service. Only 5% of that was because of Hambantota. And when it opted to raise some funds by leasing out the port – which was still underperforming, apparently because the SLPA had ignored planning advice regarding how to run the port in the first place – to an experienced company, it used the $1.12 billion infusion to ‘bolster its foreign reserves’ (per The Atlantic), not to pay off the Chinese bank.
Basically, political and economic turmoil in Sri Lanka meant that American and European creditors wouldn’t go near Hambantota. Then, when Chinese firms picked up the tab, Sri Lanka’s economy imploded, leaving it unable to repay debts to several international creditors, of which China Eximbank was one.
As The Atlantic’s article notes, China’s ‘march outward, like its domestic development, is probing and experimental’. And after constructing the Hambantota port on Sri Lanka’s coast, the companies in question likely learned important lessons about mitigating against the effects of political instability.
And besides, there are a limited number of ways in which a regional (or global) hegemon can involve itself structurally and substantially with the affairs of other sovereign nations. China’s primary approach – i.e., the BRI, which is basically construction projects helmed by Chinese companies, see the video below for British rapper and journalist Akala’s perspective on China-funded developments in Jamaica, in 2018 – China’s approach is undoubtedly less destructive than those of the US and its allies in Europe, which usually involve bombing campaigns, gutting economies, stealing fossil fuels and launching coups d’etat, and this shows in the attitudes of the vast majority of the world towards the two methodologies.
The Vietnamese tourist we met who had been in Afghanistan said that Afghans presumed he was Chinese, and he said he let them believe he was, because they treated him with so much respect for it. Again: they respected him because they thought he was Chinese. Public attitudes towards China in developing countries, research shows, are economy-orientated and positive. On the other hand, in developed countries, people view China through the lens of ideology. This means they’re more susceptible to having their opinions formed by rhetoric (anti-China media narratives and propaganda), as opposed to evidence (bridges successfully built, high-speed railways successfully operating).
Lots of people have a view on China. Some of those views are informed, either by direct experience or investigative research. Others by news outlets that tow governmental lines. We met two Dutch brothers, for example, one of whom said they had worked with Chinese businesspeople and came away from those experiences soured towards the country. Fair enough, I thought. At least it’s based on firsthand experience. But lots of people are critical of China based on headlines they’ve seen in newspapers, online or on TV.
The issue is that mainstream journalists in the West self-censor when it comes to reporting on China and its goings-on. This is self-evident, since almost everything you see or hear from mainstream news outlets in the UK and US is overtly negative towards China. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman explain in Manufacturing Consent, it’s not necessary for news companies to censor by edict. The journalists that make it to the top, to the roles that have editorial impact, only make it there because they self-censor, say the right thing, don’t cross the line. From Chomsky and Herman’s research, it’s clear that this was the case in the US mainstream press in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it’s definitely true to an extent in the UK in 2023. China’s accomplishments are treated with suspicion.
The fact that Chinese people overwhelmingly trust their government is treated as a symptom of brainwashing. When China sends warships into the waters off its own coastline, it is depicted as a military provocation, while the US’ military activity in the waters off China’s coastline is depicted as a defensive measure. China’s crackdown on Islamist extremism in its northwest Xinjiang province, while undoubtedly severe and decisive, was also provoked and arguably necessary, and has been persistently and emphatically characterised as genocidal.
I write this from Xinjiang, where Han Chinese (the country’s ethnic majority) and Uighur people (the Turkic minority) seem live side by side very peaceably; where Uighur language, which has used the Arabic script officially since 1987, is widely visible, on bus stops and shop fronts; and where the bread we’ve been seeing all over Central Asia is widely available. (I edit this from Qingdao, south of Beijing, where we just ate at a restaurant serving Xinjiang cuisine.)
There are a couple of people I follow on X/Twitter who have been consistently really instructive on the issue of western dis- and misinformation, and propaganda, regarding China. One is Kyle (@KyleTrainEmoji). Another is Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand).
So… this is what I was thinking about while we were sitting in the taxi between Qal’ai Khumb and Roshan, or Rushan, as we wended our way between steep rock faces, along the grey-green river, passing Chinese-made Shacman trucks by the dozen. By the time we got to Alichur, the Shacman trucks had disappeared. Things quietened down; the traffic petered out; and the arid, jagged wilds of eastern Tajikistan stretched out on either side of the Pamir Highway.
Alichur is a small town, connected only, via the M41, to Khorog and Murghab. And while it has a certain charm, there certainly isn’t much do there. It has 379 houses and a population of around 1,300, of which 45 are teachers. Before COVID, there were eight homestays. Now there are only three, including Shukrona, where we stayed.
Rahmani, its owner, has lived in the town for 38 years, having been sent here on a one-year teaching contract, by the government, after finishing her studies in Dushanbe. She’s been here ever since and has run the homestay for 16 years. In 2019, a new water pump was installed in the centre of town, reducing the load on the existing one. But hers is the only house in Alichur with electricity, and it gets it by means of an array of solar panels paid for and installed with the help of a foreign charity.
During her nearly four decades here, things have changed, not least with regard to the environment. She found it tough when she first arrived, she tells us, because the hostile winds blew incessantly and it never rained. Now, the local climate has, apparently, calmed somewhat. It rains occasionally, and the wind relents.
The house is heated by burning cakes of cowdung. Fuel is created by taking the cows down to the river, where the grass is relatively plentiful, and harvesting their waste. In this sense it is renewable, but it’s dirty and polluting compared to burning gas or oil. Burning cowdung as fuel is widespread in the world’s poorer regions. In his latest book, Bjorn Lomborg writes that inhaling its fumes can do serious damage to people’s respiratory systems, and that a better organised global response to extreme temperatures would ensure that even the poorest people in the world have access to relatively clean – and still cheap – gas for cooking and heating their homes.
But the global response to extreme temperatures, and climate change at large, isn’t well organised. So Rahmani, and many others in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere, will probably keep collecting and burning dung cakes for the rest of their lives.
To be continued… again again…
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This article follows on from last week’s, titled Postcard from… Tajikistan (to be read first, ideally). There will probably be one or two more in the following days/weeks, about our cycling in Tajikistan and its GBAO region!
…So in order to learn a bit more about the Taliban, I read Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article on the group – ‘The Taliban confront the realities of power’ – published a few months after the US withdrew its troops. He had feet on the ground at a crucial time, and seems to have gleaned more about contemporary Afghan politics than most journalists reporting on it.
Reading the article, a picture began to form in my mind of men joining the Taliban because of the security it affords them and their families. Like joining the military or law enforcement in any other unstable country, being a member of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, or being affiliated with the group more broadly, likely confers some kind of guarantee of status and income in a country otherwise beleaguered by instability and economic uncertainty.
We thought it would be interesting to compare Afghanistan’s Taliban government with the United States’ current Democratic Party administration. Which one has placed more restrictions on the rights of its own citizens, and the lives of others? Which one has done more to promote universal healthcare and social mobility? Which one has used its Security Council veto power to quash more United Nations resolutions? Or, which has dropped more bombs on the civilians and civilian infrastructure of other sovereign nations?
(President Biden was kind enough to restart publication of the Pentagon’s monthly Airpower Summaries after Trump put a halt to them in February 2020. In the first year of his administration, Biden presided over the dropping of 1,178 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Planes to Israel, to help the Israel Defense Forces reduce Gaza, an underdog enclave of mostly innocent people, to rubble, have ‘already taken off’. The United States has also sent aircraft carriers and supporting ships to support Israel – nothing to support Palestine, obviously.)
Most people in the developed West, even those critical of the US, would probably instinctively say that the Biden administration’s domestic policies are less oppressive than those of Afghanistan’s Taliban government. But when it comes to foreign policy, it seems obvious to me that America has the most dangerous track record of any sovereign nation – post-WII, at least.
In the lead up to the 2008 US presidential election, which Obama ended up winning, CBS News anchor Katie Couric asked the ten leading candidates which country frightened them the most. The question was supposed to ‘go beyond politics’. Biden and Clinton said Pakistan. John Edwards said China.
The rest said Iran (North Korea and Russia received honourable mentions), pinning their fears on the ‘zealotry’ of its theologians (Fred Thompson), the fact that it possesses nuclear weapons and the capacity to deploy them (Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama), that it poses a ‘threat to stability’ especially with regard to ‘energy supplies’ (Barack Obama), and that it has a leader who is ‘happy to pull the trigger’ (Mike Huckabee).
John McCain was one of the few to recognise the role the US had played in creating what it regards as a threat to its own security, noting the Iraq war’s knock-on effects in terms of regional (in)stability and intoning, with disarming lucidity, that ‘when bad things happen, bad things happen’.
Of course it’s interesting and it can be eye-opening to raise a mirror to US politicians’ criticisms of other nations and see how their own country stands up. Zealotry, defined as the ‘fanatical or uncompromising pursuit of a set of ideals’, and the ‘intolerance of conflicting beliefs’, is foundational to American political culture, to the extent that one scholar suggests that counterterrorism policies are the best way to respond to certain political trends in the United States.
The only nation ever to deploy a nuclear weapon is the United States, and it did so twice, having playfully nicknamed the bombs Little Boy and Fat Man, ha-ha. Precedent is a marker of potential. America has military personnel stationed literally everywhere, never more than a stone’s throw from the borders of nations from which is claims to fear uprisings.
And regarding threats to energy supplies, in February 2022 Biden threatened to ‘bring an end’ to the Nord Stream gas pipeline so much of Europe relied on for affordable gas, should the Russian Federation invade Ukraine. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reckons America blew it up in order to sustain the United States’ ‘long-standing primacy in Western Europe’. He called it the ‘perfect crime’.
So anyway, this is what I was thinking about while we left behind our view of Afghanistan, and while I flicked through the Instagram photos of the Kurdish man we met in Dushanbe who was, by this point, several days into his tour of the country. Someone else who had cycled through Afghanistan called it a ‘fourth world country’, but based on what I’ve read it doesn’t seem like the Taliban are responsible for this. Before the US’ direct involvement in Afghanistan was the Soviet–Afghan War. Afghanistan has not had an easy time. The first step to helping people get back on their feet is probably to stop bombing them.
Jon Lee Anderson reports on a bunch of quite interesting things apparently going on there. For one, the war on ‘graven images’ that marked the Taliban’s 1990s stint in power has softened markedly, he says. Enforcing such a strict policy is impossible anyway because of the rise of smartphones and social media websites. Senior Taliban leaders told him that the ‘depravity’ and ‘chaos’ that – in their view – characterised the 1990s made it necessary to enforce sharia law during their first era of rule. Now, they claim to be driven by ‘mercy and compassion’.
At the same time, however, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has reportedly closed; the new Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice inhabits its old home. Anderson writes that women employed by the government are ‘being forced to sign in at their jobs and then go home, to create the illusion of equity’. Which is pretty stupid, obviously. But then, the US spent $2 trillion over 18 years on maintaining war in Afghanistan, and killed 43,000 Afghan civilians in the process. So you know, potato potato.
To be continued… again…
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In total, we were in Tajikistan for just under four weeks, and spent most of those days on two wheels: we cycled in from Uzbekistan, in the west; through Panjakent, Ayni and the infamous Istiklol Tunnel (aka ‘Tunnel of Death’); to the capital, Dushanbe, and onwards via the town of Kulob in the south to Qal’ai Khumb; from there we took a shared taxi to Rŭshan, in order to avoid roadworks and mountain blasting led by a Chinese construction company as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative; and then onto the Pamir Highway proper, via Khorog, Alichur, Murghab and Karakul, to Kyrgyzstan. We crossed the border at the Kyzyl Art pass in late September. It was very snowy, and I was sick.
On the way, we passed endless streams of fluorescent orange Shacman trucks wending their way like lemmings through Tajikistan’s deepcut valleys. These trucks ply Tajikistan’s rocky highways day in, day out, and are the life force of its several massive ongoing construction projects. They climb hills with their bonnets open so as to catch the cool air and save, so one presumes, their radiators from self-destruction in the unrelenting heat of the country’s lowlands: landlocked, dust-dry.
Those with faulty brakes have a lifeline. Continuous descents are marked with emergency exits in case of brake failure, although they really are for emergencies only. They’re steep off-ramps something like thirty metres long, leading straight off the road to rubbly dead-ends. Pomegranate trees line the highway, dangling their awkward, bulbous, majestic fruits like forbidden apples over residential fences and enticing drivers and cyclists.
Once you get onto the Pamir Highway proper, i.e. past Khorog and up to 4,000 metres above sea level, most of the traffic dies away. The lion’s share of it is tourist traffic. Jeeps on tours and taxis ferrying overland travellers from one town to the next. Cyclists are almost as common as cars.
Toilets are pits dug deep into the ground, with doorless huts around them. They put out so potent an aroma of ammonia that you feel heady as soon as you squat, and you rush so as to get (it) out quicker. There is shit on the floor around you, and there are scraps of sandpaper-like toilet tissue overflowing from the bucket bin. Tajik toilet paper does not wrap around a cardboard tube, like we’re used to. It does not employ a Labrador Retriever puppy to advertise its softness.
As we cycle past, young children scream at us from the roadside, inviting us into their home before even asking their parents’ permission. The parents are more muted in their enthusiasm, but they seem glad to have us. They know by now that we’ll insist on giving them some somoni – named after the father of the Tajik nation, Ismail Samani – on our way out. Money they’ll obstinately refuse, at least at first, despite it matching a week’s wages. It’s culturally acceptable to insist, so we do.
Young men place their hands on their hearts as we pass, sombrely wishing us well. Boys on mountain bikes wave Tajik flags and accompany us like a royal procession through small mountain villages, shouting, singing and waving, their spoke reflectors flashing in the late morning sunlight. We feel like presidents. The whole town knows we’re here. They’ve given us flags of our own, which we fasten with sellotape to our bike frames.
The longest climbs are made no easier by the fruit sellers insisting we take their melons, each one weighing a kilogram or more, piled high on top of our panniers and racks. But their smiles are infectious. Young guys in their 20s, not long out of military service, delighted for the opportunity to give away their family’s crop. Or else it’s middle-aged women with gold teeth and pattened headscarves, magenta socks and matching sliders, filling our bags from their buckets of apples, grapes, pears. September is the month of plenty.
Between villages and oases of green, however, it’s all rock and water. Plumes of dust and razorsharp blue skies, incongruously fresh asphalt sometimes four lanes wide, laid as if by giants in a single strip, and machine guns. Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan is heavily militarised, although there’s no sign of anything military on the other side. Numerous outposts with single-person sort of pillboxes made out of loose rock cobbled together, sometimes with thick cardboard and wiring holding them fast.
Nearing the Tajik–Afghan border, a thick mist – being the rose-tinted interpretation of what it was, the fog consisting, likely in large part, of mountain dust – enshrouded us in yellow, adding to the feeling that the country on the other side of the grey river was hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Two of the people (one half of a German couple and a Vietnamese man) from our hostel in Dushanbe had arrived from Afghanistan; a third (Kurdish) was on his way there. The melon sellers ask if that’s where we’re headed.
The border recently reopened after four years of closure, meaning the handful of more or less weekly Afghan bazaars that dot the border have started up again. Afghans cross the Pyandzh River via rickety-looking pedestrian bridges that wave side to side with the wind. Sharofat, a zealous, kind and asinine woman who runs a homestay in Khorog, told us it was only the second time the town’s bazaar had taken place since the borders reopened, but having visited it in the morning spoke dismissively of its vendors, saying they were Taliban.
Many of those milling around the stalls also appeared to be Afghan, and we spoke to one who has been a tour operator in the country for 15 years. He told us this was a particularly good year to visit the embattled nation, perhaps because, without the military presence of the US and its allies crawling over its surface, the country has had a chance to reassess and reshuffle. The dust is settling.
But Sharofat’s comments prompted some reflection. What does it mean to be a member of the Taliban? Is it equivalent to being a member of a political party in a Western nation? One instinctively thinks it must involve more than that. But is there an initiation rite, an ideological questionnaire, or is it as simple as signing a name on a dotted line and donning a piece of regalia symbolising membership?
To be continued…
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This article is for anyone planning a round-the-world cycle trip, anyone with a friend currently cycling around the world whose routing decisions they don’t fully understand, or anyone interested in long-distance overland slow-travel, geopolitics and the environment. It’s also a summary of our research and decision-making to date. Since it is written from the point of view of a UK citizen, some of the finer details may not be 100% accurate to you, but with any luck the broader points will still be interesting and useful. It discusses, and in some cases answers, such questions as:
Can you cycle through Afghanistan in 2023?
Is it better for the environment to travel by plane or cruise ship?
Can you apply for a Chinese visa in Central Asia without an LOI?
Why do Brits and Americans not cycle through Iran, while Irish and French cyclists do?
How are overland round-the-world cyclists getting around Azerbaijan’s border closure?
Thankfully the first part of a round-the-world bicycle trip, even in 2023, is easy. Even if your country is reeling from an unwieldy divorce from the mainland, traversing Europe by bicycle involves refreshingly few brain-twisters. You get on your bike and ride to Turkey. 90 days is enough time to get through the EU/Schengen, and decisions are made by and large according to fancy: which pass to take over the Alps; whether to take the Balkan route or travel down the length of Italy and cross to Albania; to Danube or not to Danube; to stick to Eurovelo routes or plow your own furrow, and so on.
Such dilemmas are luxuries. Challenges are surmountable in the moment, and/or with a small amount of cash. For example, the worst Sicilian drivers can be avoided by taking smaller, inland roads (and they can all be avoided by skipping the isle altogether). If a particular mountain pass is closed due to bad weather or simply too tough, you can reroute. If you arrive at a border crossing to find it’s actually a military transit zone, you can usually backtrack and go around. Albanian ATM fees are a pain at €6-8, but if you plan ahead you can halve them, or avoid them altogether. And the notorious, four-lane D100 into Istanbul can be circumnavigated, or endured, one way or another. Once you get past Turkey, however, necessity takes over.
Anyone cycling ‘around the world’ from Europe sort of has to go east. The alternative is to fly somewhere and cycle back, but for many, flying defies the point of travelling by bicycle. Setting off eastwards also means beginning on familiar ground, and getting further from home as you go. Start easy and get harder. Most go through Turkey or cross the Black Sea from Varna, Bulgaria to Poti, Georgia. (There is also a route from Chernomorsk, Ukraine to Batumi, Georgia, which I took in reverse in 2018. But in 2023, this route is inadvisable.) Frosty diplomatic relations between West European nations and the Russian Federation make cycling through Turkey and Georgia favourable. And the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014, only adds to this.
What is the best route to cycle through Turkey?
Which route a given cyclist takes through Turkey depends on what they want to get out of it.
By and large, the Black Sea route is touristy, trafficky, expensive, dull(er) and easy. You’ll find regular swimming spots, but you’ll have to share them. Taking the ferry from Piraeus (Athens) to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast (whether via Chios, Rhodes or elsewhere) and loosely following the Lycean Way will afford some spectacular views, but the D400 that connects Katça, Fethiye, Kaş and Antalya is a fairly busy road. Avoiding it while still hugging the coast means lots of ups and downs.
The third option is to cut inland, for example from Izmir through Denizli (for the travertines of Pamukkale), Konya, Cappadocia (for Göreme and Pigeon Valley), Sivas and Erzerum. There are two reliable border crossing points between Turkey and Georgia, on the Black Sea coast (at Sarp–Sarpi) and in the mountains, between Posof and Vale – this one’s prettier, and more interesting, but harder to reach. The third is further east, not far from Armenia, and may not be open all year, or to all who wish to pass through it.
Those who cut inland or follow Turkey’s Mediterranean coast have the option of continuing southeast into Turkey’s Kurdish-majority regions. There may be as many as 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, and having cycled through North Kurdistan in 2018 myself, I can say it’s an incredibly interesting part of the Anatolian peninsula. Note, however, that many governments advise against all but essential travel in parts of southeastern Turkey. When I was there, the UK government considered it a red zone.
But: I loved it, and had many fascinating conversations, either in German or via Google Translate, with Kurdish men.
Is it best to cycle the ‘northern route’ through Central Asia, or the ‘southern route’ through Iran and Pakistan?
Choosing which path to take through Turkey depends to an extent on which way out of Turkey you want to take. This is the first major fork in the road for round-the-world cyclists.
Mainland Europeans (plus Irish citizens), Australians and New Zealanders can travel independently in Iran, either by obtaining a visa beforehand or, in some cases, on arrival. For citizens of the US, Canada and the UK, however, independent/solo travel is not allowed. The official line is that citizens of these countries require a government-licensed guide with them at all times. In practice, it may not be as strict as all that. But the fact remains.
So if you’re wondering why all the Instagram videos you’re seeing of touring cyclists travelling in Iran don’t feature any Brits or Americans, that’s the reason. It’s not feasible. Iran closed its foreign missions in the US, UK and Canada some time ago, and for its part, the UK reduced its diplomatic relations with Iran to the ‘lowest possible level’ following the 2011 attack on the British Embassy in Iran by Iranian protesters (protesting sanctions the British government had imposed on Iran… over concerns regarding its nuclear program… it’s a long story.).
Of the three countries with which Iran shares its eastern border, Pakistan offers the least resistance to touring cyclists. The other two are Turkmenistan (which we’ll come to later) and Afghanistan, which needs little introduction (but which we’ll also come to later). Anyone who cycles from Pakistan into India and wants to cycle out again has a few obstacles to consider, namely, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. As far as I know, it’s pretty rare for anyone to cycle through any of these, and rarer still for anyone to cycle out the other side, i.e., into Tibet or Myanmar.
Routes are either mountainous or complicated in terms of visas. Bangladesh does, however, have the longest beach in the world, so there’s that.
Cycling the ‘northern route’ into northwest China via ‘the ‘Stans’ and the legendary Pamir Highway
While the so-called ‘southern route’ takes touring cyclists through Iran (making it effectively closed to citizens of the US, UK and Canada) and into Pakistan and India, the ‘northern route’ avoids these countries altogether, and includes a couple of weeks on the famous Pamir Highway.
The Pamir Highway (Soviet road number M41) is famous for being the second highest international highway in the world. Its highest point is the Ak-Baital Pass, at 4,655m (15,270ft). The first highest altitude international highway is the nearby Karakoram Highway, also called the China-Pakistan Friendship Highway, which has a maximum elevation of 4,714m (15,466ft). Both are really high, and the Pamir Highway is something of a bucket list item for many touring cyclists.
Pre-covid-19, the northern route through Central Asia was in many ways headache-free. Visa-wise, for those with powerful passports, entry into Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgzstan is pretty easy. When I cycled to Baku in 2018, I met quite a few cyclists who were continuing eastwards, across the Caspian Sea, by ferry from Alat (south of the capital) to Aktau, in Kazakhstan. They then made their way to Dushanbe, which many see as the beginning of the Pamir Highway, and onwards to Osh and beyond.
Quick note: similar cargo ferries also ran, or run, from Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan (south of Kazakhstan). But Turkmenistan requries a transit visa to enter, and these visas can be very elusive, taking 4-6 weeks to come through. And to make matters worse, transit visas for Turkmenistan (tourist visas being out of the question, apparently) give, or gave, cyclists an arbitrary, and small, number of days to get out of the country – 4, 5 or 6. Bare in mind those are desert kilometres, with unpredictable winds. So Azerbaijan–Kazakhstan was, is, the preferred route for most.
Azerbaijan’s land border has been closed to foreigners since 2020
Thanks to the sharp edges of Eurasian and Central Asian geopolitics, getting to the Pamir Highway in 2023 presents one or two unique challenges.
In 2018, for me as a UK citizen, getting into Azerbaijan required purchasing an evisa in advance and printing it out at a Xerox shop a day or two before arriving at the border. When crossing, my German friend and I were asked if we planned to go to Nagorno-Karabakh. We answered very clearly ‘No’, as doing otherwise would have led them to deny us entry – and, incidentally, been untrue.
Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter supported initially by the Soviet Union, and more recently by Turkey, have been fighting over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1988. But the conflict’s roots go back to the breakup of the Russian Empire in 1918. Most of the people who live there are ethnically Armenian; internationally, it’s recognised as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict flared up in late 2020. There was a ceasefire. Then, in December 2022, Azerbaijan blockaded the region (also called the Republic of Artsakh).
Concurrently, in 2020, Azerbaijan closed all its land borders (with Russia, Georgia and Iran) to prevent the spread of covid-19. It’s kept them shut ever since, and nobody knows exactly why. Officially, it’s a health policy, as it was when they first implemented it. On 23 June, 2023, it was reported that Azerbaijan had extended its ‘special quarantine regime’ until, at the earliest, 2 October, 2023, in order to ‘prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection and its possible consequences’.
A lot of people suspect it has to do with the war in Ukraine. But this explanation only makes so much sense, since Azerbaijan hasn’t closed its air borders, so anyone can still fly in. Meanwhile, at time of writing (13 August, 2023), there are reportedly 12 people currently infected with covid-19 in Azerbaijan. So is it or isn’t it a health policy?
Cyclists’ solutions to Azerbaijan’s land border closure
One option is to fly from Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, to Baku. The flight takes barely an hour, and costs relatively little if booked a week ahead. But for touring cyclists, this means going through the motions of disassembling and packaging a bicycle, probably finding a large carry case for 4 pannier bags, and putting everything back together again on the other side.
The silver lining is that Azerbaijan Airlines’ Free Baggage Allowance includes bicycles; the cloud is that you’ll still have to pay for extra weight… probably. After landing in Baku, cyclists can then cycle south to Alat, go through the potential rigmarole of tracking down the ferry to Kazakhstan, and carry on as normal. This route sticks to the classic northern route, but loyalists can take it even further. I know of one cyclist who cycled from Tbilisi to the border and back, flew to Baku, cycled to Azerbaijan’s border with Georgia, and then carried on to Alat.
Another option is to forget Azerbaijan altogether. In the WhatsApp groups I’m in, there are cyclists who have flown from Tbilisi to Aktau (the next stop after Baku), to Samarkand or Tashkent (in Uzbekistan), and to Dushanbe (in Tajikistan), to the beginning of the Pamir Highway. Because, runs the logic, if you’re going to have to fly anyway, you might as well milk it.
But there is a third option, which doesn’t involve flying. It does, however, involve getting another visa.
Travelling overland from Georgia to Russia in order to reach Kazakhstan without flying over Azerbaijan
Georgia’s border with Russia is traversable at Zemo Larsi, or Verkhnij Lars, between Kazbegi and Vladikavkaz. According to Caravanistan, it’s been open for international travellers post-pandemic and post-Ukraine War. In theory, touring cyclists can put their bikes on a marshrutka or shared taxi at Tbilisi’s Didube bus terminal and be at the border in a few hours. Or, potentially, cycle to the border themselves. But it might be easier to get a transit visa if you can show that there are transport connections all the way through the country.
Note that it has to be a vehicle with Russian (or Armenian) plates. Georgia-Russia relations have been strained for a long time, and collapsed in August 2008 after the Russo-Georgian War. The two nations have maintained zero formal diplomatic relations since.
You can’t walk across the border zone, but you may be able to cycle across it. If not, there’s the option of hitching a ride all the way to Vladikavkaz. Of course, for most touring cyclists, entering Russia requires a visa, and tourist visas for Russia (and China) are notoriously difficult to get outside of one’s home country. But transit visas are relatively straightforward to get hold of.
Because of the diplomatic rift mentioned above, Russia doesn’t have an embassy in Georgia. It closed on 29 August, 2008 when Georgia ordered all Russian diplomats to leave the country. The Russian Federation is therefore represented via the Embassy of Switzerland. Who else could it be? So travelling overland, whether by bus or bicycle (or train, via Abkhazia – which needs a post of its own) from Georgia to Russia, requires a visit to the Russian Federation Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy.
Applying for a Chinese tourist visa in Istanbul, Tbilisi, Tehran, Dushanbe, Kathmandu, Karachi, Yerevan
Kazakhstan borders Russia and China to the east – the distance between Kazakhstan’s easternmost tip and Mongolia’s westernmost is about 50km. Touring cyclists taking the ‘northern route’ therefore have to work out what to do when they drop down from the Pamir Highway and roll into to Almaty.
Those who have started their trip in their (European) homecountry may have been able to obtain their Chinese tourist visas before setting off, but it’s a push. From the date you pick up your Chinese tourist visa, you typically have 3 months to enter China. As a result, many find themselves wanting to apply on the road.
The complication here is that it’s much easier to get a tourist visa for China (or any country requiring one) in the applicant’s home country. You can do it in a third country, but you might need a Letter Of Invitation (LOI), or to provide more supporting documents than you otherwise would.
Based on the accounts of touring cyclists in 2023, it’s possible to apply for and receive visas to enter China as a tourist in: Tbilisi, Georgia as a nonresident and without a letter of invitation; Tehran, Iran but there is a long queue for appointments (like, a month long), since Iranians don’t have many options for where to spend their holidays; Istanbul only if you’re Turkish, since the city has a visa servicecentre rather than an embassy proper; Yerevan, Armenia, without too much difficulty; Kathmandu, Nepal, but it might take a long time, and the officials there might not like seeing Turkish stamps in your passport; and/or Dushanbe, Tajikistan only if you can prove you have a right to remain in Tajikistan for six months (i.e., a residency permit), or if you have an LOI.
Tour companies provide LOIs, as do employers; work and study visas require them, while tourist visas tend not to. But like I said, applying for a tourist visa is harder outside your home country. It needs more stuff. You might need to book hotels and/or train and bus connections (or even flights, in some cases), print relevant timetables and/or write a declaration vis-à-vis your desire to travel, or even enter and exit the country, by bicycle.
How unsafe is it to cycle as a tourist in Afghanistan in 2023?
This isn’t really a question I’m qualified to answer. But I can say that there are touring cyclists considering it, and it’s certainly an interesting one.
Someone in a WhatsApp group I’m in said they’d talked with someone who recently crossed from Iran to Afghanistan and then onwards into Tajikistan. They apparently described it as a ‘4th world country’ with frequent Taliban checkpoints; advised learning basic Farsi and wearing local clothes so as not to stand out; and warned of landmines. It’s a ‘rough thing’, apparently, and risky. Which is obvious, but hearing it from someone who had actually been there was interesting for me.
Someone else said they had met an Afghan man who said it’s actually ‘pretty safe’ for travelling: you go through the checkpoints, withhold questions about the political situation, and that’s it. The Taliban will protect you, the man apparently said.
A cyclist who was planning on entering Afghanistan by bicycle said they planned to ‘uglify’ their bike, forget camping (to avoid landmines), and learn some Farsi. The regions controlled by the Taliban, they reckoned, should be ‘somewhat safe’ in terms of terrorism and kidnapping. It may be true that the Taliban are more likely to want to protect you (from IS, or whoever else) than harm you.
But please don’t feel encouraged by this to take the plunge. I’m as keen to travel ‘off the beaten track’ as the next person, but there comes a point where the risk outweighs the reward. Now, let’s head off on an easterly detour!
Ferry connections between China, South Korea and Japan
Again, we’ve covid to thank for potential hitches in this plan, but as far as we can tell it is possible to travel between China, South Korea and Japan by boat. Ferries leave Qinhuangdao, which is a few hours’ train ride from Beijing, for Incheon, on the Korean coast, twice a week. There are ferry routes connecting Busan, South Korea with Fukuoka, Shimonoseki, Osaka and Tsushima Island, all of which are in Japan. And connecting Osaka and Kobe, Japan with Shanghai, China.
1. Busan – Fukuoka (Hakata Port) (3 hours, JR Beetle, 2 or 3 per day; also once per day on Miraejet’s Kobee hydrofoil, 3.5 hours) 2. Busan – Fukuoka (Hakata Port) (6 or 12 hours, Camellia Line, daily) 3. Busan – Shimonoseki (12 hours overnight, Kampu Ferry, daily) 4. Busan – Osaka (18 hours overnight, Panstar Cruise, 3 per week each way) 5. Busan – Tsushima Island (1-3 hours, multiple times daily with JR Beetle, Miraejet Kobee, and Daea Express Ocean Flower)
They warn, however, that the relevant companies ceased operations because of the covid-19 pandemic. While they have been reintroducing services, travel frequency might not yet have reached pre-pandemic levels.
But if they’re running, and if we (or you) can get a double entry tourist visa for China, then planning a round-the-world cycle trip that takes in the Republic of Korea and Japan – without flying – is actually feasible. It may involve some hefty train journeys across China in order to make it out in time to comply with visa limits, but as far as I know trains in China accept bicycles without too much hassle.
Are cruise ships a feasible means of transport for touring cyclists hoping to avoid flying?
Yes and no. Yes, cruises are the only bookable boats ferrying passengers on certain elusive routes, such as SE Asia to Australia or Australia to New Zealand, or even across the Pacific. No, cruise ships are not better for the environment than aeroplanes, as a means of transport. Not objectively, anyway, although there are certain nuances to consider, and advantages with regard to experience.
Many travellers – hitchhikers as well as cyclists – hoping to avoid flying consider hitching rides on cargo vessels. But unfortunately, almost everything I’ve read about this option agrees that what once may have been a semi-viable alternative to flying is, in a post-covid world, basically impossible.
A cargo ship’s cargo is likely worth many millions of US dollars, so there’s no financial incentive to welcoming paying customers – a midsize ship pays half a million dollars to pass through the Suez Canal, so anything you can offer is like water off a duck’s back. And cargo doesn’t present a medical risk, whereas you certainly do: travel insurance doesn’t, or may not, include cover in international waters. Furthermore, there are so many rules and regulations stipulating what you can do and where/when you can do it on a cargo vessel that it’s apparently not worth anybody’s timing effectively training passengers for a few weeks at sea. Torbjørn C Pedersen, aka Once Upon A Saga, put it this way: an office manager wouldn’t let you sleep in their office for a month, so why should a ship’s captain? There’s no incentive, and a lot of conceivable risk.
Meanwhile, the advent and popularisation of air travel has rendered many ferry routes obsolete. People would rather fly, since it’s far quicker and often cheaper. There are no passenger boats connecting India and Sri Lanka, for example, despite the shortest distance between the two nations – the Palk Strait – being less than 55km. (Dover to Calais is about 42km.) Nor can you get from Indonesia (or anywhere in Southeast Asia) to Australia by ferry – the population centres are too far apart; from Russia to Alaska (geopolitics plays a role here); or from Australia to New Zealand (because, again, they’re further apart than you think).
Gone are the days, if you ever could, of taking a ferry across the Atlantic Ocean, or across the Pacific. So when it occurred to us that cruise ships ply these waters, that in some cases people travel on them from A to B on them, and that we probably wouldn’t have to disassemble the bikes at all to stow them on board, we had to find out if we could, with a clean conscience, book a cruise in order to avoid a flight.
There are cruise ship routes connecting Singapore with Australia’s east coast, and Australia with Japan, and Japan with Alaska, and the Caribbean with Europe. In other words, if the only imperative is to avoid flying at all costs, you can circumnavigate the globe as a cyclist/hitchhiker – and paying customer – without taking any flights, as long as you’ve got a passport that allows you to. However, if your reason for avoiding flying is to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, or emissions of other chemicals harmful to the environment, then cruising is not a viable alternative to flying. Why?
Why taking a cruise is not the eco-friendly panpharmacon you dreamt it might be
It’s hard to overstate the amount of pollutants cruise ships are responsible for. While there may be exceptions, many still burn fuel oil, which contains 2,000 times as much sulphur dioxide (SOx) as diesel. They often run their engines while moored to avoid paying shore-side taxes, causing them to produce high levels of nitrogen oxide within shouting distance of pedestrianised harbours. Some ships use ‘open loop scrubbers’ to ‘clean’ the cheap, dirty fuel they use, which discharge the pollutant waste (the muck they scrubbed off the fuel) straight into the ocean.
In 2017, Carnival Corporation, the world’s biggest cruise operator, oversaw the emission of more SOx around Europe’s coasts than all of Europe’s cars… multiplied… by ten.
Friends Of The Earth have been producing Cruise Ship Report Cards regularly since 2009. In 2022, they graded 18 cruise lines, and 213 individual ships, on sewage treatment, air pollution reduction and water quality compliance, from A to F. See for yourself, there are a lot more Fs than As. The latest report, says the organisation, takes a ‘continued hard look’ at the cruise industry ‘to see if clean cruising is possible’. In most cases, it concludes, the answer is ‘still a resounding NO!’
So after much humming and hawing, we decided that we couldn’t take all the cruises we’d dreamt, briefly, of taking. And any final decision on individual routes will depend on the rating Friends Of The Earth have given that particular vessel.
The takeaway: You can get around the whole world by bicycle, bus, train and boat
But only if you have enough money for one or more cruises – the cheaper ones aren’t actually that much more than flight tickets – and time enough to wait for them, since each route tends to run once a year, or possibly twice.
And you might not want to anyway, since travelling on a cruise ship is two or three times worse for the environment than flying, even if you include a hotel stay for the duration of the cruise in your calculations.
Depending on skill-set, it might also be possible to lend a hand on a private yacht in exchange for a ticket. We haven’t actually tried this yet, although preliminary research has yielded potentially promising results. I will write more when we know more!
If you have any questions about any of this, or corrections, please feel free to let me know in the comments. I hope this is of use and/or interest. Thanks for reading.
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Said there’d been an error, that my name had been missed off a list If I hurried, and conducted myself properly, I could enter the appropriate Google Meet at the appointed time. Surprise those who were expecting only a specific number of attendees – one fewer than my presence would make. Splash in with a funky background, I thought, in my delirium: running horses or a carefully selected nebula. (It would have to be the Pillars of Creation.) I woke up hopeful, checked my phone. WhatsApp, email, Viber. Nothing. Only the apps I’d wasted my evening on, dreaming of an uninevitable future that in the cold light of day was receding from my outstretched hands. The question became whether or not I should contact the professor. It’s a fine balance, in life, between letting others know how desperate you are and maintaining a veneer of professionalism. I dropped mine. ‘Professor, I’m delirious with–’ No. ‘Professor, in my delirium, I–’ Drop the delirium. Write the email. Sehr geehrte Frau That’s it. Carry on. Get to the point, and don’t use the D-word. Desperation, Delirium, inDebtedness. I would be indebted to you, Frau Lehrer, if you would only give me this chance. I Dreamt it. Let it be.
They took you in – Murphys, Egans – to delight in Earthly pleasures: years turned, too good to go. And a surprise proposal forgone, alas, by the man answering Nature’s call.
One person reminded you of another, cut from similar cloth, grown in like soil, both a Portuguese wine. After three nights of it, your voice went. Broken seismometer, worse than bad signal.
They don’t have plastic forks on trains anymore, nor even wooden ones, covid-19, although the cafe was shut anyway. Just those wooden coffee stirrers, no good with M&S pasta, leaving you with feta on your fingers and formulating a response along the lines of ‘yes, well, you eat crisps with your fingers, don’t you?’
We are currently in: Cambodia (Laura) and Thailand (Bruno).
Next stop: Thailand (for Laura) and Cambodia (for Bruno).
Route so far: See below (incomplete…).
[EDIT 27/02/24] If you’re wondering why we’re not updating our On Our Bicycles Instagram feed, it’s because we’re taking a hiatus from that and will return to it in due course! In the meantime, I’ve taken it upon myself to upload more of my creative work on this website, produce my first ever poetry zines, and keep onourbicycles.com going with some general cycling guides/what-have-you. The cycling guides probably aren’t all that relevant to many of this site’s readers, but the Photo Gallery section contains bounties innumerable. Well, technically I suppose they are numerable. Lots of love! x
[EDIT 14/11/23] Sorry all, it’s been a WHILE since I updated this. I’ll give this all a revamp in December, but for now (14 Nov ’23), we are returning to China after three weeks (ish) spent in South Korea. We’ll spend a month in the PRC and then enter Vietnam in the middle of December and spend Christmas and New Year there. WordPress is difficult to access in China and we can’t use a VPN on our laptop because it’s too old! So check in at our @onourbicycles Instagram page for more updates in the meantime. P&L. x
If you subscribe (three dots), you’ll get an email when I post something new. This will not be daily. If you’d like to know more about my writing about poetry, click on The Frip, above. For details of the novel I self-published in 2019, it’s Reveries. If, by Jove, you like what you read and would like to support Laura and me on our jaunt, the Donate form is below. Below that is a rough itinerary I put together in February, when things were just starting to take shape. Already, parts of it have changed. Such is life on this green earth.
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April to June 2023 – setting off from France and cycling to Greece
Like I did in 2018, when I cycled to Azerbaijan and some of the way back, I will set off from my family’s home in the south of France with the late spring sun lighting the way. Leaving before summer is ideal for lots of reasons. One of them is that, if there’s a chilly day or two early on, you know you’ll soon be leaving them behind. And seeing summer stretch out for months ahead is a pleasant thing.
I want to see the Gorges du Tarn and the palaeolithic cave paintings at Chauvet – because that’s what I’m into now – and stretch my legs in the Alps rather than go along the coast, so I will cycle roughly due east until I get to Genoa, where I will eat fruit cake.
Then it’s time for the islands of the Mediterranean: ferry to Corsica and cycle across it*; ferry to Sardinia and cycle across it; ferry to Sicily and cycle across it. I would also like to visit Malta and see, among other things, Ġgantija. Then I’ll return to Sicily, cross to mainland Italy, cycle up the foot bit of the boot towards the top of the heel, and cross (like I did last time, except then I had come down from northern Italy overland) from Bari to Durrës, in Albania. Or from Bari to Corfu and then Sarandë, but I like Tirana, so I’d like to pass through it again.
On the way to Athens, I want to go through Pindos National Park, see the Great Meteoron Holy Monastery of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, eat literally bucketloads of feta and olives, and maybe, if I can, have a one-to-one with Zeus himself. I’m aiming to arrive in Athens about a week before my birthday (which is 28 June).
*Google Maps automatically defaults to the ferry route from Piombino (Italy mainland, as in the picture below) to Bastia (Corsica) or Nice (France mainland) to Bastia, rather than from Genoa, but as far as I understand there is a ferry from Genoa.
July and August 2023 – cycling from western Turkey to Baku, Azerbaijan
From Athens, Laura and I will take the ferry to İzmir, a lovely coastal city about half way down western Turkey. We’ll cycle across the country, west to east, stopping at Cappadocia, Mount Nemrut, Göbekli Tepe, Mount Ararat (where people think, or used to think, Noah’s Ark may have come to rest. It probably didn’t.) and Kars. Some of this is me retracing my steps from 2018 but these places are unbelievably cool and I want to show Laura.
Besides, the other option is what people call the Black Sea route – because it’s a route that goes along the coast of the Black Sea – but the cyclists I met who did that in 2018 or before said it was relatively dull. Quicker and maybe easier, but less awesome.
There are three crossing points connecting Turkey and Georgia. One is on the Black Sea coast. That’s the one people cycling the Black Sea route take. The one furthest to the east, which at first glance seems like the logical one to take when coming from Mt Ararat in Turkey’s far east, is not always passable. When I crossed in 2018, I was advised not to try it. So probably, to be safe, we’ll take the one in the middle. Then we’ll freewheel down from the Caucasus Mountains and glide over Georgia’s lush green alpine planes, to Tbilisi, one of the best cities in the world.
Cycling from Tbilisi to Baku, we’ll probably meet a few other round-the-world cyclists. At least, I did in 2018. There’s a sort of bottleneck – similar to the one that shunts drivers and cyclists together on the big road that enters Istanbul (not that we’ll experience it this time, since we’re taking the ferry from Greece to Turkey rather than cycling overland).
And if we don’t meet them on the road to Baku, we’ll almost certainly meet them in or around Baku, because of the way the boats run across the Caspian Sea.
August, September and October 2023 – Caspian Sea, Central Asia and the Pamir Highway
Ferries cross the Caspian Sea from the port of Alat (on the coast of Azerbaijan, about 75km south of Baku) to Aktau (in Kazakhstan) and Turkmenbashi (in Turkmenistan). As in, there are two routes, one to each. They don’t have fixed timetables, and by all accounts leave when they fill up, which could be anything from a few times a week to once every two weeks.
Getting a transit visa for Turkmenistan is time-consuming at best – they say it can take weeks. It’s a relatively closed-off country, and the cyclists I met in 2018 were having headaches waiting for their Turkmenistan visas while stationed in Tbilisi, which then only gave them four or five days, depending on how generous the authorities were feeling on the day, to cross the desert into Uzbekistan. Now I think you can get five or seven days.
(They were also waiting for their China visas, which is a whole separate headache.)
Going to Turkmenistan would mean potentially being able to see the Darvaza gas crater, also called the Door to Hell. It’s a giant hole in the ground that’s been burning continuously for decades. But the country’s leader Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow, who is the father of the country’s other leader Serdar Gurbangulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow, announced in early 2022 that they were going to seal it up, or otherwise stop it from burning. So, there goes that dream.
So anyway, crossing to Kazakhstan makes more sense. Both options involve a lot of cycling through the desert; Kazakhstan lets you take your time doing it. UK citizens get visa-free entry to Kazakhstan for 30 days. It’s the same for Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are also relatively lenient. So what we’ll do is buy tickets for the Alat to Aktau ferry, get to the port and hop aboard. Some days later, we will roll into the Kazakh desert, and cycle to Uzbekistan and then Tajikistan.
From Dushanbe, we will snake our way onto the Pamir Highway, through Kulob, Kalai Khum, Rushan, Khorog, Langar, Murghab, Karakul and Tulparkul before arriving in Osh. The thing here will be to get up and over the highlands before the cold really sets in. The highest point on the Pamir Highway is at 4,655m. So, very high. This means it gets very cold. So, the quicker we can get onto it, the better.
The China Visa Headache
From Osh, we’ll wend our way through Bishkek and back into Kazakhstan, where our Central Asian odyssey will come to an end. This is because of the logistical challenge of obtaining a tourist visa for China while on the road. It used to be possible – though not guaranteed – to get them in Tbilisi. Depending on where you’re from, it might also, in the past, have been possible to get one in Bishkek, Tashkent or Dushanbe. But for UK citizens, based on information that’s available online (mostly from the Caravanistan China visa forum), the only way is to apply in person in the UK, and to do so with in-bound and out-bound flights purchased.
Also, they’re only valid for three months from the point of obtainment. As in, you have a 90-day window during which you can enter the country. As I’ll be setting off from France and Laura will be setting off from Greece (she’ll arrive by air from the Philippines), this would mean returning to the UK (probably from Georgia) and paying for express processing. The whole thing would cost us more than £1,000 and bring with it the psychological weirdness of coming sort-of-home (but not having any time to see anyone) having barely started The Trip. And we mightn’t even get the visas, on time or at all.
We’ll try our luck in Tbilisi, but the upshot is basically that we’ll most likely fly over China, from Almaty (Kazakhstan) to Hanoi (Vietnam). Out of the desert and into the tropics. Thankfully – really, it is something we appreciate – the China Visa Headache is the only one of its kind. The route has been planned so as to avoid headaches, and as UK citizens we can (still) come and go from most places quite freely.
November 2023 to April 2024 – Southeast Asia
Up to this point, there have been imperatives driving route planning. We have to go from Turkey to Georgia to Azerbaijan, because Armenia doesn’t allow people to cross into it from Turkey (or to Azerbaijan from it). We have to go through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan because (as UK citizens) we can’t go (independently) through Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. We can’t (or at least probably won’t) go through China because of the China Visa Headache.
This part of The Trip is where imperatives relax. And besides, planning it is really Laura’s job, since she’s more familiar with the lay of the land in Southeast Asia.
But there are places I’d like to go, things I’d like to see and do. These include walking around Angkor Wat, cycling along the Vietnamese coast, visiting Gunung Padang, and seeing Komodo dragons. We’d both like to go to Laos, and stomp around Laura’s old stomping ground in and around Siem Reap. If possible, we’d also like to take a boat to Borneo, see friends who will by then be living in Kota Kinabalu, and get a picture of me standing next to a Welcome To Brunei sign while covering up the last two letters with my head. That sort of thing. We’ll see.
Note: for anyone who is toying with the idea of coming out for some adventuring, this leg presents such an opportunity. We will need some recuperation time after the Pamir Highway, and will otherwise be meandering flexibly here, stopping relaxedly there. Just beam the outline of a bicycle into the sky and we’ll be in touch. (Not really. You have to get in touch with us.)
April 2024 for several months – Arbeit in Australia and/or New Zealand
As with Turkey, our route across Australia will basically be west to east. Around Perth is where you find quokkas, which is one reason we’re planning to start there. Unfortunately, there aren’t any viable options for travelling from Southeast Asia to Australia by boat, although we might try our luck at various ports. Investigating options with our noses. There are cargo ships that theoretically allow foot passengers, but they take a long time, they seem to be quite unpredictable, and they are very expensive. They’re not really supposed to take anything that isn’t cargo.
Australia is also home to the longest straight road in the world. It’s 90 miles long and, to someone like me, that’s sort of exciting. We’ll cycle along or close to the coast, skirting round the edge of the arid outback until we pass Adelaide and trundle into Melbourne, where Laura’s brother lives. Out to the east of Melbourne are some highlands and the 7 Peaks – Mt Baw Baw, Mt Buffalo, Mt Buller, Dinner Plain, Falls Creek, Hotham and Lake Mountain – which I’d like to ride up and around.
Maybe it makes sense to go up the east coast and see Sydney, and possibly even the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Or we could take the boat across to Tasmania and back and do some Looney Tunes reenactments. Either way, what comes next is a visit to New Zealand to see two friends who live there now, and possibly do some Lord of the Rings reenactments.
There are direct flights from Auckland (New Zealand’s biggest transport hub) to Santiago (Chile’s capital). When it comes to putting bicycles on planes, direct flights are always better. Fewer stopovers means less chance of luggage getting thrown around, forks bent and frames dinked, etc., and of getting stung with an oversized baggage fee at check-in.
So what I think we might do is fly to Queenstown, New Zealand, cycle south to Dunedin and then, after a week or two, cycle up to Picton. This could be north/west coast, or south/east coast. North/west looks more interesting. More mountains and glaciers. Ferries connect Picton and Wellington, and Auckland is just a few hundred kilometres north of Wellington. Then it’s bye-bye Oceania and hello Pacific.
November 2024 ish onwards – Argentina to Colombia
It’s impossible to know exactly how long we’ll spend cycling from Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego (the southernmost tip of Argentina/Patagonia) to Turbo, on the northern coast of Colombia. Turbo is where we’ll hopefully get a boat to take us around the Darién Gap.
Starting right down at the bottom, it might be 12,000km. It could easily work out being significantly more. And there will be glaciers, deserts, serpentine mountain passes and stretches of gravel. Some people say it took them a year, others say they spent 18 months cycling from tip to tip. In terms of raw kilometres, it should be doable in eight months, but we’ll see where the wind takes us.
Which, by the way, is one of the reasons we’re going south to north for this part of the trip. It seems counterintuitive, since that means it’s technically all up hill, but the prevailing winds are more likely to be with us travelling in this direction than they otherwise would be. It’s so windy in Patagonia that this apparently counteracts the uphill climbs. We’ll take every gust we can get.
This part of the trip will include some real spectacles: the glacial lakes of Patagonia; La Paz and Puma Punku; Cusco, Saqsaywaman, Pisac, and Machu Picchu; the Nazca Lines and the Sarcofagos de Karajia; and the Parque Nacional Natural Chingaza that overlooks Bogotá.
*
We might get out of South America by Christmas 2024, but it remains to be seen. The thing is, because of the way Earth orbits the sun, the knock-on effect of taking longer in South America could put us back a whole year.
Setting off from Ushuaia in March 2024 means cycling from Very Far South during the southern hemisphere’s autumn. Tierra del Fuego will already be coming out of its mild summer and moving towards real cold. As we travel north, it will get warmer for two reasons: the beginning of summer and our proximity to the equator.
It follows that the best time to arrive in Alaska is in the northern hemisphere’s summer. So, if we get to the top of South America by the end of 2024, that leaves us with eight(ish) months until the end of the Alaskan summer. In other words, it might make sense to keep going without pausing for a cup of tea, because otherwise the mild Alaskan summer will be over by the time we get there.
If, on the other hand, it takes us longer to travel the length of South America and we end up in Colombia in, say, the first few months of 2025, then it might make more sense to hang tight there until the end of 2025 – find work, volunteer – so as to avoid travelling north as the northern reaches of North America enter winter. Winter is always coming. Unless you live in the Philippines. Or I guess Central America.
202_ – Central America to Alaska
The same goes for Northern America. The route I’d like to take goes via the Yucatán Peninsula and Tabasco, through New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, Navajo Nation, Moab, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone National Park and the Rockies, Kootenai National Forest, Washington State’s scablands, and Yukon.
In other words, lots of cool stuff. Maybe we’ll be sailing past it all, at pace, in 2025. But there’s always the possibility that things change by the time we’re on the continent and/or we’ve taken an eight-month breather in Costa Rica. If so, that’s another great time to visit. 😉
That’s all for now. I hope this was informative and/or interesting. Life is a moveable feast, so check in here or, hell, with us directly for more up to date info on how we’re getting on. I will be posting stuff here as we go, and we’ve set up a joint Instagram account with a really clever name that will be publicly viewable – meaning you don’t have to have an Instagram account to see the content on it – so stay tuned for that. Lots of love to all of you who got this far. X
Soul Train night had already started by the time we arrived at the campsite, a few kilometres outside of Fethiye, and the warden made it very clear that we were not invited. ‘This English party,’ he told us. ‘English only.’ ‘Oh,’ we said, laughing for a moment. ‘But we are English!’ Nevertheless, we were instructed to watch from the sidelines, if at all. So we set up our tent and settled in.
After they had finished their set the performers, too, retreated to the wings. DJ Bubbles took over, and a sea of middle-aged, middle income Eng-ur-landers took to, and murdered, the dance floor. Moving to the lyrics, not the beat, white folks getting down to Black music. And, curiously, the band themselves put elbows and knees to work only much later, when the Bee Jees were playing, or Average White Band, or Dusty.
We started thinking cynically about what it might be like to be the only Black people at a Black music event – the band was from South Africa – and to be the entertainment and see all the old folks dancing in their particular, peculiar, unbearably white British way.
Shirtless lads were stalking girls, encircling them without actually making eye contact until, oh yes, one of them looked and the girl looked back and suddenly they were twirling each other in a bizarre performance of Ironically Pretending To Flirt and in so doing were really engaging in that most modern form of courtship.
Terry, part troll, had unwittingly built up a substantial live following with his devout hips and incongruously girthy legs. Like tree trunks swaying in a breeze. 40 years young and feeling reborn, a telecoms marketer and would-be stock broker, he had corralled some of his fellow boogiers into a corner and was demonstrating the Funky Chicken and Mashed Potato, knowing corporeally if not consciously that above all, white people – in a general sense – need a formula in order to move to music. Dancing doesn’t come easy, until it does. Alcohol runs in our veins.
In the thick of it Suzanne, real name Susan, was busy curling her body into shapes the kind of which her workmates in Woking wouldn’t even dare dream. A dervish or whirligig losing items of clothing by the minute.
Dangerously close, and more than a little aroused, was Simon, a competitive long distance runner in his youth who by his early 30s had become obsessed with designing weapons for his perpetually embryonic MMORPG, Guild Of Wizards, which was as much a way of putting all his erotic fantasies in one place as it was an earnest attempt at making a video game. He’s in IT, in real life.
But in the here and now he was Lord of the Dance. He flailed his arms in wild satisfaction, sending vast arcs into the (little) space around him, sine and cosine waves emanating violently from his fists. If only his father could see him now. That would show him. You see me, father? he was thinking. You see the multitudes I contain?
It was around this time that the foam cannon made its entrance, a massive thing dutifully trundled out by a couple of stagehands already tired – just two weeks into the season – of cleaning up after these monumental exhibitions of Britishness. Was this really the same culture that produced Downton Abbey, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters? Eric Blair and Nigella Lawson? Yes.
As soon as they engaged the motor, relentless torrents of froth burst from its deep black nozzle. Suds flew forth and multiplied in the warm midnight air, showering the pink-faced revellers with its feather-light ooze. We entered the fray, here, confident we could blend in and evade capture by the warden (we hadn’t been officially granted entrance, even though we were technically eligible, on account of our passports; the warden was a fierce man with no teeth).
The beat thrummed on: it was ‘Rhythm Of The Night’, and we were moving to it, letting it guide us, sliding out feet through and between Alrights and Oh yeahs, but within seconds we felt hands on our sides, fingers grasping our wrists. Two passerine ladies, twin sisters, Leanne and Lorna, wanted very much for us to join them in the epicentre of the action, and wouldn’t take no for an answer – didn’t even ask – where the dividing line between foam, friend and foe had broken down so completely that one was indistinguishable from the others.
Elbows in our ribs. We were hauled, and travelled inwards. Boots, staggering; turbans made crassly of bubbles; foam chefs’ hats and fezzes adorning the drunkest people on Earth. The madness shook us with its noise, Dexy’s Midnight Runners yelling come on Eileen and a woman actually called Eileen ripping her red blouse asunder, men called Tony and Gary and possibly Carl instinctively funneling suds onto her bare breasts with expressions unlike I’d ever seen, sombre somehow, but also hysterical and wide-eyed.
Somebody was yelling into my ear, “‘Girl I Wanna Make You Sweat’ is a very good song, a very good song,” and we were both agreeing, nodding our heads uncontrollably in time with the beat. We were being swept along. The maddening train was pumping out black smoke and people were falling over, only to be replaced by others, soap-saturated, from the flanks, each drunker than the last, many of them gargling and piss-wet.
Someone popped a bottle of cheap bubbly – the sound alone was enough to cause ripples in the crowd – and was furiously shaking it in time with doo raa doo raaii yaaaay while its off-yellow fizz exploded into the sky and mingled with the foam that rained endlessly from above.
When it was empty, the man wielding the bottle – his name was probably Ronald – looked up for a second. He cast his gaze like a fishing line into the surrounding mêlée but didn’t establish eye contact with anyone, which was a pity as it might’ve sobered him up just enough to prevent what happened next.
Ronald, mouse-brown hair thinning on top, pupils wide as saucepans, lobbed that bottle high. It soared heavenwards, and he forgot it existed. Having reached the apex of its curve, however, and very much still in existence, the bottle began to fall. Second by second it picked up speed, so that when at last it landed just west of the crown of DJ Bubbles, who had been faithfully providing sonic intoxication and was in fact nearing the end of her final set, it was travelling fast enough to knock her immediately unconscious, and draw considerable amounts of blood.
She keeled over and fell, backwards off the wooden platform erected earlier that day by two stagehands, onto the cool green grass. It beckoned her and saved her. She sighed silently and slept for a good while.
Meanwhile, mayhem. Terry had taken off his trousers and was waving them like a windmill in the air, sending soapsuds flying. Leanne and Lorna were beating the shit out of Ronald for maiming the disc jockey and thereby terminating the evening early – although fortunately, or unfortunately, she’d already made the transition from ‘Come On Eileen’ to Blue Boy’s ‘Remember Me’, 7-inch edit, giving the candle 3 minutes and 49 seconds more in which to burn burn burn.
It had taken just one of those for Simon and Suzanne to lock eyes, dive surreptitiously under the thigh-high blanket of bubbles, and commence foreplay. 60 seconds later, half the congregation had passed out on the floor and were completely concealed under the foam. By the time Marlena Shaw was getting to her second or third round of ging-gi-gi-gi-gi-ging-gi-gi-gings, we had slipped out from underneath that salty, slimy tarpaulin and into the safety of the sea, to wash off the evidence.
I don’t know what happened to the stagehands after that. They wheeled their cannon away and were never seen again, as far as I can tell. The band took DJ Bubbles away on a makeshift stretcher and sang to her until she came to. She couldn’t remember anything from the night’s proceedings, which is probably for the best. We slept fitfully, waking whenever one of the cleaners slipped over on the bubble-soaked ground and flung curses at the warden.
By 8 o’clock in the morning it was 35 degrees. Cerberus was biting our ankles. We decided to get up before dawn the following day and set off as early as possible so as to beat the heat. The rest of the morning we lay in the shade, trying to keep cool and hoping for a good night’s sleep before our early start.
Then, at around noon, it occurred to us that they had only gone so far in dismantling the stage and seating areas, and we realised what was going on. They were setting up for another party. Our hearts were ready to sink. But there was something different about this one, and as it dawned on us, we breathed huge sighs of relief. This one was to be a Turkish party. Much better. And we were going to be able to get some sleep!
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Fatma gathers her strength. She points with pride at the fruits of her labour: üzüm, elma, şeftali; and sighs, long-eyed, when I ask her about her çoçuk, her children. Her husband, too, is gone – she points at the sky, mimes sleeping; we understand the word Allāh and join the dots.
When the nearby mosque transmits its call her eyes well up. Saltwater rises from the deep to fill the lines that extend around her cheeks. Her creases and wrinkles multiply when she urges us to eat more biscuits, to put some skin on our bones, and deepen when she sees the rings on our fingers.
Fatma’s large bare feet stick out from under her skirts. More çay, more çay, she insists, and we accept, dropping cubes of white sugar into filled glasses. But we feel ourselves running out of things we can talk about with gestures, grins and, at most, a few dozen common words.
Scraps of tealeaf drift whirlpools of stirred tea. A silence descends. Sunlight, beamed through grapevine, mottles on the brickwork patio. We gather our strength, say and smile goodbye, walk under greenbright arches and cycle back into noonday heat.
It’s a big update: Laura and I are in Athens, preparing to set sail for Rhodes (last minute change of plan – the best kind), [EDIT: that ship has now sailed. We’re in Fethiye.] where we’ll stay a night before stepping aboard our connection to Fethiye, on the Turkish coast. But first a few words on Greece, and all the revelry I, and we, enjoyed here.
I sailed overnight from Brindisi to Vlorë (Albania) – this, too, was a last minute change of plan. On the boat, from a distance, I espied one other “traveller” (in a sea of tourists) out on deck, but I didn’t see their face and they didn’t see mine. The road from Vlorë to Himarë, also in Albania, starts out easy: coastal flats, pebbly beaches, men advanced in years sunning their voluptuous bellies, inviting waters clear as crystal, and thousands upon thousands of loungers making the larger beaches seem conspicuously empty.
But I soldiered on, pouring spring water over my head and eating very salty peanuts, and shortly before arriving in Himarë I met Sina, a kind man with a bright smile and bicycle maintenance skills superior to mine. I spent two nights at a campsite, diving, reading, eating, and set off for the Greek border having consumed one eighth of my bodyweight in baklava and spinach and cheese pie.
Then, it goes up – the road, and the cyclist’s temperature – and up and up, and I remembered it was Albania whose roadbuilders I once cursed for flouting the unwritten rule that all roads should be graded reasonably and within the bounds of your average cyclist’s capability, steepnesswise. It was up and up and up, and hothothot, and then I got a puncture and was putting it all back together when two cows came and stood either side of me – it was a reverse beef sandwich, sort of, but without the mayonnaise – watching my sweat-drenched efforts with a curiosity atypical of bovines. They were sweet; my patched and weakly inflated inner tube was not.
En route, just shy of Butrint, I met Pete and Jojo, Dutch and German. Pete is a man with a warming aura, who loves tomatoes. He, Jojo and I camped by a large stone abandoned house at the end of a rocky road, by the sea, with views of Ali Pasha Castle. We laughed together that evening, and Jojo and I – we cycled together for the following week, to Athens – reminisced several times about our time with Pete.
It’s a small, cable-drawn raft that takes you across the Vivari Channel (which Butrint’s Great Basilica overlooks and which, given the position of Ancient Butrint, forms a sort of moat around the once splendid city). It can take four cars at a time, or one truck, according to the rules. Bicycles cost 150 Albanian lek, or €1.50. On the other side, the hills stopped, and Jojo and I sailed onwards, alongwards into Greece.
During one of our pitstops, either that day or the next, we compared the routes we’d taken to get to where we were, and realised after much consideration and presumed forgetfulness that we had in fact both taken the ferry from Brindisi to Vlorë, on the same day, at the same time – it was the same boat – but by some freak accident had completely bypassed each other. Ships in the night. Invisible bicycles. And then it clicked: it was her I’d seen on deck.
The ride to Athens was marvellous, quite relaxed, full of Greek salads, watermelon and feta, savoury and sweet pies (kopita, as in spana), bee stings – just the one bee sting actually – stuffed vine leaves, and cheesecake ice cream. We were in the sea once, twice or three times a day, usually for a wake-up dip, a prolonged siesta soak, and an eveningtime refresher/cleanser. We saw wild tortoises, communed with wild horses, met a farmer with happy, beautiful cows, and salvaged freshly fallen lemons and oranges.
We met a trio of Slovakian couples, plus kids, on a beach somewhere, who gave us canned prosecco, snacks and wax wraps with bicycle designs on them. I gave mine to Janine. Martin and Martina (whose names I hope I’ve remembered right) told us about their honeymoon – seven months cycling around Southeast Asia. We met two Canadian guys, Erik and Adam, who had whiled away a month biking in the Peloponnese and loved every minute of it. Finally, in Athens, we refound Sina, and he and I had a Big Georgian Feast of khinkali, khachapuri and weird green fizz, flavour of tarragon. It was awesome.
Even more awesome was Laura’s arrival, because it was followed shortly after by the beginning of our engagement, many tears, many dishes of tzatziki, saganaki, aubergine salad and fried courgettes, more ice cream, some prosecco, and ouzo, and then the arrival of some of our friends from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – Toby, Nat, Janine and Becky I’m looking at YOU – and then it was all that all over again, my birthday, more feasts (including the perfect birthday breakfast), four nights in a Love Island villa on the island of Salamina, a fixed bike (thanks to Rip Ride Cycles – excellent work), meeting Carina and Fivos (wonderful, fabulous), and finally, after a short delay, boarding a boat in Piraeus.
So: I’m now writing from the boat. [EDIT: No I’m not, but I already wrote that so I’m leaving it in.] So: I’m now 29. And so: Laura and I have functioning bicycles, packed bags, more books than we know what to do with, an idea of how we’re going to get to Tbilisi, and a looser idea of what we’re going to do on the other side of it. Stay tuned, and cool.
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ONURBICYCLE 