Free Tibet!

In case I haven’t already stressed it enough, I like to travel by bike. Motor. Bike. And that’s what I’ve done for about 4 weeks in Nepal.

As one of my last motorbike feats, it dawned on me that I can actually drive to the border with Tibet. Why not see what it’s all about, I asked myself and off I went into a wet cloud. Suffice is to say that monsoon season actually started and the whole 120km or so from Kathmandu to the border town of Kodari have been nothing less than the biggest pain in my personal driving-a-bike-through-Nepal experience.

As soon as I got on the bike it started drizzling but that couldn’t make me turn around. Neither could the peculiar Kathmandu traffic, which looks a lot like the pattern you get once you throw chopped vegetables into a frying pan: pattern-less. Traffic laws are completely and thoroughly inexistent: wherever you want to go, you go, regardless of anyone else’s desires. Hollywood-type car or bike chases? Never gonna happen in Nepal. Not with the way they’re driving! The way I see it, you just have to let yourself be surprised by any traffic movement, or simply close your eyes and drive. You’ll likely end up exactly where you want to go.

But Kathmandu traffic stopped shocking me a while ago and I found I have a surreal pleasure in trying to find my way around. The city is not as big as I thought, but the masses of people and vehicles are quite colossal.

Anyway, I made it out and the rain miraculously stopped. 25km later it seemed that it would be the biblical deluge all over again. So I pulled over, sincerely having second thoughts about pressing on. An hour later I was back reluctantly riding my little Pulsar up and down Nepal’s mountains. It was the worst day of driving! Not just because of the rain, but the roads didn’t make it any easier. And while passing decent-sized boulders (read: bigger than your head) that had tumbled down the mountains heralding the impending landslide, I suddenly felt I’d have been a lot safer if I had stood in the middle of Kathmandu’s traffic for three hours straight.

Tatopani was my stop and I didn’t sit around chatting with any hotel owners; I dropped my backpack and jumped on the bike with the sole intention of covering the last 3km to the Kodari border in less than half an hour. It was more like 20 minutes, what with all the mud on the road, if a motocross type of track with boulders wedged together in between tracks of mud left by excavation machineries falls anywhere under the broad category of ‘road’. It turned out that the excavation in the area was pursued by the Chinese side, which had also very thoughtfully put up some informative signs, ending with this one:

The actual border between Nepal and Tibet consists of a so-called ‘Friendship Bridge’, which is friendly only up to its middle section, where a 20cm wide bright-red tiled line marks the end of Nepal and the beginning of China. That’s right, China. The name Tibet is nowhere to be seen. I intended to get right in front of the Chinese officials and purposefully yell ‘Free Tibet!’ but I couldn’t get near enough. Nobody stands on the bridge, except for the people crossing it. And tourists, who, as might be expected, are not allowed to take pictures. They are allowed, however to stand on the bridge for as long as they want and smoke cigarettes and look around.

All the day’s frustrations ended in me triumphantly throwing my cigarette butt over the red line and, technically, into China. So, take that, China!

Left side – Nepal; right side – China