Qinghai Lake

For the second half of the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold International Award, I sat back whilst another group of teenagers, this time all girls, planned and decided the logistics of their Adventurous Journey.  Yet again, my goal on the trip was more of a spectator role. Essentially, make sure nobody dies.

So my seven-girl team planned their trip to Qinghai Lake, one of Buddha's sacred lakes, on the Tibetan Plateau. The thing no one told me at the start of signing up to support IA was that there would be bicycles involved. These bicycles would go on the road. We would do this for several days. I've never really 'biked' before--I mean, around the block and down trails of beautifully bike laned cities, yes. Traversing the roads of China with its crazy drivers, no.

The panic began.

And then we arrived to the airport for a flight that would eventually be delayed for seven hours. Only no one could tell us that at the start of the grand adventure. This is how we arrived at our hostel at 5am. Things weren't starting with any kind of promise.

The day became a flurry of sorting logistics, procuring bikes, etc and getting dropped at our next set of lodging, our really, really scenic lodging:

As it turns out, the Tibetan plateau is a flat as a pancake. And there's nothing there.  Then the fat, aggressive snowflakes began to fall. Considering we could only pack what we were able to carry, I layered up and managed to get five shirts on. With a wind chill whipping up around us, we added insult by cycling into the tail wind.

My hog: 

The weather eventually started to look up:

But the scenery stayed the same:

At random intervals, yurts dotted the otherwise barren landscape.  Inside, wind worn locals manned stoves and hot water kettles. They hospitibaly opened their tent doors to the bikers and pilgrims who were crazy enough to take on the journey.

Through my students and their Mandarin speaking skills, we learned that the lake was in fact a sacred one. Buddhist pilgrims are called to journey around the lake in meditation and prayer. The more hardcore of the pilgrims took to the sacrifice of taking three steps, clapping their heads above them, at their front, on their knees and then sliding prostrate on the ground. I got no good pictures of this but it was a humbling feat. We struggled to cycle along the whole damn path and here these individuals, often very old, were shuffling the 4,3127 square kilometer circumference of China's biggest lake.

It also turned out that we were cycling anti-clockwise around it and in doing so, we were potentially upsetting the karma of the place. This made a lot of sense--locals continued to shout and wave their arms at us. I thought it was because of our mostly Western looks.  Apparently not.

Along the way, nature called. As such, makeshift toilets also dotted the landscape. I am proud to now call myself a true traveller--China has taught me to bathroom anywhere. I was afraid the planks were going to break underneath me in this particular establishment. Maybe 'in' is a bad choice of words: the road was 20 meters in front of me, a stalactite of poo resided directly underneath me:

Onward! Prayer flags always adorned the top of hills and people in their cars would throw little paper flag pieces, along with their prayers, out the window at these junctures.

Perhaps it was the extreme exercise or the cold, but the food we had during the days of cycling was pretty magnificent. We ate bread and huge bowls of noodles. Rice was hard to come by--the further north you go in China, the more noodles become a staple. Restaurants were much easier to navigate with  a group of students who spoke degrees of Mandarin.

Bread fried and then crunched up to make those crispy wonton snacky things you get in American Chinese restaurants: 

In between our three-day cycle, we stopped at various non-descript hotels and guest houses. On day one we cycled 63 kilometers. Day two followed with 70 and we finished on a whopping 83 on our last day. Along the way, one of the girls got sick; whether this was psychosomatic or not, I will never know. But my group stuck together, made choices for one another and stuck it out.

I was impressively proud of their strength and determination. They persevered to stick to their itinerary and held each other up through mini-breakdowns (2), flat tires (3) and biting winds (too many to count).

It helped when we got to the cold desert hills of the west side of Qinghai Lake. They hills were impressively huge but the cheering party at the top of each one was better.

Toilet in the middle of desert sand dunes: 

When we wheeled into the finish point and learned that we were the only group to stick to our initial plan and were in fact, the group to bike the farthest, there were tears.

I didn't think myself capable of quite the journey but I proved myself wrong. What an exhilarating experience; sign me up again.