Day 24: It's a War

The fight was nowhere near over, and today may have been the worst of it. Today I fought harder than perhaps any other day of my life. I fought the pain in my knee, the pain in my ass, and the delirium and nausea of elevation sickness all at once. I fought the fierce cold wind, I fought the trucks, I fought the terrible condition of the road, I fought the lack of oxygen, and I fought the instinct to just stop. I put myself through voluntary torture. But it yielded results. Adam and I conquered an enormous beast of a mountain today, the Singayla Pass. I didn’t sleep well the night before. Our homestay hosts living/sleeping space was, for lack of a better word, filthy. There were crumbs and dirt and bugs crawling all around. She was very sweet to us, though, despite charging 1000 rupees each, and her cooking was surprisingly healthy compared to most of what I’ve had in India. For dinner she whipped up a hearty stew of lentils and what appeared to be collard greens or some other hearty green, and we ate this with rice and chili powder. For breakfast this morning we had more stew and warm fresh flat bread with butter that I couldn’t get enough of, she even included a few to go for lunch bless her heart. We had to climb out of Photoksar to get back on the main road across a bridge. My knee, as is typical now in the mornings, was screaming out in pain telling me to stop from the moment I got on the bike. Just imagine, every time your leg goes up before pushing down on the pedal, feeling pain. You don’t even have to use force, there will be pain anyway, just from the position of your leg. And your brain just keeps sending you the same message, over and over. No, stop, ouch, don’t do that, see when you do that it hurts, please stop, why aren’t you stopping?!Eventually, I exhaust my brain, and it realizes that I’m some kind of imbecile that’s just going to keep doing the hurty thing over and over despite its warnings so it decides to put its efforts elsewhere. Perhaps you’ve experienced this with Google Maps. It tells you to go a certain direction but you know a little shortcut that you prefer and it keeps trying to reroute you over and over until, finally, it’s had enough and it accepts the route that you’ve chosen. As I argue with my brain and win, we get to the main road on the other side of the valley and begin our climb. We can see Photoksar in all its splendor from this vantage and it’s epic, with a monastery we hadn’t noticed etched into the cliff. The road wasn’t as bad as yesterday, not so sandy just hard and bumpy which of course isn’t ideal but it’s a little better for speed. As we climbed, up and up, we finally laid eyes on our project for the day, the Singayla Pass, looking menacing in the distance. 

Much to our chagrin there was a descent before starting the arduous climb on account of having to dip back into the valley to cross the trickling stream once more and press on from the other side. It’s always annoying to fight for some elevation gain and then lose it right before having to work for it once more. But life has always been a cosine wave and we are all Sisyphus blah blah. At the bridge over the stream we stopped and ate some snickers bars and took deep breaths and chuckled about what lay ahead and then we got on our bikes and embarked on an hours long climb that tested my determination more severely than perhaps anything I can recall. Almost immediately, Adam ditched me because he saw a steep shortcut through the switchbacks that he could walk his bike up. I, being a purist, stayed on the true road with my butt on the saddle. I needed to know I’d conquered this peak without shortcuts or dismounts. The beginning of the road was shit. It was a road of deep sand, hiding limitless bumps and jagged rocks underneath. It’s like I was cycling on the beach, not the nice part by the wake but the part near the board walk where the sand burns your feet and your feet sink deep into it with each step and  there’s the little shells that cut at your feet and trash strewn about in the tall grasses surrounding you and you’re wondering why you bothered going to the beach because you hate the beach and shit did you remember the sunscreen? Every stroke of the pedal was a struggle. It was easy to lose balance or spin out, constantly navigating patches of deep sand, rolling bumps that felt like miniature mountains and the balance defying chaos of jagged patches of rock. And the grade wasn’t even that horrible, I was just fighting the road itself, and losing, going at a laughably slow pace. A pedestrian would have dusted me. Finally I get to where Adam is waiting for me. This is the theme with us, Adam is much stronger and faster than me so he picks where we take our little breaks. He’d also taken a very wise and prudent short cut of course. I’m already worse for wear and we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet. After some words of encouragement and sugary snacks we take the road on once more, and its more of the same. The sand isn’t so bad and now it’s just the bumpy rocky ground and the exhaustion and getting out of the way for trucks and the wind pushing back at us and sending us little blizzards of dust to tell us to give up. And despite this we continue. And I’m starting to feel weird. Can’t get a full breath. Also, weirdly enough, super gassy. Adam explained that the elevation can expand the gas in your body, something like that. So I’m burping and farting my way up this hill, the farts propel me forward but the burps drive me back so it’s a stalemate. And I’m struggling to get a breath in. Adam and I stop before a steep hair pin and take a little break. The top of the pass is still so so far away. It’s incredibly demoralizing, seeing it up there, the trucks making turns looking like ants. Dear God, at some point today I’ll be where that truck is now. But how? How can it be possible that I’ll ever be there? We’re not sure how we are going to make it. It’s comically difficult at this point. But what can we do? We have to try. We have all day at any rate, it’s early yet and the night doesn’t threaten to trap us like yesterday. So we get back on our bikes. And around that bend, what do we see? Freshly lain asphalt. Ah, now that was a sight. The shiny black smoothness of Hope. We might actually conquer this thing now. Obviously the asphalt didn’t resolve any of the other concurrent issues, but having a smooth road brightened the outlook and helped us move along at a faster pace. It felt as if God himself had had enough of our suffering and urged BRO to help us along. The going was still tough, and as my exhaustion and the altitude increased it only got tougher. The wind started sending me little tumbleweeds of brush with the dust and sand, making the challenge all the more dramatic. Many times I cycled past groups of laborers working on the road, who all would yell “julay” which is the greeting around here and also means good and a million other things and with what little strength and breath I had I would reply with ”jilay” accompanied by the best little smile I could muster. The cheers of the construction workers was the only morale boost I had. It was so rough for me at a certain point I was regularly getting off my bike and while straddling it leaning my head and hands down on the handle bars to catch my breath for a minute or two as sitting was not an option. This probably would have looked a little worrisome to any passersby but I needed to do it, and it worked. I remember that in my addled state I kept trying to think the word “elevation” and I kept instead thinking “evelation” and try as I might it was so difficult to get that word right. I must have seemed delirious, shaking on the bike, constantly turning the handlebars to stay balanced while pedaling feebly on the lowest gear, but I fought through the haziness and nausea and shortness of breath just long enough that eventually I arrived at the top. It was incredibly windy and exposed up there so we quickly took our little photos that would serve as proof of our feat without telling any of the struggle and hurtled ourselves into the descent. 

I probably should’ve layered up in anticipation. I had my arm and leg warmers and a windbreaker but it wasn’t enough. The wind was icy and relentless and we were mostly in the shade and we went fast. There was no tarmac on the other side of the pass, just raw dirt and rock and everything in between. Some parts were wonderfully smooth, hard packed dirt and gravel, but most were painfully and worrisomely bumpy. After a certain point I learned to have full trust in the bicycle and I went full throttle. This yielded to much more pleasure, though any mistake could have lead to irreparable harm, and I sent it hard. Remarkably, Adam was able to do the same on his gravel bike and it really made me wonder why I had these monster tires. I’ll definitely swap them out for something sexier when I have the opportunity. As much as it’s fun to ride on these trail-like roads, a good steel frame and fat tires still don’t make up for lack of suspension, and though access to quiet country roads is my greatest joy, smooth pavement is a luxury that I will probably go out of my way to indulge in henceforth. At this point we are essentially mountain biking. It’s exhilarating, and it’s so very beautiful on the other side of the pass, I’m trying my best to take it all in as I rip through the rugged curves of the downhill. We are in high mountain terrain, and below us we gaze into the abyss of a massive depression, thousands of feet below. It fills me with awe and some fear, it’s as if you leaned over just a little too much you’d fall into this bottomless pit for miles on end. There is some vegetation. Shrubby little patches of red and orange and green give little flares of color to the otherwise barren rock. The rock itself has so many layers and colors and shapes, creating a multi-textural collage of natural beauty that shifts and morphs as we descend. Without much mind for photos  or breaks we tore down the switchbacks and then cruised along the edge of a steep face, following it across the depression and into another area of staggering beauty. We bumped and clinked and clanked our way through more and more epic vistas until we saw, deep down below, a town. Adam said this was Lingshed, so we finished off our descent in the harrowingly steep and sandy switchbacks leading us into the several homes making up this town. It turned out it wasn’t Linghsed, but we were quite cold and our faces were red and dry and our lips crusty and hardened snot and turned to rash under our noses, we were ready for a break. Despite how lovely everything around us was, the downhill was testing our faith in our bikes and our hands grip and we needed shelter. We chanced upon a homestay much the same way we did yesterday. The man who greeted us was kind of a goofball and stuck his hands all over my face, including a quick dip into my mouth, to greet me. I just laughed along with it and hoped he was a habitual user of sanitizer. The food was once again impeccable. A warm hearty thukpa flat noodle stew with many vegetables was drawn up for us. The host mother crouched by and silently watched us eat, hugging on to the pot and putting more of the stuff into our empty bowls every time we finished. That’s the way it should always be. The feeling of being somewhere warm and slurping down a hot hearty soup after being somewhere cold and windy and desolate and being so exhausted you can scarcely move, well that’s one of those beautiful human feelings that make life worth living. And for today, life has indeed been worth living.