Ride Planet Earth

I have arrived in the capital of China, surprising even myself. I wish I could say that was because I cycled all the way here but actually it is because I did not. I never planned to be anywhere near Beijing. To be honest my ending up pondering life under the enormous portrait of Mao hanging from the walls of the Forbidden City is basically all down to poor planning and lack of foresight. I’m hear collecting visas you see, and I’m still not sure which ones I should be collecting.

Having reached Kunming some 6 weeks ago I was mentally, physically and practically preparing for heading into Tibet and crossing the Himalayas. My timing had been quite unfortunate, as I arrived in the Southern Province of Yunnan the Tibetan borders were closed to all but the most fervently patriotic chinese. Chinese propaganda was splashed all over the television I managed to glimpse in a few cheap hotels, as the 50th anniversary of Serf Liberation Day, alternately known as the chinese invasion, came and went. I prolonged my stay in Kunming, waiting until Tibet reopened, trying to muster a few extra dollars for the rest of my long journey by teaching english to classrooms full of restless toddlers. But despite the borders re-opening for tourists they did not for crazed bicycle adventurers like myself. The Public Security Bureau said the roads were still full of police and soldiers, and they wouldn’t give me the permit I needed to make the expedition into Nepal.

View Kunming to Beijing in a larger map

Disappointed, I decided on a radical new itinerary, I would head north to Mongolia, then Russia, before descending through Central Asia to reunite with my originally planned path in Iran. But after an extraordinary long wait for a visa extension I had only 2 1/2 weeks to cover some 4000 km to the Mongolian border. There was no way I could cycle that fast, I needed to take the train.

Train lines in China are good, they are punctual, strictly organised and serve chinese food. You can get a soft seat (a sleeping berth) for the rich people and a hard seat (literally a hard seat) for the poorer people and me. The poor people can’t travel, it is simply too expensive. The journey from Kunming to Beijing takes about 3 days straight, but I broke it up with stops in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, and Xi’an in Shanxi Province. I met some wonderful people on the trains, whom I later stayed with, but also had my camera, watch and ipod stolen while I was sleeping, so it was a journey with definite emotional highs and lows.

My 5 week stay in Yunnan province was one of the best times in my life. I met many wonderful, wonderful people, each one interesting, admirable and incredibly hospitable. It fast became a home away from home and I embraced the feeling. It is not so common that I really feel at home anywhere. Due, I think, to the language barrier most of the people I met were foriegners, generally all studying chinese. This language I have been trying to pronounce for the past 2 months with very little success. My basically vocabulary often proves immaterial as no-one can understand my pronunciation. But I keep trying.

During my stay I explored extensive areas in the south and north west of the province where I was able to carry out some research into climate change impacts, speaking to representatives from several NGOs and farmers, as well as making my own observations. Climate impacts in Yunnan have been varied, in some parts of the north west significant lakes and wetlands have dried up with increasing temperatures and unpredictable rainfall while in other areas there is no discernable change in access to water. The rivers are annually filled by the summer melts of the Himalayan glaciers but these are steadily shrinking year by year. This will eventually lead to water shortages but at present the increased temperatures have led to increased melts. The more immediate problem is one I have mentioned in previous blog entries, as the waterways get dammed both the environment and the local communities are being substantially negatively effected, losing the vital biodiversity sustained by the usual river flows.

My moment in Chengdu allowed me the chance to meet with some local students, part of the Sichuan University Environmental Association and Green SOS, an organisation that supports student environmental advocates across China. These passionate young chinese talked about the rising temperatures in Chengdu and the droughts that have afflicted parts of north west china. They are actively campaigning for behaviour change among their local populations to reduce their impact on the world around them.

The changes in the world are happening non-stop. Since my last blog entry H1N1, swine flu, has hit, finally taking media attention away from the credit crisis. This is a crisis that does scare me (I wonder what kind of treatment is available in Kazakhstan) as people lose their lives, not their dollars. But it is something that I hope will pass, eventually, without too many lives lost. Meanwhile the signs that we are destroying the environment that we leave for future generations continue to roll on as the population of the Cateret Islands in the Pacific are forced to vacate their homelands due to rising sea levels and the power of the oil and gas industries force the Obama Administration to potentially fatally compromise their carbon reduction measures. Without a strong and progressive position from the US the talks in Copenhagen will struggle to achieve what they need to.

And so Beijing. My research seems to have established that the Russians will not let me in. But I want to get final confirmation before deciding on the only route that will be left for me, cycling through the Gobi into remote western China before finally reaching Kazakhstan.