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| Two bikes, Two cities, 1200 kilometers, One goal: change the world by teaching kids to read |
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| On the bike: Life in the saddle |
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| Perhaps because there wasn't much else to see besides rocks and dirt, you notice the sky a lot in Tibet while riding your bike all day long. The clouds in Tibet were really something else. Big muscular things that just plowed across the sky. Beautiful creatures, really. |
| Like a metronome, little stone markers along the ride counted our progress. This one lets us know that we are now 4924 kilometers from Beijing. The next one will let us know we are 4925. You see the same great clouds in this photo...you may also notice a cloud of dust in the upper right of the photo, just where the road goes off. These are the dust demons. |
| And, then, of course, there were days where it wasn't dust, but SNOW that made us put on our facemasks (although the warmer ones). Our bikes went through a lot on the last two days in Tibet, including hail, rain, sleet, yaks and snow. Here, Nicolas pauses just outside Nyalam as we prepare to drop down into Nepal, 45k away. Below, you see what happened as we dropped a few thousand meters, leaving freezing temperatures and cold toes behind, and embracing mud a foot thick that covered our bikes, us and our feet (those are Nicolas' shoes after we took a break in Zhangmu). |
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| Since the road along the Friendship highway is dirt, and since the clouds look beautiful but aren't much good for anything like rain at this time of year (April), there is a lot of dust. Every truck that passed us kicked up a massive amount of dust. When the wind was blowing the right way (not very often, mind you), the dust would go to the other side of the road, but most times, we saw a dust demon coming and our face masks came up. We picked up a few surgical masks in Kathmandu and wore them quite a bit during the day. |
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