Contributor: Peter Emerson
First things first: I pumped up the tires of my fold-up Brompton, bought a pair of dual-tone, all-weather, multi-purpose sandals (from the Oxfam shop), and learnt a little Chinese.
The journey started in Shangri-La. Well, actually, it started last October from home in Belfast, from where I traveled overland to Azerbaijan to attend the conference of last year’s COP29. I arrived in Tbilisi by bus, boat, bike, or train, so that was okay, but to attend the gathering of environmentalists, everyone was told they had to fly (how mad can you get?)! As everyone knows, the country lives on oil; out in the sticks, they plant piles of poles and pylons but hardly any trees, and in the city, many blocks of flats offer not a single sapling on their balconies.
As instructed, I flew from Tbilisi to Baku (but returned by bus) and then flew to Mumbai, where cycling is not recommended. I went for a 50-km cycle ride with a fellow cyclist and ended up with a horrible pollution cough as a result. So India was by train – via Dharamshala and Bengaluru to Delhi – and then a little more cheating: I flew over the Himalayas, which are a bit too much, even for a Brompton…to China, to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan.
January 29th was the Chinese New Year – enter the Year of the Snake – which I celebrated in the Tibetan Enclave of Shangri-La, and then out came the Brompton. Yunnan is quite hilly: there are the three big rivers – the Mekong, Salween, and Yangtze – running parallel to each other, often with 4,000-metre peaks in between! After Dali, the land flattens a little…and on the quieter tracks, one can escape from the bustle of China’s modern cities. Here too, however, provision for the cyclist is often pretty good, with cycle lanes and bicycles to hire, simply by using your WeChat on your mobile. There’s just one necessity for those of my vintage: you need a friend under 40 to explain all the apps.
From here, I head northwards…
