Ernest Hemingway said: "It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."
Kate Harris and Melissa Yule will no doubt endorse that, having pedalled through ten countries across 10,000 kilometres in ten months. This cycle journey, which kickstarted in Istanbul in January last year, culminated in a trip to Leh, India, in October.
An exhilarated Kate who was in Delhi recently said, "The last leg of the journey, from Shimla to Leh through the Spiti valley, was tough riding, with several high passes and rough roads. But it was so beautiful that it made all the difficulty worth it — a fitting finale to an incredible ride."
From swerving clear of insane traffic on city highways to toiling through icy tracks on the Kars plateau; from seeking refuge under mountain cliffs in the wake of a hailstorm to warming up near a roadside wooden stove with piping-hot chai in hand; from camping in Tingri flanked by Mount Everest and Mount Cho Oyo to counting stars from their tents until sleep enveloped them, Kate and Melissa carried home with them a bagful of memories.
They spoke to Weekend Review about their journey with child-like glee.
Friends since the age of 10, Kate and Melissa have shared this love of adventure since they cycled across the United States in 2005. The following year they cycled across Tibet and Xinjiang along China's Silk Road.
"Exploring the rugged landscape on a bicycle and stretching the limits of our physical and mental endurance, we fell in love with the people and the country, promising to return someday to ride the entire stretch of the Silk Road," Melissa said. In 2009, while doing her masters in Geo-Biology and International Development at the University of Guelph, she received a mail from Kate, "Do you want to finish riding the Silk Road in 2010?"
"Yes," wrote back Melissa.
Planning the journey, finding sponsors, researching on the climate and culture, and visa formalities took two years.
"Our goal this time was to explore existing and proposed trans-boundary conservation initiatives in mountainous regions along the way," said Kate, a Rhodes scholar from Oxford University with a masters in Wilderness Conservation. "We believe that people must first care for a place before they feel compelled to protect it. We hope to inspire greater appreciation for the spaces and species that transcend borders, both on the Silk Road and beyond."
On January 9, 2011, they flew from Canada to Istanbul, with their bicycles (named Marco and Polo) packed in their luggage. After spending a week in Istanbul with friends, they crossed the Bosphorus in a ferry and entered Asia.
From there began their grind against gravity on the Silk Road. Pedalling from 6am to 3pm, they stopped only for meals. After spending four nights in a tent and two nights at a homestay, Kate and Mel docked at Zonguldak, a town on the Black Sea.
"When we stopped at a gas station for petrol, attendants brought us tea and snacks once they got over their bafflement at why, with cycles, we were buying gas in the first place. We tried to explain that the fuel was for our camp-stove, but they scrutinised our cycles, searching for the motors they were convinced were there," Melissa said.
As night descended, they pitched their tents in various people's backyards — once in a farmer's field and another time in the backyard of a restaurant. Some families invited them indoors; a homestay even invited them to a birthday party.
Kate and Melissa crossed Turkey and Georgia, past Armenia, and reached Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. As the icy winds retreated and the weather coaxed tiny buds into raising their heads, the two friends found the spring back in their steps. "But when our Uzbek letter of invitation [a prerequisite for applying for a tourist visa] didn't arrive in Azerbaijan on time, we were forced to fly across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan and then take a 72-hour train ride across the ninth-largest country in the world. After spending a week waiting in embassy lines at Almaty, we boarded the same train back to the Caspian Sea coast," Kate said.
Visa in hand, they travelled through Uzbekistan, roughing the Ustyurt Plateau in the summer months. "The plateau is lashed by intense winds all day long, so we would start before dawn to avoid the heat," Melissa recounted. However, at Tajikistan Kate came down with a cold and they had to halt their journey for a week.
"Tajikistan has the most stunning stretch of the Silk Road," Melissa said.
Cycling along the Afghan border, tracing a path mostly trodden by donkeys, they crossed fields of wheat and barley. By June, they were halfway through their trip. Of course, there were times when the Silk Road was not that smooth.
"Traffic was the greatest threat. As cyclists, we were less visible and more vulnerable, be it on narrow switchback roads on the mountains or busy highways on the plains. Sometimes we took taxis in cities to avoid main roads," Kate said.
Add to that bad weather, broken spokes and flat tyres, but nothing stopped the duo from moving on.
When people asked them whether they were married, they followed the advice of a Turkish friend. "Yes, our husbands are Turkish truck drivers called Osman [for Kate] and Mustafa [for Mel]; they are following right behind us," they often answered, pointing to a random truck on the road. In descending the Pamir Plateau, riding through the Hindu Kush mountains and soaking in the Bibi Fatima hot springs, the duo found a panacea for their tired muscles and minds.
Once, when they were cycling through the Pamirs in Tajikistan, they were stalled by rain, and then thunder, lightning and a hailstorm. "We rushed for cover under an overhanging cliff until the storm passed. The rain had loosened rocks and scattered debris on the road. As we resumed our journey, a big rock landed with a thud right next to Mel, missing her by just a metre. That really shook us up," Kate recalled. As Nepal beckoned to them, they zipped past yaks quietly grazing on fields and whitewashed houses in Tibet with Chinese flags fluttering from their rooftops.
Joining them en route in Turkey was another cyclist dressed in full gear.
"He rode with us for 30 kilometres, performing wheelies and bunny hopping as we panted on alongside, totally amazed," Kate said. Then there was a dog, which they named Baklava after the Turkish pastry, that trotted alongside them in Georgia. Sitting in a Turkish restaurant relishing hot soup after a cold day, the 29-year-olds were even more surprised when they saw that they were on the national news. "Everyone around looked at us amazed," Kate said.
On September 25, Kate and Melissa entered India. After exploring the Himalayas, they visited the Spiti valley for the last leg of their expedition.
Plucking apples from roadside trees for a quick snack and stepping aside to make way for 62 speed-hungry motorists on a rally from Manali to Leh, they reached their destination safe and jubilant.
What about lessons learnt on this trip?
"The people of all the communities, religions and cultures were incredibly compassionate," Melissa said. "Despite us not speaking their language or being conversant with their cultures, they welcomed us into their homes and their hearts, sharing meals with us, swapping stories and photos of our families. We learnt a great deal about love from them."
"Smiling is a universal language that we relied upon heavily to navigate the different countries whose languages we did not know. The friendliness and warmth people showed us were incredible," Kate said.
"On the train journey, when my blanket slipped off my bunk while I was sleeping, an elderly Kazakh woman put it back on me," she added.
Back home in Ontario, the duo now looks forward to writing a book and making a film on their adventure.
What Kate and Melissa have to say
- “We studied the natural and social impacts of five trans-boundary protected areas. In Georgia, we explored Lagodekhi Protected Areas, the oldest nature reserve there, on foot with our guide, Ranger Giorgi.
- The Ustyurt plateau, lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is home to the endangered saiga antelope, which is poached primarily for meat. The horns of male antelope are also used in Chinese medicine. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, communities living on the fringes of the plateau also hunted the saiga. Although protected by law, there is hardly any enforcement in the remote Ustyurt borderland, especially in impoverished Uzbekistan. The decline of the saiga, coupled with the drainage of the nearby Aral Sea caused by ongoing cotton irrigation, makes this part of the world a prime example of environmental havoc wreaked by humans.
- The Pamir mountains are home to a wide variety of flora and fauna. Many species hide within its crevices, including the snow leopard and the Marco Polo sheep, both endangered species. Using binoculars, we spent hours watching the sheep graze in the mountains.
- We met Dr Koustubh Sharma, regional ecologist for the Snow Leopard Trust in Delhi, and left with a great sense of hope for both the big cat and the communities in these areas.
- We explored the bio-diversity conservation projects of Kuzey Doga, an award-winning Turkish NGO working on the borderlands of Turkey, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
- Our last case study was the Siachen glacier, straddling the disputed Indo-Pak border in Kashmir. In Delhi, we met Nobel laureate Dr R.K. Pachauri, who recognises that the greatest challenges our planet faces, including climate change, require solutions that go beyond borders.
- Everywhere we went we saw how local people play a crucial role in wilderness conservation and how much environmental protection depends on sustainable development.
- Some of the planet’s most valuable and vulnerable ecosystems are found in Silk Road deserts and mountains, many of which straddle political borders. The greatest challenges our planet faces transcend political borders, whether it be climate change, poverty, peace and security, water issues or habitat and biodiversity loss. These are tightly interlinked issues and to tackle them with any success and sustainability, we need to think beyond borders.
Mythily Ramachandran is an independent writer based in Chennai, India.
