“To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished leaving behind the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit boarders, unmapped peoples. The road forks and wanders wherever you are. It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices.” Colin Thubron

Central Asia has long held a fascination for me. It occupies that daydream space that’s full of niggling desire to abandon everyday life and set off into remote corners of the world. I can’t quite pin down when my obsession with this area began. Of course, I remember being read the tales of exploration and espionage from these places that have long filled the shelves of childhood bookcases.  Philieas Fogg, Marco Polo, Heinrich Harrer and the adventures of Tintin have all played their part in merging the reality of the place into pure fantasy. I also remember my favourite pages in the school’s atlas, full of swirling contours of purples and white with little annotation for settlement or landmark and I remember struggling with the central pieces of a world jigsaw, trying to fit featureless parts together by shape alone. I wondered what happened on these pages and in these seemingly empty puzzle pieces. Who lived there? what happened there? No-one knew the answers because no-one who I knew had been there. Perhaps it was this that excited me most of all.

Even today when I hear the words ‘Silk Road’ I immediately conjure romantic scenes of oasis bazaars brimming with fragrant spices and intoxicating perfumes, tents filled with the smoke of extravagantly carved pipes and hand-blown hookahs. I imagine the loud cries of traders, hawkers, fixers, and the backing cast of nefarious characters lingering in the shadows of gilded fabrics and dyed cloth. Between bustling markets and on the open road I picture a nothingness. I see a lone caravan draped in golden bells and threads rustling in the warning winds of a towering sandstorm that will scour the vast, barren landscapes. I hear the rumble and clap of high mountain passes shuddering with thunder and ice that threatens forward progress. It is these scenes that appear vivid in my daydreams, they captivate and alight that inner desire for raw un-sanitized adventure.

It was not till the long summer holidays I was afforded as a student that I satisfied this childhood interest in this vaguely defined area between east and west. With four weeks of warehouse wages in my pocket and four weeks of holiday ahead of me, standing in front of a map is a great place to be. Over a number of years, together with a good friend and fellow Marco Polo wannabe, we explored those curious places between opposing compass points.

First we travelled by train through the Eastern bloc into Russia, Turkey and Georgia. The following year we took local buses through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Each year we grew more daring with our plans, more lean with our money and more adventurous with our destinations until we surrendered our plans to the advice of the locals we met, the journeys of the travellers we were hitching with and the routines of the generous hosts that welcomed us into their homes. For two months we followed roads east across the steppe at the whims of Mongolian truckers who took us in as their own and took a punt on a Chinese bus timetable we couldn’t understand. It is in fact, very likely we passed by the ancient desert oasis of Khotan, famous for cultivating silk outside of China’s great wall, whilst asleep in the passenger seat of a Chinese HGV. By the fourth year of these trips I had accepted a permanent job in Shanghai where my fascination with the convergence of eastern and western cultures only intensified.

As your typical ‘gap yah’ students back then, what we lacked in cash we made up for in wayward facial hair and cliché philosophies from the road.  When ice cold Tsingtao are less than a dollar and you’re trying your best to blend into the hostel scenery of rugged travellers, this is a great place to be. One such evening, sipping these beers whilst writing up said philosophies, I began to tune in to the conversations being had by a group who had recently arrived atop a set of fully loaded touring bikes. Their maps were sprawled across a number of plastic tables and their bikes neatly stacked around them so that they could access their various pockets and equipment, which they did seamlessly throughout the discussion. Their facial hair was longer, much more matted than my own, their tan lines more defined and their muscles and bones more pronounced from the exertions and trials of the road. In essence they were clearly winning the unspoken courtyard competition. I was in awe. As I became more invested in their dialogue I began to understand that they were weighing up the pros and cons of various cycle routes along the Pamir Highway. Whilst we struggled to decipher the local train timetables they were assessing their options, masters of their own transport. Their eyes gleamed bright with life and soul and to me sat there in boozy, philosophical disposition the words they spoke were pure wisdom. I decided then and there I wanted a bike and that one day I would return.

That particular trip however marked the end of that chapter of my life. I returned home a graduate and soon set off to the far east where duties of full-time employment and 20 days annual leave beckoned. A few pay-checks later, I bought that bike I’d promised myself. I rode it every weekend, making up for less time off with the smaller doses of adventure that the bike guarantees. Over time those weekend trips got longer, week-day training was added in, parts on the bike were upgraded and further corners of the map explored. Eventually I built up the legs and confidence to emulate those anonymous bearded heroes and used my precious annual leave for a big trip through Asia. It was everything I had hoped for. It allowed access to more remote places and a heightened sense of self sufficiency and adventure. I was hooked. 

Eventually, having reached the ceiling of what my annual leave and free weekends would allow I began to explore new avenues of maximising time in the saddle. This mainly involved exploring the hours between 10pm and 4am so as to cover larger distances and travel to ever further places. It was another revelation, a level up again in a personal quest for more extreme feelings of adventure; a journey for the mind as well as the body. It has often seemed to me that the societal trajectory of becoming an adult means that your income steadily rises as free time dwindles away. As the Shimano on my bikes has got lighter over the years, available saddle time has shortened. Weekends bike packing long distances, racing across countries and continents is somehow my reaction to that trend. A personal protest against the trappings of adult life and a live-work balance at odds with those philosophies I jotted down many years ago in that Uzbek homestay.

Lining up for the Silk Road Mountain Race is the culmination of a long and steady process of chipping away at boundaries. It is me giving a nod to twenty year-old me, proving that the money I spend on a city haircut these days isn’t the real me. My life of bike adventures somehow feels intertwined with the silk road. I have been obsessed with this race since it began, pouring over the race photography of off-centre riders silhouetted against empty, uninhabitable vistas . I have spent many hours daydreaming of a day I might one day do it, plotting the various ways of carving out the time and space to make such a journey. It will be the privilege of a lifetime to don cap 76 and whatever the outcome I can only hope I will do my crusty, cash strapped, student-self proud.

“Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You [look out] on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated. Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.” Colin Thubron