China Motorcycle Diaries: altitude sickness at 5000m

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

10/30/2010

China Motorcycle Diaries: altitude sickness at 5000m

Canadian brothers Ryan (L) and Colin Pyle, pose for a photograph during their motorcycle journey around China on the Highway G314, also known as the Karakoram Highway, near Tashkurgan in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region September 13, 2010. Circumnavigating China's vast landscape on motorbikes was never going to be easy. But being stuck 4,800 metres above sea level in a remote part of central Tibet with altitude sickness and an empty gas tank was one of the last things Ryan Pyle expected to happen.