4 Days of Bus Rides- On A Cycling Trip.

I'm pretty sure the woman sitting in front of me is about to die. I have only listened to one other person die, so I'm no expert, but no one can vomit as much as the old lady with watery red eyes, and still be alive 12 hours later. No one. She is a vomit machine. A puking factory. She is canning this stuff and selling it at discount chains and setting up cute stands off of freeway exit ramps. It's a cottage industry for her. For four hours, starting the moment the bus turned it's engine over, she has emptied her stomach. Now she has stopped. She must be dead. I expect vomit to slosh over my feet if the bus accelerates suddenly. The floor must be awash in it.

The bus is pressing through a landscape that looks like the third day of creation. God hung up has hard hat, went home to dinner and on fourth day forgot about the tibetan plateau. Got busy making animals and water and nice things. It's the physical manifestation of deity's over-reach, over ambition. It's Yaweh's unfinished basement. "Someday I'll get to it,' God says, 'stop nagging me. The game is on." Heavenly neglect has led to a film of green grass and strand of asphalt to grow across the surface. That is all. Black snow clouds slam into high hills and then retreat back into the valleys. Their tentacles scraping the ground white we snow. We reach a pass of 16,500. The old lady with watery red eyes lurches forward and vomits. I guess she is not dead... yet. Give her a couple of more hours.

I am on a fifteen hour bus ride from Yushu to Xining and tomorrow I will be on a 15 hour bus ride from Xining back to Yushu. 30 hours of bus rides with women throwing up their lungs is the price you pay for poor planning in Tibet. At home you have to run to 7-11 at 2 am. In tibet you EARN your comeuppance. I am earning it. We have ridden for two weeks without finding a bank that will change dollars or an atm that accepts our card. Push came to shove yesterday and I ended up taking a bus 15 hours to exchange money. 15 mother flipping hours!!! This is the country that we decided to let finance our war on terror? Well played Washington. Well played.

We rode out of Litang on a snowy morning. We knew we needed to get our visa's renewed and we knew we would need to get cash soon. The next couple of days were beautiful. The scenery changed with every pass. We found terrific campsites and it was fantastic. We stayed a day in the town of Garzi. The town was on lockdown. But not the cool MSNBC show kind of lockdown. A real lockdown. Cops and soldiers out numbering people on the streets. No one could exchange money. We couldn't send packages to America. We couldn't even use the internet until we sweet talked a cop into writing a note for us. He said, "you can use the internet for one and hour and you can no talk to foreign friends about Garzi situation."

"There's a situation here?"

"I no can talk about it."

Nice.

We stayed for a day to find out that we could not extend our visas. It left us in a predicament. Man, now that I'm writing this, it has been nothing but predicaments for the last 4 days. We had 500 hard kilometers to the city we needed to be to and two days to get there. Early that morning we rented a mini-van. Piled up our four bikes on the top, squeezed in some random little girl, five giant bags of rice(?), all our bags, and enough Tibetan techno cd's to power a london dancehall for years.

The guy didn't take us to the town he had promised and instead, after much fuss unloaded us at a bus station 200 kilometers from where we wanted to be. Apparently he couldn't take his van, with the roof rack, into the province we were shooting for. Note to self. No roof racks in Quinghai. We finally rolled into Yushu and got our visa's taken care of right away. The office that issues visa extensions was out of visa extension stickers (of course) and we have to wait five days. About 7 hours later, after exhausting every money exchanging avenue we could think of, we realized I would be taking a 15 hour bus ride to a city that does accept american visa cards. So here I am in Xining. Tomorrow I will be riding the exact same bus another 15 hours back to Yushu. Except this time I will have money. A whole lot of spending money.