Worlds apart

25th July – 1st August 2026

We had been told by many people that Kyrgyzstan is beautiful, and they were proven to be correct before we had even crossed out of the 20km of no-man’s land separating it from Tajikistan. The green and red rocks which had greeted us at the Tajik border control continued, opening to a wide valley which in turn unfolded into plains stretching impossibly onwards in both directions either side of us, as if they were about to drop off the face of the earth. Behind us was a band of mountains, generous portions of snow heaped onto their peaks. The fenceless landscape was filled with a variety farm animals all intermingling in a far more sociable way than we are used to back home; Ben had to remind me on more than one occasion that I was at risk of over-romanticising the situation. For the briefest of moments, the beauty of Kyrgyzstan almost tempted us to change our route, but after an insubstantial lunch of two-day old bread and fig jam with a questionable use by date, we decided to stick to our guns, head to China and leave Central Asia on a high.

After expending a considerable amount of energy cycling downhill into a headwind we reached our destination for the day: the magical city of Sary-Tash, a fantasy land we had concocted with the help of Greg to keep us going during our final kilometres of the Pamir Highway. It had a spa, pizza, Aperol spritz, homemade gelato, and green grocers full of fruit and veg. We were painfully aware that the fantasy town we described sounded a lot like home. Sary-Tash wasn’t quite the place of our dreams but in the space of one evening meal we got all of our 5 a day, felt fuller than we had in a while and immediately began to feel more human. We spent two nights there, with Greg inevitably catching up with us on the second day leading to us celebrating what was likely to be our final night together with the last three beers available in the town.

The incredible landscape continued with us as we approached the border. On a map it looked uninhabited, but in reality it was full of yurts, giving us a brief peak into the nomadic lifestyle we would have seen in Mongolia. Far sooner than we expected, still 20km from the border, we hit a queue of lorries, which we overtook with difficulty on blind corners going uphill. We got as close to the border as we dared and found a camping spot hidden from the road next to a stream. It would have been very peaceful had it not been for the constant beeps of hello between lorry drivers throughout the night and the clear signs that they had previously used the spot for a toilet.

Since dropping to a lower altitude, we had both been getting a lot better sleep, rather than waking at regular intervals throughout the night. After each good night’s sleep, we seemed to somehow wake up even more tired than before; although we had left the Pamir Highway, we were very much still feeling its effects. The next morning was cold, making it even more difficult to prize ourselves out of the tent, and we huddled at the entrance spilling coffee all over our sleeping bags as we mustered the energy to start another day and head to the border.

It was, of course, the most elaborate border crossing yet. We passed through the Kyrg checks relatively quickly and were directed to weave our way to the front of the disordered queue of lorries in front of us, taking us to the Chinese checks. Here, we were told we would have to get a free bus through to border control. We were therefore slightly bemused when the free bus refused to depart until we had paid. We in turn refused to pay until we were told that the free bus was in fact not free. Once we had paid up and finally reached the border control building, we were instructed to take all our bags off our bikes for them to go through two scanners, one resembling the hubble telescope. Ben’s camera and our phone photos were searched, the officers hovering for a while on my photos of Samarqand. I was completely obvilious to fact that they were trying to assertain whether I had a religious interest in mosques, and flicked through the photos to show them a particularly flattering one of Ben having a nap. My naivity paid off and we were marshalled through to customs where we had to unpack and show them anything which showed up as questionable on the scanners, which seemed to be almost everything. Somehow all they took from us, rather helpfully, was our rubbish. The whole process took about 2 hours start to finish, and with the 2 hour time difference, we decided to make the most of the fact that in China it was now lunch time and spent less than a fiver on two of the most flavourful meals we’d had in a long time.

That day was the first time the police had been called on my account. After a short cycle we attempted to flop into the nearest hotel. After all the anticipation of getting through the border was over, the exhaustion of the past month suddenly hit us. The hotel we found was, at least to me, rather unusual: a collection of prefab cabins on a construction site, with a former warehouse decked out as a canteen come event space. It felt incongruous with the small rural border town we found ourselves in. Ben brushed off his Chinese to book us in and I had a conversation via a Chinese translation app about how far we’d cycled and how tired I was as a result. After what felt like a very long time we were told to take a seat and wait for the police. We had barely sat down when they had appeared, enquired where we had come from, where we were going and when, and left as quickly as they had arrived. We had heard a lot about cyclists’ interactions with the police in Xinjiang, but for us at least it felt that it was far worse in anticipation than it was in reality.

While the landscape had barely changed, the infrastructure was drastically different. The stark difference was clearly illustrated by the toilets in our last guest house in Central Asia and first hotel in China. In Kyrgyzstan, our guest house toilet was housed in a small outhouse at the bottom of the garden. It was a western style pit toilet with a bin bag inside that was held in place by sticking plasters to bridge the gap between the western style appendage and triangular cut out in the concrete floor of the original squat toilet. The toilet seat for some reason required upholstering and was wrapped in rags of patterned fabric. Our first hotel toilet in China, by comparison, was positively sci-fi. It had a heated seat, flushed automatically and had various buttons I didn’t know what to do with.

Leaving the crisp white sheets of that first hotel in China was almost impossible. For weeks we’d been telling our minds and bodies just get to China, and our minds and bodies had obliged. The problem was that we didn’t just need to get to China, we needed to get to Kashgar, and Kashgar was still over 200km away. An easy day cycling was in order, but that wasn’t exactly what we got. After having to carry several days’ worth of food in Central Asia, we had built up an image of China as a world of convenience with restaurants and supermarkets galore around every corner. It was a convincing tale, so much so that we left that day without a care in the world about where we might get lunch, snacks and eventually dinner. This proved to be a mistake. We discovered, as we shared a handful of wafers and the small portion of tofu leftover from our dinner the night before, that we were on a 120km stretch of road completely devoid of sustenance. We concluded that the road was mainly downhill, and the best thing to do was to book ourselves into a hotel at the end of it, polish off a jar of Tajik “nutella” and keep on cycling.

As we cycled, our view of the red jaggeredy cliffs was interrupted by an organised chaos of telegraph poles and electricity pylons scattered across the landscape. The geometric forms in the rock looked like they had been painstakingly carved, and bands of grey streaked the surface. The children shouting “hello where are you from?” in Tajikistan were no more, replaced by road traffic cones flashing red and blue whilst megaphones relayed automated messages of road safety. We passed road works, and what I first mistook for construction workers soon revealed themselves as manekins, robotically waving flags at us. Despite the “mainly downhill” including a surprising amount of uphill, we could soon see the outlines of a city on the horizon, and before long had checked into our hotel which was pure luxury after the Pamir, and demolished more food than we thought possible, packed full of garlic, ginger and salty oily deliciousness.

The next day bought police checkpoints at increasingly frequencies. These were often vast buildings which seemed to be erected for the sole purpose of checking the identities of foreign cyclists whilst every car appeared to be waved through having barely wound down the window. Between these checkpoints we cycled along smooth roads shaded by trees. I made a note to fully appreciate trees; all my favourite landscapes are full of them and I never seem to notice them until they are gone, as they had been for weeks on end in Tajikistan. As our route became more populated we began to notice the cold, hard stares which followed us along the street on account of us being foreigners long after their owners had passed us, somehow managing to avoid falling over while they did so. I made it my goal to crack a smile in these faces. I wasn’t very successful.

We were finally rewarded for the weeks of climbing by a slow steady descent to the shaded segregated cycleways of Kashgar, which were largely occupied by scooters and operated efficiently by rules neither if us will ever understand; there was nothing for it but to follow the crowd and hope for the best. We had been out of cities for a month, and for once the hectic nature of cycling into one was almost enjoyable in its novelty. The further we cycled into Kashgar the more we noticed small signs of Central Asia which had slipped through border control: felt pamir hats, round flat bread (“non”) and the pattern of residential streets and neighbourhoods which reminded me of being back in Uzbekistan.

We spent a couple of days in Kashgar, continuing to refuel, exploring the blisteringly hot streets for as long as we could handle and preparing for the next stage of our trip. For the first time, our bikes would be travelling solo. Several cyclists travelling in the opposite direction had recomended sending our bikes via China’s rail shipping service and picking them up a few weeks later, giving us time to explore without them in the meantime. We had originally planned to take the train ourselves but the 48 hour journey to our next stop, Chengdu, in a 6 berth cabin of hard sleepers didn’t quite appeal when a four hour flight was also on offer. With our luggage considerably lighter after our bikes had been packed off on the train, we entered the next stage of the journey: one where we would be travelling without them.