WaZup! Asia

I have hit bottom, achieved clear, I move as an enlightened budda amidst the all encircling chaos, the stares and the piercing gaze of suspicion. The pointed finger, the overheard whisper “waigoren!” flow through and around me, I remain unperturbed like a rock in a stream. Furtive whispers of “the ghost” echo about the marketplace, beware the pale demon of the west walks amongst us. Am I a rockstar? am I a freakshow? or maybe somewhere in between, a little bit of both?
What is it that really separates the brave from the mad? When I first started drawing my plans for this adventure Id been accused of both in almost equal measure. Perhaps to embark on solo travel in the darkened unknown reaches of the world requires a person to be slightly touched. To my mind, having observed many travelers and heard many a tale from the road, the difference is that the brave understand the risks and do it anyway whereas the mad see no danger. With this in mind I decided it was time to try something a little bit reckless, to venture illegally over the high mountain passes of western Sichuan towards Kanding, the wild forbidden frontier of eastern Tibet. The entire region was locked down by the military and totally off limits to foreigners during the national holiday but mummers had been reaching chengdu of a few lunatics who’d managed the journey dodging soldiers and hopping from bus to bus on the four day high altitude journey down to Kunming. The high passes would freeze solid in a few weeks with the first snows of winter, it was now or never. I began fishing about for information at the hostel, sidling up to people, glancing about like purveyor of dirty magazines before slipping them the question, any info on this particular route, nobody seemed to know anything. That was until I approached a wild haired Bulgarian guy. Sure it was possible, even easy he claimed, in fact he had just arrived from hitch hiking illegally across the entire Tibetian platau, it was at this point that I started subconsciously placing all solo travelers I encountered into one of two categories, the brave or the mad.
Still no photos, upload speeds in the Indian Ocean are abysmal …. .

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