18/10/2019 0 Comments Chinese borderOn the Pamir plateau we came up to this fence. It marks the beginning of the no-mans land leading up to the Chinese border. We always wanted to bike to China, so it's also the place where we celebrated our goal.
Originally our plan was to cycle through China to SouthEast Asia. We have abandoned that plan. First of all we because we don't have a visa for China (as a journalist Jasper would not be allowed into Xinjiang anyway). But we're also put off by the stories we've heard from cyclists coming the other way. They had to show their passport several times a day, they were followed by the police for hundreds of kilometres, questioned for 27 hours by 5 chain-smoking cops, passed from one police station to the next, refused places to stay in hotels. The western province of Xinjiang, where millions of people are locked up in what China euphemistically calls ‘re-education camps’, is an open-air prison and extreme version of a big brother-style police state. Our new plan? Cycle to Almaty and fly from there to Bangkok at the end of October where we will start the more relaxed cycling chapter of our trip.
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