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Travel Writers: Braking for the border by Jonathan Litton

Location: North China/Siberia border, Northeast Asia

I was on the road to the "Arctic Village", China's northernmost settlement. I'd been there before in the winter when it was -40F. My nose had frozen and I had sampled ice-cream from boxes in the streets for comedy value. This time, however, was in summer, and mosquitoes were more of a threat than frostbite. Locals tell the tale of reindeer that have had so many mosquitoes swarming into their mouths and nostrils that they have choked to death.

I was playing the little game of "let's see how far I can cycle along the Sino-Siberian border before the police, army and village idiots take exception to my presence". I didn't let them take exception on day one, as I hid from view as close as I dared to Xinbailuke, a military compound overlooking the China-Russia-Mongolia tripoint. The name translates as New 100 Road Capture. How inviting.

Camping near to the intimidatingly named New 100 Road Capture. Russia is about 3km in front of me and Mongolia is about 8km to my left.

Not a real yurt. Quite a surreal one though, as this dude had French, German, Spanish and Italian TV at his abode. Hang on…aren't satellites illegal in China?

On the Inner Mongolian stretch I had found the supposedly long lost Genghis Khan Wall (!), rode on a steam train, and walked through the tunnels of an underground Japanese fortress. I concluded that the mission was going pretty well until I got picked off by police near to the Argun River Bridge, the only such structure connecting China and Russia. They forced me to turn back and attempt a mountain route to the "Arctic Village" muttering something about border laws. Fair enough.

Four days' worth of climbing was repaid in the final fifteen kilometres resulting in an awesome unbroken descent. Well, my motion was unbroken, but my brakes were very broken! I had no way of stopping myself as I gathered speed and hurtled round bends. I used my feet and slalomed down the road in an effort to keep my speed in check and prayed there were no bulldozers lurking round blind bends. There weren't, but there were several streams to ford and I got some serious air-time as I hit one at an incalculable rate.

I was homing in on the mighty Black Dragon, the eighth longest river in the world and my companion for the next 1,800km or so. As I was straining to see the water, I noticed that my road would take a sharp turn to the left in a second. Too sharp for me, but fortunately a track continued straight on. Unfortunately it was the entrance to a military compound and had armed guards either side. Damn! I got through inches of shoe leather and skidded to a halt about ten metres from the soldiers. They were of the beefeater-esque mustn't-move-a-muscle training and were stationed to face each other, their steely gazes forming a laser beam designed to detect and intercept any miscreants daring to break their line of sight. On this occasion their training failed them and they turned to see a "foreign devil" on a bike smile and disappear pretty quickly. I hope they were severely reprimanded for their breach of discipline!

The tunnels of an underground Japanese fortress provide the perfect respite to the heat of the desert

Text and images © Jonathan Litton, All Rights Reserved