Words & Photos By Masanori Nishikawa
Becoming My True-Size Self / The Day My Mind and Body Connected
I had finally gotten used to bike travel abroad.
"I want to inspire someone by taking on challenges myself!"
With that thought, I was telling everyone I met about my dreams in grand terms and trying to make myself look bigger. What I ended up facing head-on was the unfinished homework from my past that I had left behind in my heart.
Writing those feelings down, settling my accounts with my heart one by one, I made up my mind to keep traveling as I was, timid and all.
This time, I'll tell the story of crossing the Himalayas, which had been my goal.
Traveling On as I Am
When I had drawn a line under facing my own life and started riding again, I found I had become a little afraid of meeting people.
But still, timid as I'd become, I went on day after day, piling up encounters on the road.
Not "I'm okay because the other person accepts me."
I can only be me, and I only have what I have.
If that's not enough, then I'll let it go.
When I met people with that attitude, I somehow felt lighter.
Ah, maybe this is fine, I thought.
"Being myself as I am" has become something like a life motto that I still carry with me now, at 43.
Toward the Roof of the World / Into Tibet Under Lockdown
After that I rode through many lands, traveling through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, and then entered China again to cross the Himalayas.
I'd gotten good enough at Chinese that in short conversations nobody could tell I was a foreigner. I fell for a Chinese woman who was traveling solo and got turned down, and when a major earthquake struck Sichuan Province, I spent four months volunteering on the ground with a Japanese NGO.
By then it was well into autumn, and before winter set in for real, I went back to bike travel to cross Tibet, home of the Himalayas.
The Tibetan Plateau, the roof of the world that cyclists everywhere dream of.
But that year in Tibet, Tibetan monks were setting themselves on fire one after another in protest against government repression. It was major news around the world, and the Chinese government was restricting foreigners' entry into Tibet.
Notes for Getting to Lhasa
Even so, I didn't want to give up on Tibet, a place I'd always wanted to go. Whenever I could get online, I emailed back and forth with friends I'd met on the road, searching for a way.
Then I learned that Akio-kun, a friend who was also traveling by bike, had gotten past the checkpoints, safely reached the capital, Lhasa, and from there made it out to Nepal.
He sent me details of exactly at which kilometer marks the military checkpoints stood along the national highway to Lhasa.
If I could just get past those checkpoints and reach Lhasa, he told me, there should be no problem heading on to Nepal from there.
I wrote it all down in my notebook and started riding from the town of Golmud toward Lhasa.
Between Life and Death / The Trap of the Starry Sky, and the Fury of Altitude Sickness
At the checkpoint Akio-kun told me about, I walked at night with my light off, swinging wide of the road.
In the distance, the small lights of the checkpoint.
And the sky was so full of stars you couldn't tell one from another, like a carpet of light.
Gazing up at it, I fell straight into a big hole.
Heart pounding, I kept heading for Lhasa.
As if Life Were Draining Out of My Body
After that, the altitude kept rising, and while camping just past a 4,800m pass, I came down with altitude sickness and had to drop out once.
I honestly thought I was going to die.
The only way I can describe that agony is that it felt like life was draining out of my body.
My head was splitting, I was wheezing for breath, and I had no strength left in my body.
I desperately wanted to be saved, but the next town was 100km away, and going back was 100km too.
Struggling through the pain and suffering, I rode 30km, and then I couldn't even stand anymore.
What I came up with to stay alive was to lie down sideways across the road to stop a car.
I don't know how long it was, but a car stopped in a hurry, they loaded me in along with my bike, and somehow I was saved.
A Conversation with My Body / What I Found on a Snowfield at Minus 20 Degrees
I recovered from the altitude sickness, extended my Chinese visa in a big city, and took on Tibet once more.
It was now December, and the temperature kept dropping, getting close to minus 20 degrees.
On the Tibetan Plateau, above 4,000m, there's nothing to block the wind.
Day after day I rode toward Lhasa into a ferocious headwind, so bad I started to think, "Maybe Tibet isn't calling me."
It was far harder than the first attempt.
You've Done Well to Come This Far
I'd managed to avoid altitude sickness, but Tibet in winter was harder than I'd ever imagined, and on a mountain pass I reached the limit of my strength and willpower.
I collapsed right there.
All alone, gazing at the white plains and snowy mountains as far as the eye could see, I somehow still felt calm inside.
I'd done well to come this far.
I'd given it everything I could.
If it still wasn't enough, then that's just how it is.
But then I realized I had never once said thank you to my own body, which had worked so hard to get me here. So, rubbing my legs, I said, "Thank you for working so hard to get me this far."
Those were the words I spoke to it.
Mind and Body Are Connected
I stayed there a while after that.
But then I decided to try just one more time, and I stood up.
I got back on my bike.
And when I put my foot on the pedal and pushed down,
my body moved for me.
Strength came back into my legs, and they pushed me on and on up toward the top of the pass.
Riding toward the pass, I couldn't stop the tears.
Riding with tears streaming down, I realized that mind and body are connected.
And one more thing.
Tibet Was Simply There
Tibet, which I had thought "might not be calling me,"
its vast nature,
was simply carrying on with its own great cycle of life.
And I was just a tiny, tiny presence passing through.
I believe the feeling and strength that came to me then carried me all the way to Lhasa, and then across the Himalayas, and on to Nepal.
Tibet, cradling the immense Himalayas, was a harsh and beautiful place.
The people who live there were strong, and kind.
Having learned how important it is to be myself as I am, and how body and mind are connected, I went on traveling as a new version of myself, meeting the world and the people who live in it.
Continued in Vol.5.