My life’s hitchhiking experience, at age 19, was two rides for a total distance of under 20km, both in my home country of Switzerland. And then I found myself in Tibet with no means of transport and low on cash.

I could have joined one of the many tour groups of foreigners heading into this land on the edge of the world’s highest peaks, a place holy to Tibetan Buddhists throughout the world, but I wanted an adventure. I wanted a trip into Tibet without a travel permit, a tour guide and without being weighed down by all the other regulations enforced by the Chinese government. I had spent four summers in China and knew something about these, how oppressive they can be but also how the Chinese work their way around them every day.

It was under these circumstances, in a part of the world I was not allowed to be in, that I learned to hitchhike.

I had been walking and biking westwards for several weeks from China’s southern province of Yunnan with a half-formed idea of finding a way into Tibet. At the start of the summer I was in Beijing on business, so several weeks later I was desperate to get away from work and from the crowded eastern cities. I wanted to see the other side of China before change overtakes it. Yunnan gave me remote villages full of women in elaborate red and blue embroidered clothes and men surrounded by clouds of blue smoke billowing from their enormous water pipes. As I neared Tibet the landscape shifted as the altitude rose; the population becoming increasingly sparse. Hours could go by without any sign of life.

I was standing on a dusty roadside facing a cloud-capped peak of nearly 7,000m when I made up my mind to find a way into Tibet. Most Chinese cities have cash machines so I hadn’t worried too much about having enough for days or weeks of travel. I came close to running out of money several days earlier and suddenly discovered I was in a town with no machines. I found myself too poor to take a bus and decided to give thumbing a ride a shot.

The previous week, while on my way through the town of Li Jiang I had
met another solo traveller, a 20-year old Chinese girl from
near Shanghai. Sha Sha, a biology student, was by herself in Yunnan on
holiday, without any particular plans. Independent travel is still an
unusual thing for Chinese men, more so for women. Intrigued by this
unusual character in a flowery pink dress sporting a cowboy hat, we got
talking, and a week later I found myself hitchhiking with her. Being a
foreigner accompanied by a Chinese female seems to be a good recipe for
getting rides in China, and within five minutes we found ourselves in
the back of a jeep.

My Mandarin Chinese is decent, but our driver spoke to us in a local
dialect, meaning we understood close to nothing. After several
kilometres of puzzlement we managed to work out that he was telling us
that Tibet was in the opposite direction.

Disappointed by the outcome of our first thumbed ride, we headed back up the winding mountain road towards our starting point.

We hiked for many kilometres through mist and clouds. Occasionally we
would pick up the faint puttering of an engine in the distance and turn
around excitedly, only to find a rickety contraption of some sort
making its way towards us. Unable to carry us, each of these vehicles
slowly pushed its way past, spewing out thick black smoke that filled
our lungs. We had been passed by several such vehicles when we picked
up a deeper hum coming our way. A truck pulled over next to us and we
hopped in.

Several rides and several mountains later the sky began to darken
and we found ourselves in the little town of Fo Shan, close to the
border between Yunnan and Tibet. In China provincial borders usually
consist of a large sign informing you of your location, but Tibet is a
special case. The borders into Tibet resemble national borders and are
watched over by armed police. Once inside Tibet matters are just as
complicated due to police checkpoints every few hundred kilometres.
Several days earlier while in a teahouse I had run into a local with
decent Mandarin who was familiar with the area between Yunnan and
Tibet. He was unusually tall with long straight hair, a long beard and
seemed to know every inch of Tibetan geography. After some discussion
he managed to provide me with a list of each town in which a police
checkpoint was located, so that I could make a point of finding a way
around them.

Sha
Sha and I were determined to make the border by night, feeling our
day’s progress too slow. We agreed to keep on moving even though it
meant walking into the darkness, perhaps a silly idea. A tractor gave
us a short ride and as it pulled up to its destination we paused to
relieve ourselves. I was unable to find the exact location of the
bathroom (if there was one) pointed out by the driver, but I decided to
use the general area, only to find a large pig sniffing my rear end –
quite a shock.

The tractor stopped for the night. We hiked on, with 30km of
abandoned mountain road ahead of us. My cell phone was no longer useful
for calls as these remote regions of China are without network, but I
flicked it on regularly to light up the road ahead.

Several hours of darkness later, a dim light came slowly into view,
eventually taking the form of a small white truck transporting mirrors.
It slowed down next to us and the door opened. We were faced with two
puzzled but smiling young men from the South. A foreigner isn’t a
common sight on this deserted road, especially at night. Late for a
mirror delivery in Tibet the pair had decided to drive through the
night. We fit four people into two small car seats. One was the driver.
Someone had to sit on the stick-shift and another person’s legs were
sprawled across the driver’s legs. This made changing gears quite a
challenge for him and eventually became a team effort, all of us
standing up in unison to make space when the car accelerated or slowed
down.

My
map had lied to me again. It labeled this a "national road" which I
thought implied a new, level road. I’d been foolish enough to picture
smooth sailing to the border. I soon saw that this national road was an
uneven path carved into the mountainside, with sheer cliff faces above
and below. Clearly, the driver had taken pity, deciding we’d be killed
if we walked this road. In bad weather dangerous rock falls are a
common occurrence. At one point I was coolly informed that on our left
was a 10,000m cliff down to a riverbed below, a remark I didn’t want to
try and understand. The road was rough and jagged, cut deep with ruts,
potholes, and blocked by boulders that required all four of us to move.
We were jolted and thrown around a truck cabin the size of a tiny ski gondola for nearly eight hours, which left me feeling like I’d been
hugging a jackhammer inside a tin box.

Now and again the headlights flickered across a lone man smoking by
the side of the road. There are no villages here, just tracks through
cracks in the cliffs, with herds of yak somewhere beyond. I thought
about walking along in this dark and suddenly having a man spring up at
my elbow. I was glad for our ride.

As it turned out, we happened to be hit by bad weather: rounding a
corner we found the road collapsed in front of us. A large, somewhat
yellow and very ancient looking dirt-mover was here to repair the road,
but by the looks of it had a lot of work to do before we could get
past. Our spirits sank.

Our driver locked the windows and doors, then switched out the
lights. He grabbed a knife from the glove-compartment and warned us
about local thieves and murderers as we peered uneasily through our
steamy windows, patiently waiting for dawn.

Sleepless hours later, the road fixed, our truck began to move
again. We soon arrived at the first police checkpoint into Tibet. I
suddenly remembered as I started from my dozing state that it was
illegal for me to enter Tibet. Being seen by police was definitely not
a good idea. I dove to the floor of the truck and Sha Sha threw a dusty
blanket over my foreigner face. I held my breath, thinking this ruse
might alert the police to the presence of a non-Chinese. I saw through
the threads of my cover a flashlight beam search the car slowly. It
stopped on me. For several long seconds I didn’t move as my Chinese
companion tried to distract the officer, talking about the state of the
road.

A minute later I could feel us pulling away. The sun began to rise
and we entered Tibet, with only 12 police checkpoints left to cross.

Previous travel stories in GenevaLunch by Liam Bates:

Taking refuge in Wu Bin’s London, 25 July 2007

Wu Bin in London, the changing world of wushu, 27 July 2007

Xtreme cool at Whistler mountain, 27 February 2007 (click on image boxes to view them)

China’s cutting edge, 5 February 2007

Editor’s note: Liam Bates, from St Prex, Vaud, Switzerland, is co-founder of Bridges to China, which offers Chinese language and martial arts courses in China.