With regards to Covid it was interesting to be part of its unfolding somehow—when I was in Thailand in late January, this new and mysterious virus was already there…I was in the second worst place in the world for infections and deaths after China. There were actually checks at the border between Myanmar and Thailand, though they were mainly checking Chinese travellers at the time. I also met someone from Wuhan a few days earlier in Myanmar, who couldn’t go home because of the lockdown restrictions already in place. This all seems rather trivial now given the huge, three-month warning to the UK. Asia was preparing itself for the worst in January. The figures clearly reflect this: the official death toll in Thailand stands at 58. In the UK it’s over 44,000.

When I left Thailand by boat, for about a month I was without internet and had no idea what was happening to the rest of the world. It was just me, the captain and a whole lot of sea. The first we heard anything was when we tried to disembark in the Maldives, and the doctor that came on the boat—fully masked and gloved—to check us for the virus told us Italy had become the new epicentre of the world. That was in March. Though it wasn’t long before the UK grabbed the global top spot for most incompetent government. I flew home from the Maldives, which was difficult and expensive to arrange, but I had very little choice. When the entire world becomes unpredictable and shuts down there’s only one place I want to be: home.

In a country where capitalist monoculture and media bombardment are so rampant, it’s so easy to get stuck in a bubble. I say this lightly. It’s all too obvious coming back to the UK. When you’re inside a bubble trying to look out, the world looks all cloudy and distorted. On the contrary, being abroad, you get a unique view of the UK, peering in, or as it were, increasingly like peering down a deep dark hole. Now I’m back in the hole it seems the way Bojo is handling the Coronacrisis has made concrete to at least some of the British population what the whole world already knows—that the UK is a political mess with some pretty deep cultural problems.

On another note I’ve come to remember all the things I forgot. Walking around a shop was pretty amusing—though only the first time—the radio presenter speaking a language I can finally understand, aisles crammed full of shiny bags all covered in English language, bags of air with a couple of crisps inside. In my pocket, money I don’t recognise, much like foreign money, worthless looking. The new pound coins at least look valuable but what I can actually buy for a pound has vastly diminished in only a few years. The things we eat in this country are quite disgusting anyway. I’ve lost my appetite. We should take as a given that all food was once alive—but when I look around all I see are chemicals wrapped in plastic. All fake. Even the way the cashiers speak is fake. Scripted. Robotics has entered the realm of human interaction. Here we are scared of technology taking over when in fact we have just become pieces of technology ourselves. To stop the machines we simply became them.

But the most emotionally disturbing concept to come back to are all the advertisements, the constant media and the commodification of everything. A world which makes you feel small, worthless, scared and skint. I knew and hated all this when I left. It was just so sweet to live for a while without it all.

Well here I am, back in my tiny hometown in Scotland, which has six million less people than the last city I lived in. And combined with lockdown, it feels like there is literally nobody here, the end of the Earth. Like I’m still on the Tibetan Plateau or in the middle of some vast desert, except there is a mystical entity called Amazon and whatever I want can appear in my hands the next day. Social interaction is maybe the only thing they don’t sell. Thankfully there are some easing of restrictions now, but it remains to be seen what kind of long term effects will be burnt into the collective psyche. Even before Covid, after visiting a lot of places I couldn’t help think what an insular society we live in—I’m not talking about far away places: the south of Europe is starkly more social than here; Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India et al just make a mockery of it. It’s a shame that it’s set to get worse, perhaps permanently. The only thing in our favour is that, at least in this part of the globe, we’re used to it.

It’s obviously not all bad. But I’ll admit it’s hard to remain optimistic in such a gloomy time. It’s not only Coronavirus, the whole world is radically changing with climate, technology, populism, social media etc. etc. There are more things to worry about than ever. I think we are all beginning to feel that now. My solution as always is to retreat to nature, come back and face the bullshit.

I’m working on my bicycle at the moment but it is going to be a while before it’s up and running. It’s so rusty from the boat trip like it’s been left outside in the rain for 200 years. In many ways I also think I’ve aged 200 years and come back to a place that, despite all the differences, is very much the same.

Maybe I’ll hit the road again.

Maybe you’ll get another update by the end of the year.

Cheerio!

My bicycle is strapped to some metal bars and hanging over the water, its two wheels on deck. I’m rocking back and forth to little wooden creaks in the dead black night. The sea is calm. There are a few stars between wispy clouds. Right now I’m sitting on a little ten-metre sailing yacht with an American skipper who’s sailed half way around the world (and just gone to bed) and an English engineer who’s studying hard for some kind of yachting navigation exam—whispering phrases like “Declination six point five thirty twelve…longitude is thirty six degrees”, then rustling through sheets of paper saying “What the fuck where did they get seven point three?!” Together in this little thing we’re going to make the long passage from Thailand to India. Afterwards the captain and I will sail on to Egypt via Djibouti.

All this is modest conjecture. I’ve never been on a boat this small except to cross a river or something. And I actually have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know how to drop the anchor, how to raise the sail, how to do anything basically. (Though from the picture maybe you can tell I can climb a mast pretty good.) All this new terminology too. So I’m heavily relying on the others to get by, show me the ropes (or lines as they’re called at sea) and I might just know a thing or two about sailing by the time we arrive in India. It should take about 15 days to get there. In any case we can’t arrive earlier than a fortnight since India has presently put a quarantine on people coming from Thailand due to the Coronavirus outbreak. It’s super unlikely we can sail that fast anyway.

It’s weird being on a boat after so much time on land. Just a few days ago I hadn’t even seen the sea for almost two years, since I cycled away from the west coast of Turkey in 2018. And I hadn’t seen an ocean since I left Vigo in Spain in 2016. Now I’m going to be living on top of this giant blue thing for the next couple of months.

Surprisingly there are many transferable and relatable things coming from a long-distance bike trip to being on a little boat, though it may not be immediately obvious. I’ve been told it will be hard for me to get used to the space, or the lack of it. No storage, tiny bed etc. etc. But even though this boat is small, to me it’s massive! There are tons of places to put my three little bags of stuff. It’s convenient. Things are just there and not at the bottom of a bag under twenty-five other things, like cooking pots and a kitchen for example.

There are some problems though. Since our watermaker is broken and we can’t figure out how to fix it, we have to take all our drinking water on board before departure. This also means limiting how much fresh water we use for washing and showering. But I’m used to it. The fridge is also out, so the quality of food will be tin-heavy and needs to be rationed. Also used to it. Probably the hardest thing to get used to is the dullness out there. After we pass the Andaman Islands there’s not even going to be anything to look at for the next ten days (no wifi out there either, obviously). I worked out that the average speed of this boat in good wind is well slower than my average speed on the bicycle! But at least we should be hitting that speed 24/7. Like when riding a bicycle the wind can be both your friend and your enemy. But unlike on a bicycle, no wind is a disaster!

China, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Myanmar and Thailand were all lovely, and I regret not having or making the time to write about the things I experienced here. But I knew I would regret not telling you about this new adventure even more. So I hastily bash this post out before we sail off into what feels like uncharted waters…

Here’s to the wind and new adventures!

Cheerio

One would think that crossing from one side of a mountain to the other wouldn’t uncover too many differences. But it actually felt like I was now on a different planet, or rather, an alternative version of reality. The most immediate difference was that I was on a road made of perfectly smooth tarmac instead of boulders and landslides and rivers and sand. There was a safety barrier on both sides, which I found unusual since I couldn’t really see any danger, and there were signs, gigantic road signs, in two languages: Chinese and Uyghur, neither of which helped me where I was going. All these things had been absent for the previous three months of cycling.

The people were mainly minding their own business, which too was a first in a long time—a vast change from the friendly hellos and curiosity of Tajikistan; the camels and yaks gave me more attention. (Why there were camels at 3000m I do not know.) It felt colder on this side of the fence, even though the temperature was higher. Oddly everyone seemed to be wearing camo, as if in fashion, and meant I couldn’t tell the military from ordinary Joes. The only people notably different were domestic tourists, in true Chinese style taking pictures of everything from those signs and barriers to the massive mountains around. The scenery is beautiful. But I’m leaving. Down I go from 4000m to only 1300m in the city of Kashgar. I need food, a wash, Chinese money and a cold beer.

I met a cyclist coming the other way, a young Chinese woman, and was very happy she stopped to chat. We couldn’t communicate verbally at all, but somehow interacted and she gave me a bag of fruit she was carrying on her handlebars. This gesture was a gift of light in what felt a terribly gloomy day.

The sights on the way were no way indicative of the diversity of this country, but did reveal to me certain things which you can only see in China. The first was a set of huge bridges spanning unceremoniously for several miles. I was sort of gliding down this massive rocky valley suspended a hundred metres above it. Everything is made of concrete and somehow feels totally normal despite the altitude and remoteness. The Chinese have a knack for making rather distant and inhospitable places have the same convenient atmosphere as anywhere else.

The second was a more sinister environment. As I fought a headwind into the first proper town, all the shops had bars over their windows and cages over the doors. I was quite thirsty but couldn’t distinguish anywhere to fill up on water since all the contents of the stores were obscured (and the signs in Chinese and Uyghur). The only things I could safely identify were petrol stations. They are surrounded by huge brick walls with barbed wire on top. A triple gate system, a one-foot-thick steel bar and tyre traps. All this is in turn guarded by either police or security or both, who log you into their computer systems with your ID card. You are monitored as you enter and only one person can go in each car, other passengers must wait outside—and it must be a car; motorbikes and other vehicles are forbidden. Consequently they are not particularly busy places, and I have absolutely no chance of getting inside to get fuel for my stove.

The people on the street here, perhaps not surprisingly, look like zombies, somewhat dispirited, drugged hamsters or robots, drones—something willing to obey commands. Anything but human. Only the kids resemble a spirit which is familiar. In the end I asked a rinkly woman from a house nearby for water, and she looked quite scared of me. But she kindly filled up my bottles and after cleaned them too. For that I gave her the bag of fruit the cyclist gave me since it was all I had. But a valuable trade because now I could eat my super noodles for dinner and replenish some carbs for tomorrow.

The local people make extremely good use of cultivating every inch of land, and thus finding a suitable place to pitch a tent that night was difficult. I ended up in a field surrounded by trees occasionally patrolled by men on scooters. And because of that I couldn’t use my torch and did a lot of sitting around in the dark.

It turns out that I had camped right next to a police checkpoint. Nobody properly checks the fields around though because who would be dumb enough to camp right next to a police checkpoint. (me) When I got there the following morning, all the police in this checkpoint, the second of several to come, were of Uyghur ethnicity (except the boss, who is always ethnic Han) and therefore the checks were very light and half-hearted. At least that is the impression I got.

The Han, who make up over 90% of the Chinese demographic, have slowly been populating this entire region, in some cases pushing the ethnic Uyghurs out and locking them up in what is the biggest ethnic incarceration since the Second World War. But that is not part of this story. Just be aware that no Uyghur holds a position of power here. Quite the opposite.

I once was cycling to twinkling glimmers of light shining off rocks and now it’s the flashes of overhead security cameras catching my eye. I’m entering civilisation, so they call it. It’s getting busy and trees are becoming buildings. People drive to work like the sheep I saw in the mountains, herded by a clock of invented importance, in 4x4s that will never leave tarmac.

That tarmac now leads to checkpoints. This next one, at the entry into Kashgar, is manned by Han police with shotguns, one guy looking down from a 25m platform. Not just a couple of police in a booth, but a complex—a technologically advanced, digital powerhouse. A factory of information designed to collect, monitor and analyse anything about you. (The previous week a checkpoint in Tajikistan consisted of 3 teenagers with Kalashnikovs, a fold-out table and a piece of paper.) It is fortunate, for me alone, that the data they collect is limited to a passport check and a face scan. For one can witness the wealth of other technology used on the Uyghurs who occasionally pass through—x-ray machines, body scanners, fingerprint checks, DNA samplers, computers, video cameras, mobile phone checks etc. etc.

Han are not checked.

Once past this brief insanity bomb, the extent of Big Brother becomes apparent.

Kashgar is an ancient city, lying on the old Silk Road. People have lived here in the oasis next to the desert for millennia, and it’s been a trading city with the Middle East and Europe for at least 2000 years.

The Chinese government have now almost finished completely destroying it. Flattened the whole thing.

In only a few years, China managed to wipe out both history and culture in one fell swoop, leaving only memories and stories to fade away.

You can, of course, still visit Kashgar today, but now it’s Disneygar, or what the Chinese call Kashi. Crushed by Chinese boots and drowned in Chinese flags. Now with widened streets to allow easier surveillance, it’s all wired up with security cameras. Previously impossible in the narrow alley-like streets, some without electricity.

Since the understandable uprisings which follow such drastic oppression of a minority it is also full of police. Riot vans are stationed every 200m. In fact the riot police are so permanent they have built them little outdoor gazebos. In the most densely populated areas there is at least one police station on every street, and sometimes three. Roads leading to parking facilities and the gates to schools are somewhat like the petrol stations I mentioned before.

As one walks around the real annoyance is the mini pedestrian checkpoints everywhere. Some are serious, many are half-arsed (depends on the season, the day, the weather). But the sad reality is Uyghurs are checked whilst Han are not, and foreigners somewhere in between. This is all done exclusively on appearance: racial profiling in plain public view, and nobody seems to give the slightest shit about it. The Uyghurs can’t speak out because they will and do end up in internment camps. The Han don’t say anything because they either fear the government or support it, or simply don’t care. The foreigners are the only people who can really complain, and their voices are simply mute to the Chinese government and the Chinese public elsewhere since—and this is the interesting part—the Chinese public do not believe them. They have been told by the Communist Party that foreigners lie about all kinds of things from the millions who died of famine under Mao to the students killed in Tienanmen Square to the unrest in Hong Kong. All the bad things that happened in China actually never happened and is instead propaganda spread by Western media. With this kind of mindset more or less ubiquitous across the population of China, the vast majority of which live some 2000 miles away from this remote region, managing this kind of oppressive atmosphere in Xinjiang is a piece of cake.

The Uyghur’s freedom is limited to a few hundred metres of street between checks, bag scans and pat downs, all the while monitored on infra-red facial recognition cameras of increasingly miraculous capability. It’s a painful thing to witness. Though when I returned to Kashgar more recently, things at least seemed a little better. But maybe that’s just because more Uyghurs are in jail and there are not any “dissidents” left.

Getting to a hostel was a relief. (The one I went to is now closed to foreigners, like so many others.) I was thankful to meet some other tourists who were also in some state of shock and could chat about things over a beer. Although not related to the problems in Xinjiang but to the proximity to the border, the fighter jets flying overhead certainly gave more depth to the Orwellian character. And it was hard to shake the feeling that I was always being watched.

Hungry, I decided to get some food. Immediately outside the relative tranquillity of the hostel were five policemen, more or less permanently stationed there until late at night. It was only a short walk until I witnessed a riot policeman dragging two school kids down the street by their little red neck-ties. They were only about 8 years old, and looked terrified. They were just playing on the street, climbing a little stone wall. It wasn’t the only time I saw such things. Many schools in Xinjiang have one or two policemen stationed inside. Why?—I do not know.

The kids everywhere in this city play on streets between security cameras. For them it’s normal, they grew up around this. But that old man sitting dejected on a bench, wearing a Muslim prayer cap and surrounded by tens of Chinese flags, what was he thinking? What kind of world has he lived through? Watching his culture swallowed, a few friends or family members disappear here and there. Everything he knows replaced with this. Fake paved roads, concrete and flags. There are more Chinese flags here than anywhere else in China, and it’s the least Chinese place. Kashgar is closer to at least 31 other countries than it is to the capital of China.

Whilst waiting for my food, looking through to the back of the little restaurant I noticed the kitchen knife the woman was using to cut up the noodles was chained to the worktop. Cameras were also pointing inside leaving almost nowhere unwatched. Many shops and restaurants had metal detectors at the doors too. At least the food is good. It’s a cross of Chinese and Middle Eastern dishes, a sort of oriental spicy mix. It may be the food is the last real culture left in Xinjiang.

The food available in supermarkets is wildly different. I badly needed to do some shopping and stock up on supplies, and of course being in a Chinese city, there are several supermarkets around. I hadn’t been to a supermarket in several months, so what I saw was both amazing and unsettling. Chinese supermarkets are not like the ones we know back home. They are some of the biggest places I’ve ever seen. Like a Tesco Superstore and a Debenhams combined.

The aisles are endless. Full of vacuum packed unidentifiable animal objects in jelly. Packets in packets. Rows of sausages in plastic tubes. Seaweed cake. A single shrink-wrapped prawn in a bag. Every type of egg sealed individually. A full aisle of every type of soy sauce. Another, every kind of flask in the world. Pre-peeled oranges. Fake wines you’ve never heard of. Grapes the size of plums and plums the size of apples. Full-contrast technicolor Monsanto on steroids. Terrible music. And fruit that is more perfect than in Plato’s dreams and probably even glows in the dark. I spent a fortune but the experience itself was almost worth paying for. There were also riot police patrolling the aisles.

Back at the hostel, some other cyclists turn up. They tell me stories of the rest of China, how it’s different from here, how I need to give it a chance. None of them cycled across the desert, instead taking the train. I wanted to cycle. I wanted to see the vast region of Xinjiang, an area roughly the size of the UK, France, Spain and Germany combined. And after a while, two more cyclists arrived with the same idea. We left a few days later to tackle the Taklamakan desert.

Overall I spent a week in Kashgar in September 2018 and went back for a week in September 2019 after almost a year in China. Kashgar is still changing, and soon there will be little left in the way of evidence of any wrongdoing. Outsiders will only be shocked at the (diminishing) police presence and the surveillance, the latter being rolled out across China. But elsewhere in Xinjiang already more and more travellers are being escorted out of cities and being refused entry to cities altogether. Chinese visas are becoming notoriously more difficult to obtain abroad and the nearby border crossings from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have become two of the strictest in the world.

The atmosphere created in Xinjiang has become the new normal for the locals. But coming from a liberal background it’s easy to be horrified at what’s happening here. Not many nations can get away with this blatant level of control (or putting one million innocent people in jail). I’m aware that Western governments chanting democracy are also spying on and monitoring their citizens, but here is another level.

Though for me the hardest part about cycling through Kashgar, and the rest of Xinjiang, is knowing that there’s practically nothing I can do about it. The only thing is to call on our governments to make a stand against this atrocity. Even without factoring in the million or so Uyghurs that are locked up, the blatant evidence on the street is that there is some degree of Apartheid here. Many Western governments have already called this out, but still continue doing business with China because they can’t face losing the trade links of its cheap market and growing economy. And that’s the way it is. You like cheap stuff? This is one of the many by-products. That’s the real atrocity.

A few hours of tough climbing later, at 4,365m (14,320ft), I was in China. I had cycled to China.

A pile of police riot shields sat neatly against one wall of the room. On another were nine, huge plasma TVs, each displaying a different camera angle of the compound. And dotted around were tens of desks holding shiny black computers all quietly humming. Things I literally hadn’t seen in months. A man dressed in all-black was slouched, sleeping on a chair with a balaclava masking his face and a strange high-tech machine gun resting precariously on his lap. The other busy-bodies around were in military uniform. There were no other tourists or travellers crossing the border, just truckers. But even though the traffic was very light, the border staff seemed always to be doing something in immense hurry, yet simultaneously doing nothing at all. For some reason, in only those few feet from Tajikistan to China, time had suddenly become a massive problem for everybody.

Things were different now. It was hard not to notice the insane amount of security cameras around. Every inch was being obsessively watched, or at least appeared to be. Outside, satellite dishes and aerials sprung out everywhere like the antennae of a technological beast, stretching beyond this futuristic complex behind a mesh of fences into a cold, snowy, inhospitable land. I honestly don’t remember the Tajik side having a single camera. I’m not even sure they had electricity.

My bags now needed checking. At first I was ordered to put my whole bicycle through the x-ray, until I had to explain there was no way it would fit. After a short discussion, the guard settled for the panniers. Throughout this process, I was confronted by everyone’s utter desperation to find my mobile, repeatedly asking me. Don’t have one, I would shrug. When one guard double checked the x-ray and told me to get my phone, I produced a power bank from the same bag, which satisfied him. I had planned for this, since I had been told the guards would try to install spyware on it.

I was under no circumstance to be allowed to cycle. I was now ordered to put my bicycle on the back of a passing flatbed lorry, without discussion. As the driver of the selected lorry was busy changing his licence plates to Chinese ones, I hurriedly tied my bicycle to the back with ropes in hope it wouldn’t fly off mid-ride, then joined him in the cabin along with a Tajik who was crossing the border on foot.

We rolled down on perfectly smooth tarmac, clinky trinkets chiming from the ceiling, some words muttered by the Chinese and the Tajik trying to talk with each other; neither could understand the other’s language. It was the most high-security zone I’ve ever been through, despite the total remoteness of it. For all of the roughly 12km, white poles were leaning across the road, three security cameras on each one. There was also a high barbed-wire fence on each side the full way. It was an odd contrast, being both in a prison and surrounded by snowy mountains, so high and so far from anything. It did make me think of how pointless it was. But if there’s one thing I learnt from my time in China, it’s that nothing makes sense. It was the first time in over 30,000km and over 40 border crossings which I wasn’t allowed to cycle.

The driver pulled left and right as we swerved a dead dog on the road. We had reached the bottom. So had my morale. I had to get out and remove my bags from the truck for yet another passport check, only to return them again, this time on the back. We then proceeded to drive through a disinfectant spray, which soaked them and my bicycle. Then before I could get my bearings a policewoman holding a shotgun told me to carry my wet, chemically-drenched bags immediately to a building by walking the least obvious and most impractical route possible. And I had to do it ASAP. I was cold now, and tired. I was still at 4000m (13,213ft) altitude, feeling like an inconvenience to everybody, or a prisoner. It was in brutal contrast to the freedom I had experienced in Tajikistan only an hour or so ago.

Outside the building was a soldier already waiting for me.

COMPUTER!

CAMERA!!

TEWAPHONE!!!

Well what a warm welcome! I followed him inside with my computer and camera, claiming I still didn’t own a phone. Inside there were all the usual border-tech things: more x-rays, lots of security cameras, scanners etc. etc.. My computer and camera went into a room and then the door closed. I was told by another to sit in the waiting area. This didn’t last long. After a minute, I was told to also go into the room. There were six guys all in military gear, a couple of them in front of computers. The problem was they couldn’t find the on switch for my laptop, which might give some indication of their professionalism. Once they had found it, they asked me to enter the password. Naturally, I refused. This made most of the people in the room extremely angry. One even shouted, in all seriousness, “ARE YOU A SPIDER??!!!” The piece of sticky tape covering the webcam didn’t help my case that I wasn’t. The soldiers were not used to disagreement. After much shouting, mainly at me, and quarrelling amongst themselves, they told me that it was the law, and I must obey. Okay they never said obey, but that was their message. Even if it wasn’t the law, they wouldn’t have let me into China otherwise. So, reluctantly, I yielded, but only on condition that I could stay in the room to watch them, to see they don’t mess around with anything.

They could have easily said no, but actually they didn’t care I was there. Thankfully they didn’t plug anything in, and clearly didn’t really know what they were doing. Two of the guys were now bored and playing shooty games on their phones with each other. For the others, they couldn’t read English very well and so the procedure involved systematically opening nearly every folder on my laptop. They missed programs on my desktop, such as VPNs and networking tools that probably could have gotten me in trouble. But they found pictures I didn’t know I had, like covers of e-books. Black Mirror episodes came up a couple of times. They were digging deep. Probably the biggest mistake I made was forgetting to delete the photos on my screensaver, a photoreel of about 250 pictures, a few from my time in Greece of demonstrations and fiery riots. They found this very suspicious (especially since China has almost zero tolerance to even the most timid of protests). The one of a refugee at a demonstration holding a cardboard sign, they all spent ages on that one trying to get what it said…

And then one border guard, reading over someone’s shoulder in a heavy Chinese accent, said “Open… the… fuck…ing… borders”.

Watching the whole thing drowning in irony made me want to laugh. But actually I think it’s looking back that makes it funny. At the time I thought I was fucked. Long questioning followed, where my stomach was wrenching from both lack of food and lack of hope of getting into China. I thought I was going to be at the border for eternity. Four hours was enough, it seemed. In this time my bags were once again checked, and my mobile phone was finally found. They plugged a tablet into it and scanned it. It’s not clear to me if anything was installed on my phone, but strange things that happened later in China supported this theory. I later got rid of it. All the questions, checks, then fingerprints, face scans etc. naturally came to an end around the time their shift finished and they wanted to go home. Once I left they closed the whole building down. Exhausted and digitally raped, I was free to go. Free in the sense that I was now in a restricted border area for at least the next 100km, and in a province, Xinjiang, which some compare to an open-air prison.

But at least I could ride my bicycle. Most of the time anyway.

What confuses me to this day is the absurdity of it all. The guards are primarily concerned with two things: pictures—supposedly searching for signs of “terrorism”—and journalism. But all their behaviour was indeed bizarrely weighted to the possibility that I might in fact be a spy. Like a spy would cross a militarised border at 4,300m on a bicycle and not just fly in, without a computer. All modern spies must be women anyway; they are better at lying and are less suspicious.

If all this sounds rather dystopian to you, I suggest you don’t bother visiting the province of Xinjiang. Because, for me at least, this was only the beginning of a protracted nightmare where I was witness to mass surveillance, censorship and oppression.

Lovely tales for other days.

Cheerio