Seventy-Two Bends and a Few Too Many Tyres

“When you are on the road, reality is the best storyteller.” — Anonymous Tibetan proverb

Into Thin Air

Crossing into Tibet was exciting. High mountain passes, snow and ice and a lot cooler finally. It felt like stepping into thinner air and sharper contrasts: prayer flags snapping in icy winds, devotion set against state control, beauty side by side with exhaustion.

The higher we climbed, the more the world thinned out. Charlotte struggled with the altitude, and although we joked at first about the absurdity of sleeping with a pipe up your nose, the reality was unsettling: lying in bed listening to my wife breathe through piped oxygen was both a relief and a deep worry. Was she just unfit? Was she ill? Or was this a glimpse of frailty that would come back to haunt us later in life?

We passed our first fields of prayer flags, a reminder of Tibet’s unshakable spirituality. We saw prayer wheels everywhere, and we tried to spin them when we could. Each spin, Tibetans believe, releases a prayer into the wind. Painted mani stones lined the roadside, carrying carved mantras — Om Mani Padme Hum — their weight both literal and spiritual.

Lhasa, Then and Now

Lhasa awaited us, as it had in 2011. The Potala Palace still rose proud, its white and red walls luminous against the blue sky. Pilgrims prostrated — raising their hands above their head, then stretching flat on the ground, arms outstretched — before stepping forward and repeating the act, slowly circling the Jokhang Temple in a moving tide of devotion. It was faith embodied, one step at a time.

That temple is Tibet’s most sacred site, so it jars you when you notice the square crawling with riot police, water cannons parked up, waiting to extinguish anyone who wants to set light to themselves as they have done in protest against the Chinese occupation of their country. And it doesn’t end in the streets. Walk into a Tibetan home, and you see the Chinese flag in the window, President Xi, the president of China, adorning their walls. No law makes them do it, but everyone knows it’s easier that way. The state hasn’t just taken the land — it’s marched straight through the front door and sat itself down in the living room.

We also revisited the old market area, where men still wore traditional dress, hair plaited with amber worked into it, showing off beads and trading their Amber with each other. A reminder that not everything had been bulldozed into uniformity.

Procrastinating is common in Tibet. Many people used to take months to reach the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, where they procrastinate around the temple to show their devotion.. They would set off from their homes in the country and travel the roads, procrastinating all the way. The government outlawed this, as many were killed by passing motorists gloves, arm pads and knee pads to protect them.

But something else had shifted. Shops were now selling cheap plastic and Chinese junk, much like Camden Market. This “Disneyfication” hit me hard. In 2011, we’d driven up towards Everest, slept in yak-hair tents, shared food with strangers, and walked up to the base camp the next morning with no gates to pass, no fees to pay, just unsupervised, quiet, and alone, Everest looming raw and unfiltered. Now the sacred heart of Tibet was smothered under neon lights, plastic tat, and techno music blasting out. Fee’s to park and a bus to get, well, nowhere near base camp. It felt less like a spiritual centre and more like a selfie backdrop.

We didn’t go. We will hold our memories from 2011.

Borders and Blockages

Beyond Lhasa, the road unravelled. Reports came of landslides closing the Nepal border, and when we arrived, they proved true. The Motorbikes in our group were manhandled over the debris by Sherpas, but our truck was immovable. With just nine days left on my visa, our only option was brutal: turn east toward Laos, 4,000 km away, including over 1,000 km of mountain passes.

Landslides are common in the rainy season when the mountainsides become saturated, the earth gives way, and whole roads and villages vanish under mud and rock. We’d seen it before — sudden, violent, frightening.

The most infamous part of the drive to Laos was the Nujiang 72 Bends. Hairpin after hairpin. If we didn’t feel travel sick before, we would after the bends. WE managed it without incident.

A Cascade of Mishaps

Then the cascade began. A blowout — no spare. A careless car sideswiped our bumper. The accident could have ended everything for us. The damage was repairable, but in that moment, I truly thought: this might be the end of our journey. After each mishap, I asked myself, Can we go on? And each time the answer was the same: we are not stopping. We’ve come too far.

At first, the careless driver offered us the equivalent of £100. The police were called and gave us two options: accept a settlement or file a report that could take weeks to process — time we didn’t have with my visa running out. We pushed back until it became £500, still nowhere near the real cost, but the only way to move on.

Still raw from that, I promptly ripped off the air-con unit on a low bridge. The sign said 3.70m. We’re 3.85m. I must have been in a trance not to notice. Gaffer tape, rope, and tarpaulin turned our truck into a patchwork of improvisation. Our rig didn’t feel like the fortress we were promised back in Doncaster.

Tyres blew again and again — four in total. One failed on a motorway bend with trucks screaming past us at breakneck speed. Ordered to the roadside by the police, we waited while Charlotte calmly cooked egg fried rice for me and our guide. It wasn’t just any meal — I can now say Charlotte and I cooked egg fried rice for a Chinese man, in China. Takeaways back home will never taste the same.

We had new tyres waiting, around 100km further on. Pre-ordered days ago, and awaiting our arrival. Why couldn’t we of made that last 100km before the blowout? A fitter had to drive one out to us to get us to town. We then limped into town at 19:00. The shop stayed open, fitting the rest of the new tyres until gone 22:00. Exhausted doesn’t quite cover it.

At last, with new tyres fitted (at £450 a piece), we made it to Laos — one hour before my visa expired. We don’t know what the penalty would be for overstaying a Visa. But knowing China, it would be a lot worse than driving erratically, causing an accident and having no insurance.

End of the Road, Almost

There’s no lesson in Tibet, just the fact that you either keep moving or you stop. We didn’t stop.

What lingers, though, isn’t the number of bends or the altitude on the pass signs, but the way everything pulled against everything else. Faith carried on, even with riot police parked on the temple square and Chinese flags hanging from people’s windows. Everest, once a place where we’d slept in a yak-hair tent and walked up on our own two feet, now fenced off and piped full of techno like some cheap fairground ride. Our truck, built to take us anywhere, held together with rope, tape and stubbornness.

Through it all, Charlotte kept the line. Oxygen pipe in at night, frying rice on the hard shoulder with trucks blasting past — steady when I wasn’t. That’s what resilience really looked like, not some grand gesture, just refusing to give in.

Tibet is beautiful, yes — but beauty under every kind of pressure except the one the air itself has. Up there, the pressure drops; everywhere else it piles on. And still we kept moving.

What can I say? China’s roads told a story full of surprises, most of them costly; we won’t be rushing back anytime soon.

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In case you’ve not seen these…

How we got here (our last blog)

China: Border, Control, and the Long Road to Tibet

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Escorted Across Pakistan: Guns, Landslides and a Narrow Escape to China

We were one landslide away from the river — and one protest away from missing China entirely. Find out what happens when the mountain road collapses and your only protection is a rifle convoy.

Tea with the Taliban: An Overlander’s Passage Through Afghanistan

A must read for those considering taken the road less travelled . Is this as scary as it gets? We certainly hope so!

We didn’t have 1.25 million dollars in cash strangely?

Bribes, breakdowns, and flooded crossings. One minute it was dust and diesel, the next it was gangs, collapsed bridges and a demand for 1.25 million in “cash.”

China: Border, Control, and the Long Road to Tibet

Khunjerab Pass border crossing into China/Pakistan. The highest paved border crossing in the world is at 4693 meters above sea level.

“Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” — Winston Churchill

Border Shock

After Pakistan, China hit us like a wall of order. The Khunjerab Pass at 4,693m wasn’t just a border; it was a statement: pressed uniforms, polished glass, and cameras everywhere. On one side, dusty chaos; on the other, regimented control.

Our truck number plate, translated into Chinese.

The plan had been to cross into India, but with the Wagah border closed after political fallout, the route shifted: China → Tibet → Nepal → India. That meant a 6,000km detour, heavily regulated, always watched. We joined a group to share the cost of the required guide.

Maps, Medicine, and Power

At the border, our truck was practically dismantled. Some of our household medicines were confiscated. The seriousness was made clear: 5g of heroin equals 7 years in prison; more could mean execution. Foreigners included.

We desperately wanted to go to floor 11. Every time we passed, we wanted to stop, but common sense said no!

Then came the map. I was asked if we had any maps, and when I handed over our world map as instructed by the border guards, I thought they were curious about our journey. Instead, I was marched into an interrogation room. Three officers loomed over me, jabbing at Taiwan and some obscure islands off Japan. Why were they not the same colour as China?

They said “everyone knows these islands (that I had never heard of) and Taiwan were part of China”, and so why did I have a map showing something else? Was I a political agitator?

Deportation was threatened more than once.

Charlotte, as usual, stayed out of it. She never interferes when I’m in trouble — she waits until later to tell me I’m an idiot. But I noticed her silence sharpen, the way she folded her arms and withdrew, as if willing herself invisible while the officers circled. It was a coping strategy I came to recognise again and again — her way of surviving the weight of scrutiny.

We later heard of eight German bikers deported for nothing more than a Nepalese flag sticker being displayed on one of their motorcycles. A reminder that in China, even a piece of paper could become political evidence. Maps weren’t maps — they were narratives, controlled and policed.

We saw a number of lorries carrying these. Randomly parked on a roadside. Why and what are they?

Surveillance on the Road

Getting SIM cards was another ritual. Passport photos weren’t enough. We had to pose with the SIM in hand, elbows showing, so they could see it was me holding the SIM and not something superimposed into the picture, then again with a placard of our number in Chinese and English. (Cultural note: this biometric SIM registration ties into China’s digital ID system, ensuring every call and click is traceable. In regions like Xinjiang and Tibet, these systems have been expanded further — part of the state’s strategy to track movement and suppress dissent. For travellers, it meant constant visibility, every phone call another data point.)

One of many ghost towns in China. All the infrastructure, but no one living there and no shops?

Once on the road, the rules multiplied. Checkpoints two or three times a day: photographs of us, the truck, the Chinese number plates we had to carry, and the translated driving licences. Meanwhile, above, cameras flashed endlessly. Charlotte and I both found ourselves quieter, speaking less — as if words themselves might be captured and judged.

The land itself was vast, mostly desert and scrub when coming in from the west. Then, out of nowhere, construction. Three hundred kilometres of roadworks in a single stretch. New cities sprouting from sand. The roads were flawless, smoother than anything we’d seen in Central Asia.

Food and Fatigue

Food was another endurance test. Egg fried rice, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Charlotte, normally cosmopolitan in her tastes, began pushing plates away in quiet resignation. Once she muttered, “I never thought I’d dream of a sandwich.”  Menus offered variety — pig’s trotters, half-developed chick eggs — but neither of us had the appetite. Add in constant spitting, constant smoking —no matter where, lifts, shops, restaurants, nowhere exempt from the disgusting behaviour — and the sense of suffocation grew.

Meals were cheap though — a plate of fried rice with a bottle of water cost about £1.50 — and plentiful, even if repetitive. We didn’t cook much.

What struck me most was a lack of humour in daily interactions. Maybe it was the weight of rules, or the ever-present cameras — either way, people seemed wary of laughing at the wrong thing.

Breakdown and the Long Catch-Up

Then disaster: the driveshaft bearing fell apart. Without it, the truck was stranded. Parts were not easy to source despite the “Made in China” label on half the world’s goods. Our hardship was not to be sympathised with, and our group of motorbikes decided to leave without us. Without them, we’d need a separate guide. Should we abandon the route? Head south to Laos?

The broken driveshaft bearing. The first of many mechanical issues.

Charlotte stayed detached during my debates with mechanics, but when the replacement part finally arrived sooner than expected, she gave the faintest smile — relief under fatigue. We drove 34 hours across two days, 15 hours, then 19, grinding through mountain passes until we caught up with the group, both of us shattered. Charlotte later told me I was mad, but that she knew I wouldn’t quit.

Along the way, we passed Lake Turpan, 154m below sea level, with desert heat soaring past 40°. Beauty and bleakness are intertwined, but no time to stop and enjoy the views. We needed to catch the group.

Joe the Guide

Our guide, Joe — real name ChuFeng — travelled with us sometimes. Just 22, raised in the countryside by grandparents while his mother worked tables in Chengdu, he’d studied hard to become a guide. Now he lived in a small flat, the rent was a mere £170 a month, his hobbies were video games, and his favourite TV series was Downton Abbey. Naturally, he

loved Taylor Swift and country music. Don’t all 22-year-olds listen to Country music?

Joe - Our guide.

I said to him one day, the Chinese would take over the world. He shrugged: “That will take some years.” His quiet pragmatism seemed emblematic of his generation: ambitious, globalised, but cautious. Charlotte and I respected him, though his age made deeper conversation difficult. He was kind, diligent, and a reminder that behind the checkpoints stood individuals making their own way.

Reflection: Control and Fragility

Crossing into Tibet, our final stretch, I felt a shift. Leaving China, we thought, freedom was suddenly tangible again. I joked to Charlotte that I could strip naked and run down the street and no one would care. She didn’t laugh — she just looked at me as if the idea wasn’t so far from how we both felt. Little did we know what lay ahead.

Crossing China wasn’t about distance — it was about control. Every camera, every checkpoint, every bland meal reinforced it. We had set out as independent overlanders, yet here we were dependent on guides, permits, and even the arrival of a single spare part.

Independence proved fragile when rules and machinery could stop us dead.

The East/West contrast was stark: Pakistan’s chaos against China’s order, Indian excess against Chinese blandness, individuality swallowed by scale.

The heat was horrendous, and a view from our hotel window, you can see people had beds and so they could sleep on the roof of their buildings.

Charlotte endured it all with quiet resilience — the food fatigue, the relentless checkpoints, the silence she retreated into when the weight of surveillance pressed down. Her way of coping was as much a part of the journey as the roads we drove.

And that map at the border still lingers with me: how a simple piece of paper became political evidence, how narratives themselves are policed. In China, power is drawn not only in borders but in colours on a page.

Yet there was space too — deserts, passes, and the quiet shrug of a young man named Joe. Strangeness became the constant, and perhaps the only way to keep moving was to accept it.

In case you’ve not seen these…

How we got here (our last blog)

Escorted Across Pakistan: Guns, Landslides and a Narrow Escape to China

We were one landslide away from the river — and one protest away from missing China entirely. Find out what happens when the mountain road collapses and your only protection is a rifle convoy.

Tea with the Taliban: An Overlander’s Passage Through Afghanistan

A must read for those considering taken the road less travelled . Is this as scary as it gets? We certainly hope so!

We didn’t have 1.25 million dollars in cash strangely?

Bribes, breakdowns, and flooded crossings. One minute it was dust and diesel, the next it was gangs, collapsed bridges and a demand for 1.25 million in “cash.”

Escorted Across Pakistan: Guns, Landslides and a Narrow Escape to China

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.” — Helen Keller

A Movie Escort at the Border

The sirens hit before the dust of the border crossing had even settled. Within minutes of entering Pakistan, we were in a convoy straight out of a movie — armed escorts sweeping traffic aside, rifles visible at the window, our truck suddenly the star of someone else’s action script.

Our armed guard and support car with 2 more armed officers and a driver.

The change from Afghanistan was obvious too — cleaner streets, English road signs, even women walking alone — but it was quickly overshadowed by the guns at our side. Afghanistan had felt far more chaotic, with Taliban checks at every turn — yet the people

there were warmer, perhaps because tourists are so rare.

A quick check before a new armed guard takes over.

On our entry to Pakistan, we were picked up by an armed police escort, and told it was necessary for our safety. They took us from the border to our overnight hotel (we were told we couldn't stay in the truck for security reasons, just as we were in Afghanistan). At our hotel, an armed guard was waiting for us, and so after the police left, the new armed guard took over. The rifles had decided for us: the evening would be spent inside the hotel.

The next morning, another escort arrived, lights flashing, waving us through toll roads without stopping, halting whole lines of traffic so we could glide through without stopping.

It was thrilling in one sense, unnerving in another — theatre and tension all at once.

When we asked why we needed an escort, the answers were vague. One officer muttered “Taliban,” explaining this was a different branch from the Afghan fighters, and that they were targeting police, soldiers, and foreigners alike. And our oversized truck made us too visible, too tempting a target for the Taliban. In truth, the escort felt less like protection and more like theatre, though I took some comfort in knowing we weren’t entirely on our own despite the surreal feeling of having our own armed guard.

The police had also informed us that the escort would stay with us for three days, right up to the Chinese border.

Roads of Risk and Reward

For us, it was mostly about making distance. Our initial plan was to cross Pakistan to India, but due to political tensions, that border was closed, so we had a 6000km (almost 4000 miles) detour to enter India via China to Tibet and then to Nepal and finally into India, and we had to meet fellow travellers in China, a group of motorbikers we were scheduled to drive with across China, so Pakistan was a line on the map to be crossed quickly, now.

We saw little in terms of sights, but saw much of the country’s reality. People seemed to live at a higher standard than in Afghanistan; roads were more organised, uniforms sharper, signs bilingual, spirits lighter. And despite the escorts, we felt oddly more at ease.

We drove the Gilgit Pass, the Karakoram Highway, and the Khyber Pass — all on Charlotte’s bucket list for years. But dreams rarely come without risk. Landslides scarred the roads, tarmac sliding into rivers before our very eyes, trucks teetering on the edge as tarmac fell into parallel rivers. Every few kilometres, diggers clawed at fresh debris to keep the roads clear before the next landslide meant they had to start over.

Charlotte sat silent for long stretches — the roads she had wanted to drive the most were now the ones she feared most. She had been delighted to tick them off her list, but the road conditions soon turned that delight into unease. Relief only came once we cleared each stretch without rocks above us giving way.

There were many beautifully decorated Pakistani trucks.

The Karakoram Highway is sometimes referred to as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” an engineering feat that links Pakistan and China across some of the harshest terrain on Earth.

It is also notorious for constant landslides, collapses, and fatalities — beauty and danger in equal measure. Crazy to think just how vulnerable we were in a 12.5-tonne truck, lumbering across roads that seemed barely able to hold their own weight.

A week after we left, a landslide killed 43 people on the very road we had taken. That knowledge still chills me.

A Fragile Beauty

Northern Pakistan was a feast for the eyes — snow peaks, glaciers, rivers foaming against the rocks. Villages clung to mountain sides; some cut in half by previous land slides. Many houses lay derelict where rock and mud had swept through and destroyed much of the structures, scars of earlier landslides visible in every valley.

Yet life carried on with a quiet stubbornness. In the villages of Hunza and Gilgit, families tended orchards of apricots and apples that somehow flourished at altitude, their green terraces a shock of colour against the stone. Every tea stop offered “chai” with an insistence born of mountain hospitality.

We passed places of almost mythic renown — the Hunza Valley, with its turquoise Attabad Lake formed by a landslide only a decade ago, still swallowing the road beneath it; Nanga Parbat looming somewhere beyond, known as “Killer Mountain” for the lives it has claimed.

We wondered how people slept at night, knowing the mountain could take their home by morning.

Blocked at Sost

Tired and frayed, we reached Sost, the last town before China. Ready to cross, we were told the road was blocked by a demonstration.

Our armed escort bid us farewell, and we were finally alone.

Local business owners had barricaded the road in protest against new council taxes that, they said, made it nearly impossible to stay in business.

I went to speak with them and tried reasoning, asking them to remove their roadblock so that we, the tourists, could pass. I said, but they weren’t a part of their struggle, and it made no sense to block our access, but they were not for budging.

We were stuck, and this was a real problem as we had a rendezvous with a load of bikers, and we had to make that rendezvous to get across China. You are not allowed to travel without a guide in many parts of China.

Our saviour came in the form of a local man who took pity on us, guided me to a dirt track looping behind the blockade in town. The ground was rough and unpassable by car, but our truck’s 4x4 capabilities helped us crawl threw. Relief surged — until we saw the steel power cables hanging low across the path we wanted to cross. Our normal method is that we would nudge them up with a broom handle, but these were live, uninsulated, and untouchable.

After a few frantic phone calls, a policeman arranged to have the power cut, and so we could pass. Lifting the cable with caution, we crawled under it in our truck. As we edged through, wondering how many homes were left without power, the power was cut for our crossing. Oh, to be a white tourist in Pakistan. Again, parallel worlds.

No Guarantees

Pakistan taught us that danger wears many faces: rifles at your window, rocks above your cab, or wires across the road. Escorts and diggers gave the appearance of control, but none of it really made us safer. A landslide could come down without warning, or a handful of shopkeepers could block an international border for days.

Charlotte’s long-dreamed passes turned into long silences. The roads she had wanted most became the ones she feared most, and the only relief was getting through each stretch in one piece. Bucket lists don’t show the exhaustion in your shoulders or the ache in your stomach when the cliff edge drops away beside you.

Every border seemed to tell a story about power. Afghanistan had dust and tension, Pakistan had rifles and escorts, and China was waiting with its own brand of order. Different masks, same fragility underneath.

And that was the real lesson: the journey could be stopped by anything — a rockfall, a protest, a loose cable across the road. All the rules and uniforms in the world didn’t change the fact that we were just moving forward on borrowed time, hoping the mountain or the politics would hold off for one more day.