Seventy-Two Bends and a Few Too Many Tyres
- David Stephenson
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
“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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