Mountain biking in Tibet

I cycled 1100 kilometres from Lhasa in Tibet to Kathmandu in Nepal on a twenty seven speed mountain bike with five other cyclists, all of whom were from Australia. The trip was organised by an Australian company called R.A.W travel. It is a company that runs mountain bike trips in many parts of the world. A major purpose of the company is to raise money to help fight child hood cancer in Australia. Each participant in the tour must either raise or donate a minimum of 1,500 Australian dollars for child cancer in addition to paying all the travel costs of the tour in order to be able to take part in their Tibetan tour. I do not know what their requirements are for other tours in Australia and other parts of the world but it is likely that they are very similar.

A highlight of the ride included cycling up to Everest base camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain which is situated near the Rongbuk Monastery. Most of the roads are now sealed but the road from Shegar to Everest base camp is unsealed and it makes for some challenging cycling. The group met in kathmandu on 19th September. We flew to Lhasa three days later, spent three days acclimatizing to the 12,000 foot altitude and visiting several monasteries including the magnificent Potala Palace before starting the ride itself.

We did fifteen days of cycling, covering 98 kilometres on our longest daily ride. Some of the passes were very long with ascents of as much as 3,800 feet from bottom to top. Although the gradients of the climbs were not steep the length of the climbs, coupled with the altitude made fro some very challenging cycling. The highest altitude reached was 17,126 feet [5,220 metres]. One of the highlights of the trip was the long descent from Nyalam at 12,800 feet in Tibet down to the Last resort in Nepal at 3,700 feet over a distance of forty kilometres. We had been cycling through a high altitude desert between Lhasa and Nyalam but from Nyalam to the last resort we descended through every vegetation zone from Arctic to Tropical jungle.

We rode in vans for the last part of the journey to Kathmandu to avoid the smog and the chaos and congestion of very heavy traffic of Kathmandu. We departed from Katkmandu back to our home countries on October 12th.