How do we usually meet nature? We don't. Normally, we meet a familiar world defined by the parameters of controlled and "safe" circumstances: we build roads to let us drive through the mountains and never have to get outside our cars. We holiday according to an itinerary based on time and the ease with which we can be guided through things. We are enclosed by embodied, mechanized movements and the substance of reality tends to slip past us. We visit elaborate and carefully maintained theme parks, or play video games to experience a systematic depiction of "real" events without ever having to close the distance between fantasy and reality. We never really get much chance to leave man-made shells behind, unless we decide to go far away from home - preferably to a remote environment. More than ever before, people with surplus time and energy are "escaping into pure nature." River-rafting, long difficult treks, hiking into remote countries - all such activities obsess many of us. We imagine that we will find the "truth" and "ourselves." Of course, we often do little better than to become awestruck and disoriented, sometimes simultaneously.

The feeling of solitude is real though. On a bike, I'm absolutely surrounded by the beautiful lines of empty Earth. The emptiness makes me feel small. Here are only rocks. The Yarkant Valley is made of carbon black sand and some scribbly scrub brushes.

The road doesn't ever end. After drinking some water, I go on to some startling vistas. Everything rises to a high shoulder above the river valley. Below, on the flood plain, the river divides into silver threads and cords all unraveling. Sedge-like grass on the valley floor adds an unexpected sense of life to a landscape starved of all but blazing sun. Around the next left to the north is a huge ice mountain. Passing the vast pyramid takes half-an-hour. The Earth is very large, not small, believe it.

One last road workers' commune: I go inside and the fellows greet me in an almost friendly way, as if I'm a fool. They smile and generously offer me several hard buns. They seem intent on moving me along, so they can go on repairing their big earth-moving tractor. But I don't think they really want to fix it, because then, they'd have to go back to work... Maybe they're too far away from home like I am. They're smiling after all: amused by my predicament, and maybe they don't really believe me a fool. They're happy to give me bread and water, but I don't dare ask for any hot noodles. I guess I'm supposed to be a tough dummy.

One of the Uigur guys shows me a photograph - it's a French-Swiss mountain climber who tried making K2 the year before: with curly locks and big gold earrings, he looks the perfectly charming Romeo-cum-Errol. But he didn't make the mountain, and they tell me that he died in the effort. I have no idea why the Uigur worker wants me to know about his tragedy. I'm not expected to make it either. It doesn't matter about the dead climber from Europe: nobody can scare me... I'm not climbing K2 Mountain. I'm only riding a little bike over 5000-metre passes - it's easier and much safer. Cycling takes more stamina than skill. Well, a bit of skill - riding down, maybe. But I still feel like an ox.

So slowly I climb up the steep, smooth pass separating the Yarkant and Karakax valleys. The grade becomes high and very steep as the road ascends a narrow flute between towering rock walls. I pass a broken truck. It's jacked up. A hungry-looking crew try to repair the rear wheel. At least I make them smile and joke in face of impossible problems. The black rock formations give way to colorless greys and sandy beige at the top. The ice peaks show up, a few hundred steps above.

A cold wind comes over the pass, opposing me. I can barely move against this monster's hydra-head: it's like the atmosphere is frozen solid. It pushes me, so I lean on it like a wall. I get off, fumbling to drink some water. Wind grips my weary leg muscles and crushes at my heart. Why should nature take on this personality of resistance? For a moment I feel nature hates me - because I'm a man. My suspicions are superstitions. I'm feeling it's more like the resentment of nature, not anything like nature's jealousy of me. Yes, (lack of) human imagination is the suicide's best tool... Unreal phantasms, superstitions, mistaken ideals, manufactured vanities, false teachings, the sense of despair and failure plaguing our scientific age - all savagely conspire to murder civilization everyday. We need to escape despair - it's made of isolating selfishness. If we want to discover more joy on Earth. Waiting for heaven feels too silly for most of us now...

Personifying the elements will never again be new enough. Transcendentalists thought Earth is mother and protector; but in a romance of the sea - the ocean becomes an avenging god. Today I feel fear because the wind doesn't want me to get over the pass. Yet, if I make the top, the same wind can give me pleasure. So I get off and don't give up, but crouch forward, grip my bike, and walk into the wall of air. It stops me - for a minute. I'm not so strong. The force makes me feel like crying. Go on?

The road switchbacks away from the wind and stretches, at last, up the summit. A level space made of 360-degree vistas upon three gargantuan ice peaks not far above the roadway. Snowy rocks and gravel. White and black earth. Behind lies the Yarkant, and below, the Karakax Valley. Shivering, I put on more clothes as my sweat chills. A land-cruiser comes up and stops. Three Tibetans travelling together and they offer me water. But I smile and shake my head: plenty of melting ice flows near the road.

The deepest valley lies far below and I ride down very fast over steep gravel. A sort of descending plateau unfolds, the tongue of a glacier bed, which will eventually crumble into sharper vales not far ahead. Windswept sands in spaces between the peaks resemble subdued watercolor washes. The most surprising hue is a charcoal black landslide.

Some green marsh appears along the fast, small stream flowing down from the glaciers. Here a farmer has pastured a few big cows and the first cool signs of rain. Time to camp. The river surrounds an islet of burned quackgrass. The flowers over there are tiny bright and dare me to cross over the creek. Life is irresistible, even amid so much barren land.

Light rain patters on the nylon night of my tent's skin. The temperature drops as if attached to Newton's apple. I clamber into my sleeping bag, once again wearing everything: my long johns, my feather vest, my toque. The sleeping bag is a French ultra-light that won't keep a man warm very much below zero. The bag's funny, too - cut for skinny freaks nine feet tall with shoulders only twenty-inches wide. So, I'm lying in a pretty tight squeeze wearing all my clothes. Sometimes I wake up at night - gasping. Above 4000 metres, the air is so thin that you can't catch breath to make your heart beat enough air into your torn muscles.

Flowers blossom by bubbling clear water and I write about life. Here's a quote from my road journal...

"Sometimes as I ride along, I keep thinking that I should use the free time to imagine a plot for a novel, and draft it out as I ride away. Well, I keep watching the road or gawking at the mountains instead. Then I think, guiltily and I wish, more joyfully, about women I know, my lover Kate, and hopeless Sue, and my lost Sarah. I think of the work I've done and the new job I'll have to find when I get back. I laugh at the time I'm wasting - have wasted for the past few years. Really, writing is my destiny, or death deserves me. When I think of the women, like Kate, I see her going through her routine, hopefully getting on well with Nick... and here I am working like a slave to ride this bike, everyday a vista, an exhausting struggle. Kate would wait forever for a guy like me, Sue won't. I haven't lived with her. In my own vain thoughts, I remember age and feel it coming over me. I'm no more capable of making a brilliant decision today than I was five years ago. "What a mind!" Not, "What a life!" They used to say that when I was ten years younger: "What a life!" Now, it appears that I'm expected to petrify and evaporate, since that's the normal course for a devoted obsessive-compulsive dupe idiot genius like myself. I don't want to hate anything or anyone anymore. Find peace. That's what I want. I'm a little scared of this natural Earth. I want to relax more and forget about whether it will be hot or cold tomorrow. Poor dear Kate? What will we do with each other? I am too stupid and afraid to say goodbye. To hang on without making a choice, that's distracting enough to the imagination, but perhaps crueler to someone younger who doesn't really understand why I cling so. Perhaps words will make sense to me again, later. I can't wait forever for the fate, the making up of my mind, her mind. Love is the one thing I need to be at peace. To let a woman love me - that appears to be the only thing I need to learn... People like me are considered foolish, since the one thing modern people pride themselves on is their decision, their self-assurance and the where-with-all to achieve everything. In our society, culture reminds us everyday to live sincerely and to devote your passions openly, honestly. Love cannot steal a man's focus... Only as a man understands what love is - can he receive it again. Life is a series of big and small crises, and naturally, some of us have strengths to reach and give, others have a gift for reason and analysis; our individual nature is driven simply by strengths, and as for our weaknesses - we ignore them, blot them out - until someone else accuses us of going off and being too selfish, etc... Our time is in love with opposed passions, selfishness crying for selfless love; xenophobia battles the open mind, and calm tries to defeat anger. Perhaps the time of civilization really does know too much, and so much do we know that our attempts to proceed are often mildly or wildly baffled by knowledge - and not by the declared "complexity" of things and personality... We are wise without really wanting to be, since we still don't know how to pacify the animal race beneath our pubic passions... Say it again, claim it, buy it - but try to sell it - that's another life davey... Rest and eating. Raisins and walnuts, buns, water, milk powder and cereal powder. I feel like an astronaut."

The next morning, I find my way down into a sand pit valley. On the way, I meet a group driving two jeeps: they call themselves "China Explorers." They're visiting the remotest corners of Tibet. Their leader is a bilingual Chinese fellow who spent years in America; he kindly outlines the road ahead, explaining the precise distance between the truck stops beyond. We all leave each other behind and I'm alone again.