At 6:30 A.M. I set out for the Aksai Chin. What is the Aksai Chin? It's a humped-back whale. A plateau in the no-man's land between India and Tibet. Icy mountain peaks are visible several kilometres beyond the furthest horizon. Most of Aksai Chin plateau is flat and lies about 5000 metres above the sea. To the east lies Tibet's great northern wilderness: the Jangtang plateau, one of the world's wildest and most remote natural habitats. I hope to see some rare species of antelope up here...

On the way, I go past the very last Uigur road commune without stopping because noon hasn't happened yet. I see these guys have something special: a large dog like a husky and also, I have to laugh, an electric washing machine connected to their power generator - which they aren't supposed to use during the day! It isn't far now, is it? I spy another truck wrecked at the bottom of a cliff, this one looks at least two years old.

Thankfully, the mountain is windless. The charcoal peaks hang only a few hundred metres above and they are frosty on top. I sidle slowly over and my eyes don't lie - there's an old canvas tent perched right by the summit. Outside the tent is a wooden post driven into the sandy clay from which hangs a deer carcass, eloquently rotting, and purposely hung up to do so.

Inside the tent three Tibetan men recline on dusty carpets, taking their noon tea. These men look so poor, dirty and abandoned in comparison with the cheery, clean Chinese soldiers who drive the shiny new supply trucks. One of them is getting on in years, a silly old fool for whom the other two are responsible, it seems... He takes some white pills for his head cold. They offer to feed me. One fellow lights his kerosene torch to boil my soup. I feel like crying that these poor fellows are going to feed me. I smile instead. Simple wheat noodles simmered with cabbage. I give them 10 yuan, twice what they ask for the soup. I leave the lonely men alone with their claim - not actually to be hunting the protected wild deer.

An endless gradual rise. The planet looks dead now: no plants, not even the smallest weed can grow here. At this point my senses find cheer in a childhood fantasy about driving up that huge volcano on Mars - Olympus Mons, three times taller than any mountain on Earth and hundreds of kilometres across. I'm mailing plans to Florida. I giggle and feel elated. The air is getting thinner and thinner... A big flat-bed truck sits there. The driver lies on the ground, fiddling under the engine. I'm nearly over this last, ultra-high pass, above 5000 metres. I catch my breath three times before going over the top and walking the last 100 metres.

As I focus my camera on the vast panorama below, I see the whole Earth cannot be captured by a single shot. But I reach with the small lens, to capture the northern reach of the Aksai Chin plateau... The driver wants to give me a lift down the mountain. What do these goofs take me for? I want to do it at speed, on my bike, through the thin wind!

I follow the road halfway, but it's potty, so I dive onto the super-smooth clay beside the road, short-cutting the remaining switch down the ridge. This is like the Bonneyville salt flats, but steeper. I'm setting a record! As I slide soundlessly across the hard clean surface, I spot a convoy coming along the main road. They grin at my speed. I reach a small clapboard shack - another cafe - built beside a patch of solid ice melts into a pond. Water enough to sustain life.

Outside the shack, I chat with a guy. I assume he's Chinese until I realize his English makes that unlikely. He tells the truckers he comes from Taiwan, but actually he's Japanese, hitching. He sits close beside me in the cafe, as if longing for a friend. He tells me that he studies contemporary Russian literature.

This food shack is manned by three Uigurs. One of the Uigurs looks like an old Canadian acquaintance: the visual reminder makes me feel amused, melancholy, when all I want is rest. There were so many good friends in my life and it feels weird, imagining how I'll never see any of them again. The Japanese guy watches me eat a bowl of rice, tubers and fried mutton. It's pretty good. But he says, "It's expensive." I reply, "Only 8 yuan, I have to eat..." He's either starving himself or confusing this place with a Tokyo cafe. Then his driver is calling him to go and he's gone.

A crisp snap in the dry dusk air tells me it will be very cold tonight. So I decide to stay inside the shack. I read my book and share smokes with the Uigurs, who are quite happy to have me. They lead me to understand that there's nothing beyond this place. "Here," says the cafe boss, pointing his finger at the soil below, "5000 metres." He turns round and points at tomorrow: "Up there, 6000 metres." More more, up to go. Okay, I'm ready.

So, I settle on a cot beside the door in my sleeping bag. When I get up the next morning the thermometer says -4 degrees Celsius. I pedal forth at 6:00 o'clock as everyone sleeps. It's too early for so much slow sand. I get on higher, more solid ground, stop for a doo-doo drop on a hill, smoke a cigarette and press on. I think about being alone out here in this vast empty space, and that right now I can't just get on a plane and go some place else. There's nowhere to go. Maybe you can see that in the photos: but you have to be out on the Aksai Chin, alone with a bike to feel fear and solitude contend with joy and elation. It can't be described - that solitude - in the middle of nowhere, with nobody for hundreds of kilometres. No one can give you food and water. You have to bring everything along. Being self-sufficient is related to freedom. Earthly solitude makes you feel smaller: and you become capable of more salient and humble abstractions, like the world can do without us, and that the presence of people on Earth is an accident, magical and unlikely.

You know, when you wonder, "Why me? Why this mother and that father..?" I'm not one to explain that fate is like the illusion with which we oppose, using our imagination, the sensations of chance or inconsequence that afflict our wish for well-being. We want meaning to mean more than the apparent and obvious content of each proposition. It's as if we crave that everything be riddled with a lovely sub-text, a metaphoric harmony must be invoked to reveal our sublime insights about the truth of being alive. Life must "come from" somewhere - and so we need certain beliefs in abstract reality, like God, a home, eternity and the like. The measure of civilization - and the value we attach to faith, life and love - all this begins and ends with the relationship that imagination has to the senses. From this relationship comes, I believe, all ideas about reality, including hard scientific and philosophical understanding as well as all higher abstractions: artistic/fictional, emotive/religious.

I'm not afraid of dying like the doomed Jack London hero in 80 below arctic weather. Now, I'm far from being afraid, let's be clear about that. I feel small and a little old. Good. I want very much to see everything round me, that's all. I have a visual thirst for the extravaganza of ever-changing novelty. Wilderness is the only treatment for walls.

I look for people and see none. The rocks peak-aboo above the horizon's limit. Too high. A creek. Fresh water flows from under ice into my bottle. The road is rough and I pass a scientific research station, an aging complex. An ache is jabbing into my left shoulder blade. The bumpy washboard beats me up. I don't care. The pain in my neck goes away at night as I sleep. For the first time, solid, smooth tracks appear by the road. I ride them as a tail-wind swoops in: 30 kilometres an hour instead of 5. Fun. A 1959 hollywood mountain is painted on the horizon. Big backdrop.

It's coming closer... I mean, I'm getting closer to it. At first the hill looks so smooth and even-toned that I assume it's small and close by. But I'm small, and it's huge. The subtle wash of earthen colors has no rough texture and the air is so perfectly clear that no familiar visual cues can help me see that depth perception doesn't work up here. The mountain is six kilometres from the roadside; yet, due to the clear air, and the flat plain between, it appears as near as one or two ks. Strange beauty keeps her distance!

Some vivid golden grass appears among shorter green weeds. Lush efflorescence of rare flora. Then I see the animal, almost without motion. Far away - and only that sensitive peripheral glance claims it. I whip out my trusty field glasses. I pan to and fro, then spot him. A huge creature, tall as a man. The antlers are straight, it isn't a deer at all. A gazelle, an antelope, an ibex. It looks my way. I'm getting my camera. I'm walking across the turf and the animal watches me with telescope eyes then walks a few paces further away. It's two kilometres from me, and so wary! It won't let me approach. I ride again. The wind is a powerful blessing. I become a sail full of motion and spot another group of animals. Three wild asses munch on the sparse grass. These brown and white animals are profoundly cautious, too: I walk at them with my camera, and the asses take a few steps away.

An earth-mover has gouged huge troughs near the road - to catch water. They do it on purpose to prevent erosion, and to water the animals, and maybe to keep stranded truckers alive. I need to stop here because the sun will drop in less than half-an-hour. 98 kilometres: best day of the whole trip!

The wind is so strong, it really wants to kill me. So, I head for a telephone pole. It's reinforced with a circle of timber piles built round it. Four heavy gauge guide-wires multiply the support. The structure blocks out the wind fairly well. I climb inside my tent to smoke and eat. Sun gone, the wind relents. But the air's freezing at almost 6000 metres. Longest ride, the highest camp - and my coldest night: July 6, 1999.

In the middle of deep sleep, the chill wakes me. It permeates the sleeping bag. So I curl into a tight ball: my fetal fear of freezing is real. Exhaustion douses the cold - but not my will to live. My body burns extra calories. Minus 10 degrees Celsius as I crawl outside at 7:30 A.M. With sun, the temperature climbs in minutes to 8, then 4 degrees below zero. Have to get more food today. I round a small emerald lake and am showered by a swarm of newly hatched flies that resemble termites. I pedal through, panicky, hoping I won't swallow any in.

On high ground again, I spot a gazelle - an ibex of an antelope - a big babe of a buck - bounding in long blind leaps to the road. He's going so fast! Two huge swords spiral nearly a metre straight from his head! The animal spots me, perhaps by the motion of my glance. Instantly, he juts forth his front legs to catch and arrest the mass of his rapid momentum. He's only five metres away! He turns around in less than two seconds and bounds back the way he came, gaining speed quickly. That animal is in fine physical shape. A few minutes later, climbing a ridge above me, I see another gazelle, or maybe the same one, or his mate - looking down on me too carefully. The stillest ibex, her eyes looking right at mine. Wait, wait - till I'm in the safe grave...

This small pass! Fuck, I'm slow. A truck goes by, jams on the brakes. One guy, an Uigur, jumps out and carries a watermelon to me. Thoughtful. I feel satisfied for the ten minutes, eating the thing. I top a hill and view a pure splendor - a glowing bowl encircled by smooth, sandy peaks. I'm somewhat shopworn by distances, am running out of superfluous descriptions... The lake below floats a huge turquoise table - liquid gemstone - an efflorescence. I'm going down rough, bouncing at speed, a big truck close behind me. I'm hungry, so hungry!

The Chinese woman in the tent diner feed me well: sweet, fatty grilled pork and a mountain of spinach and bowls and bowls of rice. I eat with a couple of the working girls, feeling like a monster. I take some water for a shave and then get out. The restaurant is too busy with young Chinese soldiers. But I want to be alone again! I so love the land, with its valleys unpeopled and the wondrous solitude, the thrilling distances ahead - all so far to see beyond!

Another pass. This one gives me a slight headache, but I reach the last valley before Tibet. This ethereal place evokes the full spectrum of color available to a gifted painter. The valley cuts out a large circle, much like a crater. The road rims round to some ice mountains south. The valley floor is velvet green next to the pitch black river gulch. My camp lies on the same kind of lunar sand.

The cold comes, but isn't so intense as before. The next day, by all estimates, I should cross the Xinjiang border with Tibet. At 3:00 A.M. I open up the tent and peer up to heaven. The Milky Way is still there. We're caught in the last, long wing of a mansion - our great galaxy - and all we can see is one wispy arm and billions of stars. How come we never see the bulbous glowing center of our galaxy at night? I don't know. Maybe we're too far away from it. But at this altitude, the stars are unnumbered. I wonder, how many intelligent creatures live out there, observing this vista from the night side of planets far across the vacuum sea? I don't see them, and they can't see me...

A quote from the road journal: "I've been thinking silly thoughts, trying to purge that redundant negativity which I blame on society, my parents... Resolving to read more Dostoyevsky, even Philip K. Dick. I should plot out my novels. Dreamed a hilarious dream last night. Captain Kirk was sitting on a bench in the middle of the boulevard, holding up a tasseled blue grey banner with gold stars on it. He was grinning in a sheepish yet winsome way. Then when I woke up a moment later, I realized many people are waiting for that bus which never seems to arrive and suffer their own lot, being typecast or whatever... Can you think of a better description? By being subject to a circumstantial character and the peculiarly unconscious destiny we end up creating for ourselves. I suffer from that inevitably helpless sensation I'm little in control of my own ends, letting things happen more often than I put my own foot forward... I hope I don't freeze tonight. Wonder what Kate is doing today? In four of five days I'll be in Ali, where I can rest for a day, wash clothes, shower, write a few letters and make a couple of calls."