THE KORA
MY EYES BURNED AS A SALTY STREAM
of sweat flooded them. With a fully loaded bike on my back and DEET-laden insect repellent dripping onto my hands, I tried to squint through the deluge of lost fluids coursing down my face.
The frenzied nebula of mosquitoes buzzing around me was doing a stellar job of stymying my progress, landing on every inch of exposed flesh and piercing my skin with their needle-like proboscises.
“This is pure agony,” I grumbled, resting my bike against a cluster of bamboo and swatting irritably at the shadowy veil of vectors. “At this rate, it’s gonna take us ages to climb out of this mess.”
“That’s for sure,” affirmed my teammate, Sam Seward, squashing his helmet against his forehead and sending a cascade of perspiration down his cheeks. “Maybe we should have started higher up.”
We’d dragged our good buddy, filmmaker Joey Schusler, to this remote corner of southwest China to bikepack a high-altitude circuit around three extraordinary mountains considered sacred by the Tibetan people.
Known as the ‘Yading Kora,’ this multi-day pilgrimage beneath a triangle of snow-clad, 19,000-plus-foot peaks is a rite of passage for Tibetans. For these hardy plateau dwellers, a ‘kora,’—or completed circumambulation of mountains historically ordained as holy by various Dalai Lamas—will purify a lifetime of negative karma.
At this point, though, it felt like all that negative karma was landing squarely on our shoulders. Not only were we hampered by heavy bags holding 10 days’ worth of supplies, but the heat itself was smothering, with a humidity factor that made breathing feel like an act of desperation.
Add the deafening reverberation of a symphony of cicadas, rubbing their wings together until they reached an eardrum-splitting crescendo, and it seemed like the entire forest was collapsing on us.
Further compounding matters, I’d spent the previous week fighting a crippling bout of African tick bite fever that I’d unluckily brought with me from my temporary home in South Africa. After several days of sweating off the delirium in a stifling hotel room, I was starting this mission weak and malnourished. The cool majesty of the mountains taunted me. I was in hell.
A flat patch of soft wildflowers means it’s time to pitch the tent
Bike’s editor-at-large, Brice Minnigh, pushes his way up the Kasi Hell Valley
‘mantra rays’ on a Tibetan hillside
Sam Seward, shagged but not stirred.
EXTREME CONTRAST
There was no choice but to press on. Our transport into these thickly forested foothills had left us behind hours earlier; the trail we were following would eventually lead to a fire road we could pedal up to higher elevation. This was the price we’d
