Travel Reference
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off. 'It looks like a bloody beach!' he exclaimed. 'How the hell are we meant to get
these things through there?'
'It's worse than the beach,' I corrected him. The heat and falls of the past hour
had sapped my energy, making me feel demoralised. 'You get hard bits on beaches.
This looks more like the place where they make the sandpits for all the kids in the
whole bloody world!'
We pushed our cycles tentatively forward and they promptly sank. The bottom
bit of my front wheel was completely buried, leaving the spokes extending upwards
as though they were growing out of the sand.
'Fuuuck,' Tim breathed, dismayed. 'My bike won't move! What the hell are we
going to do?'
I heaved again, exhausted, and my bike moved forwards five centimetres. 'Jeez,
mate, I don't know. At this rate it'll take us a bloody week to reach the border!' I
said, dejectedly. 'You know, maybe they were right.'
'What?'
'Maybe they were right, you know, all those people who said we'd never make
it.'
'What the hell are you talking about?' Tim fixed me with a level stare.
'Well, I dunno. It's just that if it
does
take us a week … well, there's no way we
can carry enough water for a week and maybe we'd just have to bail and …'
'Chris,' Tim cut me off. 'We're nine hundred kilometres from Beijing. We
have
made it!'
'Huh?'
'Think about it. We're a couple of weeks from Beijing. Not even the pit of hell
is going to stop us now.'
His words pierced my gloom and snapped me back to reality. He was right: we
virtually had made it. Through all the snow and ice, past the ticks and mozzies.
We'd been struggling away for over a year - rarely a moment without its challenges
- and now here we were, only a few weeks and one more challenge away from our
grand finale. I shook my head as I realised the simple truth. Of course nothing was
going to stop me reaching Beijing. After all, a ticket home to Nat was waiting for
me there!
'I guess you're right, mate.' I laughed. 'I don't know what I was thinking. All
those people and all their warnings - every one of them predicted that we'd be dead
by now! Like a pissy little bit of sand's going to stop us! Right!'
