The Bike Messenger

October 29, Lhasa, Tibet—Back from the mountain. Another failed expedition. Two months of cold and struggle and unfulfilled dreams. Nothing worked out as expected. I no longer know why I am here.

Everyone else had already left. I remember I was so restless I couldn’t sleep. I rose very early every morning, slipped into the street, and walked past the orphan girl asleep under the cardboard, her face pressed against the cobblestones.

I walked the squalid backstreets of Lhasa until nine o’clock when I could rent a bicycle. Thereafter I rode. I went to lunch at a cafe run by a New Zealand girl who washed up in Tibet after a year-long pilgrimage. I brought my defense department aeronautical charts and studied the mountains north of the Himalaya while I ate.

One morning I got up, packed silently, and caught a bus north. It was illegal for me to be on this bus but the Chinese police weren’t up yet and the bus