Turning point for Delvin man as quake hits China

Delvin native Mark Donlon has hit a turning point in the final phase his 2008 “Bike to Beijing” bike ride across three continents in aid of UCD Volunteers Overseas and the ARC Cancer Support Centre, Dublin.

Mark, who hails from Caddagh, Delvin, spent much of his childhood living in north Westmeath before his family moved to Dublin. He started out for Beijing last September with two friends, Conor Rowan and Paul Ryan. The overall aim of the trip is to reach the Chinese capital in time for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

Writing to the Westmeath Examiner with his latest update last week, the trio were based in the walled city of Xi`an, home to the famous Terracotta Army. They arrived in Xi`an by diverting from their planned route through further desert.

“We`re still doing the same distance and will still be cycling to beijing but. in a more roundabout route now. We just couldn`t face into another month of desert,” the lads wrote.

As they composed their e-mail, the now infamous earthquake measuring 7.9 in Sichuan province, and at the time of writing, it was not clear how many casualties had resulted from the tremor. On Tuesday of this week, there was at least 35,000 dead.

“We felt continuous shaking for about two or three minutes, the mirror fell off the wall in our room but we haven`t seen anything else. We were all rushed out of the hostel, there are lots of ambulances and fire brigades buzzing around outside but that`s it.

“It is a really weird feeling; it felt like being on a ship in a really rough sea. There is another about to go at 7pm tonight; there are big warnings about it in the hostel.”

“If Central Asia was purgatory, then we`d slipped into hell. Every day we would get on the bikes at 8.30am and cycle through till 9 pm and see nothing, not a tree, field, animal, house nor home. We would trudge on through barren emptiness for 12 hours and maybe find one or two places with enough buildings.

“We`d get a lunch of stir fried donkey and noodles, set up camp in the middle of nowhere that evening with only trucks roaring by for company, before climbing into the sleeping bag knowing that the next day was going to be the exact same. Wake, suffer, pause, suffer, pause, press repeat.”

Eventually it became evident to Mark and his friends that this wasn`t what they had set out from Dublin to do - reach Beijing as physical and emotional wrecks after careering through some of the toughest terrain and weather conditions known to man.

“There`s no sense of achievement of getting over a mountain, no scenery to distract you, no interaction with local people. There is none. At this stage our whole view of the trip was being skewed. It looked like we`d get to Beijing and the feeling of achievement and pride in ourselves was going to be replaced by a horrible sense of relief.”

Breaking point for the lads came after they ran into fierce, gale force winds and horrific weather conditions, forcing them to do something they have not done from Dublin, through Europe, Turkey, the Middle East and most of central Asia: hitch-hike.

“It was then we decided that we had had enough,” the trio reported. “Why were we killing ourselves cycling through a province most people haven`t heard of, through a desert most people don`t know about, along a road most people don`t take? “So we decided to change the route. We would get the train to Xi`an, cutting out Gansu province, and making up the distance by cycling down to Shanghai, and then up the coast to Beijing via Qingdao.

“Perhaps we could have soldiered on if this was at an earlier stage in the cycle, or if we hadn`t just cycled through the Taklamakan after Central Asia. but to face into another month of barrenness when we`d been through that for so long was too much.

“We always managed to get through the  tough stages; the biting cold in minus 20 degrees` winter in the Caucasus cycling on 3 inches of ice; the Karakorum desert and the political minefield that is Iran and Turkmenistan, the food in Uzbekistan, the 3,600 metre Irkeshtam pass on unsurfaced roads, the Taklamakan desert, the constant isolation of being a foreigner; we knew what tough is, but this was something else.”

And so, with just three months to go to the Olympics, Mark and his fellow travellers are taking the calmer route to the centre of China`s former imperial majesty, but look set to achieve their goal of reaching Beijing nonetheless.