Northern Wilderness, Solo Traverse of the Great Chang Tang - 游记攻略

treker
2010-10-29 16:56 倒序浏览 174101人浏览

逆流赤脚站在冰里太厉害了！

感谢各位兄弟姐妹鼎力支持，没有你们鼓励，俺就挺不住了。

About Foods

The provisions I brought with plus the weight of the bike were about 100kg, among which foods were about 50kg that I now list in here.

The principal foods: Tsampa 25kg (thrown away 0.5kg), Hard tack (pilot bread) 12.5kg.

The others: Garlic  2.25kg (rotten 0.25kg), Yak butter 2kg, Roast peanuts 2kg, Salt 1kg, Cereals 1kg (thrown away 0.5kg), Nori (seaweed) 0.75kg, Chilli powder 0.75, Milk powder 05.kg, Tea 0.5kg, Chocolate 0.25kg, Dry shrimps 0.25kg, Seasoning bags 0.25kg.

My main intakes were Tsampa and pilot bread, ignoring the snacks. Walking in a place like Chang Tang, the daily energy intakes should be at least 5,000 calories, a target very hard to meet.  In the early last century, some westerners, among them Sven Hedin was the leading figure,  started to explore this mysterious land for the first time. They brought a herd of sheep and many other animals as food. But the main food supply was still hunting wild animals. Obviously there were plenty of animals in Chang Tang and people were not aware of the concept of conservation then. As for me I had stunk to a main principle, that is not to consider killing animals as long as I could survive. Another thing is it by no means easy to kill any animals without proper facilities. At least it is not as romantic as you might imagine.  Well, back to the food, there were four phases for the daily energy intakes in my whole journey:

1. Restraint phase. During the period of the first 45 days, the daily energy intakes were about 1400 calories, equivalent to 200g of tsampa and 150g of pilot breads, plus some soup. The energy intakes were in level 3, given 1 to 5 levels with 5 the extremely hungry.  Basically I lost all my energy after 4pm in the afternoon everyday. During this period, I strictly controlled my food consumption, which directly resulted in the staple food consumption for the 45 days was only 15kg. (There would be some surprisingly extra supplement I would talk about in detail later on).

2. Rising phase. Because the food was controlled well below the expected consumption, the ratio between food consumption and the distance travelled was 2:3. Therefore I decided to raise the ration to 250kg tsampa and 187.5g bread. However, it was out of control only in one week.

3. Out of control phase. From the 52nd day, the food consumption was completely out of control. Partly this was because of my physical demand, partly due to the desire mentally. It was hardly for me to fall asleep in the night, there were always some illusions where delicious food out there were ready served for me. Whenever I could not control my unbearable desire, I could easily eat up 250g tsampa without drinking any water.

4. The final phase. From the 64th day to the 74th day when I met humans and got saved, the daily intakes were less than 800 calories, which was even less than BMR for an adult.

The selection of the food types were based on the objectives of reducing load, high energy carbohydrate. There were very few snacks, I regretted to bring those peanuts because at later stage, I could not help eating them like snacks. I had not eaten any meat but vegetable for once. Vitamins were from Jinshierkan multivitamin tablets. The lack of animal fat directly resulted in the deterioration of my ability against coldness and my endurance. The Inuits, for instant, can not survive if there is no meat to eat.

Water, was the main problem throughout the whole journey. I had lost water supply many times in the later stage of my journey. Although there were quite a lot of rainfalls and rivers overflew, the quality of the water was not good most of the time. Considering the 77 days of the whole journey, there were about 20% of days I had clean drinking water, 40% I had snow and the other 40% light alkaline or muddy water. Obviously, if there were no snow or snowfall, I would not be able to survive. Well, if you had drunk too much light alkaline water, there could be very serious consequences. I would come back to this later on.

Standard breakfast and supper, tsampa plus chilli plus garlic, photo taken last year

Self-made chilli paste. I did not bring any prepared chilli paste because they were much heavier, much lower amount-weight ratio, photo taken last year

redwingsgao
10月29日

本帖最后由 redwingsgao 于 2010-10-29 17:32 编辑

132# treker

你别说，看了看你的翻译，还挺不错的。需要有人给你检查或者帮忙的话，可以说一声:)

提点小意见啊：你直译的地方太多了。有些地方读起来不是很通顺。其实我觉得你稍微意译或者甚至再创作一下，效果应该会更好。毕竟你的受众不是看过中文原文的读者，而是不懂中文的人。你说对么？

redwingsgao
10月29日

121# treker

Intercepted改成snapshot或许更好？

中岂
10月29日

我也来支持楼主一下。
坚持！

maria_0628
10月29日

楼主照片赞！！！！

treker
10月29日

本帖最后由 treker 于 2010-10-31 05:21 编辑

Day 14 (May 3), 25.2km, Camping 5118m

Through coordinates, I determined the rising time of the sun, ten past eight (it was about two hours time difference from Beijing time, for the first half of the journey it was about eight while the second half was stabilised at about seven-forty), I just wanted to experience the morning in low temperature. The lowest day temperature in Chang Tang appeared within the half hour before sunrise. After leaving the hard paths, the average daily speed of mine was 16km. The fact was I had to have an average speed of 20km in order to complete this journey as planned. Otherwise, it was hard to imagine what would happen. Taking heavy snowfall, difficult road conditions, illness, flood, lying in and so on into account, I should have an average daily speed of more than 20km. Through my last year experience, I knew that this target was very hard to reach, if it was not impossible. Pushing a bike was much slower than walking alone and required good road conditions. The only solution to this was to get up as early as possible and pushed a little bit further when the frozen ground was still hard.

It was very bitter experience getting up early in Chang Tang, Yilishen, you would know what you felt after taking them. I used to get up after sunrise, and then boil some water, dry my stuff in the sun, pack and so on so that it generally was about 10 am when I set out. The interior temperature was -11C, outside -16C, no wind, mild cold. I set off at 9.37 in the morning. Although I only set out half hour early than before, the road condition was much better, plus most of the soils were red clay and the moisture from snow, the ground was frozen hard, it only took me three hours to push the bike 12km, which was almost the halfway of my journey on the day. Because the day in Chang Tang was very long, after that I pushed the bike bit by bit and did not care how far I could push any more. In general, at about 8pm, I camped. Today, I did this at 8.49 and walked 25.2km, which meant that I had spent 8 hours for the last 13km. It was not easy for hiking backpackers to imagine how hard it would be to push a bike with heavy loads. I actually had many hiking experiences, I felt that they were not comparable (of course except those extra heavy load hiking).

The most painful thing by getting up early was from my air tube. The larger you moved, the more air you would need to breath which resulted in the more cold air entered your air tube. This was just like an icicle being inserted into your stomach via the air tube, you would have a running nose all the time. Are you talking about facial masks? If you had experiences, you would know why you would choose not to wear it. Can not be bother to talk more about it. Around 6 o'clock in the afternoon, I entered into a piece of sparse grassland, completely out of the basin, part of the ground became soft. There should be some effects from the snowfall because the ground looked dry but quite sticky and the wheels got jammed when passing over. At last, I chose a small slope to camp because there are plenty of wild animals, chirus, wild donkeys, and wild yaks. I liked being surrounded.