The G318

August 8: Zheduo Mountain Pass, China

The G318 is one of the craziest things we’ve seen in all of China. And that’s saying a lot.

The G318 is China’s most cycled road. You see, it’s popular for adventursome young Chinese, wanting to see the breadth of the country, to bike from Shanghai, in eastern China, across the country to Sichuan, and then into Tibet, where Lhasa, Mount Everest, or even the Nepal border is their ultimate destination. The G318, also knows as the Sichuan-Tibet highway, connects Chengdu to Lhasa, climbing the western Sichuan mountains to reach the Tibetan Plateau. It’s a beautiful route.

So far so good. But here are three things to know about this road.

First, the G318 is a major commercial artery. Officially, the G318 is a “National Highway” – that is, a national level road, but a smaller one – roughly the equivalent of a U.S. highway like Route 66. But since China still lacks any larger road that crosses the Sichuan Mountains, the G318 serves more the function of a U.S. Interstate: it’s the major artery for commercial traffic and tourism between China and Tibet. Think something like I-70, as it climbs from Denver, Colorado up to the Eisenhower tunnel through the Rockies.

The second thing to know about the G318 is that its climb through the Sichuan Himalayas is huge. You see, the western Sichuan mountains make the Rockies look like foothills. From Denver to the Eisenhower Tunnel, I-70 climbs 6,900 feet – over a vertical mile. Impressive. But in its ascent over the first pass of the Sichaun mountains, the G318 doubles that. It climbs from from Chengdu, which sits just 500 feet above sea level, to the Zheduo Mountain Pass, at 14,100 feet, a towering 13,600 foot ascent. For comparison, that’s nearly 20% larger than the climb of Mount Everest, base camp to peak. The last, crazy stretch of this climb ascends 3,600 feet over 24 crazy switchbacks leading to the pass.

Now, here’s the third, and most important, thing to know about the G318: it’s just two lanes wide. And it has no shoulders.

So here’s the image to conjour in your mind: dozens of huge commercial trucks, fully loaded with coal, lumber, you name it, straining the outer limits of their engines’ ability as they ever so slowly groan, chug, and churn their way up this insane road, torquing slowly around switchback turns every few hundred meters. That’s the uphill lane.

In the downhill lane, a similar volume of trucks–with their multi-ton cargo–strains to keep some semblance of control as they careen down those equally steep slopes. When an uphill truck passes a downhill truck, they skim by with just a few inches of clearance. If they happen to meet eachother around one of the 24 turns, it’s a particularly hairy sight. And if one of the truck’s brakes should fail? Runaway truck lanes – not so much.

Ok. Now add to this picture carloads upon carloads of Chinese tourists headed to destinations in the mountains. These cars are stuck in long, snaking lines behind the giant commerical trucks, which are chug-chug-chugging up the mountain at a glacial pace.

This state of affairs pushes many a driver over to certifiable insanity. For, with shocking regularity, one (or more) of these acending cars suddenly steers into the opposite lane, facing down the many tons of certian death careening down the mountain towards him (or her), guns his engine, and races to whip around the long line of traffic ahead of him before he is unceremoniously flattened on the grill of the monster truck headed his way. There’s precisely zero margin for error in this deadly game because, remember, no shoulders.

You’d think that only the ascending drivers would run this ridiculous gamble with death. But shockingly, the downward headed cars do it to.

Got all this? Now let’s add our bikers. Scores upon scores upon scores of bikers. By midafternoon, there is not 100 yards of road without a biker. Virtually all the bikes are going uphill because they’re headed in the Tibet direction. They ever so slowly and painfully grind their way up the mountain – except for the large fraction, who, defeated by the grades, give up and walk their bikes.

The thing is, this two-lane, shoulderless, insanely mountainous Chinese interstate is not really wide enough for two cars and a bike. And certainly not for two monster trucks and a bike. So every time a truck or a car comes along a biker (and this is very, very often), the ascending driver has to edge out into the oncoming traffic. Including, yes, those downward charging, heavily loaded, nearly out-of-control, giant trucks. And the inexplicably impatient carloads of tourists trying to pass them.

Sound awesome? There’s one more thing.

Often times, everyone driving this route is doing so essentially blindfolded.

That’s right. Because, you see, at 14,000 feet, there are a lot of clouds. So the top stretch of the G318 is frequently entirey whited out. When we were up there, there was maybe 100 feet of visability for long stretches. Maybe.

You will notice that we have no pictures of video of this terrifying mayhem. That is because the entire time we were on this road, we were fearing for our lives. And the last thing we wanted to do was devote any attention to operating a camera.

Sometimes, in a situation like this, you begin to wonder if your sense of the danger involved is just an overblown foreigner’s anxiety – if maybe there’s a hidden order to the madness that keeps it all relatively safe. But we looked up the World Health Organization statistics. We didn’t find anything for the G318 specifically, but the nationwide statistics paint a pretty compelling picture on their own: in the U.S. there are 14 traffic-related deaths per 100,000 vehicles each year. In China? 133.

Indeed, the twenty minutes we spent climbing on the G318, and the hour and a half we spent descending, amounted to among the scariest two hours of our entire lives. Our friends at Bike Asia put us on this road for about 30 miles because for that one short stretch in the mountains, there really is no alternative. And unlike the hordes of other bikers, we were descending, which meant we were going much faster and so were passed by the crazy traffic much less often.

Still, God help us if we ever have to cycle a road like this again. Just thinking about it is nearly enough to make us swear off roadbiking forever.

Did we mention that this is the most cycled road in all of China?