In the darkening days of my motherland it would, from all appearances, seem that clamor of revolution is in the air…

I felt as though I was spending more time in well-lit tunnels (still rather frightening), some of them over 4 kilometers long, than I was in the open air.

It was late when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur International Airport. I bedded down in the hallway near Starbucks for the night, curled round my trailer, which was locked to my bicycle. I woke early in the morning, sole inhabitant of an island besieged by a tumultuous sea of feet…

“Aṭutta muṟai varai, India!”

I hugged my sisters goodbye, and latched up my trailer for nearly the first time in six months…

This had been a record fifteen days of traveling without a proper shower, a fast that I would have readily and gladly broken had the opportunity for a cleansing presented itself.

We had the traditional tsampa for breakfast, a mixture of hot water, yak butter and barley flour that is, well, predictably bland and not popular with non-Tibetans, but a healthy way to start the day all the same.

I clipped my trailer onto the rear axle with bits of rusty wire – I had long since lost the original clips – and saddled up. As I left the Priory grounds, the familiar clatter of the bullock gate passing under my wheels caused a mixed emotion of regret and exhilaration…