It’s raining. Around us a countryside landscape, the gloomy fog and the usual heaps of waste. We meet a few people and a few chickens that roaming around in the street. A suspicious car follows us. It overtaked and pull over the road. It leaves us overcome, and again restarts its slow race behind us. All this is repeated several times. The driver is intended to call someone and gesturing, pointing to us.
In the meantime we start to think about the ending: a gang that kidnaps us, a journalist who wants to interview us, a curious person who simply wants to know where we’re going.
After 5 km we see the car moving away quickly, and we lose sight of it, behind a curve.
All is well that ends well, we think. No tragic final. We restart riding again, breathing a sigh of relief.
We don’t have time to end up laughing that we see in the distance, at great speed, a police car. Let’s get our path, blocks us the way and forces us to stop. It seemed to be looking for us. We draw close the road. They aren’t interested in the passports even in our incredulous faces. They just want to put our bicycles on the car and bring us to the nearest police station. We ask explanations but we’re ignored. We want to know, otherwise we will oppose resistance. And so they inform us that we’re in a military area, an “off limit” area for foreigners. They must inspect our electronic devices to make sure we are not spies.
We follow them, now a bit quieter and curious to know how it will end. We arrive at the police station and they kidnap us the cell phones and the camera. They find not too much: foggy landscape, trees, monkeys, a rice dish a little faded, Andrea and his new hat. Perhaps disappointed but satisfied of their control, they return us our things and tell us that we can’t stay there: they will bring us to the “open zone”.
We are not at all happy to swap a ride on the police car with our freedom and our desire to ride, despite the incessant rain. After almost 90 km – moreover not really on the same direction as we were set up to do – we stop. We are in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the mountains, and now it is almost dark. They tell us that we can go ahead by bicycle, because we’re out of the “off limit” area. They can’t bring us beyond because from here their jurisdiction ends.
We explain our disappointment, our discomfort, seeing on the navigator that the nearest town is a 20 km away and with these roads, riding, it will take almost 2 hours.
They can’t do anything, they say, these are their orders. Oh yes, you can do something, we think. And we threaten them to call the Embassy and to denounce their way of doing, insensitive and arrogant.
This sentence was enough to make him make a call to their superior, for new provisions.
And from “we leave you here, in the middle of nowhere” to other 30 km beyond their jurisdiction and a nice “you’re arrived, this is the hotel.”
Another adventure from bitter taste, here in China, that ended well.
What is done is done when we say that it is done
QUOTE FROM MOVIE: Mission Impossible 🤘😎🔝
