The day had begun in the Chinese city of Kashgar, where I awoke to see thick winter clouds pouring cold rain onto the streets outside. It was a dismal site, for in this weather I was about to hitchhike to Kyrgyzstan's border with China, climbing to altitudes that would eventually have me in temperatures hovering around zero degrees Fahrenheit. Grimacing at the awful weather, I began to hum the theme music to the Indiana Jones films. This is a psychological trick I play on myself on days when I'd almost rather be a vacuum cleaner salesman.

Somewhere between Kashgar and the Chinese/Kyrgyz border

Fast forward now to one o'clock in the morning. For seventeen hours I have been working my way westward, hitchhiking with truckers and farmers, or wandering alone down high desert highways. It was almost dusk when I reached the Chinese/Kyrgyz border, and darkness had fallen completely by the time I emerged from the Kyrgyz immigration and customs building. Then at about 10:00 p.m., after having eaten dinner and negotiated a $25 price with a jeep driver to take me to the city of Osh, I continued westward.

The driver (right), his wife (center), and the Chinese passenger (left)

The ground crunched beneath the Russian jeep. We crashed through puddles, throwing up icy slush that froze solid to parts of the vehicle. The road was rough and the jeep lacked suspension, putting a sharp pain into my gut. The night was lit only by a sliver of moon and the jeep's dull headlights, but this was sufficient to view a terrain in which nothing could easily survive, a frozen white landscape haunted by cold. At 1:30 a.m. our headlights revealed a staggering figure on the road, and we swerved just in time to miss him. The person's pants were ripped and his knee bloodied--I presumed by falls--and in his absolute drunkenness he looked inhuman. He was not dressed for cold--I believe he was only wearing a t-shirt and pants--and as we continued on our way, leaving him stumbling in the blackness a kilometer from the nearest village, I wondered if he would die. It was entirely possible. He looked to be thirteen or fourteen years old.

Events inside the jeep were not so grave, but they were uncomfortable in their own way. There was one other paying passenger on board, a Chinese citizen of Kyrgyz ethnicity, who sat up front. And in the backseat there was just me and the driver's wife. She was a kindly woman in her thirties, and shortly after leaving the border she slid from the far side of the backseat to the middle so that our shoulders almost touched. I wasn't sure what to make of this. With the passage of a half hour, which was the time it took for her to have fallen asleep on my arm, I was even less sure. To have someone's wife fall asleep on you can be uncomfortable in any context, but the feeling was accentuated by having just spent three weeks in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, where other men's wives rarely look your way, much less recline on your shoulder, especially in clear sight of a husband's rearview mirror. Did the woman like me? If so, was she mothering me or romancing me? Was she trying to make her husband jealous because of some internal dispute I could not be aware of? Might the husband, who while at the moment seemed perfectly relaxed, suddenly fly into a rage? And if he did, might I be pummeled by him and the Chinese fellow (who I could tell didn't like me) and then be thrown into the road to stagger away into darkness? Why in the world was the woman not sitting on her side of the seat?

Not until the next morning did I happen to discover the reason why she fell asleep on my arm: the heat vent reached whoever was sitting in the middle, and it was so cozy there that you couldn't help but fall asleep.

The driver's wife at dawn

Joel Carillet, chief editor of wanderingeducators, is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, follow his regular photoblog, or purchase images, visit www.joelcarillet.com