The Pan-Eurasian Bike Trip

The Adventure
We left Belagorsk trailing our egos in trailers behind us because we could no longer fit them in our own heads, we had spent 4 days in Blagoveshchensk doing TV interviews and getting make up done, now in Belagorsk we had a "fan" who came out to ride with us. Greg had seen us on TV and wrote us through the website. We got out and rode with him for a bit back to the main road, there was TV and autographs, God it was getting tough towing our egos around all the time, they were enormous! We finally got to the main road "HAHA you forgot about me I see!!!!" the wind howled, "Didn't I tell you I was coming with you to Porto?!". "Ah guys this is a bit much for me, the wind is crazy, I'm heading home" Said Greg as he turned his bicycle around. And there it was just me and Levi looking at a 1000 miles to the next city over half of it was to be off-road. Our hope was to really kill it the first few days and get to the off road part as quick as possible. After saying goodbye to Greg we climbed the first hill, looked into the distance and saw that tell tale puff of dust under a car in the distance. "well I guess the off-road comes in sections" "yeah of course, why would I have thought that the Russians would have gotten it together enough to string 300km of actual ridable road together?" And so it began, for the next week we would struggle with the off road, not so much that it was very difficult, you just never knew when it was coming or how many kms it might be. So we devised a new method of getting information, after a month of cars stopping us midway through hills and asking us the same questions, we took revenge, we took to hailing cars and trucks down and asking them how much gravel road was left. Perhaps all of you are chuckling to yourselves having done similar experiments at one time or another in your lives but here are some of the answers we got from the same point in the road all from cars coming towards us, i.e. having just driven this section of road. "excuse me how many kilometers of road without asphalt?" 1. "not much, about 20" 2 "I think about 75" 3. "oh at least 100" 4. "45" 5 "your there, just 3 or for more km" It became more for comic relief that we would take a break and hail a few cars, we would keep track of the answers and try and see what area they might cluster around and figure that would be approximately right, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.  We also started asking the guys who were working on the road for an idea of how long it might go on for, but with similar results, mostly when we stopped with those guys it was more to watch the road being built, a process that I must say hurts the brain with its lack of efficiency. One of our favorite techniques is that they put down a hardener and then coat it with tar, I imagine a pretty standard practice before laying down asphalt, but here instead of letting it set and pouring asphalt the next day they have another team of about 20 guys who then collect rocks all along the side of the road and put them down evenly distributed along the road so that no one can drive on it. It is our favorite technique because not only is it ridiculous to watch all day these guys laying down boulders on the road only to have to pick them up a few days later, but also because there is a vehicle which can still ride on this quasi road, a bicycle, that's right we get miles and miles of "prohibited pavement" just dodging rocks like you are in a videogame, we watch as the big trucks struggle with the rocky crappy road on the other side as we glide along just avoiding rocks.

We did our first three day stint with relative ease, at least looking back on it, at the time it was hell, but we had the energy to get frustrated and angry which made for some good videos and some silly times doing impersonations.  Our third day of riding brought us to Sivaki, where we intended to spend the night at a hotel, it was here that we discovered that things were not going to be as we thought here out in the middle of Russia.  We rolled our bikes (hogs) into what appeared to be a combination of a junk yard a garage and a truck stop, however the highway sign deemed it a Cafe and Campground. We asked around and sure enough we could get food and a bed there at a very reasonable rate, it was to be our first truck stop hotel, where you begin to realize that a hotel is not really what you think.  We walked into the little house that was the rooms, it was a typical little russian house set in the middle of the junkyard, obviously the first settlement here before the collecting of junk ladas and old railroad timbers began.  We walked in and saw a long row of hospital beds, of which 2 were ours, it was more like a dorm. Later the beds would be filled with a couple of Azerbaijani men who came in in the middle of the night and woke us up to ask us if we were indeed Americans, and after deciding we weren't lying offered us some tea, we politely declined and rolled over.  The woman also showed us the stove where we could build a fire if we were cold and the bucket of water where we could wash or drink to our hearts content.   This is of course all fine, we had already come to the realization that things like a shower were out of the question most of the time, even in hotels (a few days earlier we had payed 50 dollars for a place where we could only stand in the bathtub and fill a bucket with cold water from the sink and pour it on ourselves, i don't even know why they had the tub), however the toilets were getting more and more impressive. I remember reading in Off the Map and other books people describing bathrooms that would make your skin crawl, describing sights that sounded out of a horror film, more than something that could happen in a bathroom, even if it is just a hole in the floor, what is the worse thing that can happen.  I always thought "oh that is too gross to even use, it can't be like that anymore, certainly i won't be using such things, I would just not use it" Slowly I have come to realize that it is a very slippery slope "outhouse living" first you get accustomed to using an outhouse, which if it is a nice one isn't that hard, then you move down the line, you find yourself riding a bike solely along a highway, everyone knows what highway gas stations are like, so slowly you become a little more accustomed to declining standards, you just slowly move down the scale until what you might think is repulsive, Levi and I just say "hey that one isn't too bad". Then in Sivaki, I reached a new level, I walked into the outhouse, it was a "duplex" two holes, I would say stalls but that would imply privacy, just holes, and worst of all one was "occupied" by a trucker who just casually looked up at me and nodded, and continued to smoke his cigarette. Now of course my first instinct was to turn and run out of the building screaming like a little girl. But then the animal took over, I stayed, that is when I knew I was losing a little bit of the civilized Ellery on this trip. The next morning some one walked in on me, I just continued, and considered picking up smoking.  We took a day off in Sivaki as part of our new plan to ride three days and no matter what, take the fourth day off. I think judging by the look on the woman's face no one had ever stayed two days at the "hotel" we spent a great day lounging in bed.    The next three days were more of the same, hailing truckers to get inaccurate distances, complaining about the road, sleeping beside cafes next to truckers napping in their trucks.  Indeed we were becoming truckers, we had our cargo and our destination and we were trying just to make time, we were dirty, complaining and swore like sailors, we were one of them. Although I must say that here in Russia truckers are not like the American version, or at least the stereotype I have in my head, here the truckers generally are the nicest guys on the road, very helpful and usually travelling with their entire families, rarely do you see a lone trucker, if he is going a long way he is usually with one or two more people, family truckers.   One night we rolled particularly late into a town and stumbled upon a depressing or uplifting sight, a group of young high school kids all dressed up for a Prom like event, for the first time in my life it was blatantly obvious why they try to discourage highschoolers from drinking at prom. These kids were drunk, very drunk, swarming around the Americans like bees, I took a video, as we posed for a dozen or so photos, 2 guys who hadn't showered in days dirty and gruff, surrounded by about 25 highschoolers who had never seen anything like it, half disturbing, but the first people in a long time here that we had seen that seemed to really be enjoying drinking, everyone else is rather depressingly drunk. 

For our second forced break we reached a place that we had both been looking forward to getting to the town called Never, not only was it an indicator that we were basically in Siberia and the middle of the big hump over China (see the map) it was also called Never. Needless to say the crappy puns flew. We were greeted as we rode into town by a huge billboard sign of John Travolta posing with his family on the side of a convenience store, we have no idea why this is there or what it is trying to sell, I came up with the theory that Travolta is a huge Russo-phile and comes to Never every year with his family proceeds to get Russian Style black out drunk and hang out with the village drunks (who as we witnessed have perhaps the best perch of any village yet, they switch between two shaded bus stops in the center of town, overlooking the valley below, in the morning they sit on one side of the road on a bench catching the suns rays then when it gets too hot in the afternoon they switch to the other bus stop which is shaded, all while drinking 5 liter jugs of beer and smoking 12 cent packets of cigarettes) before returning home to hollywood for another stressful year of movie making.  It's a beautiful image, I hope it really happens, John Travolta just chatting away in his perfect Russian with the village drunks, buying everyone beer for about 3 weeks, its probably a village holiday, Travolta month.  Never was also the home of another great discovery of ours, the transit hotel.  We imagined that there had to be some sort of complex that houses all of these asphalt workers (there are hundreds of these guys and almost nothing out there in terms of housing) and in Never we found one, The Hotel Tranzit. In terms of our trip from Blagoveshchensk to Chita this was probably the height of luxury, we got a room with 4 beds (again dorm style), but this time no intruders in the night, so we got a luxurious room to our selves, and there was plumbing, we even got to wash our clothes in hot water.   Our next three day push was marked by a couple of notable events, we had a little before never officially hit permanent off road, no more "prohibited pavement", few asphalt crews, (more like guys playing with boulders in the middle of a highway) and we entered Banya country, something I am quite excited about, where every cafe also has a Banya, be it a giant discarded oil drum with a stove stuck in the side of it to create an intense hot room, or a nice old wooden shack where truckers go to "shower". The Banya is no shower, but it does get the toxic mix of bug spray and sunscreen off, which is our main goal at the end of the day. Now at nearly every cafe you could manage if you had the energy to dehydrate yourself further (sometimes you just don't have the energy to stay up another 3 hours, 1 for the Banya, and 2 hours to drink all the water you just lost) you can for a very small sum, usually 3 dollars.   It was a good thing that we hit banya country, because we also began to hit the mountains, and with the mountains comes rain.  We had been lucky so far on the ride to avoid rain almost completely(except for the hail storm), but it chose a particularly inopportune moment to strike back.  We had for weeks been dealing with a very rocky and hard packed gravelly road, however out of Never we found some looser sandier road where we could really fly "boy this road is nice today" I said "Oh yeah very smooth, not too rocky, my back hardly hurts at all today" replied Levi "Was that a raindrop I just felt?" It was. Suddenly our road that had been so majestic turned into a mud pit, the hills became almost impassable mountains of sludge, our smooth tires spun helplessly sending mud all over our selves, gear and bikes as we skidded up the hills, occasionally a truck would buzz by us to give us an added dose of the good stuff. One day in particular, just after a nice long rest break it began to rain, which meant another stop to suit up in the rain gear, "ready to ride?" I asked, "oh yeah I think this rain won't slow us down today" answered Levi. It didn't just as we cruised down the hill a bolt that holds Levi's rear cargo rack on snapped, luckily it was down pouring.  We really did luck out though, not only was there a sizable chunk of bolt left in the frame that I was able to wrench out, we were in the middle of a road construction site, I just walked over and asked a foreman (i.e. the least drunk man I could find) of the job if he had any bolts like it, he and I searched in the pouring rain through a gigantic closet of discarded parts, screws and scraps from all time periods probably even Tsarist.   That was the last time either of us said anything positive about anything while on the bike, any compliment you gave the road it would take away. We spent a day trying to hide from the rain, in what again was a new development for us, train station hotels, it turns out that sometimes the train stations in small towns have rooms that they rent to travellers, I think they are only supposed to rent them to train travellers, but when the Babushkas see two drenched Americans on bicycles I think they cannot say no.  Once again I think we were the first people to ask to stay an extra night.   Finally we reached our next rest spot Magocha, we rode in late at night (here the sun is up until 11 or so) on a Sunday, probably one of the worse times to ride into a town, but sometimes you cannot help it.  There was something weird about the town almost immediately, although I guess when you ride into a town at dusk and dusk is at 11 o clock it is always going to be an eerie vibe. We stopped to get some food for the night before we were going to head to the train station, our new favorite spot. We of course explained our selves and before you knew it there was a crowd around the bicycles and little kids kept popping their heads into the store looking at us as if "oh okay so there are foreigners here" before darting out.  I was in line to by food when Levi got into some sort of a confrontation, with a drunk man who's face looked like it had been the victim of a recent car accident, his son (maybe 5) also looked like he was involved, although he was less bandaged.   We each had our own hypothesis as to why it happened, here they are: Levi's: man: "Hello, my name is Sergei" Levi "Oh hi my name is Levi nice to meet you." man: "This is my son" Levi "Oh hello Son" Man: "Hey!! You don't talk that way to my son, you show him respect!!!!" Levi "I am sorry sir I don't understand why are you so angry, please excuse me" Man "You show him respect who the hell do you think you are!" Levi "I don't speak Russian, I don't understand"   It went on like this for about 15 minutes with everyone laughing at the situation while Levi and I tried to get out. I was off to the side, buying the food, without being directly involved, indeed looking straight at the ground to avoid any eye contact this was my theory:   Man: "Hello my name is Ivan" Levi "Oh My name is Levi nice to meet you" Man "I was involved in a car accident a few days ago with my son, I was black out drunk. Maybe you can pay for his medical bills?" Levi "Oh hello Son" Man "Pay for our bills, you are rich, look at my son he is all beat up, look at this scar!!!" Levi "I am sorry I don't understand" Man "Help Him!!! look at us I barely survived, at least pay for his teeth, he needs teeth" Levi "I don't speak Russian I am sorry" Man "just give me money!!! His teeth are fine, its mine that are F@#$@ and I want to drink away the pain, now gimme money!!" and again it went on for 15 minutes with everyone laughing at us. Hard to say which is more likely. As we were pulling out onto the road again we went by a car with a man shaking his fist at us, "boy do we need a kindly babushka right now" said Levi.  Luckily we found one in the train station, we never found out exactly what was wrong with Magocha but again we came up with some carefully thought out hypotheses, the whole town seemed just filled with men out of control, drinking and doing anything but working, even the next day it was an abnormal proportion even by Russian Village standards.  We decided "This must be a town where for once the babushkas are not in charge, but the men, all the women seem dispirited and down and the men just seem to be in perpetual party mode, I imagine all across Russia the worst threat that one can scream at ones wife is "Oh yeah well maybe we will move to Magadoch"" This theory was only bolstered by the fact that while we were eating in a cafe, a couple of men getting wasted at the table next to us asked us if we knew what the name Magadoch meant, claiming it would be in our dictionary, they seemed to imply it was something very vulgar or something that would have deterred us from coming here, I just assume it means "run by Russian men" which indeed is almost a vulgar thought and certainly would have deterred us from going there.

Things were getting weirder and weirder, as we left Magadoch, one might have said we needed a reality check, we got one. It was a particularly hot day, and around 5 (when the sun is out until 11 this tends to be the hottest part of the day) we abandoned our bikes on the side of the gravelly road and ducked into a little birch grove to get some shade for an afternoon cookie break and lie down.  A while later we heard a car pull up. "Hello? any English speakers down there?" It was a couple, an Australian guy named Alan and his wife Daniella from Germany, they were travelling by Land Rover across Russia, Mongolia, and the -Stans to Germany. It was an incredible moment, the first real English speakers since Vladivostok, and the first fellow adventurers of the trip.  We were all spouting off like people who had not spoken to anyone in months. "Did you see the rocks on the road" "Oh yeah we ride on those" "Don't you love how there is nothing in the convenience stores" "Just cookies" "Have you guys found these ravioli like things" "eat them all the time" "What about the drunk drivers" "oh my god it is crazy, there are no police out here" We killed about 2 and a half hours without even thinking (we met up again the next day and again killed 2 hours, just dying for new contacts).  We rolled into the cafe again late, delayed but refreshed by our new contacts with someone like us, adventurers and English speakers. As I got off my bike a strange man came up to me and started talking Russian to me, I just waved him off casually with my standard phrases, not really knowing what he was saying, not really caring because I was excited for Levi to pull in so we could talk some more about our fellow adventurers, this guy kept pestering me though saying something. "Uh huh, yes of course, yes I understand" I said in Russian hoping he would leave me alone, I was beginning to think there was something wrong with him, he pulled out a headlamp and was showing it to me, I recognized it as one of the crappy ones you can buy in the Chinese markets here for about 50 cents. "Very nice" I said, finally I try to avoid him by walking up onto the screened in porch of the kafe. I stop dead in my tracks, his Russian words come racing back to me. There on the porch was a bicycle with piece of wood strapped onto the back a small leather bag and a sleeping mat attached. "You're riding across Russia?!?!?!!!!!!" "Yes I've ridden since Ukraine" Levi was just pulling in. "You have GOT to see this!" His bike was a single speed with a coaster brake, freshly spray painted blue (he showed us the can), I now took a closer look at him, he appeared to be wearing almost all of his clothing to stay warm or to keep it near him and he had a bag of dirty laundry tied around his waist which he never seemed to leave far behind.  He told us of his trip, he had many difficulties, firstly he was Ukranian and being Ukrainian in Russia is not easy, he seems to have little to no money which I can only imagine how difficult begging as a Ukrainian in Russia is, he said he had been beat up many times and had many problems with the police.    But he had come very far, pedalling 100 km a day for three months (yeah that includes some winter months) from Ukraine, later we even have stayed at some cafes he had, and they confirmed the strange Ukrainian with no money riding his bicycle across Russia.  We were never really able to figure out why he was doing it, but we did determine that he was only going to Khabarovsk, which is like riding your bike from the Atlantic to Idaho, why not just finish it off.  So we met the first English speakers and the first biker in the same day after nearly 2 months of nothing. We bought the Ukranian (Roman was his name) dinner, and gave him some money and cookies, we began for a moment to disbelieve his story the next morning when he left the cookies in the trash (what kind of touring cyclist turns down free cookies), but we did as I said meet other people who had put him up for the night.  In the end we labeled him more of a drifter than an adventurer, he lied to us a couple of times trying to get money it seems, but hey I still think overall he is riding his bike from Ukraine to Khabarovsk, he was Ukrainian, he was more than happy to prove that, and he plans to ride back, more power too him, we only hope to stay ahead of him, he was a little too strange to be the third idiot.

A day or two later we had the moment we had been waiting for, just like that there it was at the top of a hill early in the morning, as if it had been no trouble at all to put there, as if you had been on it the whole time, complete with lines and guard rails, asphalt, black and smooth.  Even though it wasn't for the last time that we would leave the gravelly road, it was special, that moment when your whole bike stops clanging and shaking and vibrating and there is just the slight hum of your tires where they are supposed to be, on pavement, you look around and you can hear again, birds, cars, wind, even Levi - for weeks we had hardly exchanged words during our daily ordeal except on rest breaks, you could never hear one another over the clanging of metal and the grinding of rocks.  And we flew, we breezed over mountains as if we were on a roller coaster, flying down hills, feeling the bikes back in their natural habitat for the first time in weeks.  In the afternoon rainstorms threatened our day, but instead we raced them, zipping ahead of them only letting the rain catch us for an instant as we climbed the mountains, sprinting out of it on the downhills. Suddenly our surroundings changed, we climbed one last mountain, dodged one last dark cloud, and we were out, on to a plateau, it was sunny and treeless, farm land. We arrived at Cherneshevsk, 300km from Chita, we had reached the real Siberia at last, I had no mental image of Siberia before, but when I saw Cherneshevsk tucked under a bright green grassy cliff, I knew I couldn't be in the Russian Far East anymore. We passed through the fields (several were by a dump and had bottles and trash scattered so evenly across them they looked like an art installation) and felt like we were in Chita already. We even started talking like we were in Chita.  We found a great guest house, really just the same as renting a small Russian house to ourselves, since there was no one else there, and we spent our final rest day talking about how great it was to finally be at the end of the Blago-Chita section. Perhaps we should have been a little less focused on how great it was to be done and focused more on how we had 3 days left to go, few patches for our tubes left and very little energy or motivation to make that final push to Chita. The first day back out on the road Levi had 4 flat tires, suddenly we were left with only 1 tire patch to go and still facing down a section of off road before Chita.  Then we fell into an immediate cafe trap, everyday we would pull into a cafe towards the end of the day for a late lunch, we would gorge ourselves and then inevitably it would happen "well we could just get up a little earlier tomorrow and make a big push". Then the next day we would find a good reason to quit early, there was one day in particular where we were dodging thundershowers alternating with 90 degree humid sun blasts, you would get completely soaked from the rain, then spend 5 minutes in the sun, get soaked in sweat, take off all your rain gear and then notice again that you were riding into a thunder cloud, you could never win fighting the bi-polar weather pattern, so eventually you quit early.  It took us 4 days to get to Chita as opposed to 3 that we had planned, and it almost took us 5, the 4th day we were so excited to get to Chita that we were flying through the first 80 km only eventually stopping at a cafe to eat, it was there at the Cafe that we realized that it was scalding hot out, we had nearly given ourselves heat stroke, idiots. We took thee hours to cool down and let the sun cool down before attempting the 11km climb to Chita. We made it exhausted but thrilled around 11 at night. Luckily we had a contact here Maria who had already arranged a hotel for us and we were able to go and immediately pass out.    It was a very strange sensation the next morning waking up and walking around a city. It didn't seem possible that somehow after 1500 kilometers of complete lack of real cities, towns and villages you could ride into a town, still surrounded by those same strange excuses for towns and villages, that resembled a European town, a regular center square without cows just roaming free eating the moss coming out of the Lenin statue. There are buildings, unique and different from one another, not just the Soviet block style housing and government buildings.   And I don't like to harp on the Russian alcohol problem, but after spending so much time in the villages, where few people work and there is such an impossibly high alcoholism rate, it was strange to see so many people working, soberly and diligently.  Levi just as we were reaching civilization again said "boy how is it that all the men in this country can look so sketchy?" but just like that we reached Chita and realized it was just that we had been at the edge of reality out there, when you come back into a city or a real town things change again, the Russian men return to normal, the only people left weird are us.    We are like country folk in the big city now, Maria drove us around and we squirmed at the high speeds. We paid a fortune for our laundry because it never occurred to us to ask, why would laundry cost a lot even if it is a nice hotel? We went to a Chinese food restaurant and saw people on a dance floor, we couldn't look away, we were mesmerized by watching people doing things with alcohol that weren't just sitting and grumbling (granted if you had seen some of this dancing you wouldn't have been able to look away either, it was bizarre).  I had always thought that culture shock was something that I would never suffer from, however that first morning in Chita I think I was suffering from civilization shock, so many stores, so many sober hard working people, so much normal life it was hard to take it all in. Chita is a place that in Tsarist times they sent exiles, including in 1825 many of the Decembrists, a group of the nobles who tried to disrupt the natural succession of the Tsars.  They arrived in Chita at a loss of what to do in a backwater provincial town like this, it is weird to think that they thought of it as a place of punishment but for us it is the ultimate reward. From here we continue west to Ulan Ude, home of the world's largest Lenin head, then to the largest and deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal.  Shortly after that we will be in Irkutsk, getting ready for a big, fast push across the Russian plateau. We've lately found Russia a bit more expensive than we would like, so we are hoping to make up for it by making a big push across the Steppe, saving money and time on our way to Porto, just an incredibly intense month of riding fast and eating simple pasta.