The Pan-Eurasian Bike Trip

It was one of those things that only sounds good while sitting in a nice hotel room after eating a big breakfast at the buffet. 950km in 6 days. It was just the kind of thing that after a really tough stretch from Novosibirsk to Omsk that the Idiots wanted mentally but dreaded physically. We needed a mental boost after completely losing it on the last section, but probably our bodies in fact I think no ones bodies need 6 100 mile days in a row, but we are idiots and always err on the side that most people wouldn't (hence finding ones self in the middle of Asia on a bicycle)  But there was no getting out of this one, that was the real idiocy of it, we had to make it there because we had to speak on the 7th day. 
 But we got out there hungry, the wind was behind us, the road was flat and we knew that once this section was over we would be in Europe (Yekaterinburg is nestled in the middle of the Urals and just outside the west side of the city is the land boundary between Europe and Asia).  The wind was behind us just as weather.com promised (never had a forecast actually be correct), and we got out there and rode as if the nothing could stop us.  We beat our getting out of a city curse, managing not to get lost or delayed along the way.  After facing so many headwinds on the trip, it was great to feel the wind at our back, if you chose you didn't even really have to pedal, but we had a schedule to keep. We did 140km the first day and felt good and optimistic.  The road from Omsk to Yekaterinburg seemed in some small ways much improved from the last stretch, there were truck stops again, our favorite stopping grounds, the road itself didn't have the extensive potholes that were so numerous before that you wondered if the air force used the road from Novosibirsk to Omsk as target practice.
 
When it comes to the 200km days the eating borders on the grotesque, no one should be eating like this, but the hunger is intense.  5 ice cream bars is not over doing it on a day when you are riding 126 miles a day, it is just a good way of cooling down, ordering 3 orders of the Russian equivalent of tortellini isn't over doing it on a day you are riding 126 miles it is just a good way of getting protein and carbs, it is so over the top sometimes you stand back as the cooks bring out the food and say I can't believe I will eat this and probably still be hungry.
 
I think that the days travelled from Omsk to Yekaterinburg will be forever hanging in the back of Levi and I's minds as the most intense of the trip and the reward (getting to the verge of Europe) the most sweet, I doubt we will have to work so hard to get out of Russia or to get to Porto as we have to get to Europe. The days were long and the nights were short, at one point in the middle of the consecutive 200km days I broke out something I had long put away, as being unnecessary, my wristwatch. I started timing our breaks, trying to give us more time to sleep at the end of the day, there are few things more annoying than a timed break, but getting that extra hour at the end of the day is pretty sweet.  We forced ourselves out of bed daily at 5 am when it was still dark and pedalled until there was no light left in the sky, around 10.  By the 4th day we were exhausted, but were only 250km from Yekaterinburg, so in theory we only had to go 130km each of the next two days, but we all know that that isn't how Idiots work, we rode about 50km and happened to pull into a very nice cafe and hotel, suddenly a wave of exhaustion hit us both.  We decided to go right to bed at noon, and do another 200+ day the next day, just one more big one to get us out of Asia.  The hotel itself appeared to be a former military barracks turned hotel, there was a guard tower and quite a bit of fencing surrounding the obviously soviet structure, but we didn't mind we parked our bikes next to the large road work vehicles (road workers are the main clientele of the Russian Roadside Hotel), and passed out in the small stuffy room even with the sun baking the sheets. 
 We did the final 200 climbing into the Urals to find Yekaterinburg, it turned out that the Urals around Yekat are nothing more than rolling hills, which was a nice surprise.  It was a marvelous moment to climb the first rolling hill and look back at that long tough stretch of plateau that extended all the way to Novosibirsk, "whew, good to get that out of the way".  Our way into the city was guided, luckily by a fellow cyclist we met on the road, Dmitri, he took us right to our doorstep at the Ural Polytechnic University dormitory. 
Yekaterinburg is certainly deserving of being the gateway to Europe, it is far more open and spacious than some of the previous cities we have been to, with many parks and modern buildings, few of the heavy solid Soviet apartment building.  It is the sight of the death of the last Tsar and his family in 1918, the sight of their deaths and the location of their burials have both become sights of churches.  The Church On The Blood downtown marks the spot of the house where the last Romanovs were killed (Boris Yeltsin had the house destroyed in the seventies), and surrounding the mine shafts where the bodies were found in the 90's there is now a series of seven small churches, one representing each person killed, and a small mmonastery.
 
Our time in Yekaterinburg has been enlightening, we came in tired and rather grumpy, but by the end of our stay here we find ourselves revitalized for the second half of the trip.  The first day of our stay  we tried to do a American Corner talk, it was our first talk since Blagoveshchensk, and we bombed, or at least we were not as positive and funny as we would like.  It was the first time we got to talk about the off road section, the bad roads, the wind, the mosquitoes, the food poisoning, the immense nothingness, and we still wanted to cover some other things like : the drinking, the cold, the wild fires.  By the end of us blabbing, one man stood up and asked in complete sincerity, "well with how you describe the far east, wouldn't it be better if we tore up the road and made eastern Russia a nature reserve?" another man said "I am so disappointed in my country that it has disappointed you." Disappointed are you kidding? It's been way better than we could have imagined, we love it, we just needed to vent to someone (we only get to talk to other people about every 3 weeks), it just happened to be the entire population of English speaking Russians in Yekaterinburg, an unfortunate choice.  In the end no one seemed to mind too much our whine fest, most thought the stories were quite funny, even if Russia did happen to be the but of the joke most of the time, we even were presented some t-shirts.  The next day Chris from the American Consulate took us all around Yekaterinburg, including out to the mine/Monastery where the Romanov's bodies were found, although a solemn location it was very beautiful and had some of the most wonderful wooden churches we have seen yet.  Chris was also very generous in giving us two big jars of peanut butter from his private stash, there is no better gift to a cycle tourer in Asia than a big jar of Extra Crunchy Jiffy.  We met up with a cycling club as well, and talked gear and kilometers, finally ending our day by getting some nutritional supplements from two nice girls, Olga and Olga, to help us on our next stretch. By the end of this stay we have rather regained our sense of adventure, which somewhere out there between Novosibirsk and Omsk had been scared off by all the screaming and yelling at the swamp and wind. I think we are ready to cross that arbitrary line in the sand and start riding in Europe.
ellski
 
Oh and I almost forgot, I bet you want some numbers, they are incomplete as we still have about 30km to go so probably just add 1 to each column.
THE CONTINENT OF ASIA:
Kilometers travelled: 7813
Kilometers without pavement:2000
Days on the bike: 76
Days Althaus was stuck in bed because of food poisoning: 10
Flat Tires: 60
Times lost: 0 (oh yeah!!)
Number of times the frames broke: 4
Countries Visited: 1, still not even done with it yet
Outhouses visited: 2000
Outhouses that were too bad to use:700
Number of times a man screamed out Otkuda (where?) from a moving vehicle: 1,450,387
Number of wild marijuana passed growing on the side of the road: 1.5 billion (estimate)
Number of wild marijuana plants growing out of outhouses: more than you want to think about
Number of birch trees passed: infinite
Number of mental break-downs: would have to know how many wind gusts there were in the last month
Autographs signed: too numerous to remember, ahh being a celebrity in the Russia Far East, the good ole days.

Author's Note:
We recently did a talk at an American Corner to a group of english speaking Russians, and although on the whole it did go well, many people felt that it came off anti-Russia, or at least didn't make Russia sound to appealing.  This is in no way my objective or at all how I feel about Russia and it scares me to think that this might be how people are interpreting my blogs. I will continue to write about the silly incidents and absurd aspects of travelling through Russia as I would travelling through the US that is just my way of writing, but hopefully you will understand that these are isolated incidents and that we overall have had an amazing time here and the Russian people have been more generous and welcoming and the landscape has been more beautiful and interesting than we possible could have imagined while we poured over maps 8 months ago. Thank you Russia, and no offence meant.
Ellski
 
We left Novosibirsk with a little tinge of dread, not only leaving our comfy penthouse suite, but heading out into a part of Russia that in some ways we were dreading, the plains.  It had always rather held our interest, from Novosibirsk to the Ural Mountains you cross a huge steppe, and at the end you are in Europe. Looking at in my room back home Levi and I saw a larger version of the US Midwest and drifted into revery about the truck stops and wide open spaces, riding into a city called Omsk, and the speed with which we would dispense with the plains.  "Omsk! That's going to be a wild night, maybe more than one, god I can't wait to get to Omsk." Levi had said on more than one occasion.
 
But slowly along our trip we had gotten a different impression of what it might be like, Denis in Vladivostok said "It's just a huge swamp, millions of huge mosquitoes", Baikal, Alexei, pointing at the stretch from Novosibirsk to Yekaterinaburg, said "Here it is going to get really remote again, worse than the off road" and of course there was always the stern warning we had gotten at the beginning of the trip from Mark Jenkins, telling us that the headwinds he experienced, especially on the flats were nearly catastrophic for their trip. 
 So standing at the edge of Novosibirsk looking at a limitless horizon on a windy and rainy day we found ourselves once again saying "God, I can't wait to get to Omsk!"
 
It wasn't perhaps so bad the first day, we went slower than usual, but the wind was more of a cross than a full on headwind, and it came kind of in waves, it would gust and then almost retreat into a tailwind, like an under toe on the beach, so you would be pulled for a few seconds, get your momentum up for just a few seconds before you got pounded by the next gust.  By the end of the day we really felt pretty good about our chances of accomplishing our new and ambitious route plan, we wanted to spend the next month travelling big distances without stopping much, riding north instead of south, heading to Moscow and then on to St. Petersburg before turning west and heading through Europe. It would require a month of hard riding to avoid the bad weather, being on a very strict schedule of long days and short nights, but it was very feasible, and the first day of facing the plains left us thinking it was in fact possible.  We camped that night and indeed found more bugs than before, but nothing too bad, we still had not gotten out our bug nets, and in fact they were facing deportation in the next package to home.
 
The next day the wind was almost behind us, and we rode for a personal best 220km, but even with a slight advantage from the wind, cracks were beginning to show, especially after a month of very scheduled riding.  I had for months been thinking, and we had been joking, about the concept that we were too young and inexperienced to be bike tourers, we are once again the youngest guys out here and overall bike touring seems to be for mostly newly weds and retirees (two groups you might not think perfectly matched for cycle touring but it is true).  For us we get up exhausted and think of only one thing, getting through the day as quickly as possible so that we can get back to bed and get some rest again, we live for our days off and are striving to get to a point where we can just slow down and ride less km.  But when you meet other riders out here, they are invariably older and they just spend the entire day on the bicycle, 10 or so hours, just cruising along, going at a much slower rate than us, but never taking days off, in the end they have inevitably gone twice as far in half the time as us.  It's an old man (and woman)'s game patience is the name of the game.  Although in our defence, our main goal is to see the country of Russia, the one we are most interested in, they are going through it as fast as possible in an attempt to make it to Mongolia, the country that everyone else on a bicycle in the world seems to be most interested in.  At one point during our trip to Omsk we were actually made fun of by a 60+ year old Frenchman when we told him how far and how long we had come. 
 
It is this lack of zen that often caused problems on Team Idiot on the flats, the whole trip so far has not tested your mental stamina in the way one day out in the flats did, even on the off road where you went through fewer towns and went at a much slower pace so that you might only see one or two towns or settlements a day at least had hills and mountains to focus your attention and enthusiasm on. Here on the flats you just keep your legs moving and watch the horizon for something to strive for, going through a town every few hours.  Song lyrics race through your head again and again, the same little snippet over and over to the rhythm of your legs turning, slowly the lyrics change inevitably into some sort of verbal attack on the wind or the flats. Levi is a master at this art, be it because he suffers even more frustration because he wasn't a cyclist before and is more unused to the frustration of the wind slowing you down and howling in your ear or because he is losing his mind, he never fails to have a new one when break time comes. There are some wonderful things about the flats as well though, there is something magical about riding through the endless fields sunflowers or golden wheat that one comes across every few hours, often they are filled with hundreds of crows that give you a feeling of a living Van Gogh painting, you can stare off at the limitless sunflowers for hours just wondering how far off they go. 
 
By the end of the 220km ride we were exhausted, we had planned to ride only about 180, but we really wanted a hotel as the weather looked threatening and it is better to just get a hotel room, that way in the morning you don't have to hang around trying to dry the tents.  Unfortunately by the 180km marker there wasn't a hotel just waiting for us, so we trudged on another 40km, watching the ominous sky.  It was one of those moments right out of a comedy, we finally made it to the hotel, I could barely climb the stairs my legs were so sore, but I went in and ordered a room for 2. "Nyet" was the curt reply I received "why?" I asked, thinking "could this place really be filled? I'm in the middle of nowhere and there are about 2 cars in the parking lot."
"No foreigners"
Perfect. We wound up negotiating to sleep in the parking lot, and luckily it didn't rain. However the next morning we could barely move, and as it turned out, it was the first headwind day. It didn't take long, it was lunch break when it happened, " Aw ##$@# this, I am not going to get up every day at 6am for the next month and ride 150km until 9 at night, this is my bike trip and I am going to relax and just chill out and ride." And just like that it was over, we are going north still, to Moscow, because quite frankly the photo of us with the bikes in front of the Kremlin is simply to tempting, then we will meander through Europe at our own speed, going where we please.
 
Things calmed down after that moment, we decided not to worry about these things, we had, after all, finally caught back up and then some with where we wanted to be at this time on the trip, and really things had been going splendidly, our flats had decreased to almost non-existent, the way it should be, we were strong enough to go 200km if need be and go 160 for days on end, but we didn't need to according to the numbers, we now can (and will) just ride about 140km a day and make our way to Moscow, snap a picture and continue on into Europe. It sounded to heavenly to even imagine. We went only a few more kilometers that day before we found another roadside hotel and said, "yeah we're worth it, let's stay in another hotel tonight"
"Nyet" was the response again, we are beginning to consider Russian brides just so that we can stay in the hotels again, but luckily the attendant directed us down the street to another hotel that does accept foreigners (or more accurately doesn't ask too many questions)
We were woken up the next morning by the howl of the wind, but we didn't let that bother the new zen Idiots, had a leisurely breakfast and packed up, hopped on the bikes and did a leisurely 80km (okay I'm exaggerating a bit, when the wind is blowing that hard it is difficult to describe anyone' attitude as zen, but there was a more casual attitude towards the shouting at the wind, less desperation) It was at some point during that day that we met the 60+ year old Frenchmen who started every sentence with "foooooh!" and proceeded to make fun of us "Foooh! very slow. Fooooh! maybe too much gear. Fooooh I must be off now I go to Australia, Fooooh" I guess no one told him there isn't a road.
 
Finally the next day we cruised into Omsk, we have noticed that with every Russian city we ride into there are about three things that happen about 100 to 150km outside of them without fail, it becomes incredibly remote, the road gets so bad you can hardly ride on it, and the traffic becomes unbearable, Omsk was no exception, in fact in terms of remoteness it took the cake, when we reached the sign there wasn't a house to be seen, as far as I could see we were still out on the flats.
 
Omsk held special significance for me not only because it was a strangely named four letter city in the middle of the map in my room, but also because it was here that Dostoevsky was imprisoned for 4 years.  My obsession with Dostoevsky is what partially drives this trip and so it was a great treat to finally make it to a city of significance in his life.  Our first impressions of Omsk, were very positive, the outskirts seemed to have a very mixed population, not just Russians, but people seeming to hail from all over the former Soviet Union which was interesting to see.  It is also a major industrial city, where many of the factories from Western Russia were evacuated to during WWII, which is a very strange thing to see, factories rather forced into any open spaces in the region.  We found ourselves overcome with the west in Omsk, we stayed in the Hotel Omsk (creative name) which featured an all you can eat Russian breakfast buffet (not really sure if it was all you can eat, but no one seemed to mind when we did).  On our way down to meet Maria, a girl who had kindly offered to show us around the city after seeing our site, we discovered a TGI Fridays in downtown Omsk, which conveniently had the cheapest business lunch in town, we couldn't resist.
We spent the afternoon relaxing and walking around Omsk with Maria, she took us to the Dostoevsky Museum and showed us around the city of Omsk which we really took to.  We spent 3 full days in Omsk, avoiding any sort of work at all  (I am writing this blog from Yekaterinburg), letting ourselves heal mentally and physically.
Of course by the third day we were feeling pretty good again, strong and happy, we knew that the wind, at least according to weather.com, would be behind us for the next 6 or so days. We did have to set a date to give a talk at the American Corner in Yekaterinaburg before we left Omsk, so when the director told us we could either give the talk in 7 days or 11, we looked at each other as only two complete idiots can and said  "well with the wind behind us we can probably do 950km in 6 days, it'll be a challenge."
"yeah and I like a challenge"
"Maybe we can even do it in 5 if we do just straight 200's"
we texted the director back, "we'll be there in 6 days"
it's almost as if we learned nothing
 
ellski

 I am sitting right now in what can only be described as a penthouse suite in Russian terms, on the eleventh floor of a Novosibirsk high rise, surrounded by the finest Chinese veneer that money can buy. We each have our own bed and there is even a computer hooked up to the internet on a desk by the window, it is magnificent, I get to write my emails and look out over the third largest city in Russia. But I guess this is jumping ahead in the story, according to your reading I am still in Krasnayarsk, well consider this my first dabbling in the dreaded flashback writing.
 
If there is one thing the Idiots don't know how to do it is leave a city we have tried and failed many a time to get "a big start" at the beginning of a new push, but have yet to achieve it, we rarely even get a normal day out of a city, usually we do about half of what we would do normally, when I look back through my journal, numbers like 40km, 70km, 25 km repeatedly stand out next to the phrase  "Well we left Blank today, but..."  Krasnayarsk was no different The city itself was a maze that took us an hour to figure out how to solve, then there were the two flat tires Levi suffered in the first 2 hours, this sadly required a patch break, because the team mechanic (!?!) forgot to patch tubes while we were in Krasnayarsk, luckily thanks to our new found speed we found our selves at a cafe having done 90km a few hours later. "Should we push another 30km today or leave it be, as is we have 3 perfect 150km days ahead of us to Kemerovo, then we rest one day there and push on too Novosibirsk with another two 150km days, I like the challenge I think."
"yeah lets do it, the terrain has been pretty good, nice and flat so we should be able to do it no problem."
That was that, enough said, we walked into the cafe and ate ourselves silly.
We awoke early in the morning to find a change, we had been debating it for days, could it really be that summer is winding down here already? The dews were getting heavier, the trees didn't seem to have that deep lush green look and indeed some of them seemed to be fading. It seems that in seasonal time here it is late August, which would makes sense, in Off The Map there is talk of a frost on August 11th something we found unfathomable two weeks ago but now seems quite logical.  Fear not, it isn't going to start snowing and drop to Siberian winter temperatures, it still gets to about 85 or so every day, the mornings are just cooling off again, time to break out the "morning layer" again.  We rode along trying to process and either prove or disprove that the season was turning all day to no avail, indeed it might be just in our head, perhaps the last 3 weeks was an intense heat wave and this is what summer is really like here, or perhaps this is a cold spell, this is Russia, anything is possible.  The terrain stayed flat and we flew along alternating fields of wild flowers now seeming to fade, wheat which seemed ages from being harvestable and birch trees which seemed to be getting ready to change colors.  As we pulled into a cafe at the end of the day (we did our 150 no problem) we met 3 other cyclist coming from Moscow, they were Russian, so we were unable to get quite as much out of them as we would like, however we did learn that on one day on the flats they got a strong tailwind and cruised an unbelievable 260 km which is something like 160 miles, incredible.  I don't see us catching a westerly wind of that magnitude on this trip but if we do I'm shooting for 300. 
We were slow in getting ready the next day and slow in doing everything really, but we managed even with 3 flats to make it about 140km to a big town with a hotel, Mariinsk, about 160 km from Kemerovo. We figured hey we will stay in the hotel get an early start and do a cool casual 100 miles tomorrow.  I even texted Natasha and Nikita, a couple that had contacted us on our website and told them we would reach there city around 7 (we would be staying in their apartment).  It seemed perfect.  The next morning things fell apart from the start, it was one of those hotels where there was only one bathroom and everyone else lives there on a semi permanent basis, the line is terrible, we couldn't get out until 9 o clock, but no worries, we knew we still had plenty of time.  A few hours later Levi had the first dazzling crash of the trip while trying to turn around to fast to look at some flowers, we took a few minute breather, again knowing that really things were going fine, our pace was fast and the roads flat and good from here to Europe, the day before I had rather confidently but honestly said "Right now I think we are strong enough that I am not afraid of big winds, mountains or rain, I think that we can power through them and make good time if we have to." I stand by those words, still. All day there was a fair head wind, which of course made sense to us after I had made such a remark there was certainly going to be some backlash.
By around 4 we were just lounging, knowing we had about 4 hours left of riding but not too concerned, Natasha and Nikita would understand. It was right about then that I got a call from Natasha asking us where we were, I told her and said that I thought we would be in Kemerovo around 8, "But you said 7 yesterday, I though you told me 7." Natasha was pissed. So we got on our bikes and started racing towards the city, still a cool 90 km away.  Much like the surprise Fall a few days ago we were not prepared at all for what was happening to us, we started climbing, not just a little bit of climbing either, the kind of climbing one associates with a mountain range.  "Are we going back into the mountains? Is this possible?"  We couldn't believe it, finally I texted Natasha, "Is there a mountain range here that we didn't know about." She responded "Yes there are a lot of mountains, will I see you soon?"  We continued to race, pushing ourselves trying to make good time, slowly the rainclouds were forming overhead.  The thunderstorm didn't start until we were about 20 km outside the city, but it didn't matter, it was so intense that everything was soaked almost instantly, but in a way it was quite refreshing, if laughable.  We continued to fly as fast as we could, but when there are mountains, it is not a speed sensation you get, it is not like when you are on the flat, there you can get your bike moving fast enough to pretend for a minute that it isn't stacked high with 50 lbs of gear and that you are a real cyclist, on mountains you are a workhorse, pulling a mammoth weight up the hill only to fly too quickly down to the bottom of the next climb.
Really it was quite a scene, us pushing our hardest against the mountains, lightning and thunder clapping down all around us, the traffic getting heavier as we neared the small "mountain city" of Kemerovo. We finally made it to the city gate and of course no one was mad, we had raced for nothing (although if we had taken our time we would have spent even more time in the rain), they met us with bicycles and shared in our drenched adventure back to their apartment (along the way I took my first fall of the trip, not much to right home about, but none the less a tumble).  When we finally got the bikes up to the apartment we were beaten men, we could barely move, not only had we pushed big numbers for the last few days, now the mountain sprint had left us breathless, we gobbled down some borscht and pizza and went to bed. 
 We slept late the next morning in our double bed (!?!), which was a great extravagance for us. Natasha and Nikita seemed to have the day all planned for us, which can often be a good or bad thing. We had breakfast while Nikita looked over our bikes (he was very into cycling mechanics apparently). He immediately deemed them unridable and said we should go to the local bike shop.  Anytime you have someone who speaks fluent Russian and has a knowledge of bikes you just tend to agree to whatever they say, it is better to have things replaced here with Nikita talking than later with me trying to explain what I want by pointing.  So soon we were back on the bikes (groan) and riding presumably to the bike shop. One of our biggest problems with home stays is food, everyone feeds us well, gives us great home cooked meals and really if I wasn't riding a bicycle 200k a day I would be over fed, but after a dinner and a breakfast at home Levi and I were already conspiring ways to escape to a super market and gorge ourselves. As we got out onto the street Natasha told us we would be going to a museum, we agreed of course but only after a sideways glance towards each other.  The museum turned out was on the top of a huge hill, making our legs relive the terrors of the day before and our stomachs question if this was the proper way to the supermarket. 
The museum itself was fascinating, Kemerovo is just opposite Kuzbass where just after the creation of the Soviet Union there was an experiment to make an independent and advanced workers colony. Bill Haywood a prominent American socialist and others were involved with Lenin's blessing. It was an amazing museum, showing that up until Lenin's death workers from all over the world came here to Kuzbass to help build a better society (it turned out that all the mountains we were passing were filled with coal, the engine that drove the project).  There was running water and electricity long here long before anywhere else in Siberia (still lacking from what I have seen).  Upon Lenin's death,  Stalin's paranoia and persecution of foreigners caused the downfall of the colony, most of the workers returned back to the United States or whichever country they had originated from.  All this I was able to absorb while lying to my stomach, telling him we were just in a really long line at the supermarket.
 
Finally at the end of the coal mine could be seen, "Ok guys let's go drop the bikes off at the shop." said Natasha.
"And get a pizza each?" Levi and myself chorused in our minds.
We got to the bike shop and Nikita was there to meet us. We got rid of our bikes, no more riding today, phew now let's eat.
"Okay guys, now we want to take you to a national park for a little hiking, then we will all go home and eat, the park is about 1 hour each way."
"Let me talk to her I'll set her straight!!!" My stomach bellowed.
"A hike!?!" My legs screamed.
We managed to convince them to stop for a snack along the way, Levi and I jumped out of the car like two convicts making a jail break, running to the closest kiosk and buying a loaf of bread to supplement whatever snacks they insisted on buying for us (again they were perfect hosts, we are just absurdly hungry guests).  We managed to tide ourselves over for what turned out to be a simple walk through the forest to some very old and interesting cave drawings along the Tom river. We got back to the bike shop, collected our bikes, which seemingly had nothing done to them, and returned home for dinner. We ate a very delicious meal, but again Levi and I began to conspire to get out and gobble down some extra nourishment. We used the excuse of coffee, luckily she took us to what resembled an American style 50's diner and we had what most would consider an unnecessary second meal. 
The next morning we left Natasha and Nikita, they were excellent hosts, the Kuzbass museum and the cave drawings were not to be missed now that I looked back on it. We simply have an unending hunger which turns us into grumpy edgy old men if not fulfilled every few hours.  It was 260 kilometers to Novosibirsk, a cool 2 days ride, where we could relax and do just 130 each day or as we were hoping do most of it the first day out of Kemerovo and relax and have an extra half day in Novosibirsk the next day.  It was of course not to be, we got lost leaving Kemerovo in a way that I had not experienced since my parents and I travelled together.  It took us three tries to leave the city, we continued following a circuit of signs saying Novosibirsk, but always brought us back to the same spot, it may not seem so bad, but when you look down at your odometer and realize you have done 50km already and haven't gotten anywhere your hopes for that half day in Novosibirsk fade, you know that tomorrow is going to be bad.  Indeed by the time the sun was falling in front of us we had just knocked the 60th kilometer off the 260 and we were standing in front of a roadside hotel.  We decided to push tomorrow and break our record of 194, see if we couldn't get to 200 km, cycling procrastinators.
 
And we did it, we flew, averaging 25 km and hour, knowing that a three day rest awaited us in the the mighty industrial city of Novosibirsk. There were no surprise mountain ranges, just rolling hills which were slowly tapering off as we now are approaching the plateau, the Russian Steppe.  At the end of the day as we stood outside the apartment building our odometers read 202, suddenly 271 seems in sight, now we just need a tailwind.
ellski