Turns out those boys can move. We left woke up in a double bed one morning looked into eachothers eyes and said "Let's get as far away from here as possible!". I think for maybe the first time on this trip the passion for killing kilometers hit us both at the same time, and suddenly we found ourselves flying through the twisting streets of Irkutsk past the old wooden houses and churches only stopping to take a photo in Levi's case and to buy a Russian flag for the bike in my case. For so long our legs have been held back, first with weakness from Vladivostok to Blagoveshchensk, then with the slow, steady and bumpy ride from Blago to Chita, and finally with the frustration and mountain filled ride from Chita to Irkutsk, they spun with no end of strength and speed as we escaped into the rolling fields of purple and yellow wild flowers. It finally has become the bike trip we have been dreaming of, we'd been riding hoping to reach "the good life" and we have finally reached it. Our lives are straight out of "The Sportsman's Notebook" by Ivan Turgenev, it was the first book I ever read by a Russian author, and is probably what sparked this unhealthy obsession with Russia. It is simple group of short stories about a hunter and his dog roaming the Russian country side from village to village and having simple but wonderful encounters with villagers. Granted this has been our trip all along, but it has been a bit sweeter of late, we don't have a dog, but in every village, right next to the shish kebab stand there is usually a sweet stray dog willing to play the part, particularly when I pull out my bag of dog biscuits (yeah, I carry dog biscuits, so what!? nobody else is going to feed these little guys, I even got the mint ones to help their breath). Usually we stop now at a small shop and ask if we can use their Chai-nik or electric kettle and we turn their store into a mini ramen noodle making factory (it certainly takes more than one ramen noodle packet to fill the 120km void in our stomachs) then we sit, eating outside the store in the shade with our new temp-pet, waiting until the first villager becomes curious enough to stop starring at us and get up off his haunches and start the well rehearsed dialogue. The sun is out here from about 5 am til 10 pm, which makes about 4-6 unbearably hot, and we have taking once again to mimicking Turgenev's hunter, pulling over the bikes into a field or under a tree for some shade and a nice afternoon nap, I never planned on being a nap guy on this trip, it doesn't really fit in with the cycling image, but it gets quite stifling every day. After a quick afternoon nap there is usually a quick gas station ice cream break and back onto the road, racing along, with the sun slowly passing over our left shoulder to directly in front of us, blinding us for those last few hills, but we don't care because by then the temperature is positively cool and refreshing, we reach our final cafe as the sun is starting it's elongated setting process and just as Turgenev's hunter usually finds his way into a peasants cabin for the night.
Of course Turgenev's hunter wasn't riding a bicycle and he wasn't an Idiot, there have of course been setbacks and troubles. On the second day, again racing into the cooling sun and just a few kilometers from finding our next cafe home for the night, I heard a tremendous snap in the back of my bike, the kind of snap by now so familiar to me, a broken rack. I looked back a and saw I was a lucky man indeed, the elusive and much sought after double snap-both sides of the rack-was going to give me a little end of the ride walk to stretch my legs. We walked to the nearest garage to hopefully find a welder, however it was too late, they had closed for the evening, we looked around at the town, it had a very "I'm full of obnoxious drunk men and you won't be getting any sleep tonight". These types of towns, whenever we see them we say "uh oh it looks like another town without women" meaning that it seems in these small Russian towns that only the women keep things in control. Lucky for us there was an amazing gas station where there was even a security guard who let us camp behind the store under his watchful eye and billy club.
We awoke the next morning and strolled over to the garage. Unlike the other garages that we have visited on this trip, this one had a distinctly Russian village feel, I walked in an immediately noticed the lack of tools and excess of dirt, also it was not a garage, just a shack. The owner was asleep on a dirty even by my currently low standards couch and barely raised an eyelid as I entered. Having now memorized the word for "weld" I asked if he could help, he promptly grumbled that he didn't have a welding machine and that he didn't know how far away the next one might be. Now before we might have sat for about 2 hours debating the merits of returning to a city, or hitchhiking to the next town, but I was over it. There was going to be no more of these problems so I promptly went to the nearest clothing store and bought myself a green striped tank top, the kind that all the mechanics wear, and got to work. It took me about 5 hours 9don't laugh, I didn't even have a vice to shape my home made metal brackets with, this guy had nothing and appeared to be too hungover to be interested in helping) but in the end I made brackets for the rack which hopefully will last till Sochi. I must say being a not very mechanical person I got quite a bit of pride hammering out my brackets and earning my place as team mechanic, I even got a little group of Russian men around me watching, there were impressed with my Russian-style improvisational techniques. I left there with a new sense of pride, a new rack bracket and a new sunburn (whew those tank tops are revealing). And we still did 90km, although we did have to forgo our afternoon nap, the last 5k were off road, signalling we had reached the last section of off road, supposedly, on the Russian Federal Highway, the Irkutsk to Krasnayarsk section, approximately 200km. Great time to have a new untested rack bracket.
In some ways it was the best off road that we had experienced yet, fairly smooth, not too many really soft patches, very few steep climbs or unpleasant decents, and it wasn't like the remote off road of Never and Chita, there were gas stations and cafes everywhere, just no road. In fact I would go so far as to say the off road wasn't a problem in the 350km where it was on and off, the pavement was. It was rather unbelievable, and at the same time it explained a lot, if there could be paved road this bad then why pave road at all, if the road from Blago to Chita was like this section of pavement, rocky, monstrous potholes 4 feet wide 1 foot deep and stretching across the whole road, Levi and I probably would have killed one of those poor asphalt workers out of spite. At one point there was a section where they had just laid down 4 by 12 foot sections of premade concrete slabs, that according to one guy are usually used in airports, instead of road, laying them down like dominos. Didn't anyone tell the Russians that there is a reason that people don't use concrete for road construction? Many were completly cracked or decayed and sinking unlevelly, creating a broken wheel playground for us. At times the metal mesh inside the slabs was bent out creating a 3d obstacle course, it was crazy. Finally we returned to asphalt, only to discover they had actually just paved over the giant dominos, creating a very unstable and terrible road again with huge potholes reaching to unthinkable depths for a pothole. My newly adjusted rack made it through, boosting my mechanic pride (we had our first spoke break during the offroad, and again I was able to fix it just fine).
Our quick legs and ambitious heads of course wouldn't last all 1100 km to Krasnayarsk, our first goal. By the 4th day Levi could barely move his knees at night, forcing him to keep them as straight as possible all evening long, and warm them slowly in the mornings. Try as we might adjusting his bike we couldn't get the pain to go away, we eventually realized that it was just our bodies were not used to our quick pace, the legs could handle it but the knees would need some time to get used to spinning the pedals so fast and so hard. But in some ways we were thrilled by the concept of overdoing it, after so long of under doing it. So we continued on our way albeit more tentatively to Krasnayarsk, but certainly not limping along (Levi's knee really only hurts when he is off the bike). The road is finally approaching something of a real highway, granted the pavement itself isn't, but we now ride through a big town every one or two days, the gas stations have stores attatched and often if you are willing to fork out 30 cents you can get a real toilet. For us these are real improvements, we have been waiting 3000 miles for them, we always assumed that once we got to Chita we would see them, we didn't so it is nice to finally be able to stop at a gas station get a cold drink and an ice cream, sometimes I can even get a can of coffee. We cruise through small and medium even large towns all day now, whereas for so long you went through one town a day, the one you slept in, and were forced to stop where the cafe or store was because you never were sure when the next one might come. So despite a few setbacks we find ourselves here in Krasnayarsk sleeping in seperate beds, and quite possibly on the verge of enjoying "riding the good life".
ellski
