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.