THE ‘STANS
The 130 km road that leads us up out of the final stretch of western China is a brand spanking new swish bit of tarmac that also happens to be part of the new silk road route, a network of truck friendly roads stretching from Xining in central China to Poland. If you think that’s mad then consider how long it must take a container ship to get from Shanghai to Europe
Alongside us we can see scraps of the old pass road in oxbow loops stranded in uselessness on either side of us.
Another checkpoint. Is this the crossing? We are continually not quite sure of exactly what’s happening. Via mixed information gleaned from the Internet, lonely planet guide books and hostel hearsay we pitch together variously possibly out of date information to guess at what the correct procedure might be. Tricky as border policies seem to waver constantly; depending on local troubles and governmental whims.
There’s a big long line of trucks and a group of several big fridge-like RVs who upon closer inspection are a group of middle-aged Europeans travelling through Russia and back again through China and ‘The ‘Stans’ in a massive multi-thousand mile loop back to Europe. Bizarrely, a number of the vehicles don’t seem to have anything going on in the way of windows. Extremely odd that people choose to grandly tour the world and promptly utterly disconnect from it all in the process. Perhaps the aim of the exercise is not to actually experience anything, but only to be able to brag about their big journey when they get back to the safety and convenience of home.
At a small shop I buy lots of tiny and surprisingly delicious cakes and an enormous bag of the cheapest nuts ever. This part of the world is nut growing country. Almonds walnuts the freshest peanuts I have ever tasted (not like the chewy pointless things we buy in England) and there’s more horse beans (roasted broad beans).
After some small arbitrary delay we pass through. Next is the Kyrgyz end of things. Another few miles and the taxi stops and our driver indicates for us to get out. We are here. We think.
Strolling down the hill I take a few snaps of people carrying bulky baggage lumps down to the Kyrgyz border point. I see a guard and stuff my phone in my pocket. A Japanese chap in our group is not so discrete and gets his big lenses camera confiscated by a grumpy guard.
Japanese man is understandably upset. After being forced to delete all his photos he eventually after a hour of negotiating gets his camera back.
Yet another checkpoint later and we are finally in Kyrgyzstan.
We stand around negotiating with taxi drivers about the cost to get to either the local small town of Sary Tash or the big town of Osh further away on the western border. Whilst deliberating this I am shocked to see a overbearingly tall dark looking man with a camel hair coat and a mouthful of shiny gold teeth. Not only does he look like a dodgy gypsy horse trader but he’s also about seven feet tall. And wearing the silliest hat I have ever seen. The hat is white about a foot tall and made of four felt segments sewn together to form a truncated four sided come shape. And it doesn’t quite fit on his head so it sits there delicately poised. The man looks so shockingly silly that I cannot look him in the eye.
No one else seems to be bothered. I am later to discover that this is the national hat of Kyrgyzstan. Carrying your personal wealth in your mouth I later discover is also thoroughly normal here. It’s what everyone does instead of dentures. Kazakhstan has wife kidnapping and Kyrgyzstan has crazy hats. Welcome to central Asia.. .
The ride to Osh is incredible. The mountains roll and rise impossibly and the land is swathed in green. I haven’t seen grass for about two weeks. It is so beautiful that I am absolutely joyous. This would be amazing country to cycle through.
The landscape is studded with gers and ger life stuff. Horses sheep yaks. The mountains so vast, the ger camps sit like pin pricks in the landscape. I am in love again…
We land at the Osh Guesthouse some 200kms later. I am to discover that it’s the kind of hostel that is so laid back and friendly that it can be hard to escape from.
I stay there a week but it feels more like two months, so comfortably ingrained I come to feel being there. groups come and go, organising trips out to various tourist spots. There are No trains or actual buses in Kyrgyzstan so ordering shared taxis (mashrutkas) is how transport happens.
I am in recovery from being in China. I never really liked China very much and it’s some small comfort to find that I wasn’t the only one. I get my whinging out of my system and begin the process of figuring out what to do next…
I find the prospect of yet more travelling by motorised vehicles daunting. Either I have finally had enough and it’s time to go home, or… I get a bicycle.
The hostel manager has a very nice bike that his father wants to sell, rather conveniently. It’s a Bergamont Vitess 4.3. Go look it up…. some cycle tourist had flown it here in order to ride it and then changed his mind. Consequently it’s pretty much brand new.
So this is it. Abandon plan a to start my cycle ride from Istanbul. It starts here now.
The advantage is that I get to cycle through Europe in the early spring. My winter will happen somewhere around Georgia or Azerbaijan. That’s the plan anyway. The rest of my route is a little bit tricky, complicated by more hearsay and rumours about visa restrictions and border crossings. Route planning is slightly mind boggling for me especially as I have no idea where any of the places are that people are talking about. And the country borders are somewhat tangled too. When the Russians came here in the twenties and divvied up the area they managed to split tribal groups and cause confusion. Hence internal difficulties within the newly formed countries.
My final route plan seems to be to head south into the high mountains of Tajikistan and onto the Pamir highway following it south on a clockwise loop on one of the country’s few highways, looping round North along the Afghanistan border and then up to the main city of Dushanbe. From there north into Uzbekistan, to Samarkand and then west across desert along the Turkmenistan border towards western Kazakhstan across the Caspian sea and then to Baku in Azerbaijan. My route then follows into Georgia then Turkey then into Bulgaria and then up the Danube and then the Rhine. After that Lord knows.
Well that the plan anyway.
Hanging out at the Osh Guesthouse felt like a necessary staging point, letting go of China and then finding what the next plan was to be.
After purchasing the bike, that part was decided. I was going to cycle all the way home. Various people are telling me that if I am going to cycle the pair highway then I need to go right now as summer in the mountains is coming to an end.
There is no real bike shop in Osh. A few guys down the bazaar in the city mend Chinese bikes for running round town but no quality gear. I need panniers and probably general fettling done.
I take a shared taxi to Bishkek, pretty much the only way of getting there certainly with a bike. Maybe I could have hitched with it. Our driver man handles my bike into his car, dropping the chain-wheel in the dust in the process. I am audibly upset. I just bought this bike. If anyone’s going to trash it, it will be me!
The drive to Bishkek is 600 kilometres and much of it wends its way through vast mountains mostly in valleys and at one point through a hairy hairpin bend sequence to an ugly scary tunnel 3kms long with no lighting.
Our driver is reckless. He tears last everything, sneaks right up the area of the vehicles in front and then leaps and overtakes. Except for the times when we narrowly miss having head on collisions with the traffic coming the other way. Five times we narrowly escape death. If we were travelling with sardine she would be tapping our driver on the shoulder continuously and scolding him like a naughty five year old. I have a little smile to myself about this and figure that the gods will come for me when they want me.
Past a wall of mountain and the houses look different. Now we are in territory that is noticeably Russian. Dinky little cottages with brightly pastel shades walls, little gardens with chickens that look disproportionately large against the tiny homes. Old ladies in headscarves who look like they have seen absolutely everything scuttle past and chat with each other.
We get to Bishkek. It’s a city. Lots of what I imagine to be Russian influence. Nightclubs, people enjoying the night life, very little street lights and lots of broken pavements which makes cycling them something of an offloading experience.
People are decidedly white, there are fewer noticeably Muslim people here. The white people remind me of westerners coming in all shapes and sizes, some of them a little on the unhealthy side.
following the sat nav on my brand new phone I find my way to the confusingly named At Guesthouse. I am welcom3d in despite not having booked. It’s a hostel specifically for cyclists. It’s fabulous!
Over the next four days my bike gets sorted out and prepared for the start of my multi-thousand mile trek back to Europe. Nathan the hostel proprietor wonderfully gives me some abandoned rear planners and sells me very cheaply some high quality front panniers that are too good to give away. A whole workshop full of tools space bits and pieces later and I’m ready to roll. I am wonderfully assisted by one of the fellow residents, a beard Englishman called Tom who along with his tandemming partner Cherry are waiting for new axles to turn up in the post.. they have been here for three weeks now.
The other guest frequently seem to be French. A young Swiss lady has been cycling for a year and a half and now she wants to buy a funky Russian van and drive it back home to Switzerland.
Many of the people here are round-the-worlders, and it’s great to see just how possible it is and to glean advice and see how a truly long distance bike is fitted out.
My new bike gets some new second hand tyres that are a bit fatter for carrying the tonnage of stuff I will undoubtedly be carrying. A front panniers get slanted with a six-inch nails and epoxied with glue and string. Tom donates me some bigger pedals. Almost ready to go!
I am a little anxious. This is my fourth long distance cycle trip but I have never taken on anything like this. Two thousand miles of Himalayan proportioned mountains. Two thousand miles of hot sometimes empty desert.
We set off. Rolling out of Russian Bishkek negotiating the morning traffic. This is it! We are actually doing it! I think of the beginnings of the other long distance runs, of how soon everything normalises into its own rhythm, and then after not so much time it ends again. This time I am not even certain if infant make it from one end to the other.
Reaching the edge of Bishkek we stop at market stalls to buy watermelon and veggies. Russianness begins to give way to more Kyrgyz influence. Can’t help wondering if the Russians have all the money….
The day becomes hot. It’s above 40 degrees and unbeknownst to me this is how it’s going to be all the way to Osh. We pass out through low countryside running up alongside a rather dried up looking riverbed. On the horizon the last northern edges of Tien Shen mountains. Quite why the Chinese named range remains with its Chinese name all the way into Kyrgyzstan I don’t quite understand. It bothers me a little as I had got quite fed up with China’s relentless expansionist ambitions. It’s a little irritating to find the Chinese name here.
Besides that, this wall of mountain, another aspect of the great Himalayan vastness, is where we are heading. We might be skirting alongside them for today, but tomorrow we make inroads.
After 70kms of very gentle upward slope and baking heat, we find a lovely camping spot by a glinting gurgling green pubed stream, and manage to shake off th3 village drunk. We had encountered whilst stocking up on edibles at the village magazin. Magazin is the Russian word for a small local shop that sells mostly food stuff. Notably, they don’t very often seem to sell actual magazines…
Day 2 we start to bit the mountains proper. Mammoth triangular walls of rock rise up before us, overwhelmingly huge. Somehow the road before us continually disappears inexplicably round every bend. Where could the road possibly go past the seemingly solid and impenetrable mountains? Apart from the stonking hugeness of our surroundings it seems to me a major miracle that anyone could ever have found a path through this labyrinth. Clearly, there is a river to follow alongside, but it still amazes me. It occurs to me that there’s a huge practical logic to following the river. Not only will it inevitably lead in a long consistent line upwards but it will also mean that any vast caravan of people and animals passing through here in the past would always have had sustenance. Not much point struggling halfway through a load of bloody mountains and then finding yourself and all your mates dying of thirst.
Not exactly spoilt for great camping spots; there’s usually no gap between the roadside and the sheer walls of upwardly mobile rock. We camp a quarter of the way up an exhausting series of hairpin bends. Far up in the peaks we can see tiny lorries earnestly chugging along at almost zero miles an hour along narrow stretches of road.
I ask Roma if this this is where we are going next. He tells me it isn’t.
This would come as a relief to know. Except that it isn’t true.
After camping next to the relentless diesel fumes of struggling lorries all night we head out. Emilie has a puncture. She mend it. Ten minutes later she has another one. I don’t mind the waiting. It gives me the chance to tinker with my own bike. I had just about managed to get my bike sort of functioning in order to catch up with Rom a and Emilie’s appointed leaving Bishkek time. It’s meant that I still need to do final fettling and adjustments as we go along.
I am astonished at my ability to just plug away non-stop regardless of the slope ahead of me. I just go go go go go…. incredibly slowly mostly. It’s hot. Sweat pours off me. My arms glisten. Almost every motorist that passes us either gives us a foot of encouragement or a big friendly wave or shouts something to us as they go past. It really helps. I like the Kyrgyz people. They are genuinely friendly. Over the course of the journey to Osh I am to discover that this welcoming enthusiasm is never ending. Kyrgyzstan will rapidly become one of my favourite countries because of this.
What seems like most of the way up the hairpins, Roma and Emilie have got a lift with a German couple in a truck and are waiting for me. The rising bends conclude with a disgusting smelly unlit and dangerous tunnel 2hich no cyclist in his or her right mind would consider cycling through. As if to prove the point, two German cyclists had tried to cycle through at 4am imagining that the tunnel would be empty at that time. It wasn’t and one of them got asphyxiated by fumes and passed out halfway…
Somehow bundling everyone’s bikes and panniers into the living truck we continue the upward ascent towards the tunnel. It would have taken at least another whole day for us to get to the top bar we stayed on our bikes.
Passing through the nasty tunnel we disembark at the other end, agree to meet our new German friends at a hostel at the bottom of the mountain. Emilie and Roma find some French mountain bikers. Except they don’t have any bikes. They’ve got all the lycra though. Their bikes are on their way in a vehicle. When it arrives they are going to make the 27 km descent that we too are about to make. Except we are loaded up with half a ton of gear each as well.
We begin with an overview of a vast flat valley floor far away with another set of mountains in the distance. Our next challenge. We can see parts of the winding spaghetti route we will be hurtling down in a few moments time….
I go too fast. At first I overshoot on gravel bend which luckily for me there’s a nice big space for me to stop in. Better than a cliff. I try to go slower. The road seems clear and flat with no potholes or truck-mangled corrugations. I speed up. And then I find myself somehow surfing the bumps. Panniers threaten to self eject. I dread to think what it’s doing to my spokes. If I had any hair I would have had the wind in it. We reach the bottom separately. In the evening I am rethinking how I came down those 27kms and tell myself off for riding so dangerously. At one point some stupid driver decided he was going to overtake a car coming uphill and I nearly had a head on collision with him. Much as I love the Kyrgyz people, some of them drive like complete frickin idiots.
We stay at a free guesthouse at the bottom of the mountain. Free showers free WiFi. A special privilege for cyclists only. This is very nice except the guy who offered us the stay omitted to tell us about the free five dogs that bark all night long ten feet away from my tent. In the morning I look like a zombie. I would have been better off sleeping in a nice quiet ditch somewhere.
The next day is baking hot as usual. I now understand why the Kyrgyz men wear these funny tall white felt hats. 2hen I first saw them I thought they looked utterly ridiculous. Now I understand how they are totally practical. White to reflect the sunlight. Tall to let the air circulate so your head doesn’t boil. Utterly sensible.
We meet a chap with such a hat and be invites us to take photos of us with him and his wife next to their yurt. Emails are exchanged hats are t3mporarily swapped hands are shaken and yoghurt balls are gifted.
Along the current stretch of roadside many yurts are encamped and each is offering a tr3stle table stacked high with bags bottles and plastic jars filled exclusively with various types of yoghurt balls. Usually they are salty.
More than once I narrowly miss colliding with a stacked table.
We climb high and the mountain peaks attract not only us but also rain. My hands go numb with cold.
We get invited into another yurt to sit out the rain. We meet the families kids one young girl is learning English at school. Otherwise we communicate in Russian via Google translate on my phone.
We sit down at a lo2 table and enjoy bread and cream and jam and honey and char, the Kyrgyz word for tea. Unlike Mongolian tea which only has three strands of tea in a sea of watery milk, Kyrgyz char is the real deal. A blessed reli3f for an Englishman in the rain.
When we leave it’s still raining but it soon stops. I out-pedal a crazy dog which comes after me intent on eating my leg. Much swearing shakes it off.
We camp at the very top of a sublimely beautiful pass with a broad sweep of Flatbush grassland. Horses are browsing freely. It’s a wonder to see horses allowed to roam. Two eagles with improbably broad wings loop round above us, checking us out.
The next morning begins with Aretha Franklin on Emilie’s stereo. Personally I will always always always begin my day with peace and quiet. Especially on The top of a high mountain pass. Bits But it’s Aretha Franklin. So that’s not so bad. One bowl of porridge each later and we are off. Today is all downhill.
What follows is probably the best cycling experience I have ever had in my entire life. Even better than knocking my two front teeth out when I was fourteen whilst doing my paper round. Yes even better than that.
We descend. For 70kms. The road is empty. The tarmac is good. The mountains are super sexy. I soon give up even thinking about using my brakes. We drop and drop and drop and drop…. from high bare rocks to alpine forest following a green glacial river, past dozens of honey-sellers… eventually quite some time later, we need to pedal again. Time for lunch. I have laghman. Which is basically spaghetti Bolognese without any cheese and made with mutton and lumps of fat. Better than it sounds. Top cycling fuel.
We manage 90kms that day but despite the 70kms for free both me and Emilie are getting a bit burnt out. We camp by a beautiful lake that also happens to have something of a cannabis forest next to it. Which is where we camp of course.
The next day we have a half day only doing 50kms.. for me 50kms is a full days riding but never mind… we end up encamped under some guys awning next his house.
Much socialising with drunken grandmothers ensues. I go and hide by the lake. I have too. If I don’t get some rest I am going to break. Every morning I wake up with my face puffy, my voice croaking and me coughing. Doing things to someone else’s rhythm is hard for me. But I like Roma and Emilie so I am happy to keep going.
The next day begins with 14 mms of sheer hairpin bending upwardsness. I don’t feel like I can move. I feel like shit. I get on the bike and pedal non stop right to the very top. How can I do this? Even I don’t understand. Something in me just goes positive and I seem to be able to overcome my mental barriers. That’s why I love riding a bike.
We camp at à cafe round the back. In the morning I tell Emilie that I’m going have an easy day with no pushing. We manage a total of about ten kilometres. Emilie is not well. She has knee trouble and is being sick. A day off suits me totally. I get time to put new brake blocks on the bike, adjust the bike stands (one for each wheel), fit a Japanese ring lock, and do some other fiddly things and watch a movie independence day resurgence.
I’ve caught up with myself at last. The lake we are camped next to is making lovely lapping sounds, crickets are cricketing and the sky is full to bursting with stars. It’s gorgeous.
And then it got stupidly windy. And none of us gets any sleep. Doh.
In the morning Emilie is still unwell so she and Rom a are going to hitch bike to the next big town of Jalalabad some 120kms away.
I arrange to meet them there and set off on my bike.
I’m on my own again. It’s lovely.
I repair a slow puncture and a middle-aged chap stops his car and comes to watch and ask me the usual questions.
Some time later I need to fix probably the same puncture again. This time no leas than three people stop their cars to ask if I need help. I think I am falling in love with Kyrgyz people.
The road is mostly Flatbush and I think I might have covered somewhere between 80 and 150kms. The roadside km markers went all unsequential and then totally blank for some distance so that’s confused me rather. The fact that it happened as the road went alongside th3 Uzbekistan border might have something to do with it perhaps.
Now, after an evening dose of samsa (Kyrgyz Cornish pasties) and one bottle of Pepsi I have one final fling along the road. The road surface turns to shit round about the Uzbekistan border area and then gets its act together a bit further on. I am looking for a river to wash in. The one on my map has evaporated. Literally. It has no water in it anyway. I head up a side road away from the noise of the main road find a field to camp in and hey Presto, a very nice little irrigation channel. Doesn’t look good to drink but it does mean I can wash my sweaty garments and me.
The next day requires me only: to ride a mere 40kms in order for me to arrive in Osh so the day feels like a lazy lots of ice cream sort of day. I get there just after lunch which gives me plenty of time to say hello to my old friends at the Osh Guesthouse that I stayed at previously. A quick shower and then I head off into the towns bazaar in order to plough my way through my seemingly enormous to do list, get my ripped trousers sewn up, get a spare Tyre, a spoke spanner and a chain link remover; all in anticipation of the bike going pear shaped in the middle of nowhere. Scary thought.
After that, printing out e-visas, trying briefly to do some fiddly phone stuff and then off for a well deserved dinner of laghman. It’s very satisfying to come break and be able to negotiate my way round the bazaar so easily. The bazaar is really massive; it’s a warren of market stalls that stretches for over a mile. It’s so densely crammed wall to wall with stuff and people that rarely do you get to glimpse the outside world. This might all sound a little claustrophobic but the sheer kaleidoscopic variety and colour is thoroughly riveting. A pigeon stands in a small sack of poppy seeds enjoying a free meal until the stall holder spots it and shoos it away. Endless middle aged women in fantastically colourful dresses and shawls harbour their wares, selling reams of cloth, fruit and vegetables, hardware tools, they lean over steaming piles of samsa (a cross between a dumpling and a Cornish paste), endless stacks of the freshest, chewiest, yummiest rounds of platter shaped bread. Kebabs, shashlik, and anything else in the regional style that you might fancy for lunch is all here for you to snack on in between the hefty business of getting all your shopping done.
I think Osh bazaar is almost certainly one of my most favourite places in the whole world. Which is all the more surprising as in general I don’t really like towny stuff.
A night in the hostel, further techno-fiddlings, finding places to either give away, post or otherwise offload various redundant items that I’ve been pointlessly carrying the last few months… One trimmed down bike load later and I’m pretty much ready for the Pamirs. Talking to a young Dutch woman and a German with the unlikely name of Juan Carlos, I find out all the practicalities that I might need to know in order to get me and my bike through Tajikistan in one reasonably happy piece.
The Osh Guesthouse is the kind of place that I could find all sorts of spurious reasons to just stay for ages and never quite get round to leaving… So I take a quick quiet shower and almost manage tell sneak out before anyone can notice that I’m gone but of course it doesn’t quote work out like that, and a heartfelt round of goodbyes is had.
By now, I’ve missed the strongest part of the afternoon sun and I weave my way out through Osh’s heaving traffic, still managing to exchange brief conversations and high fives with lots of drivers on the way. I shall miss Osh. It has left a little mark in my heart.
Heading out of the town, the shambolic shop fronts give way to the inevitable rows of roadside melon sellers.
A day in the town and off the bike gears me up nicely and at the end of the day I smooch back out into the sticks again. By twilight I have covered thirty clicks and finish my day putting up my tent in the company of a young lad who has finished his shepherding duties for the night.
I am now reaching the final goodbye of my time in Kyrgyzstan. It’s a place I have come to love, despite the occasional flirtations with death in the form of some of the cars on the busy bit of road between Jalalabad and Osh driving at break neck speed mere inches from me. Driving for many Kirghiz people seems to be a simple (that’s simple as in stupid) process of putting the foot to the floor, and honking the horn should anything slower than you happen to be in the way, i.e. me. Then there’s the utterly joyless experience of encounters with bored snarly dogs whose idea of fun seems to be to attempt to remove your legs with their teeth, if they can catch up with you. I have quickly learned that trying to outpace them insist going to work if I’m knackered or going uphill or both. Better to see them before they see me, let them see me load up with a handful of gravel and tell them sternly to back off. This is much less stressful. So far I haven’t been bitten. Yesterday a dog came at me so I swore at the dog. The owner was watching, and did nothing to control the dog and seemed to find my predicament funny. So I swore at them too. Morons.
These are the shit bits. But despite that, it’s lovely that pretty much every kid you see will shout out hello, stop what they are doing and come racing over to high five me, ride along with me if they’re on a bike too, or give the bike a thorough examination if I happen to have stopped outside a magazine to get food. Lots of adults too are similarly inclined, and there will be requests for photos and offers to join them for lunch… I pretty much always decline. Usually I just want to keep moving. I do wonder though how different my time would be if I could speak easily to people and I didn’t have a set goal in mind. It would be totally doing different.
So despite my own built in hesitations, I love that there is so much openness and kindness in very obvious abundance all around….
Back to my day…
Cycling on, heading ultimately for Tajikistan, I am aware that Emilie and Roma are out here somewhere. Asking various cycle tourists coming in the opposite direction, it becomes apparent that they are both not so far ahead of me. Finally I meet a Danish couple who had seem them only twenty minutes earlier and had even recommended a good camping spot to them. With them only being ten kilometres in front of me and also having a pretty good idea where they were going to camp, it was only a matter of homing in… And lo and behold, I find them. Pretty good going considering the only information I had was that they had left Jalalabad on the morning of two days ago. So here we are. Reunited. And they are telling me that another couple we had all met at the Bishkek cyclists hostel were also not far behind us and also heading the same way as us. Maybe we might end up with a little convoy….
It seems that the common consensus between cyclists that have already come through Tajikistan, is that 90% of riders get sick in some form or other. Today I meet a couple of Frenchies, one of whom was doing the human Catherine wheel…. I shall arm myself with as much coke cola as possible and try to avoid eating meat. I may end up living on crisps or something.
Hmm…. Bedtime.
The next day…
Having pushed myself beyond my normal limits the day before in order to catch up with Emilie and Roma, I now find myself holding them back as soon as I’ve arrived. I’m exhausted. By midday Emilie is suggesting that I’m probably better off taking a break for a day or two. She’s right of course, but I can’t help but feel a tiny bit sad about leaving them as soon as I’ve found them.
Not only am I exhausted but I’m also not well. My guts are going slightly haywire.
Biting the bullet, I cycle off ahead of them and stop halfway up a hairpin bend a couple of kilometers up. They pass, meet some cyclists coming the other way and chat for a bit. After half an hour, every one else gets moving again.
I think I’ll just stay here for a bit longer. I fall asleep in a road side rain gully for a couple of hours. When I wake up, it’s clear that I’m not going anywhere else today. I find a nearby spot to put the tent up that’s invisible from the road. Only problem is, I’m so knackered, all I can do for about 45 minutes is stare at my disassembled tent. Wow I really am done in. Eventually I am finally set up and I sleep like a dead log. The next day I do nothing but watch films on my phone and wonder about what I am doing. Sheetal says she is missing me. I’m about to embark on some massive crazy journey that could very easily not work out for a number of reasons. The weather might be impossible. I could get hopelessly sick. I’m already not well, so that’s a distinct possibility. I’m worried,
the next day I feel slightly better but not great. I have to let go of the possibility of relying on being able to cycle with others in order to feel safe. It’s no good me trying to push to keep up with someone else. I really do have to go at my own pace. Otherwise I will just be ill.
Some way up the road, two Belgians on their recumbent cycle past me as I am resting. They don’t see me and carry on past, starting an ascent up a long string of nasty hairpins. I watch them pass. My first instinct is to try to catch up with them. Except that I’ve just learned that that tactic doesn’t work.
I watch them disappear, and reflect again that really I am doing this trip alone. If I do happen to coincide comfortably with someone else then that’s a bonus. But wanting it to happen isn’t going to work.
Ho hum.
Finally, I start my own ascent. The top of the pass is way way up, the culmination of about twelve steeply rising bends. On previous occasions, my approach would be to see if I could get up the slope stopping as few times as possible, a strategy achieved by going as slowly as possible. This time I’m still not well. My tactic this time is to go as slowly as possible, stop as many times as I like, and if don’t get to the top then so be it.
I get halfway, on stop number six, and I can see the distant silhouettes of four people seemingly peering down at me. The altitude is about two and a half thousand metres where I currently am. My guts aren’t right. Possibly I am a bit delirious in imagining it’s the Belgians waiting for me. Half an hour later and two thirds of the way up, I can still see four people at the top. Bizarre. When I get to the top, finally, I see the unmistakable shapes of bikes and a recumbent. They really did wait all that time for little old me! Wow!
The other couple is an English couple, Patrick and Rebecca. It’s so refreshing to meet some Brits! We all chat, the Belgians start the long descent to Sary Tash ahead of us, and then we follow.
Today is a novelty. It’s the first time I’ve felt cold for a very long time. Eight months of non stop summer is about to come to a halt.
We book into a home stay place, whist we coincide with another four Frenchies all on recumbents.
Sary Tash, a minuscule nowhere place, seems to be a major focal point for international global cycle tourists. Yesterday we met a Korean woman who is famous in cycle touring circles, famous for being on the road for two and half years and being a bit bonkers. In a good way.
Meeting Patrick and Rebecca continues to be great fun. We can be rude to each other in ways that we find hilarious and that other Europeans completely don’t understand. It’s so refreshing. An accidental joke;
Rebecca: you went to Mongolia didn’t you? Did you try marmot?
Me: marmot. You either love it or hate it.
Much laughing. Only likely to make any kind of sense if you are English. Marmot sounds like Marmite.
Patrick convinces me to rest for another day. I’m still ill and every day I go nowhere is another day that the Tajikistan mountains head towards inhospitable winter. I rest.
Finally, I manage to fart my way through the night instead anything else happening. This is a cause of great optimism on my part though possibly requires an apology to my roommates…
Patrick and Rebecca head back to Almaty. On account of the Chinese border unexpectedly being closed for ten days and their Kyrgyzstan visa being about to run out.
I head off, feeling optimistic even though physically I’m still not a hundred percent.
I purchase ten packets of confidence boosting noodles. It’s funny how perspectives change. I not so long ago declared that I would never ever ever eat instant noodles ever again for as long as I lived. Then the frightening world of greasy mutton happened. In Mongolia I encountered a Danish women who was fleeing the country in terror as she couldn’t face the possibility that if she stayed in Mongolia see might be forced to eat Mongolian ger food again. At the time I thought she being a bit over dramatic in the way that Scandinavians can sometimes be. Now I understand. I never want to be offered greasy mutton and flavourless noodles ever again. The mere thought of them makes me feel ill. This is a genuine problem as Tajikistan food is known to be even more awful than the worst Kirghiz village food. How the hell am I going to cope with being in the middle of mountainous nowhere in Tajikistan where the only food will be greasy boiled sheep’s arse? My insides quiver horribly at the thought.
Suddenly instant noodles seem like a great dining option. What once seemed like the very embodiment of lifelessness itself, now appeals tremendously. No weeks old unrefrigerated animal grease. No contact with flies or other uncertainties. They come with little packets of extras that actually taste of something other than animal grease. And they won’t stay stuck in my teeth leaving a yucky lingering after taste.
Suddenly instant noodles might be my saviour. Halleluya!
Today the wall of mountain that I’ve been seriously dreading. Peaks so high they disappear into the clouds. Not at all an inspiring sight for a man who is having difficulty stopping his guts from falling out.
Tactic: stop every time I feel like it. I will need to acclimatise to altitude too. All day long as the wall of mountain gets nearer, I find myself gasping for breath even when making almost no effort. The same thing happened to me when I went to Himachel Pradesh. That time it was all a bit freaky. This time I’m expecting it.
From Sary-Tash there is a prairie plateau at about 3500 metres that is thirty kilometres wide and lays below the natural mountain border. It’s utterly empty bar a couple of herds of goats and sheep. A couple of what looks like decrepit nuclear early warning radar domes sit rusting in the middle of nothing. Maybe another remnant of Soviet days, keeping Chinese ambitions in check.
After many brief stops, I pass out through the Kyrgyz border without event. The guards all seem very friendly.
Richard Terry 