Crossing the border proves to be a simple process. No queues, no hassle. I camp in the tiny neutral zone between the hundred metre gap between the two border points. My visa for Tajikistan ran out on the 26th whilst my Uzbekistan visa starts the next day. You can cross at midnight! I am told.
A logical solution perhaps, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just put my head down in my tent and get in a night full of deep zeds. Much better than trying to fill in forms correctly whilst half asleep and having to find somewhere to camp in the middle of the night.
Anyway. That more or less bring me back to where I am now.
I have been occupying my mind with trying to figure out how to go ultralight with my camping gear… this has been a tricky process marred by the lack of available resources (you can’t even get duct tape here) an allegedly very dodgy postal service (possibly putting the kybosh on getting sexy new camping tat posted to me).
Head stuff.
I sat halfway up a hill climb this morning and just stopped. Stopped cycling, stopped thinking about camping gear, and stopped travelling and being a traveller. A rare unprompted spontaneous moment; here I was, in some random spot in Uzbekistan of all places. Seeing it as if for the first time. Indeed, in a momentary lapse in self-centred story-running, a veil is dropped and I become more present than I have been since I don’t know when. How on earth did I come to be here? I reeled backwards through all the places peoples and situations that had brought me to here; cycling with an impromptu group on and off through Tajikistan, Bishkek, Kashgar, Sheetal in Eastern China and Mongolia, Dimitri in Shanghai, flying out of Sapporo, the Japanese coast, hundreds of happy selfie snappers at Fuji-san, funky Rajasthan, the super chilled out hostel in Agra, colonial Shimla and it’s scary monkeys, the smiley guy running the cafe there, the mechanic on the hillside in Himachel Pradesh, the stunningly wonderful Golden Temple at Amritsar and kaleidoscopic Mumbai where my time out of England more or less began. It seems an absolute age away. So much has happened, and as far as I can remember, I’ve loved all of it (not including the four bouts of food poisoning of course).
What a journey. Recently I think some part of me had forgotten how lucky I am to be doing what I’m doing. I’m glad I stopped on the hill this morning.
Uzbekistan after Boysun is pretty darned flat. Lots of agriculture mostly cotton and reedy irrigation ditches is the order of the day. A mixture of modern houses with corrugated steel roofs intermingle with the more usual mudbrick flat-roofed houses which tend to have winter hay stored on the roof.
Uzbekistan doesn’t have the stunning mountain scenery of Tajikistan, but what it does have is hundreds of miles of lovely new dual carriageway. The added bonus of riding on lovely flat smooth pothole-free tarmac is that of the four lanes, two are always closed where workmen sometimes are which means that I have most of the time two whole lanes to happily ride without the interference of motorists. Bliss! Suddenly my 45km daily average jumps to a daily average of 60ish.
It is then nearly three weeks that pass until I write again now. In that time I have met some lovely new people re-encountered Roma and Emilie once in Bukhara and Val and Pif again twice; once also in Bukhara and again in Khiva. In Bukhara I stay for four nights. Cycling into Bukhara, the temperature is 93 degrees. In the evening a wind blows in and the next day it rains all day. A sudden wake up call to the reality of my impending desert journey northwards towards winter. I am anxious.
Bukhara is amazing. Lots of old domed-roofed madrassas and bazaar places. Glorious geometrical tiles and designs. Bukhara used to be the capital of Uzbekistan, but now it’s Tashkent. Bukharans of course think Tashkent is a bit rubbish. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been there.
I meet a young local chap in the street and we talk for about two hours about bikes. He seems like a decent chap so we arrange a meeting for the next day.
The next day comes and I’m exhausted. My friend from the previous day seems bent on assassinating my character, doubting that I don’t drink alcohol and telling me how old I look and even that I must be a very disturbed person to look so old. What’s making me disturbed is you me old China plate.
I sidestep him and lose him somewhere. Being knackered is one thing. Being berated for it is not my idea of fun and is too much for me to bother listening to. Bye bye! Well that got rid of him…
Back at the Rumi Hostel we are fed the best breakfasts ever; chai, a cooked meal and glorious Uzbek cakes. The women are better looking than Tajiki women and the Uzbeks are big on cakes. They have cakes here I have never seen before. Awesome.
Also at Rumi Hostel, I meet the lovely Saeed a Pakistan-born Kenyan-raised and Birmingham-settled chap of the last fifty years. A very warm and gentle chap who manages to fall in love with Gula, the housemaid here. They both seem very happy about it. She has something very sweet about her too. Aaah!
Riding out from Bukhara the lovely new tarmac continues for another hundred kms.
Aiming for Khiva which is not on the main road north, I take a left- hand fork that seems to take a more direct route to Khiva. After precisely one kilometre of relentless pothole dodging, I quickly retrace my way back to the main road… unfortunately the sexy tarmac on the main road only lasts for another 5 clicks before that turns into something decidedly average. Nowhere near as useless as the other road though.
Khiva is nice. Old minarets and madrassas, much like Bukhara but less touristy. I spend an afternoon in the bazaar people-watching as a shoe-mender resoles my long-suffering boots. It occurs to me how normal this all is for me now. I feel utterly comfortable here. Everything makes sense. Much of the western world doesn’t make sense to me. Here it does. Everything is either beautiful or functional or both. No adverts.
I hang out with Al an Englishman from Andover who is lovely to talk about home with. As well I encounter Val and Pif yet again; their presence already made apparent by the sight of their Hase semi-recumbent sitting outside the hotel. Another chap, an American, greets me like an old friend. I have no idea who it is. He has to explain to me that we travelled from Kashgar to Osh together in a mashrutka but since then he has shaved off his massive beard. No wonder I don’t know who he is. The Chinese authorities weren’t sure who he was either, and had arrested him and his illegal western Chinese beard. Which I think is why he is now shiny-chinned. Oh! It’s Matt! ‘Yeah, the whole beard thing got kind of old.’, he says, stroking his nude chin ruefully.
Donald Trump has been elected by the American masses. Yoiks. Download lots of BBC podcasts by way of news in order to get my head round all this.
The road out of Khiva is smooth and easy. The rest of the world I don’t think I could say the same for…
In Elabod some 25 miles west of Kungrad, and the first significant staging post in the now cold desert, I wake up (after a very restless night) from my way too hot hotel room to find a thin layer of drifting white snow on the ground. What feels like a cutting icy wind blows more or less as a direct headwind. Headphones in and the Toby Foster Radio Sheffield Breakfast Show podcasts set on auto repeat, and I fill my head with cheery voices as I set out into the direction of Jaslik my next port of call 147kms away with nothing in between but utterly flat and empty land and unhelpful weather.
Now I am wearing everything I’ve got. I know I must be in the realms of being a real explorer now because my wild and shaggy beard and moustache are full of small lumps of ice.
Going for a wee is tricky as it requires furtling through several layers and zips and buttons with slightly cold-dumbed fingers. It’s like trying to do a cloth Rubik’s Cube with your eyes shut.
At one point a driver stops and gives me a balaclava and some gloves. I sit in his car and thaw for a bit and then get on my way. He had offered me chai and a bed for the night but he understood when I told him that my time now was limited by the need to cross the border.
In the late afternoon my bike suffered its first real breakage; the bolt that held my saddle onto the seat post sheared. And I don’t have a replacement bolt. A car full of gas workers stopped when they see I have a problem. My saddle is now tied on with a short length of rope. Miraculously, beyond my expectations, it has stayed on and I can still ride quite comfortably. In fact, the slight wobbliness of the saddle means that it moves with me and is in some ways more comfy.
The wind becomes decidedly unhelpful, blowing even more directly as a cold icy headwind. Eventually I find a dug out scrape with a bank of sand that offers some token protection from the wind.
In my sleeping bags, fully dressed except boots. I sleep but it wasn’t a warm toasty sleep. At least I only needed to get up to pee once in the night.
In the morning, it takes a concerted plan to figure out how I am going get ready to go. I have no wood to cook with, it’s too windy anyway. Nothing hot to put inside me to give me a fighting chance. My toes are frozen before I have even got out of my sleeping bags. Zips and fastenings are going to present difficulties.
I eat four sugar lumps a double size snickers bar (frozen solid) and two somsas (meat pasties). One I had kept in my sleeping bag and the other not. So one of those is frozen too. In a ‘it’s now or never’ kind of way, I gung-ho myself into action; getting dressed, going to the toilet and starting to get packed before my fingers get too cold for it to be possible.
I manage to dress and pack everything but my tent. I have to stop at this point to sit in the tent to yell and cry slightly in frustration. This is not a sustainable process. It’s quickly becoming apparent that much more of this in an unsupporting desert, could very possibly kill me.
I sort of pack the tent, having first huge difficulty in pulling out the tent pegs which have frozen into the ground. I pack the tent in a very approximate way. Random leftover bits of stuff bypass their usual fiddly storage spaces and get slung in wherever is easy.
Miraculously, I’m sort of ready to go. Now at least I might turn this sugar into body heat.
On the road I quickly discover that my gears don’t work anymore. Residual atmospheric moisture inside the cables must have glued everything frozen. Luckily I’m in bottom third gear which is the right one for the headwind which is now even colder and fiercer than yesterdays headwind, blowing directly from the north. I’m sort of staggering along but I’m pushing pushing pushing… I’m reminded of tales previously heard of cyclists managing to make only 5kms progress in a whole day. I think I’m going to do better than that, but I’m worried. Exactly what I had most feared is happening; I was measuring my progress daily working out that I needed to cover roughly 50kms as a daily average in order to get to the border on time. Now I’m being beaten by the weather.
As soon as I had got on the road, snot began to stream uncontrollably out of my nose, whereupon it was instantly freezing into an ever enlarging snot icicle on my mustache.
My breath was freezing onto my beard forming another icy clump.
I would raise my hand to my mouth at passing cars uttering ‘chai, chai’. Thinking that I was waving and not drowning every driver would merely wave back at me cheerfully. I had kind of hoped that the lower half of my face being covered in ice might have offered a clue, but I guess not.
I staggered on. I had 67 kms to go before I might reach any habitation. At my relative snails pace it was going to take me about twenty hours of non stop riding. And all I had left to eat was one frozen somsa and a bag of sugar lumps. And some uncooked porridge oats. I could die doing this. I had no option but to keep going and hope for an angel.
An hour later a car stopped in front of me.
Did I need something to eat and did I need a lift anywhere?
Yes, and yes. My fantasised hopes of cycling all the way to Europe without a break are now dashed by painful reality.
Anvar, the driver gets his three co occupants to load my awkward bike onto the back of the boot. Afterwards they are all stamping their feet and desperately blowing on their painful cold hands. They have my sympathy!
They are from Denov right down in the south on the Turkmenistan border. Anvar, a taxi driver, is driving them 4000kms to Moscow where they hope to work for a year earning the relatively big bucks of 400 us dollars a month as construction site labourers. In Uzbekistan they would get 60 us dollars a months for the same work. They ask me how much I earn. An embarrassing question.
They ply me with food; meat sausage which usually I don’t like but which now is delicious. Several pomegranates and some traditional curd balls, which now also is delicious.
They offer to take me to Moscow which would have been a fun diversion but sadly I don’t have a Russian visa. Instead they drop me at the Kazakhstan border some 270kms on from where they had picked me up.
Watching the endlessly flat and deadly scenery roll rapidly past was definitely better viewed from the comfort of a warm car.
Anvar wants me to call him when I get back to England. A very paternal and slightly unusual request which, one day on, I now understand his concern. I was stupid enough to ride off across frozen deserts, and I had told him I was going to continue cycling through the even colder Kazak desert. Clearly I’m a man either trying to die or utterly without any sense whatsoever.
A warm night indoors has made it clear to me that death-defying self-punishment is no longer an option. I will happy to call Anvar to tell me I travelled back to Europe in the manner of a normal person. I am proud that I managed to grow a three inch snot icicle on my nose though. I can still think of myself as being in the same league as any other heroic beardy snot-icicle growing type of chap.
Now that I have arrived at the border well before my Kazakhstan visa starts, I now have four days to hang around and wait. I am very happy to find the border ‘hotel’ an oshhana (cafe) with a room to sleep all and sundry (no beds, only traditional beautiful roll mats) full of ordinary travelling Uzbeks, truck drivers mostly. Costs 5000 Somoni a night. That’s about one pound twenty. Bargain.
This gives me the chance to mend my saddle (now held firmer with even more string; I had tried joining the snapped bolt back together with some epoxy glue. How’s that for misguided sheer brazen hopefulness? Only Jesus could glue a broken bolt together successfully), write this, sew some things and, mainly, come to terms with my change in circumstances and to figure out a new plan. Which I think will involve trains, buying super dooper thermals and big furry mittens and staying with as many warm showers hosts as possible. And avoiding icy camping.
I spend five days in total at the guest house. The daytime is quiet but for the occasional snores of the lady of the house a large rotund Uzbek babushka catching up on her much needed beauty sleep. She spends much of the night receiving new guests who cross at random times the 24 hour open border.
Apart from one or two Russian truck drivers, it seems that nearly all the guests are from Denov way down in the south on the Turkmenistan border. The cotton harvest is now in so they are all heading en masse to either Moscow or St. Petersburg to do manual labour. It seems that mostly they are expecting to work on roadworks. A hefty shift in temperature for them no doubt, to be working outdoors through the northern Russian winter, but they say the money is very good for them; usually about 400 to 600 US dollars a month. Historical soviet connections means that getting work is not guaranteed but still a pretty safe bet, which is as well considering the 4500 km overland journey they are making.
All these guests, asking me the usual questions over and over again with each new wave of overnight guests inspires me to start getting to grips with at least a little Russian. Apart from helping to dispel the frequent frustration I am starting to feel more often when I meet people. It means I will be able to more able to communicate in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania and I expect some of the other countries on the Danube. It also might help to improve my chances of getting a job as an overland tour driver. Maybe. That’s if I don’t decide to be an English teacher somewhere affluent, warm and toasty with fabulous food, like Korea…. who knows. We’ll see.
Its lovely to be surrounded by ordinary Uzbeks instead of other tourists. It’s a lovely full stop on my time in the country to just lie on cushions at the low table drinking endless bowls of sweet green tea, and dunking chunks of fresh chewy bread into it making it into soggy cake. This is the normal Uzbek way of having tea. It is so comfortable and civilised. If I end up back in England I shall miss this way of having tea. Chairs seem to make me feel more rigidified.
Along with green chai, bowls of beef broth with, happily for me, a strong emphasis on boiled kartofelen (potatoes). For so much of my trip, particularly in very poor Tajikistan, I have sorely missed potatoes. Now I am making up for it.
There’s not much point in going outdoors during this time except for visiting the frozen solid long drop toilet out the back and to get fresh air. All around is a vast flat sea of ice-whitened reedy grasses and sand. Four or five similar one-storeyed flat-roofed homes line up next to us. Lorries sit, engines running to keep the machines alive. A few dogs trot about hunting for scraps to eat. One of them manages to catch a cold-befuddled pigeon and trots away happily to eat it in private. As well as a number of pigeons, a flock of about sixty finches fluff about in the rubbish, raking over discarded sunflower husks which litter the place. I wonder if the birds had been caught here unexpectedly by the cold and had intended to be further south; when I reach Aktau some days later I am informed that the whole area had been hit by an unseasonal cyclone. It wasn’t usually this cold so soon. This would explain the strong cold northerly headwinds that had put paid to my cycling towards Jaslik. It had been somewhere between minus 17 to 20 at the time.
At the granitsa (border) I have established by talking to their most senior commanding officer that the border is to remain open on the 25th after all.
Richard Terry 