In places the road is so new there are no white lines and no Armco its brand spanking, President Putin’s gift to Russia apparently. The only worry is, with road this new when will I get to the bit they haven’t done yet? Apart from that dodgy area in Dagestan this has been the only other time a really fast bike would have been any use at all on this trip.
But to conserve my ever increasing oil consumption and knocking engine I just plod along at my usual 60 MPH. I stop every 100 miles for fuel just in case the fuel stations run out with the asphalt.
Things are really cooling down. When I stop for my lunchtime soggy thawed tomato and sausage sandwich I have to put in my linings and fleece, all these clothes usually sit behind me in a bag offering back support but now I'm wearing them I may be warm but I can’t lean back and give it the easy rider position anymore. Autumn is becoming more evident with orange ferns in the undergrowth and yellow
aspen amongst the pines. It’s a little scary being so far out; there is some traffic but nothing much in the way of any form of life.
Back in western Russia every 4th car wasn’t a Lada but here every car has a paper temporary plate in the window, and is right hand drive even thought they drive on the right, there is a massive migration of imported 2nd hand cars from Japan, personal and professionally imported the further east I ride the left had drive Lada becomes a rare sight. These are fast cars, reliable and being Right hand drive it means the drivers can pass me even closer despite the wide open road ahead. Bastards.
The scenery is pretty, hills and trees not really barren waste land just untouched and for most of the year I would imagine uninhabitable. I’m not feeling so good; its coming on in waves may be something I ate, that dam tomato. I haven’t had a hot meal in 2 days its so much effort ordering from a menu I can’t understand and I have such limited Russian that I can only order one thing. Well 3 things actually, that makes one meal. I make myself stop at a cafe it has some trucks outside so it can’t be that bad can it? All heads turn, they always do. Sometimes its ok, sometimes you feel like screaming and sometimes you just can’t face it. I point meaningfully at an item on the menu ‘nyet’ is the response, it means no, I still can’t pronounce it right and god knows I've heard it enough times. It’s the most frequent answer to my requests
‘Stroganoff’ the miserable bitch says, ‘oh yeah great that will be perfect’ I drink my black sweet tea and out comes some grey meat on top of some watery bloated rice and its barely warm. This darling is utter shit you should be ashamed of ya self serving up such inedible tripe it’s a waste of fairy liquid getting this plate dirty with such fowl looking slop. Assuming you bother to clean them at all or is this just the last lot of rejected leftovers? This isn’t a place of exile now you know, I don’t have to be here, I have choice. It come with bread, great more bread everything I eat is either between or accompanied by bread. I push it away so as not to be put off my tea and walk out. You pay upfront of course, places like this the world over would never chance leaving the bill to after the meal. It’s such an awful experience I just want to get away and don’t bother to top up from the large galvanized tanks of fuel out by the stinking and no doubt frequently used pit toilet. I just leave. Now I really feel rough. Nothing I can put my finger on, just need a nice room and good bed, warmth and familiar food, in fact what I need is familiarity, not road and bike, its familiar alright but I want... I want to stop; I guess that’s what I want.
I can’t tell where I am, fuel stations and civilization in general have dried up, so much for writing down the town names the only one that is ever signposted is Khabarovsk in ever decreasing distances. A town is sign posted I can’t tell you the name I only know it in Cyrillic and my keyboard won’t do that and I can’t even pronounce it properly cus I haven’t learned all my sounds, like backwards ‘3’ ‘*’and a sort of a house shape etc. But said town is down 11kms of dirt road, I don’t need this but I don’t need to run out of petrol either, I overtake a car cus I'm eating his dust, I hit 2 rocks in a row really hard, the suspension bottoms out and the wheel has more flat spots now that a plateau of pancakes. But I get my fuel, god what is this place? it’s got the now almost obligatory soviet housing blocks but it’s so desolate not un-inhabited its just had a joy bypass, I chance getting some supplies soon as I'm here, I find a ... well whatever I call it will give the wrong impression. It’s a faded sign over a door way in a grey concrete block I walk through and there is a bunch of musty royal blue couches and arm chairs, and beyond a few shelves of dull and uninspired packaged food. A young girl is sitting at a counter looking as stuffed at the couches. She shouts for her mother and I think granny comes, I can’t find water, every transparent liquid I see is vodka, I find lemon water. I'm really feeling bad now. I go get my water bottle and show it to them they find me water all be it fizzy. I hate cooking and brushing my teeth with fizzy water. Bread and chocolate, that’ll do I guess. I decide to rid my pocket of the ever swelling pile of coins, I count out 50 roubles, it takes a while but there is no rush for anything in this place, urgency is not anywhere to be seen . I make a gesture like I can pull up my trousers now and it raises a slight smile and they follow me out, to check I’m leaving? 3 generations of utter boredom watch me mount my tired dirty steed, maybe they’re pleased, maybe there envious, and I leave into the unknown and leave them in there complacent familiarity.
The sun is going down, shadows are getting longer, I have to find a place to camp. So much of the tundra each side of the road is just a boggy... well bog really.
I cannot, dare not, get the bike stuck again not out here not on my own. I don’t like the places I'm finding and I'm running out of daylight. I go down a blocked dirt track it goes to a kind of quarry an excavation for the use of building this improved hi way it will have to do. dry mud impossible to get tent pegs in and far more exposed than I would like but in this vast expanse of wilderness there are surprising few places to actually camp. Now I've stopped I have noting to concentrate on but the way I feel , my bottom explodes and I think I’m gonna throw up. This is not really the place to feel like this especially being on my own. At 9pm its dark, I put on my thermals and get into my sleeping bag, I can’t face food. I can hear the Trans Siberian railway on one side of me and the occasional vehicle from the road on the other, and pure silence in between... I wake in the night cus there is something outside the tent, by the time I have wound up my torch and un zipped sleeping bag and inner and outer tent the source of the noise has long gone, but I'm not going to just lie there in the unknown, I at least want to know what is going to attack me, man or beast, what beasts are out here anyway? Bears? Those vicious marmots with the sharp pointy teeth? It rains a little in the night but it’s mainly that infinite star canopy that I see when I brave the outside in my long underwear for yet another piss. It’s a long and lonely road this, very long and very lonely.When the daylight comes there is a sheet of ice on my seat and top box.
Even the nuts holding the chin strap on Monklets helmet are white. Not frost, ice, god it was cold last night. Siberia, cold? Who would have thought it, ya’d think someone would have said something.
But I feel better, just a pounding head, that’s fixed with forcing myself to drink 2 litres of water, as I dry the ice off the tent and make a peanut butter sandwich and swallow an ibuprofen. Back to the road. You would think after all these miles all these different terrains I would know how to ride appropriately but I go too slowly and to cautiously over the mound of stones which were put there precisely to stop me being this side of them in the first place. The rear wheel spins and buries itself. I’m stuck; again, I manage to push the bike back and put it on the side stand, kick the stones around a bit and then breathlessly attack the new hurdle with more speed and determination if not more confidence. And I’m back in the road 700kms further down it than I was this time yesterday. Well that warmed me up, out of breath I continue east. I was kind of looking forward to this autumn ride but an autumn ride is one thing, out for a few hours and then home for a whiskey or cuppa tea, but getting out of a frosty tent, waking up to a frozen seat and riding for 12hours, in, all be it clear blue, still cold skies, isn’t so much an autumn ride, it’s a big chill. But today for the first time making an appearance from the bottom of my pannier is the heated waistcoat. Plugged into the auxiliary socket especially fitted to accept its plug of potential pleasure. I didn’t even know I was going to Siberia when I packed it. Like everything else it was bought on the cheap and I don’t have the thermostat for it. I usually just turn it on and off but, not here I leave it on and it’s wonderful. It warms the whole of my body, even the extremities. I figure that soon as the heart pumps the blood around the body as long as there is warmth around the heart then the blood will warm and the in turn warm up its destinations. But best of all is the collar it’s so toasty and I push my neck against it to feel the electric warmth. It’s better than a hug. The problem is it makes me sleepy; I do calculations in my head, miles to kilometres distances to days. I look forward to significant numbers, half way down the hi way, 13,000 miles travelled since home. But then there are no exciting numbers due, and I realize apart from pump attendants, shop assistants, hotel receptionists and ugly old hags who dirty plates in the name of food. I haven’t spoken to anybody in over a week. There aren’t even any police check points like there were in the west. I guess It’s not a desirable place ‘if ya wanta come here feel free, we aint gonna stop ya’. I'm not stopping at cafes any more, too many bad experiences, in fact I'm not eating at all, I'm listening to my body and it’s not telling me it wants to eat.
It takes so long to cross a page of the map, gratification does not come quick in this infinite area, ok I admit it Siberia is a little bigger that I first thought, not endless but defiantly prolonged. But its dry and its sunny, it’s a dry ride in more than one way cus once again I'm giving my liver some time off. I don’t have many songs in my head and I don’t have many thoughts either, I'm not travelling some inner path to self awareness I'm just trying to use a delicate sound of thunder to get a lady ga ga song out of my head. Most of today’s riding has been done in a daze, concentration levels are low, not distracted just low. I don’t need concentration, the road is smooth there is no traffic, no police, no live stock wondering the road, only the occasional squashed Siberian tiger at the side of the road, no wonder they are so rare, they clearly have bugger all road sense.
I make my mileage, so focused now on my destination I miss the turn off to a town I half wanted to see, the half of me that didn’t care is pleased for the lack of diversion and the half that did want to see it checks the guide book again and decided it’s not really that interesting. Once again the shadows are long
and I have to stop I've done over 500 miles today. My record for this trip, considering the hard seat and the speed that’s pretty good, this aint no tourer but with the additional padding of thermal underwear and lined trousers my arse has more mileage in it. I find a river, a big slow moving silent river
and although judging by the amount of rubbish left behind it’s a popular spot it’s late and I take a chance and camp there. Cook a ready meal. All these emergency things I bought from home are getting used now I'm at the end of the journey and haven’t had an emergency. When I go to wash my plate in the river I find it’s really warm, un-naturally warm, like a warm patch in a public swimming pool and I wonder what pollution had generated such heat in this silent brown river. In fact it’s not totally silent. It makes the occasional ‘plop’ for no apparent reason.
The night seemed cold but there was no frost on my seat, just low energy levels I suppose. This could be my last night’s camping and I have so much food left, so extravagantly I make beans on toast for breakfast. Well beans on blackened bread eaten with burnt fingers. There is a sandy track from the river to the road. I hate sand. Once again I’m breathless and sweating by the time I get to the road, it’s a great warm up, work out or am I just out of shape form 3 months of throttle twisting.
Another high mileage day. Adventure will never find you on the road if ya don’t stop to let it catch up. From dawn to dust I ride getting closer to my destination but nothing gets close me.
Now I have started to empty my panniers I am really into shedding weight I discard my olive oil and later I find a few cloves of garlic I was carrying , oh yes that will really make me go faster.
Sometimes the road runs with the train track, sometimes with a river and sometimes it runs alone. As the day progresses my shadow slowly emerges from behind me, till I can see it out the corner of my eye, sometimes I try to take photos of its perfect definition of my riding position but when I hold a camera it just aint looking like it really should.
The distance markers are beginning to represent years, when it’s at 1911 I think that was the First World War then 1939 the second and it occurs to me all that could happen again in this century we’ve only just begun. When it gets to 1965, the year of my birth I start to associate the years with events in my life, each new number is about 40 seconds away, perfect for my attention span. It starts with schools attended, houses lived in and albums released. Then into the 1980’s and girls I was seeing and places I travelled to. It was a real memory exercise. The 2010 sign was missing but come 2011 all I know for sure is I'm going to see Roger Waters in May and then 2012 and beyond I realized I have no clue where I will be living, house or country, no plans what so ever. And I think that’s the way I like it. Slowly there are signs of life again and once more like every country since Poland people sit on stalls and sell their wares at the side of the road. Its large mushrooms this time, from sex to water melons from white milky vodka to wicker baskets there have been local goods available at the side of the road. I like that. Although the English lout in me desperately want to stick out my foot and kick over a bucket of ‘shrooms not in a nasty way it would just be so much easier than making contact with a melon it’s not malicious, done with a smile, I'm still a fun guy. But of course I would never do such a thing but man those buckets are soooo kickable. At KM 2161 I've long since stopped playing the year association game it’s stopped being fun once I past my expiree date. I’ve reached Khabarovsk And I cross a massive bridge over the equally massive Amur River, my god sensory overload, there is so much to look at, my mind had really gone numb, slowed right down, there is no end of the road celebrations, I'm thrown into civilization with no time to consider what I've just done. There is traffic and things to think about like finding a hotel, once again negotiating my way into the centre of a foreign city. And once again I manage it perfectly without one single wrong turn or one sign post understood. I'm so glad I'm not one of the satellite navigation generation and I can find my way using a black and white map in a guide book. For the first time the temperature warning light on my bike has come on. Turns out the wire had come off the fan. If my body had a temperature warning light it would also be illuminated, the thermals are no longer needed but not easily removed. The streets in Khabarovsk are hilly
a little San Francisco like. I have heard good things about this place and been looking forward to seeing it, may be taking a day off. These hills are no good in traffic for a hot and tired engine the top end knocks like a hammer banging nails into shipping create, I hear ya knocking but I can’t commit. The first hotel has no rooms, the 2nd I can’t find, the 3rd had no rooms nor the 4th the 5th is a railway station resting house and I can’t leave my bike unattended here while I go find the reception. The next one has expensive rooms but its late I'm tired and this is what credit cards are for. Secure bike parking and the promise of a much needed registration of my visa, and wifi, so to my room, laundry? No I’ll be ok I got one more pair of underwear. I’ll just have a much needed shower, the shower holder is loose and the water sprays everywhere, I go get my Swiss army knife to fix it but slip on the wet floor and go down hard, arrggghh. It’s a quick fix but now my shoulder and back are wrenched and bruised. I shouldn’t have to do this shit in an expensive hotel. No internet, I have to go down 2 floors to get reception, by reception. Anyway I'm hungry. I walk to the cafe I saw by the station, it closes at 8 and it’s gone 8 cus I have crossed yet another time zone. I find another one its burgers and fries they look bad and I've had enough of meals between bread, well there is a supermarket by the hotel I’ll get something there, but I can’t find it either, ok last resort, the Chinese’s restaurant but its full not even a table for one. Shit. Back to station and I get a kebab it’s actually pretty good but I'm eating and walking and not really enjoying it. Back at hotel and the internet is so slow and keeps cutting out. I'm really not having a good time. I'm grumpy and this city has become a real disappointment. Khabarovsk’s’ population of half a million inhabitants make this the worlds coldest city. There are certainly plenty of autumn leaves blowing around the streets but the temperature of this place is mainly reflected in the white blancmange consistency scrambled eggs and ‘potato pancakes’ for ‘included’ breakfast, how difficult is it to heat food in this country? Obviously very.There is no way in hell I'm staying another night but I’ll take a walk around the city. I'm sure it was pure coincidence putting Guns ‘n’ Roses, Chinese democracy on my iPod as I walk down to the river that separates China from Russia. Ok. been there, seen it, done it, taken a few photos now back to hotel,
check internet, ‘nych’ I have to pay for another log in code if I want to get on line today as well, ‘what do you mean, as well?’ ok fuck it ‘is my visa registration done?’ suddenly no English is understood. No surprise. No registration, I pack up my bike and as angry and pissed off as I arrive I leave.
760 kms left to go to Vladivostok. The end of the country the end of the trip. I’m not going to make it today, it’s already midday.
Slowly it occurs to me I don’t think I really like Russia that much everything has been disappointing, Sochi was just a rich city, fine if ya got money, the coastal road there was just crawling trucks pumping black clouds of diesel exhaust into the air and down my lungs the Caucasus mountains were littered and the ‘attractions’ were little more than building sites. The Altai was tacky touristy and as with every place that has seen any kind of life, littered with plastic bottles and any other discarded trash. And then Lake Baikal when I could see it was, again, left like there was a dustman’s strike. The Trans Siberian was ok, glad I did it but there is nothing I have seen that makes me want to come back. The women are beautiful but that’s only cus they’re not covered in discarded plastic bags and smashed vodka bottles. As a point of transit, a gateway to Kazakhstan and Mongolia it was fine but as a destination in its self it’s disappointing.
When I stop on a side track to have my lunch someone has shat right there. Problem is now I'm down on it, now I've decided I don’t like it I can see fault with everything, I move on and find a river to stop by its ok but again rubbish everywhere.
They have no pride in their country , you can boast the biggest this the highest that but if all ya see is trash where ya promote natural beauty then it will always fall short of its potential.With 300kms to go I find a motel it will be nice to have an early finish 6pm have a proper meal in the restaurant and sit and do some writing, I deal with the bulshy babushka at reception and she takes me to the room but can’t get in. Lots of knocking many keys and 20 minutes later she opens the door to reveal a drunken unconscious guy on a bed with the TV blaring, I'm not sleeping here, I want a private room for that price. Ok give me my money back what a complete waste of time. Back on the road and one more night in the tent. One more emergency meal.
When ya done, ya done. I couldn’t just stop in Ulaan Baatar but I can now, not fed up of riding just fed up of the country I'm riding in, I have no Carnet de passage for my bike so shipment to Japan is out of the question. I have ridden to the end of Eurasia all the way to Vladivostok. No elation , no excitement just a badly packed dew soaked tent, a pile of smelly cloths , incomplete paperwork and the worry of what to do with my bike now. Did I come too far? Should I have stopped sooner? Left wanting more? Or felt like I've had enough. Funny how the fun has gone. A police check at last, I hand him documents so enthusiastically he has his hands full, he clearly can’t read what they say and hands then back to me too quickly I'm on my way again in less than a minute. Well that was err uneventful.
On the road into the City there is a big Concrete sign announcing the name of the city it the usually thing but in this case it’s worth a photo. I cross 3 lanes of unforgiving traffic and conveniently there is a car stopped so I ask if a photo can be taken of me, which would be great if he hadn’t have cut the ‘K’ off the side of the photo. It’s a sign it just shows how Russia is ‘could be better’
Whilst I research my options I have got a tiny room with a magnificent view of the harbour I can’t see the bike out on the street so monklet had been removed from the bike he seems to have developed a bit of a pod.
All I have in my head is a hundred hopeful options. I can’t leave the bike here, it’s on a temporary import visa and if I ignore it I will never get another visa and my overland gateway back to Kaz and Mong will forever be locked. But I don’t want to spend more than it’s worth to ship it out of the country, I can’t even give it away and I refuse to push it off the end of Eurasia at the dock on the western side of the Sea of Japan even though Japan was its place of birth. They think it’s all over ‘land’ well it aint over till it’s over.
When his nuts freeze monklet smiles
When I lie about the road kill monklet smiles
When nothing changes monklet smiles
With the unknown and familiarity he keeps on smiling
When he’s taken off the bike with bad posture and a little pod he smiles
And we think it’s all over monklet smiles a very dirty smile
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