I reached tentatively into one dark pannier and pulled out a heavy jar of peach jam. The contents had frozen in the intense cold and looked like an alchemist’s jar of preserved brains. My cycling sneakers had frozen solid as two boards, and Tim’s gear and brake cables had completely iced up. We sat rebuilding our bikes in one of the unheated back rooms, rugged up against the minus ten degree Celsius chill and listening to Smashing Pumpkins on Tim’s walkman.
We visited our friends and most nights enjoyed a fresh round of enjoyable but less riotous parties. The long, dark winter had taken its toll on the people and I got the impression that our friends were running low on energy reserves. It seemed that everyone was waiting patiently, biding time until the spring sunshine returned to rejuvenate their lives.
One major deliberation we faced was in choosing a suitable present for Baba Galya. Like most pensioners in Russian villages, she lived on a government allowance of only a couple of hundred roubles a month – thirty or forty Australian dollars. In practice this was paid irregularly and never in full. To survive, she had to rely on her own labour: picking and preserving barrels of berries and mushrooms from the forest in summer, growing as many potatoes as she could fit into her plot of land and chopping tons of firewood to see her through the winter. She had put all this on hold to look after us like royalty. We felt we owed more than we could ever possibly hope to repay.
The most precious thing in Baba Galya’s life was her daughter, Irina, who lived in the Ukraine on the Black Sea. They hadn’t seen each other in years because of the prohibitive price of the train fare – a $100 for us, yet an almost unattainable fortune for the average Russian. We wanted to give her the fare, but were uncertain as to whether she would accept the money. We decided to offer her half, with explanations on the tip of our tongues in case she refused. But, to our surprise, she accepted the gift straight away. She saw not the cash we were offering but the face of her daughter. She grabbed the notes at once, bursting into a flood of embarrassed tears.
I went to bed feeling horrible. The sight of the brave face she had put on when she realised that we had not given her enough was still clear in my mind. I waited until I was certain she was asleep then had a hurried discussion with Tim. We found the place where she kept her valuables and added the balance to the little pile of money.
The next day we were ready to depart. Our bikes were as ready as they’d ever be. All of our extra gear was strapped on, and the machines stood heavy and overloaded before us. The road was icy, and it took a couple of practice runs and slippery crashes before we were able to start trundling away.
We waved goodbye to Baba Galya and some of our other friends then turned onto the main street, which was thankfully clear of snow. We headed at snail’s pace towards the other side of town and the open highway. We rolled down the hill towards the river and stopped for a crowd that, like most in the village, had heard of us but whom we hadn’t yet met. A couple of policemen emerged from the throng, too. They pulled us aside on the pretext of checking our passports, but they were really just itching with curiosity and keen to get a look at our bikes.
We crossed the river and pedalled back up the hill. It was a relatively gentle slope, but such was our podgy condition after the motionless months of winter that it felt like a major mountain range!
I shifted down to my easiest gear then pedalled, heaved and blew. My legs filled with liquid fire and my lungs strained to bursting point. My gulping breaths were threatening to tear apart my chest and my heart pounded crazily inside me. It was below zero, but I was sweating a fountain. Red spots prickled the backs of my eyes and I bit my lip hard, struggling to stay upright.
A toddler from the village watched, fascinated as I veered from one side of the road to the other. She scurried over for a closer look and I gave her a quick grin as she walked beside me. The look on her face seemed to say that she was unsure whether to burst out laughing or to run ahead and tell her friends to come and watch too!
Gasping for breath, I reached the top and let out a cheer. Tim pulled up beside me and we surveyed the open and mercifully flat road ahead. Sure, we’d only come a few hundred metres, and sure we had over 9000 kilometres to go, but at the top of this slope I felt on top of the world.
We pushed off again and crawled away from the village. Hour by hour, day by day, month by month, we’d make it. Road or no road, come snow or mud. We were finally moving again and it felt great! We were inching our way to China!
———
An hour or so later, after we’d decided that our pudding bellies had had enough exercise for the day, we realised that the cycling over the next few weeks was going to be the easy part of the journey. The road we were on had been kept clear of snow the entire winter, leaving a two-metre-high pile of muddy ice and snow on either side of the road. We spent an hour hauling our bikes to the top of this formidable barricade, then an hour more bulldozing them across fifty metres of handlebar-deep snow between the road and the treeline.
I slumped exhausted, wet and sweating over the back of my bike. We rested for a few minutes before Tim spent an hour digging a pit for the fire and setting up the shelter. I went off to hunt for firewood. I climbed dead trees and hacked away at the upper branches, then waded through freezing, waist-deep snow, dragging the fruits of my labour back to camp. It was gutwrenchingly hard work that left us exhausted and it wasn’t for weeks – until the snow started to melt and we were getting fitter – that our camp site duties began getting easier.
Later, as the burning wood crackled and the pot of snow slowly melted, we fervently argued our way back to the last meal of our very last day of cycling the previous year.
‘What the hell do you mean it’s my turn to cook the bloody dinner, you lazy bastard, Chris? I definitely cooked last!’ Tim exclaimed.
‘What are you talking about, you bludger?’ I retorted. ‘The last night of riding last year was the night we lost each other just before Babushkina. You’re not gonna try and get me to believe that eating a whole bag of biscuits counts as cooking dinner!’
‘No.’ He paused for a second to regroup. ‘But the night before that! Hah! That night it was my turn to cook. So there, it is your turn.’
‘Sure, mate, you cooked that night, but that means I cooked breakfast two mornings in a row! And in my books, that makes it your turn!’
We carried on for a while, until reluctantly I agreed that it was indeed my turn to cook the dinner. A little later, just after realising that I’d left my toothbrush at Baba Galya’s, I crawled into my sleeping bag and within seconds fell fast asleep.
The next few days panned out in a familiar pattern. We’d wake before dawn, haul our bikes through the snow to the road, ride all morning, stopping at midday for a hot meal, then pedal on until early afternoon to make camp.
The temperature hovered up and down on either side of zero. During the day, the snow would melt to a wet slush and then freeze at night to form a perilously slippery surface. We were having trouble staying dry and warm. On really cold days, the old spectre of frostbite loomed again. Tim’s toes, in particular, were suffering. He took to removing his socks by the snowy roadside and, after making sure there was no traffic in either direction, dunking his feet into cups of hot tea from the thermos.
In the evenings I would hunker down with a candle and write long letters to Nat, while Tim settled down to his diary with a shot of barmatuki, tea-infused vodka courtesy of Baba Galya. Before he ran out of this ‘bedtime juice’ he went through a week of evenings in various states of tipsiness. One evening he described himself as being ‘pissed as a newt’, a phrase I hadn’t heard in years.
After four days we reached our first major milestone. The town of Nikolsk emerged from the trees, first as a few isolated cottages, then as a string of ornate wooden houses. We approached the river at the centre of town and stopped at a rundown stolovaya, a uniquely Russian establishment that, depending on the guests and the occasion, serves as a restaurant, café, pub or just a
general eating-house for the masses.
The lady behind the counter was unimpressed as we traipsed in with our smelly, dripping clothing and faces smeared with mud and charcoal. Definitely eating-house, I could see her deciding. And hostile service as well.
Outside, a group of local men gathered around our bikes; we could see them poking, prodding and fiddling through the window. I finished quickly and dashed outside – too late to supervise one of the guys who pushed off on my bike and helped himself to a test-ride. He wobbled wildly for a few seconds before slewing heavily into the pavement. The rest of the guys cheered drunkenly while their friend brushed off his ripped pants and grazed elbows, and I went to make sure no damage had been done to my bike.
One of these guys, Igor, was about our age and seemed harmless enough. None, it seemed, really needed to get back to work and within a few minutes we’d been invited to someone’s home. Only half an hour after determining that we could probably ride another twenty kilometres for the day, we were wheeling the bikes to Igor’s father’s house where there was a temptation beyond resistance: another meal!
Igor’s father, Yefgeny, turned out to be an old grease-smeared communist. When we came across him, his head was stuck in the bonnet of a huge old Soviet Kamaz truck. He greeted us with a grunt from somewhere behind the carburettor, but emerged when he heard our accents. He’d never met a foreigner before but he approved of us instantly. Tim and I were, apparently, everything that foreigners should be: young, Russian speaking and adventurous.
‘Such qualities,’ Yefgeny said proudly, ‘make you just like the fine young comrades of my day!’ He looked narrowly at the gathering crowd and added in an undertone, ‘They were a big step above listless, lazy young sloths like my son here.’
An impromptu party was thrown. Igor’s mother laid the table with platters of boiled potatoes, jars of pickles and slabs of pork fat while her husband gleefully produced the bottles of vodka. Shots were downed quickly – much too quickly – and within minutes my head was buzzing. Yefgeny got rolling drunk and told loud, carousing stories about his good old communist days, while his wife looked on disapprovingly.
It was late at night when the vodka finally dried up. As Igor’s guests, we walked across to his flat on the other side of town to be greeted by his extremely unhappy wife. She took one look at us, decided that we were drunk bums and launched into an all-out attack on her husband.
They had a long, loud and almost physical ‘domestic’. He was a ‘lousy, useless drunk who would lose his job and let her go hungry’ and she was a ‘stupid cow who should mind her own business’. Their baby daughter screamed unnoticed in another room, and we found our own way quietly into some spare beds. It was a relief to get back onto the road the following morning and head out of town.
We carried on, going a little further and getting a little fitter with every passing day. We went through a cold snap and woke one morning to find that the damp insides of our felt-lined Russian gumboots had frozen solid. Neither of us wanted to get up, and we each lay silently in our sleeping bags, waiting for the other to make the first move. Finally Tim gave in to hunger pains. But after breakfast, as I was packing up and getting ready to leave, he told me that it was still too cold for his toes, and that we would have to stay put until it was warmer. Selfishly, this annoyed me and we had another fight.
‘Come December,’ I argued, ‘when we’re planning on riding into Beijing, it’s gunna be heaps colder than now, and if your toes can’t take this weather then we’re simply going to have to finish up earlier. Like October!’
Actually, this was something that I’d thought about a lot. I was missing Nat terribly – the more so after leaving Petrozavodsk and breaking off the daily contact on the Internet. The thought of being able to knock a single day off the ‘exile’ was the stuff of my dreams.
‘No way,’ Tim replied, always the calm one during our arguments. ‘We’d have to race the whole way, and we’d miss everything. Besides, there’s no way I’m going back to Australia before my birthday.’
Tim’s birthday fell on 7 December, and he’d long planned on returning to Australia a twenty-two year old. The seventh, however, was also the anniversary of my relationship with Nat, and a date for which I’d dearly love to be home.
Hard feelings rarely lasted long, the issues mostly dissolving into irrelevance shortly afterwards. We carried on riding, with the weather getting warmer and green patches of grass beginning to emerge on the southern sides of the rolling white hills. We rode through small and large villages and turned off the main highway on to progressively smaller roads. A lot of the locals had never been further from home than the next village and couldn’t tell us much about the road ahead. As we travelled further, the warnings became more persistent.
‘You won’t get through!’ people yelled from their windows. ‘There’s no road up ahead!’ We laughed and carried on, feigning incomprehension. We were young and unstoppable, and besides, we had our ‘reliable’ Russian road atlas that showed us a road carving its way from here all the way to Mongolia.
It was a couple of days later, the morning after we’d pitched camp on our first patch of snow-free grass for the year, that we reached the village of Luptyug and realised what everyone had been talking about.
It was sixteen kilometres to Klyuchee, the next village, and between the two villages ran a provincial border. We turned onto the road, the bitumen ended abruptly, and I crashed painfully. The dirt road was covered in ice and embedded with fist-sized rocks. We were riding on studded ice tyres – the larger rear ones bought in Finland, and the smaller front tyres hand-studded with hundreds of steel screws and glue. These helped to an extent, but the going was perilous and the falls bruising and painful. Within a few kilometres, the road deteriorated again. I waited for Tim to pull up beside me and sat surveying the scene ahead. Nobody, but nobody, it seemed, travelled this way.
The two provincial authorities had obviously not been able to reach any agreement on who would maintain the road across the frontier. The result was that for four months of the year the two villages were cut off from each other by a two-metre-deep tract of snow.
Before us was a trench – a tractor had obviously got through in the past week or two – and we began the arduous task of pushing and hauling our bikes through the slushy snow. It was perhaps more of a moat than a trench – a half-frozen moat interrupted by regular islands of snow. A pattern quickly developed as we made our way through: we would wheel our bikes carefully along the slippery islands then double up to haul them one at a time up and out of the trench and around the moat sections through the waist-deep snow.
It was exhausting, wet work, and after an hour we’d covered only a few hundred metres. We reached the top of a small rise and saw the trench and its string of countless puddles and little islands stretching far ahead. We pushed on, still taking care to keep ourselves and the bikes clear of the water, but as we progressed our standards inevitably relaxed. Before long we were ploughing obliviously through the water.
One of the puddles was deeper than I expected. My bike dived in up to the handlebars, submerging my front pannier bags which contained a loaf of bread, packets of biscuits and my tool kit.
We made seven kilometres before stopping to camp. We quickly lit a fire and set to drying our clothes and sorting through some of the gear. I reached into a pannier and pulled out a bloated roll of toilet paper that had put on almost a kilo during the afternoon. Tim rummaged through his gear and found a bedraggled toy koala that he’d been saving to give as a gift somewhere along the way. Its wet and matted fur seemed so forlorn and the expression on its little synthetic face so homesick and miserable that we couldn’t help ourselves. We laughed until our grimy faces were streaked with tears.
It wasn’t until much later that we discovered Tim’s bike had suffered a serious mishap during the push that afternoon. A submerged stick had caught in the spokes and tangled with his back gear-changer, breaking one of the jockey wheels, a vi
tal component.
Jockey wheels are meant to last forever and I hadn’t packed a spare, yet without it, Tim’s bike was crippled. It was time, I decided, to improvise.
I cut a section of hardened plastic from the inside support of my front pannier then sat by the fire while Tim took my turn at cooking dinner. I had a traditional, bone-handled knife that had been given to me by a bear hunter we’d met along the road. It was very sharp, and I set to work carving a replacement jockey wheel.
At midnight, with the fire burning low and my eyes glazing over with sleep, my hand slipped and I sliced a deep gouge into the heel of my left hand. I went to bed swearing. Tim could finish the job in the morning.
Amazingly, it worked and after a few hours of pushing through the wet and cold of the trench, it seemed as though we had come through the worst of it. The puddles slowly disappeared and the snow thinned out to be replaced by sloppy, oozing mud. We were able to ride again.
We cruised through Klyuchee exultant. We had conquered the trench. We had made it through; we’d won. The road lay open and snow-free before us and although Siberia was still a thousand kilometres away, the distance seemed like peanuts compared to the past two days. We reached the top of a hill and turned to survey the village and snow – the frontier even – behind us. I paused for a minute, smiled and pushed off again.
Watch out Siberia, I thought. I’m on my way Nat.
Tim grinned like a maniac beside me. Then he let out a whooping yell: ‘China, look out. Here we come!’
To the Urals
Kirov – Ekaterinburg
Spring 2000
———
Tim
We inclined along a road that followed a riverbank; soon the forest panned out in a blanket of green. Grey apartment blocks rose from a nearby hilltop like a fortress of civilisation. On the river V’atka the reflection of the low sun was shattered into a million glistening shards. Water gushed out in a flurry from widening cracks in the partially frozen surface. The cold was finally losing its grip and it seemed like the corpse of winter was being swept away with the current.
Off The Rails Page 7