Off The Rails

by Chris Hatherly

  ———

  We left Novosibirsk after a week; we were both glad to get back on the road. As we slipped back into our familiar routine, I realised that I’d actually been missing some of the things that Tim loved about the journey.

  At first, I’d felt indifferent to Tim’s beloved taiga forest. The tall, pencil-straight pines, spruces and birches looked sickeningly monotonous. One camp site seemed to be as good as another. As reluctant as I’d been, Tim had finally taught me a little about my surroundings. Slowly, I had come to appreciate the subtle beauty of the northern forest. My subconscious no longer compared it to the Australian bush and I found myself looking forward to nights spent by glowing fires of resinous pine stumps. More than anything, though, I began to appreciate the sheer size of this ancient wild forest. I found it sobering to look out the tent door and realise that the trees, the fallen branches and the rolling, needle-strewn ground continued north, unbroken by road, track or any other mark of humankind, for thousands of kilometres.

  We followed the highway north and east, away from the flat grassy steppe of the south, and back into the taiga forest of what I’d come to consider the ‘real’ Siberia. The full heat of summer had arrived during our stay in Novosibirsk. With the heat came the first real armies of Siberian mosquitoes. These were not your normal, slap, slap, backyard-barbecue, repellent-fearing bugs stupid enough to melt themselves on a zapper when there was good fresh flesh around. These were serious mozzie mercenaries and although not quite as terrifying as the fist-sized, blood-sucking ‘mosquitobirds’ about which we’d been warned, we figured that they must be juveniles. To escape from the hordes, we were forced to wear full-length clothing, mosquito-net hats and stay out of the shade.

  We took back roads for several days, heading east. The baking sun had dried the road to a fine, powdery dust, which managed to find its way into all our gear and every crevice of skin. Each car or truck that passed threw up a billowing cloud that first left us coughing and spluttering, then settled down on our sweating limbs to form a thin coating of muddy grime. Tim was philosophical about this extra dirt. He thought that having an additional coating on our exposed skin might deter the mosquitoes but I wasn’t so sure. I found it hard to cope with the constant feeling of having abrasive, grimy skin. My dirt tolerance had naturally gone up since starting the trip, but seeing beads of sweat turn to mud the instant they oozed from my skin was starting to drive me insane.

  We crossed hundreds of creeks and rivers as we rode up and over undulating hills, from one valley to the next, and we stripped off to swim in most of them. The heat of the midday sun made riding almost too much to bear, and we’d have long, extended breaks at lunchtime. Before climbing back on my bike to pedal off again, I’d drench my shirt in the cool water and for a while I’d enjoy the sensation of cold shivers under the blasting sun as icy droplets trickled down my spine.

  I pulled off the road one evening to find a camp along a little sidetrack. The mosquitoes were particularly bad for some reason, and every minute I waited for Tim, the worse they became. It was as if every mozzie within a range of several kilometres had smelt the blood of a fresh young Australian and come tearing over to get some.

  Tim was only a few minutes behind, but by the time he came into view I’d managed to quickly pull on my waterproof pants, fleece jacket and mozzienet hat – my insect armour – and set up the video camera. I was ready and waiting for what I figured would be a good show.

  I zoomed in first on Tim’s face. Framed by matted hair and a bushy beard, it was a picture of consternation verging on panic. All around him a buzzing, moving cloud darkened the air and I had to zoom out quickly as he raced towards me, his legs whirring in a blur of speed. He’d come 100 metres in less than fifteen seconds and almost reached me when it became clear that the onslaught was too much for him. He dismounted quickly, foregoing the usual routine of applying the brakes and simply vaulted off the seat and over the handlebars. The bike crashed behind him, and he hit the ground running.

  Tim raced towards me. ‘FUUUUUuuucckkk!’ His wail switched in tone like the siren of a passing ambulance as I panned around with the camera, and his flailing legs sent him shooting up the road. ‘HELP CHRIS!’

  It was a plea of desperation and I stood uncertainly for a moment wondering if he was expecting me to go tearing after him. But, in the next instant everything became clear. Tim performed a sliding turn at full sprint, then sidestepped quickly to dodge the cloud of mosquitoes that were zooming after him. He sprinted back towards me – a good five metres clear of the bulk of his attackers now – and barged a rapid path down the hill through the stragglers. I quickly ripped his pants and jacket out from underneath the lid of his pack and we performed a neat relay handover as he streaked past me once again. His head was back, his arms pumping, determination showing in the whites of his eyes.

  I ran back to the camera just in time to see Tim leap nimbly into the air. His body crouched over and his knees rose to his chest to gain plenty of vertical elevation. I realised that he was going to try to pull on his trousers in mid-air. He got one leg through then leapt again. His second leg was through now too, but I cringed as I saw that he was about to land at full tilt with his pants round his ankles.

  He sprawled face first onto the ground as I’d feared, but even as I was focusing the camera, I could see that he was still working to a plan. Harnessing his momentum, Tim flipped deftly over onto his back. Still sliding, he hitched his pants up to his waist before performing an agile back-flip to land on his feet – all within an instant of going down!

  He was facing in the opposite direction, but his legs were still pumping. He sprinted triumphantly back to pick up his jacket and hat and the rest, from there, was a piece of cake.

  ———

  We cycled steadily eastwards. We did our shopping in small towns and met a broad mix of people along the way. We met a convoy of lively central Asian truck drivers transporting tons of fresh produce from Turkmenistan to Krasnojarsk. They pulled us over for an impromptu feast of vodka and juicy tomatoes while showing us bullet holes in their trailer covers that were the result of a run-in with armed highwaymen in Uzbekistan. We stopped for lunch on the banks of a lonely creek and shared the freshly cooked catch of a silent but smiling boy who’d cycled an ancient bike fifteen kilometres from his village to spend the day fishing with a homemade rod. I stopped by the roadside one day and listened for an hour as an old man who was selling potatoes from a bucket explained his philosophy on the limits of personal responsibility. Tim, the lucky guy, was invited on the spur of the moment to be the guest of honour at a wedding reception.

  The most amazing encounter we had was with a lone Russian traveller by the name of Gregory. Gregory was a remarkable-looking man. He was tall and skinny with a clean-shaven scalp, deep, furrowed smile lines around his eyes and a gigantic, ruddy brown bush of a beard that extended halfway down his chest. He was wearing a deeply stained shirt, heavy trousers and a pair of shoes held together with old scraps of leather and bits of string.

  Like us, he was travelling by bike, a typical single-gear Soviet machine with a cracked and pointy-looking leather saddle. The bike was laden with bulging white potato sacks that hung behind the seat and over the handlebars. Gregor introduced himself to me with a twitch of his demonstrative moustache. ‘Hello! My name’s Gregory. I’ve just been talking to your friend here and admiring his bike.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Chris.’ We shook hands. ‘You’ve probably already told Tim, but where are you heading to? You’re the first traveller we’ve met in five months!’

  ‘Yeah,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve been on the road for most of the last fifteen years and I’ve only met a few, too.’

  ‘Wow.’ I gaped.

  ‘I’m going that way for now,’ he continued, pointing in the direction from which we’d come. ‘But apart from that I’m not really heading anywhere in particular.’ He noticed my eyes straying back to his bike and chuckled amicably. ‘I’m just sort of going
to continue along until the bike stops going, then I’ll probably start walking.’

  He agreed to make camp with us for the night and we rolled down the hill to a little river in the valley. Automatically I pulled the tent out from my pack and slung my sleeping bag over a nearby branch to air, as I’d done every night for most of the past year, but then stopped to watch in amazement as Gregory untied one of his potato sacks and rummaged around inside. He produced a few bits of clothing, but it appeared that a large part of what he was carrying consisted of books.

  ‘Ah, them,’ he said, when I asked him about the books. ‘This and that mostly. Russian authors and a few translated texts, too. Orwell. You know him?’ I did, but what I really wanted to know was why he had them all weighing down his bike.

  ‘Well,’ he started, reflectively, ‘books are the only things I’ve ever really bothered to hang on to, and I don’t have a home where I can leave them, so I just sort of bring them along, I suppose.’

  Gregory pulled a shortened axe from his bag and trudged off into the forest to find wood. He emerged a while later dragging a large tree stump behind him. After exchanging a surprised look with Tim, I set off to find more manageable pieces of firewood. Gregory trudged off into the forest once again, and Tim took the opportunity to quickly get a fire going.

  This was an area in which Tim excelled. He’d studied under expert firelighting tutors during his year in Finland – he could bring a pot of water to the boil using only one match, his pocket knife, and a soaking tree-stump pulled from a creek! After building two to three campfires a day for most of the past five months, he’d become a consummate one-match magician. No paper, only wood.

  Gregory returned bearing an armful of mushrooms and a bag of berries. He looked at Tim’s compact cooking fire in dismay. ‘Tut, tut, tut, boys.’ He shook his head and clicked his tongue. ‘That’s no way to make a fire. Come, I’ll show you how to make one properly. I’ll show you the Russian way.’

  Tim and I rolled our eyes. This was something we’d come across many times before. The locals always had a better way of doing things. ‘Russians,’ we murmured under our breaths. Then, as Gregory began to hack into his log and lay out a bonfire, we burst out laughing.

  We shared a meal of macaroni, tinned herring and the rest of a bag of Turkmeni tomatoes, then sat at a respectable distance from Gregory’s bonfire and talked into the evening.

  Gregory was an eternal wanderer. He’d worked in various jobs at different times, but it didn’t really suit him, and so he’d spent most of his adult life making his way in the wild. He lived on wild wheat and barley and on what he could find in the forest or in the rivers: berries and mushrooms, fish and the occasional small animal. In winter, he stayed in abandoned huts in the forest and hunted game. He’d walked extensively through many parts of Siberia’s wilderness, but had never travelled by bike before. Basic as his bike was, he had minimal tools to repair it. The single gear and heavy load meant that he had to walk up any hill steeper than a dead-flat plain. He wasn’t expecting it to carry him far.

  He looked at our bikes and gear with what could have been a faint twinge of envy. We thought that we’d been doing it tough, but compared to Gregory, I could now see that we were living a life of relative luxury. We were strangers too – foreign curiosities – and we received gifts and hospitality almost every day, whereas Gregory mostly received none. A great deal of our curiosity value stemmed from the fact that most Russians we met couldn’t understand why we chose to live a life that they regarded as harder than their own. We were bums with a difference whereas Gregory was just a bum.

  The fire burned low. Gregory manoeuvred the glowing coals into position between two thick logs laid out together on the ground. ‘It will smoulder all night this way,’ he explained. ‘I’ll sleep right up alongside these logs, and the coals will keep me warm. Hopefully the smoke will help keep some of the bloody mosquitoes away.’ He looked at us and offered a downcast explanation. ‘I don’t have a tent or a sleeping bag you see.’

  Tim and I looked at each other and then at Gregory, who sat there swatting mozzies away from the inflamed red bite-marks on his neck and exposed scalp. Tim reached into one of his packs and pulled out the zip-up mosquito net he had used on the solo ride to Novosibirsk; we weren’t planning to split up again.

  We rose early the next morning and invited Gregory to join us for breakfast. With the warm weather we’d stopped cooking our porridge in the mornings and had started eating the raw oats as muesli, instead. The greenish oats with clumpy milk powder tasted sour and metallic, but usually they were all we had. This morning, however, we had extra luxuries.

  I handed Gregory a bowlful of first-class muesli complete with sugar, sultanas and a fresh chopped banana. A full-blooded Russian used to savoury foods for breakfast probably would have tipped the mixture out in disgust, but Gregory was something of a philosopher and took the bowl with an open mind. Tim and I sat nearby, munching heartily and watching as Gregory looked into his bowl dubiously. He tried a tentative spoonful and considered it for a moment before breaking into a beaming smile. ‘This really is good soup!’ he said, earnestly.

  All of a sudden he was dodging a spluttered mouthful of flying oats and shaking his head uncomprehendingly. He’d caught us unprepared. I’d been in mid-mouthful and Tim was halfway through swallowing. Gregory could only watch with bemusement as we rolled around on the ground, choking and spluttering, struggling to laugh and breathe at the same time.

  ———

  When the time came, Gregory rode off to the west, leaving us with a newfound sense of just how comfortably we were living. We continued east, and after a few days of cycling along dirt roads, we reached the next big city along our route. We climbed to the top of a gradual hill, and suddenly found ourselves looking down at the long, narrow city of Krasnojarsk, snaking along the Yenisey River valley far below.

  We left our bikes at a guarded car lot then headed to a comfortable hotel near the city centre. Our room didn’t have a shower so we washed away a fortnight’s road dust in the little basin, turning the nice white hotel towels a festering dark brown. The next morning the cleaning lady came screaming down to the foyer and blocked us from leaving. She flicked at us with the filthy, wet towels and yelled abuse until the manager and a security man came to drag her away.

  We spent several days in the city, going through our usual routine of getting in touch with home, relaxing and eating lots of good fresh food. The weld in Tim’s bike frame had started to crack again, and he spent an adventurous day getting it fixed. I spent a day unsuccessfully scouring a city of a million people searching for much needed tyre patches.

  ‘No one’s got them,’ I was told. ‘The city’s been out for months.’

  We went to the cinema, restocked our supplies at a bustling market and then, after three enjoyable days, wheeled our bikes onto the road and cycled happily out of town.

  ———

  Civilisation became sparse; we found ourselves pedalling for endless miles along eternal stretches of bitumen. The sun was up for twenty hours at a time and we adapted our routine accordingly. Often we’d ride until midnight and then sleep till early afternoon. We averaged over 100 kilometres a day on roads that, for a whole week, were inexplicably covered by billions of butterflies.

  I was on top of the world. I loved the long uninterrupted hours under the sun, watching the scenery glide slowly by, but Tim was struggling. He was still using the old gear changer we’d picked up in Novosibirsk, which would have made riding harder for him. It seemed to me, though, that at least some of Tim’s disenchantment had to do with food.

  In the month since we’d left Omsk, Tim had recovered – physically, at least – from the shock of Bruce’s death. His appetite had come back with a vengeance and he was eating more than ever before. I’d only just come out of an endless appetite myself, so I thought I’d seen most of what there was to see in terms of pigging out. But Tim’s capacity was something else again. I watched
amazed as Tim casually downed kilogram bags of pryaniki, and was left bewildered at lunchtimes when he swallowed loaves of bread as though they were snack food.

  The problem was that Tim hadn’t realised any of this. He bought provisions according to his usual appetite and as a result he was almost constantly starving. This placed him in a vicious circle. The hungrier he got, the more absent-minded he became, and the more absent-minded, the less likely he was to remember to eat!

  Our petty arguments had started up again, and ballooned out one evening into a rowdy yelling match. I can’t remember how it ended up, but the whole thing started with a disagreement over a plan I’d had since the beginning of the trip. I wanted to modify our bikes to ride along the tracks of the BAM railway.

  The BAM is a major railway that branches off the main trans-Siberian line at the town of Taishet – a few hundred kilometres further on – and continued for another 5000 kilometres through northern Siberia, to the eastern coastal city of Komsomol’sk On Amur. We were planning to follow the line for just over 1000 kilometres to the northern tip of the gargantuan Lake Baikal: the deepest in the world, and known locally as the ‘Jewel of Siberia’.

  Our map had roads marked only along the first part of the railway, and Tim wanted to follow the road until it ran out. I had only a vague idea about how I’d go about turning a bicycle into a rail-rider, but I was excited about the prospect of cruising along a smooth metal track for as long as possible.

  It was this railway that had sparked my first dreams of Russia. The BAM was fundamental to the journey for me, and I wanted to make the most of it.

  ———

  We rolled into Taishet in the middle of the morning a few days later and, as usual, we caused a bit of a stir. Cars veered onto the opposite side of the road as drivers turned to gawk over their shoulders. Kids yelled and pointed and the elderly stopped to shake their heads in disbelief as we pedalled by.

  We rolled down the main street until we found a park sporting a rusty but imposing Soviet tank with the nozzle of its cannon pointing high into the air. We investigated the tank for a time while a group of teenage cyclists on well-loved and heavily-patched bikes spied on us from a distance. All around the tank lay shattered glass and litter. The sides were streaked with crude graffiti and white bird crap. From inside came a concoction of very nasty smells. It seemed strange that a people who lusted so strongly for the ‘good old days’ of communism had let an icon of Soviet power decline so drastically. I wondered if the defacement of the tank had occurred only in the past decade or whether, isolated so many thousands of kilometres from Moscow, the people here had never paid much attention to the grandeur of the Soviet war machine.