Off The Rails

by Chris Hatherly

  We turned our attention to the group of kids circling us at a distance. They were moving gradually closer, and one of them looked as though he was plucking up the courage to come over and find out who and what we were. Their hesitation disappeared once they realised that we could speak Russian. The usual questions progressed to general questions about the bikes and a good deal of awestruck pointing at our racks of Shimano gears.

  A few kids escorted Tim to the market, while I found a slab of wood and sat, minding our bikes and chatting to two boys. They were both mad-keen cyclists and spent every minute, when they weren’t at school, riding. They offered to escort us out of town later that day and we willingly followed them along a rough, bouncy track that served as a shortcut. We stopped in a village to fill up at a hand-pumped well, and as we headed back onto the road, I begun to hear an ominous clicking coming from somewhere underneath me.

  I investigated and was surprised to discover that my rear hub had come loose. I’d checked and tightened it only a few days before. The clicking noise was probably the sound of the ball bearings and the inside of the hub starting to disintegrate.

  This was a lesson that I’d learned well on my trip around Australia – ignore the sound of a self-destructing hub at your peril. So, I dragged out my tool kit to put it right. A few twists of a spanner and we were back on our way again, but five kilometres later the sound returned. I started to worry. The noise was definitely that of a hub in the process of devouring itself, but having tightened it, I couldn’t guess what the problem could be. Dismantling the hub for a full service was a process of at least an hour, and our friends, who had stuck with us for most of the afternoon, were getting impatient. I rode with them for another few kilometres, wincing at each grinding metallic crack. Finally, they turned back to Taishet and I found a shady corner where I could settle down and fix my machine.

  An hour later, I was getting worried and Tim was getting bored. I’d dismantled the hub, cleaned out all the ground-up little flakes of steel and iron filings, replaced the worn ball bearings and reassembled the whole arrangement. But I couldn’t tighten the hub sufficiently. It took me another hour to pinpoint what was wrong. The internal cone of my hub – one of the two surfaces which sandwich the ring of ball bearings that allow the wheel to roll – had developed a hairline fracture and had slowly cracked away from its position. As I tightened the hub, I was simply pushing this broken surface backwards a fraction into the hollow interior. Before long, the two rings of ball bearings would be pressed up against each other and the axle would snap.

  My bike was fatally wounded and I feared the worst. The closest replacement hub that would fit my bike was the one on Tim’s bike (I eyed it longingly for a second), and the nearest one after that was probably at least another 5000 kilometres away. It was time for desperate measures.

  Carefully, I sawed off one of the aluminium legs of my camera tripod. I shortened it and used it to brace the inside of my hub against any further collapse. It was definitely only a temporary measure. Even if the brace did work, the cracked surface of the cone would spin around like a grinding machine and slowly decimate any ball bearing in its path. I carefully reassembled the axle, stood the bike upright and realised that I was scared.

  I explained the gravity of the situation to Tim, who summed it up neatly. ‘Looks like we’re stuck in the shit then, doesn’t it, mate!’

  We wheeled our bikes back onto the road the next morning and I hopped on cautiously. The brace held. Tim and I let out great whooping yells of jubilation. But after ten kilometres I had to stop again and dig out my tools. The brace I’d made wasn’t broad enough to keep the bearings stable and my back wheel was wobbling dangerously.

  After some readjustments, we pressed on. I was testing fate and counting on luck. We were in the middle of nowhere with a mortally wounded bicycle. The only sensible option would have been to turn tail, hop on a train and buy a replacement part in Moscow. But I didn’t want to waste that much time and Tim certainly didn’t want to hang around for a fortnight until I returned. While there was still even a glimmer of hope, we decided that it would be best just to keep on riding.

  ‘And besides,’ Tim said, ‘even if you can’t fix it, even if it dies completely in another two hundred kilometres, at least we will have gone two hundred kilometres further. And we’ll still be in the middle of bloody nowhere. There’s not really much to lose.’

  I spent an hour modifying the brace and made it to the top of the next hill before it needed adjusting again. I was so absorbed in the impending disaster that I hadn’t been paying much attention to the scenery, but Tim had.

  We’d finally branched off the main route through southern Siberia. We’d left the trans-Siberian railway and adjacent highway behind, and with it we’d left the main logging corridor. Our new route along the BAM was relatively new, and had only recently been set upon by the mechanical teeth of the timber industry. The result was that although wagon after wagon of ancient pine logs rumbled past, we were able to fully immerse ourselves in the taiga forest for the first time since we’d entered Siberia.

  I looked up from the greasy, troubled mess of my bike hub and let my gaze float towards the northern horizon. Before me, the familiar trio of pine, spruce and birch stretched out in a mottled green sea, interspersed with their native Siberian counterparts: fir, larch and what the Siberians call cedar but is actually a variety of pine. The whole expanse extended over one and a half thousand kilometres northwards in a vast undulating continuum, broken only by secret river valleys and rocky ridges, until finally, it merged with the empty rolling tundra and then the Arctic Ocean.

  We set off again and I suffered two successive flat tyres. After a day and a half of non-stop bike repairs, this was enough to test the limits of my patience. It was getting late so Tim rode on, out of range of my curses, to wait in the next village, Kvitok. I patched my tyre and limped on to find him waiting for me outside a shop, in the middle of a seething throng of sidecar motorbikes, Ladas and kids on bicycles. He’d managed to completely snarl the main intersection of the village.

  I rode up unnoticed and stood up to catch a glimpse of Tim over the heads of barefoot kids straining to see the excitement. In Tim’s hand was a bulging bag of pink pryaniki and on his face was the broad, totally-immersed-in-the-moment grin that I’d grown to know and like so well.

  I worked my way to the centre of the crowd and quickly learned that our accommodation and meals for the night had already been arranged. First up we were to visit Vladimir, whose wife was already at home cooking up a feast, and who’d be angry if we didn’t get over there right now. After that, we’d been invited to spend the night with the family of a pleasant, but serious-looking man called Andrei.

  We were escorted to Vladimir’s house by a cavalcade of onlookers who cheered as we got our ungainly bikes going. Once inside, a beaming Vladimir introduced us to the other guest of honour. Seated proudly at the head of the table was his favourite thing in the whole world – a huge twenty-litre jar of double-strength samagonka. In the Russian tradition, he poured everyone a liberal shot, while explaining that he made it to sell to the village.

  ‘Yeah! And he’s his own best customer,’ an old woman squawked from the corner, receiving a rowdy burst of laughter before we all drained the shots. ‘Bottoms up.’

  Two more rounds of firewater preceded the first course, and the meagre helping of food was quickly followed by more rounds again. With an empty stomach full of potent alcohol, my impressions of the evening soon became a blur. There must have been over twenty people in the room, but to save my life I couldn’t remember more than two or three. The only distinct memories after those initial rounds were of everyone dancing to loud music from a tinny gramophone, and of a teary Vladimir holding me in a tight, slobbering embrace, slurring drunkenly in my ear. He’d forgotten our names.

  ‘I have to thank you and praise you and Tom like the gods, Kosta. You have made this into the best day of my entire life!’

&n
bsp; Thanks to a healthy cyclist’s metabolism, I was starting to sober up by the time we moved a few doors down the road to Andrei’s home. Most of the crowd had dispersed by this stage but a twisted handlebar and a bounced-off pannier bag told us that a few intrepid souls had obviously taken the bikes for a ride.

  We pushed our bikes along the muddy road, past high paling fences and sturdy solid log walls punctuated with warm, friendly windows. Vladimir – still devastatingly drunk – escorted us to Andrei’s front gate and bid us a slurred and incomprehensible farewell before wandering slowly back home. We pushed open the gate and wheeled our bikes into what seemed another world.

  Andrei and his family were immediately different to any Russians I had met. True to form, they fed us a second dinner (it was midnight by this stage), but incredibly, and to our immense relief, there was no vodka. They asked us intelligent questions and listened to our replies. The conversation ranged and as they slowly became more comfortable with us, they started to crack jokes, laughing uproariously, then patiently explaining the naughty punchlines and puns that we’d completely failed to understand.

  They told us briefly of their religion. They were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses. It became very clear that their religion pervaded their entire way of living and thinking. We talked, laughed and listened into the small hours of the morning before finally being ushered towards the beds that had already been made up for us. I lay there in a happy, exhausted daze, staring at the ceiling, still softly illuminated by the faint moonlight creeping gently around the curtains.

  That morning I’d woken in a dirty tent with a broken bike. I’d spent the day fighting to keep hope alive against the growing realisation that my hub was fundamentally stuffed and now, twenty hours later, I was lying in a bed in a wooden cottage nestled in a clearing somewhere in the middle of the Siberian taiga forest.

  What a day! This is what it’s all about – the basic addictiveness of travel. Wake up with a broken bike, go to sleep with new friends and a whole village to get to know. Our journey had opened wide the wildly unpredictable door of surprise. The hub was still busted, but as I drifted off to sleep, I was quietly confident that somehow, a solution would be found in the morning.

  Miraculously, it was! Andrei, his two brothers and his brother-in-law were all tradesmen – welders, woodworkers and mechanics. The next morning they took a quick look at my hub, held a brief conference, then loaded the wheel into the back of Andrei’s little car. Together, we drove to the other side of the town to the workshop of the village school. Inside stood a home-built lathe, made out of an old diesel-powered truck engine. Pasha was the expert on this machine, and after making a few precise measurements, he was able to slot a chunk of old steel into the lathe. Half an hour later, he handed me a piece of engineering that was perfect. I stripped out the broken cone, hammered in the new device, and the whole thing was as good as new.

  We returned to the house for a sumptuous lunch prepared by Andrei’s mother, Clara. Afterwards, they hitched up their stately old horse to a wooden cart, and we all trundled off to a nearby field. The village tractor had broken down irreparably a few years before, and so they were slashing hay with scythes. We spent the afternoon raking up all the dried hay and loading it onto the cart with long-handled pitchforks. They sang religious songs and hymns as they worked, and talked of their lives as we pitched in by their sides. The whole extended family worked hard all through the summer, gathering hay and growing potatoes. They did not drink or smoke, and by growing more than they needed for the winter, they were able to sell their leftover produce in the village market. At twenty-six, Andrei was also a highly skilled welder; he worked long hours to bring in regular commissions. The family and all of their devout relations in the village were prospering while other villagers seemed to wilt with bitterness. We asked them about this at dinner, and after a moment of consideration, Andrei explained. ‘Most Russians were better off under the old regime. They had jobs and security. Their pensions were always paid.’ He looked at us and we nodded. We had heard that many times before.

  ‘But for us and people of our faith, things were different. We were prisoners under communism. My father, Slavic, spent fifteen years in a gulag labour camp because he refused to deny God!’

  I looked towards Andrei’s parents with a profound new respect and understanding. Their eyes were filled with tears that told of the anguish of their lives, filled with unimaginable hardship and suffering, as well as the newfound peace and tranquillity of their old age. Clara looked lovingly at Andrei, himself choked up with tears. Her gaze held the quiet, loving pride of a parent, watching her son grow to live in a new world, taking advantage of opportunities and chances that she had never known.

  ‘Our country has changed,’ Slavic continued gently. ‘Our lives are hard but now they are free.’ He smiled and gestured at a heavy, leather-bound bible in the centre of the table. ‘Before, we kept this book of God’s word in our house at the risk of our lives. Now it lies there for all to see. People yearn for the return of communism, but all they really wish for is a return to the days where they lived easily because they were not free. People want the riches and the benefits of capitalism, but they want to keep the security and safety of old times. They wish to earn like westerners, but they also want to work lazily and without risks, as they did during the communist times. That is why their lives have become harder. We have always lived by God’s laws. We have always been free in spirit. And so you see, it is easy for us in the new system. Now we can live freely too.’

  We sat up talking late into the evening. After working a summer of eighteen-hour days, Andrei had been able to buy a video camera and television. He showed us hours of wobbly footage: the extended family singing hymns and slashing hay in a field many times larger than the one we had seen that afternoon; the local river in flood, and a trip by train to Lake Baikal.

  We asked about their singing and they joyfully produced an array of instruments, from an electric guitar to a balalaika, and they played and sang for hours more.

  By the time I finally crashed into bed that morning, I could only think how lucky we had been to stumble on this family. They seemed to be as happy and content as anyone in the world.

  ———

  The next morning, after a stately breakfast, we took our leave. The bitumen ended a few kilometres from the village leaving us to face a long, rough and unfriendly stretch of dirt road. We said a final goodbye to our small escort of a dozen cyclists and hooting cars and set out on what promised to be the biggest adventure of all. We were off to tackle the BAM!

  The construction of the BAM railway was the most expensive single project in the history of the USSR. Twenty-five billion dollars US had been poured into the venture and hundreds of thousands of young workers from all over the Soviet Union had journeyed to the mosquito-infested swamps of central Siberia to force the line through wild and unwelcoming terrain. It was the dream of the golden renaissance of the Soviet Union. The youth of the nation would push the line through to the immeasurable mineral riches of the Lena River basin and open the doors to the largest mining and industrial development in the world.

  The line took twenty years to complete and blew its budget by 1000 percent. By the time it was finished in the late 1980s the situation in the USSR had altered, and there was no money left to develop the new mining industries, anyway. Only a few years after its completion, the icon of the Soviets saw the Union decline and then fragment in a collapse that shook the world. The workers who hadn’t grown old and died during the construction either gave up on the dream and travelled back to former lives, or turned their temporary workers’ accommodation into isolated villages to eke out a living from the land.

  In the years that followed, the gleaming metal superhighway saw not the countless thousands of wagons bearing untold fortunes back towards the rest of the world, but the odd passenger train and the occasional timber freighter. A decade later the traffic had picked up a little as the independent opportunists of
the new capitalist regime moved in to log the ancient and unprotected timbers of the taiga. By the time we arrived, apart from the steady flow of old-growth forest heading towards the voracious Chinese market, the railway was relatively unused.

  We struggled on a further ten kilometres, puffing and blowing as we climbed sandy hills and sped down to crash spectacularly at the bottom of others. We made camp at a beautiful gurgling creek where we were surprised by news from a passing convoy of logging trucks. ‘We saw a bear a few kays up the road,’ they told us nonchalantly. ‘A big one.’

  Jesus, I thought, looking at the men sitting high up inside the steel-walled protection of their cabin. I glanced over my shoulder at our still-smouldering campfire then back at the grinning men.

  ‘But that’s okay,’ the driver carried on. ‘If you see it, just shoot into the air and it should run away.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You are carrying a gun, aren’t you?’

  ‘Um …’ I exchanged a worried look with Tim. ‘Actually we don’t have a gun.’

  ‘What!’ The driver stared down at us incredulously. ‘You must have a gun! Nobody stays out here in the forest without a gun, especially at this time of year. There are bears everywhere!’