‘Oh, really?’ I was starting to feel sick.
‘Christ!’ The driver snorted and pulled his head back into the window. He explained the situation to the other passengers, and they all burst out laughing. ‘I hope it’s not hungry!’ he yelled down to us, then crunched into gear and drove on.
The next day we encountered an unexpected forty kilometres of new bitumen for the ride into Chunsky, the last outpost of real civilisation before Bratsk – 400 kilometres distant. Along the way, an expensive black Land-cruiser pulled level to glide alongside us. A black tinted window hummed open to reveal the driver, a fat, dark-skinned man with black slicked-back hair. The high-pitched voice of the latest teenage pop star from Moscow ripped loudly through the open window from an undoubtedly state-of-the-art system. Two ovals of shiny black Ray-bans turned slowly and a gleaming white smile erupted from above a corpulent, smoothly shaven chin.
We chatted briefly. The driver and his passenger were Azerbaijani businessmen, involved in some way in the forestry industry. They were obviously not the ones who chopped down the trees. The guy in the passenger seat – a thinner version of the driver – owned a restaurant in Chunsky and he offered us a meal when we got there.
They flicked up the window after a while and seemed about to pull away, but at the last minute, as though struck by an afterthought, the window glided down again and the driver’s black-sleeved arm extended, proffering a fluttering banknote. Tim started to protest but the driver cut him off. ‘Take it,’ he said, smiling.
Tim did, then waved goodbye as the polished black status symbol disappeared down the road. Wordlessly we stared at the 100 rouble note – about $30 in Australia – and looked at each other incredulously.
Of all the earnest warnings we’d received before embarking on the journey, the most ominous had been the danger of a run-in with the Mafia. ‘You are foreigners,’ we had been warned. ‘Compared to the locals you are rich. In Russia anyone with money is a target. At the very, very best you will both be robbed and left for dead as soon as you set foot in the country, but that is only if you are lucky!’
In reality, it had taken nine months before the Brotherhood had even noticed us. Then, far from the hideous atrocities that had been forecast, we had actually been given money!
We reached the Azerbaijani section of town later that afternoon. The restaurant to which we’d been invited stood out while the other scattered buildings and caravans – tea houses and shashlik stalls – all looked a little rundown.
We parked our bikes against a wall and sauntered to the restaurant, chuffed at the thought of a free meal. The staff hadn’t been told that we were coming, however, and looked dubious when we explained our story. They invited us to sit down and eat anyway, but on our tight budget, we weren’t prepared to order anything that we might have to pay for. Eventually, a man who knew about us came along and we gratefully ate an excellent, spicy meal.
We made friends with one of the waiters while we were eating: I asked if he knew about the existence of sustainable or selective harvesting practices, but before he could answer, a man in a suit turned to face us. ‘I’m a forestry man.’ He greeted us with a limp handshake. ‘And I can tell you that we certainly do follow selective logging guidelines.’
I looked naively into his eyes and believed him. He held my gaze for a moment then burst into peals of laughter. ‘Oh, yes!’ he shouted. ‘We practice selective logging.’ He waved his hand at the wall beside him in a gesture that I assumed was meant to indicate a vast expanse of forest. ‘Oh, yes! We …’ He wheezed and laughed some more. ‘We select a tract of forest and we log it!’
———
Later that evening, I was pacing up and down a stretch of railway line, thinking hard. Over the past few days, we’d come almost 200 kilometres from Taishet. So far, the road connecting the towns and villages along the railroad had been surprisingly good. But the sketchiness of our map and the pessimistic warnings of the locals told us that things could change for the worse.
‘A lot worse!’ The locals insisted. ‘You’d be better to turn back now.’ And while we had no intention of doing anything of the sort, it felt appropriate to put just a little bit of thought into our plan of attack. I paced some more and scanned the girders of polished metal.
The rails were smooth, flat and empty; everything, at this point, that the road was likely not to be. Riding along the rails would be perfect. Endless miles of easy cruising through pure wilderness. But how to do it was still a problem. For one thing, there were regular, heavy bolts protruding from the outer edge of each rail – trains used only the inside surfaces of the rails. Then there were other problems, including the obvious one that Tim had raised: what would we do if a train came along?
We talked about the idea the next morning and decided that if and when I could come up with a practical way of rigging our bikes together so that they could sit side by side on the rails, we’d give it a go. For the moment, however, the road was still rideable, the weather good, and the unknown lay waiting for us. We packed up and rode on.
Fifty kilometres later I dumped my bike on the ground in a screaming panic, abandoning what had until then been a calm but hurried search through my pack for a suit of mosquito-proof rainwear. Ahead of me, Tim had almost disappeared in a cloud of buzzing mozzies, to the point where it was no longer possible to make out sharp edges. This time it was him who was laughing.
Despite the heat, Tim had sensibly put on all his long clothes half an hour ago, when we realised we were about to ride through a swamp. He would be sweating rivers by now, but at least the bites getting through would number only in the dozens, rather than the thousands.
A commando battalion of darting mini-blood-transfusion units found the unprotected leg hole of my shorts and made a kamikaze run towards the weakest point of my defences. Painful chafing at the beginning of summer had forced me to abandon the wearing of underwear, and now, under siege, my control was about to crumble completely. I killed a dozen attackers in a savage swipe at my left forearm. Then they struck. I felt the sickening sensation of forty hypodermic daggers sinking into parts of me usually treated with only the very best of care.
My eyes boggled in disbelief and I let out a choked cry. I flung my raincoat to the ground and hopped around in erratic circles. I took tentative slaps at my genitals and howled hopelessly for mercy. Tim was doubled over with tears of laughter in his eyes. I spotted a creek where it crossed the road only twenty metres ahead. I lurched, hopped and ran towards it. To add to my other concerns, my hair had become a nest of trapped mosquitoes as well. Unable to get out of the thick mop, hordes of them had burrowed deeper, making a pincushion of my scalp. I slapped at my head and mashed a few hundred insects into my hair-do. Fresh forces had breached the holes in my T-shirt, and I was starting to suffer heavy blood loss from my belly and armpits as well.
I reached the creek on what felt like the verge of consciousness and scrambled to get out of my clothes. I got my shirt off and freed one leg from my shorts before a sudden wave of bites on my exposed bum toppled me headlong into the freezing water.
I lay in the ankle-deep trickle, twisting and flattening myself to get everything under the surface, then sensed rather than saw the tide of dead and drowning mozzies drift slowly by. I lay still. The roaring agony of the bites slowly subsided and my consciousness made the slow journey back to reality.
———
We woke the next morning to persistent rain. We struggled on for a few kilometres, but the swamp we were trying to push through was getting soggier by the minute and the service track was now little more than a submerged cattle pad. We battled fallen trees and huge trench-like puddles with perilously slippery edges that stretched for hundreds of metres. Our progress was ridiculously slow. It was still 700 kilometres to Lake Baikal and we decided, eventually, that this just wouldn’t do.
The previous day the road had deteriorated gradually but steadily from a wide sandy road to a rutted, corrugated trail to a muddy bumpy service trac
k that went through rather than around dozens of deep and fast-flowing creeks. Each village we passed marked a further deterioration in the road.
Eventually we reached the small, rundown village of Savelyevsky. Dirty children in bare feet chased chickens down the wide, muddy main road lined by a dozen ramshackle log houses. We caused the usual stir on our arrival. The children stopped chasing the chickens and ran over to ogle us instead. A gangly teenager in oversized, grease-smeared overalls had slithered out from beneath a broken tractor to have a stare, and a gaggle of stout old babushkas squawked questions in a loud, unintelligible dialect. A middle-aged woman with hair tied back in a brightly coloured headscarf, and carrying two buckets of water, approached and gave us a level stare. ‘And where do you two think that you might be going?’ she asked firmly, placing her buckets on the ground and hands on her hips.
We looked at each other uncertainly.
‘Um, we’re following the train line to Baikal.’
The stare continued. ‘Um, could you point us towards the road?’
‘There is no road,’ she declared.
‘But our map …’
She cut us off with a shake of her head. Her firm features softened slightly to an expression of faint tenderness. Maybe she’d noticed the rows of inflamed red mosquito bites on our legs and arms, or maybe she’d just noticed that we were dirtier and more bedraggled than most of the kids in the village. ‘We do have a road,’ she admitted, hesitantly. Our faces brightened. ‘But it’s only a winter road.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s a winter road – you can only get through in winter when it’s under two metres of snow. And then only in a tractor.’
‘Oh.’ We paused. ‘Do you think that we could get through on our bikes?’
She looked at us uncertainly, shaking her head. We chose to interpret this as a confirmation. What with the language barrier and all … ‘Great! Could you point us towards the road then please?’
She raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth to protest, but then obviously decided that she was dealing with foreign idiots better left to their fate. ‘Cross the railway here in the village then follow the track to the east,’ she said abruptly. The tender expression had disappeared. ‘It takes you into the swamp.’
———
We held a conference on the edge of the slimy, swamp-ridden stretch of road and decided that it was time to try the railway.
We heaved our bikes one at a time to the top of the steep, rocky embankment and leaned them against a towering pillar that rose up and over the double tracks of the BAM. It supported one of tens of thousands of spans of electric cables. A thunderclap galloped towards us from somewhere in the distance then reverberated loudly in the humid air. The mosquitoes still roared, but up on the embankment, some ten metres clear of the road and the swamp, they were slightly less infuriating.
A wet and morose-looking forest stretched away on either side. The fresh bright greens of spring had well and truly matured, leaving a much less inviting canopy of dense dark green rising above the white, brown and grey of birch, pine, spruce and aspen. Grey clouds filtered all brightness and joy from the day, leaving a stifling and energy-sapping heat. The occasional crow flapped slowly and grimly through the dampness. Resolutely, I hauled my tool kit from my bike and sat down to try and work out a way of turning our bikes into pedal-powered rail-riding machines.
We armed ourselves with an axe, a saw and a handful of cheap Russian hose-clamps and tottered off into the wet forest. Half an hour later, we added a small stack of fresh three-metre birch poles to our equipment. As we paused for a quick lunch of bread chunks with slices of salami and tomato, it started to rain again.
We were trying to set up our bikes so that they could sit side by side on the rails. Our plan was to join them together using several horizontal poles and diagonal bracing poles to add stiffness. It took us several hours, but eventually we had connected three poles to the seat supports of each of our bikes. We were running out of hose-clamps. There were only enough left to add some crude wooden runners to our front wheels.
We heard another distant peal of thunder. It continued rumbling, growing strangely louder, until we realised that it was a train. We waited some tense moments until the train came around the corner 500 metres away. It was on our side of the tracks! We did some quick scrambling and exchanged a few unsavoury words as the whistling train approached. We struggled to co-ordinate our movements and lift the suddenly awkward and bulky four-wheel contraption over the rails. With less than ten seconds to spare, we sent it hurtling down the steep embankment. We looked up as the train thundered past and saw the amazed face of the driver poking out of the window, gaping at us. The roar of the engine receded into the distance to be replaced by a seemingly endless progression of racing, rumbling wagons loaded high with pine logs. As it rounded the far corner, a tiny hand extend from the driver’s window in what was unmistakably a friendly wave.
A few more hours, one more train, a lot of rain and the reserves of our patience later, we were finally ready to test our design. A couple of hasty exits from the tracks had weakened the structure and bent our flimsy hose-clamps slightly, but short of trying to lash on extra poles with the guy ropes from our tent, there was nothing much we could do about it. We made some final adjustments, perched our bikes on the rails, then took some photos and did a little filming as testimony to our efforts.
We pushed the bikes tentatively. They rolled forward a few centimetres. They didn’t tumble over. Things looked hopeful. We pushed a bit further and the wheels started to diverge. We straightened up and pushed on. We made another fifty metres or so before one back wheel thumped off the rail and onto the sleepers. Things no longer looked so good.
We conferred briefly and decided that it might be possible to ride. We climbed aboard and gently eased the combined mass of our bikes, gear and selves onto a dozen creaking hose-clamps. The bikes wobbled dangerously but stayed upright. We pedalled cautiously, trying to stay synchronised – and the thing went to pieces.
I ranted for a while, shook my fist at the sky, the forest and at the endless rails. And also, once or twice, at Tim. After a bit, I settled down enough to take some pleasure in sawing through the three connecting beams – destroying eight hours work in two minutes – while Tim caught the moment on camera.
Late that evening I sprawled on top of my damp sleeping bag in our damp tent writing a letter to Nat, while Tim sat outside trying to make a fire out of saturated twigs and soggy branches. The stifling air was equally thick with mosquitoes and raindrops. I listened to Tim’s hopeless anguish through a constant rumble of thunder interspersed with bangs and flashes: ‘Come on, come on, light damn you, come on – piss-off-you-bloody-little-buggers! – come on, light, please, come on, light, dammit!’
He gave up at around midnight and we went to bed, exhausted, wet and starving.
The next day we continued a long slog. The sawn-off poles still attached to the bikes made good grips for pushing, and push we did. We tried pushing along the rocks on the outside of the rails, along the sleepers in the middle of the track, and along the service track below, now ankle deep in oozing, sticky mud. In the end, Tim worked out a method of balancing his bike on one of the rails and wheeling it carefully along. While it was possible to walk fairly quickly this way, a momentary lapse in concentration would see the front wheel slide from the rail, bringing progress to an abrupt and often painful halt.
About mid-morning, we ran across a maintenance crew repairing a stretch of the line. About half of the fifteen or twenty men were hard at work sleeping off the effects of a crate of empty vodka bottles. The other half sat smoking on a fallen log. One man walked out to greet us with a handshake and a friendly smile.
They were from Taishet, halfway through a three-week spell working on the line. We joined them for a lunch of stew and before we left, the crew foreman fiddled a bit with an ancient-looking radio and let all the crews working down the line know that we were on the
way.
We hit the tracks again and pushed on through the evening. It was exhausting, but eventually a station came into view. Half an hour later, we were being ushered along the road by an excited young man and his little brother.
Our new friend was called Vadim. He had got wind of us from a train driver the day before and had been waiting impatiently all afternoon for our arrival. He hauled us aside and quickly invited us home. Exhausted, we were more than happy to take him up on the offer, but I began to have second thoughts when we were shown into the house.
It was a filthy one-room shack full of buzzing, black blowflies. His mother sat by the window, wrinkled and dirty; she swore at him violently as he came in. We sat down on one of the grimy beds and listened as Vadim boasted of his gypsy heritage, but after a little while, we found that we had run out of things to say. There was a bowl of sour berries and some fermented milk in the kitchen, but there seemed to be no other food at all. I went back to my bike and returned with a loaf of bread. Tim and I tore off some chunks for our dinner and Vadim and his little brother dug in hungrily as well.
There were plenty of beds around the walls of the single room, so Tim and I each chose one. I sunk into mine – almost to the floor – and tried to lose myself in sleep and dreams of being elsewhere, away from these horrible surroundings and back at home with Nat. It wasn’t to be, however. Vadim snored like an earthquake and his mother spent the night hacking, coughing and swearing as though she was about to die.
We rose at first light, and left quickly. The only good thing about the village, from our point of view, was that it was where the road started again.
Gratefully, we pushed our bikes through puddles of mud and back onto the wet gravelly surface. We could ride again, and although it was still raining, things felt like they were due to improve. We pedalled through the morning until we reached the village of Turma. Here, we were invited in for a delightful lunch by a lovely old lady and her husband, a stark contrast to the night before, and we stayed with them for a couple of wonderful hours before pedalling on.
Off The Rails Page 19