Midway along the main street, I noticed a middle-aged couple in the process of a fitful domestic argument. The woman’s face was etched with so many lines that not a smooth patch of skin remained. There were only two relatively flat surfaces, and they were covered in thick, red lipstick.
As we passed, she screeched and insulted her partner as he fossicked away in the boot of a Lada. In her rage the woman began slamming the car boot down on the man’s back. I was astonished to see that apart from the odd flinch, he carried on with his business as if it was a regular occurrence. We kept moving, glad not to be acquainted with such crazies.
We continued on, trying to find the home of our hosts for the night. Suddenly a car pulled up alongside us. ‘Where have you been? Come on, our house is down this way!’ someone screeched from the passenger seat. I looked closer. It was the wrinkly faced woman. It was her after all who had invited us to stay in Zvyozdni. And so begins our time with the woman who beat her husband with the car boot, I thought. It would surely be a perfectly fitting end to the day.
After rolling the bikes into a garage we followed the couple up a dingy stairwell to their apartment. The husband was a short man with thick glasses and a clean blue shirt. His name was Alexsei. Like his wife he had very few patches of wrinkle-free skin. Under his eyes were deeply set semi-circles that looked as if they had been painted grey.
Although Alexsei was quieter than his wife, he had a drab, unchanging tone of voice that was only broken by a sniggering laugh.
Unfortunately, dinner was served with two bottles of homemade samagonka. Alexsei’s eyes lit up and he sniggered before coughing and spluttering on his own cigarette smoke. We were bullied into having two shots. It was considered bad karma to open a bottle and not finish off its contents.
More than anything, I wanted sleep. The vodka, however, had brought Alexsei to life, which was most noticeable by the sudden rise in the number of obscenities per sentence. They weren’t just soft, playful expressions, but a barrage of filth. The more he drank, the more his wife scolded him, and on more than one occasion she slapped him hard across the face. He just sniggered and spat into his smoking ashtray.
Eventually, I weeded out some interesting information.
It turned out that Alexsei was the retired chief of police for the Zvyozdni district. He was able to confirm that seven prisoners had escaped and that three of them were brothers. But they posed no threat to us – they had all been shot dead in the forest earlier in the day.
We also gleaned that he and his wife had three sons. One of them had recently died fighting in Chechnya; the other two were unemployed and still living in Zvyozdni.
At some point the term bomzsh came up in conversation. It was the Russian equivalent of ‘bum’ or ‘tramp’. I had heard it before but was still unsure of its meaning. Alexsei was eloquent in his definition. ‘Bomzsh! Well, basically, that is you without bicycles!’ he said, sniggering. Even his wife giggled at that.
Later, when a blind-drunk man fell through the doorway, we had the pleasure of meeting the eldest son. Fuck was the only word I could make out as he delivered an epic tirade aimed at his father. Alexsei argued back in a similar fashion until the wife, to whom we were not introduced by name, stomped over to her son and struck him deftly on the skull with a clenched fist. ‘Idiot! Fool,’ she screamed.
The festivities dragged on until 4 a.m. I went to bed feeling as if our healthy cycling routine had been badly broken. The vodka over dinner had felt like little glasses of bad health. It seemed ludicrous that we had opted for such hospitality when there was perfectly nice forest stretching thousands of kilometres in all directions from the village.
In the morning I headed into the vegetable garden behind the apartment block to repair my torn bike seat. Next-door the charcoal remains of a garage were still smouldering. Apparently, it had burnt down the day before our arrival.
For hours I sat prodding at the torn mesh with needle and thread. Meanwhile, Chris and Alexsei went about fixing my punctured tubes. Each attempt was shortly followed by a loud hissing sound as another patch broke free.
Alexsei’s wife, looking even more wrinkled without make-up, lay on a deck chair next to the carrot patch, taking deep drags of a cigarette and exhaling heavily. Her plan to go berry-picking for the day disintegrated when her son arrived with a two-litre soft drink bottle of samagonka.
With each successive repair failure our hopes of getting back on the road also disintegrated. By 4.30 p.m. I was reaching the point of intolerance. By 5 p.m. I was desperate. Alexsei and his son were wildly drunk, and his wife turned on me after I broke her one and only threading needle.
Finally, the bike seat was ready. I worked feverishly with Chris to sort out the tube situation. The Russian glue and cut-up rubber just wasn’t working, and neither was Alexsei’s vulcanising repair system. After some desperate searching, I found deep in my coat pocket a stray patch. It was our last chance. I applied it to the puncture with glue, put the tube in the tyre and pumped it up. Suddenly the air came gushing out – I had ripped the valve from the tubing.
Chris pumped up a tube for the twenty-third time and something unprecedented happened – it stayed inflated for more than three minutes. We put on a smile and announced our departure. The family strode out of the vegetable garden to shake our hands and have a group photo taken. Twenty metres from the vegetable garden my tyre was already dead flat, but I was determined to keep going. I continued to wave and pedal until I passed out of sight behind a fence. At least we had officially left Zvyozdni.
Two hundred metres on we stopped to eat lunch and discuss our problem. ‘I had a cycle touring manual once and it was useless,’ said Chris, ‘but I do remember one thing. An emergency technique in the event of a ruined tube is to stuff your tyre with grass.’
The thought of riding on a grass-stuffed tyre for 500 kilometres to Lake Baikal was enough to inspire a final puncture-repair attempt.
I took a small piece of copper wire from my tool kit and retrieved the tube with the severed valve. I was then able to wind the wire around the rubber and valve, working it like a mini tourniquet. It was a long shot, and Chris had little hope the idea would actually work. But, miraculously, it did. And so we rode off with the certainty of our journey as fragile as ever.
———
For the first time in weeks we had a smooth, unbroken few days. The view along the Niya valley was supremely pristine. The nearby trees, with twisted, gnarly fat trunks, were dressed in thick shoals of moss, and the forest floor was like a spongy mattress of multi-coloured mushrooms. The road had fallen away in many places and there was negligible traffic. The terrain became increasingly hilly, and I began to anticipate the Baikal Range, the mountains that surround Lake Baikal like enormous castle walls.
We passed through the villages of Niya and Magistralni, where most of the vehicles were off-road trucks, four-wheel drives and motorbikes.
Locals repeatedly informed us that crossing the Baikal Range would be impossible. ‘There is no road going over the Baikal mountains! You realise you will have to walk, and you won’t make it. The gravel stones up there are the size of footballs. I can’t even drive over there in my four-wheel drive,’ said one man who was angered by our indifference.
Further on we descended into marshy land where the forest was clearly being harvested. In the village of Ulgan, children described how Japanese businessmen often visited by helicopter. ‘They are taking our forest! A few years ago there was good forest right up to the edge of the village. Now you have to go a long, long way to find berries, and hunters also have to travel far,’ complained one boy.
Not far from Ulgan I caught my first glimpse of the mountains. The high series of craggy peaks ran right across the horizon and cut a jagged silhouette into the pale blue. They launched far above the forest, draped in small white glaciers. A shiver of excitement ran through me. The treeless terrain with a network of crevices and snow-choked gullies was the first true mountains we had come t
o in almost 7000 kilometres.
We camped at the base of the steep slopes and awoke in anticipation of a rigorous challenge. The day began under a burly, overcast sky that precipitated light rain. The road soon deteriorated so badly that we were dodging cavernous gullies and potholes large enough to swallow a Lada. Sharp shards of slate and rocks fallen from above replaced the gravel.
The high peaks were shrouded in misty cloud that swept across barren slopes, curling and wafting like smoke blown from a fire. Now and then, through the thinner mist, I could make out the white patches of snowdrifts clinging onto perilously steep terrain. Further on we passed over bridges that consisted of a few planks and logs laid across the rapids and bound with fencing wire. Each plank was just wide enough for a car tyre.
Then the road began to rise and, suddenly, the forested plains slipped from view. We were surrounded by the mountains. Glancing up I saw thin white strips of water gushing their way down from unseen heights like unravelling toilet rolls from the heavens. I felt dwarfed by the rocky slope that rose to the right. It was exciting to be back in the grandeur of the mountainous terrain that, although enveloped in clouds, began to reveal the detail that had been a mystery from a distance.
Mosquitoes biting at the ankles, legs burning, fighting to keep balance, dodging boulders, we cycled on. The hills were interspersed with rivers that gushed right over the road, forcing us to push through with icy cold water up to our shins. The landscape was just like an enormous mound of gravel and our route was a fragile ledge that could crumble at any moment. Then the road made a sharp turn. This was where the BAM railway on the valley floor below passed into the tunnel and under the wall of towering rock. We would have to go up and over the saddle.
I looked at Chris and he smiled. This was it. There would be no downhill or even flat until we were over the other side.
At times it was so steep that my front wheel lifted off the ground. Large rocks made balancing on the bike acutely difficult. As we rose, so did the clouds, revealing razor-backed ridges that looked black and menacing. From below, the constant roar of a river could be heard from where it tumbled down a series of steep gullies.
Then, quite abruptly, the road flattened out and I caught up to Chris. ‘Well, mate, I guess this is the saddle then.’
It was an unremarkable, swampy patch of land crisscrossed by a decaying rail line network. Scrubby birch lined the roadside and a shallow stream sluggishly flowed over thick brown silt. It was a little disappointing after all the graphic descriptions we had heard from the villagers. Sure it had been hard, but only for a couple of hours.
The anti-climax didn’t diminish the achievement for us, though. Crossing the ridge signalled the last day of one of the most vivid experiences of the journey up to this point. Until now, Lake Baikal had been a mythical place. That little swampy saddle was proof that we had really made it somewhere.
All that was left to do was start rolling down. Halfway down, near the village of Godshigit, we stopped for a rare treat – a dip in the famous Baikal hot springs.
We spent several hours lazing in the hot pools that smelt strongly of sulphur. The weightlessness was soothing and contrasted dramatically with the force that was applied to push all eighty kilograms of bike and gear up the mountains. There were two pools: one bearably hot, and another that felt close to boiling.
In the less daring pool I lay back and peered up at the peaks through which we had passed. No matter how relaxed I was, I still wanted to be up there in the wind. There was a certain feeling of freedom that came just from running my eyes across the treeless space. Later, as a rainbow made its way out of the clouds, I wondered if Bruce was somewhere up there.
To our surprise we were denied a view of Baikal until the following afternoon. A series of lower hills separated the mountains from the lakeshore. Blessed with clear weather we stopped frequently to film and take photos. The clouds had parted to reveal an incandescent blue. With the sunrise the grey sloping giants were awoken from their modesty. Lower mountains, olive green in colour, bore slopes where even the scraggiest bushes struggled to cling on. In many places the green was broken by scree slopes where rocks tumbled and seemed to flow like rivers. In the shadowy crevices the trickling waterfalls and snow shone a brilliant white. Unlike the mist of yesterday everything was crystal clear. In the intense heat, the idea of snow seemed far fetched.
The lake appeared just as the road turned to bitumen and my legs felt as if they would splinter under the strain of more uphill work. Through the trees the unmistakable blue glittered in the sun and mountains launched straight up from the far side, snow drifts glistening like jewels embedded into the cliffs.
———
Cevero Baikalsk was a bustling town crisscrossed by apartment blocks and surrounded by a sprawling mess of wooden shacks and train carriages. It had been built in the ’70s purely for the BAM railway workers. Nowadays harvesting the famous Baikal omul fish, a member of the salmon family, is a core industry. I found it strange that so many cars filled the streets when they were confined to such a small area. The only roads that were navigable led to the neighbouring fishing village of Nizshneangarsk and the hot springs. In winter there was an ice road – a route marked on the frozen lake when the ice is thick enough – along the lake that led about 500 kilometres south to the city of Irkutsk.
The population of Cevero Baikalsk was an intriguing mix of nationalities. Many of the workers on the BAM had been recruited from central Asia. When the railway was completed and basically abandoned, many people, reluctant to leave, had found other means of making a living. Interestingly, by crossing the Baikal Range we had officially crossed into the Republic of Buryatia, which is home to the Buryatians, close relatives of the Mongolians. In the market of this far-flung settlement one could find Azerbaijani food, Buryatians with Mongol faces, gypsy families and Russians from all corners of the country.
For us, Cevero Baikalsk was where the road ran out. From here, our task was to seek passage on a ship that would take us about 250 kilometres southeast to the far shore, where we could rejoin a road.
We were skirting around the central square, when suddenly a fierce shouting began. ‘Hey! Tim! Tim! Australians!’
It was Slava. I had talked to him on the outskirts of Bratsk, where he had handed us a bottle of ‘Baikal Mineral Water’. Now he was leaning against a car with his arms crossed above his pot belly. His face seemed to run in parallel lines, his chin just as wide as his forehead. His eyes were clenched tightly between tensed brows as he squinted into the sun.
‘What took you so long?’ he boomed, as we approached and shook hands vigorously. Within minutes we were following him home. Unfortunately, he had forgotten his house keys and tried to break in through his own window.
‘Don’t you know, it’s normal for us Russians to get into our homes like this,’ he said.
Once inside, it didn’t take long before a steady flow of friends arrived to meet the famed Australians. One visitor was Sasha, a man with the erect posture of a policeman. In his train conductor’s uniform, I mistook him for an officer come to check our visas. His hair was short and thick, combed back in a stiff series of waves. He wore sunglasses perched above his forehead and when he smiled they moved ever so slightly, making the grooves around his eyes apparent. He was full of energy and never without another question or suggestion.
‘Have you swum in Baikal yet? Have you talked to a captain about getting across to the other side? Do you have a wish to do such?’
Dinner was almost ready but Sasha convinced Slava’s wife that a turn on the lake was obligatory. After a trip on the open water, we returned to port for an impromptu swim in the icy water. Dripping wet and shivering violently, we returned to Slava’s home and a celebratory chorus.
‘Don’t be shy, eat as much as you can, be at home, eat! Eat!’ demanded Slava’s wife. I looked down at the table and my pulse rose. There was an array of salted and cooked fish, an endless supply of pelmeni, potato salad, cucum
bers and tomato. And, of course, vodka.
Next came the banya. Inside, Sasha grasped the veneg, a bundle of birch twigs and leaves, and dipped it in a pot of boiling water. I lay down on the timber slats before he began whipping my back and legs in a mad frenzy. ‘Mechta? Mechta! Isn’t this just a dream? It’s a dream!’ he kept saying. It felt as if my skin was being singed and boiled; at any minute it would be ready to peel off.
The session lasted three hours. I watched in amusement as Chris stumbled out naked with glowing red skin, unable to focus his eyes. The grin on his face suggested extreme pleasure. Before returning home to party, we agreed that it was the most luxuriant banya we had ever had.
I rose at 10.30 a.m. feeling guilty for the sleep-in and as I tiptoed to the kitchen for a glass of water, I was greeted by a cacophony of snores rising from the bodies lying in the lounge and bedroom. More than happy, I returned to bed. Perhaps, after all, it was a well-deserved rest.
When I awoke again, the activities were already in full swing. There was a platter of food and talk about an excursion to a nearby spring. As for passage to the opposite shore …
‘Five thirty this afternoon, it’s all organised,’ Slava said, proudly. ‘The captain is a bit eccentric and he is transporting frozen fish, but he will let you on board.’
Come 4.30, we downed a salutatory shot of vodka and cycled off towards the port. Slava drove behind with all our gear – it had taken extensive persuasion to convince him that we wanted to ride.
The whirlwind of laughter, celebration and good food continued right up until we were sitting on the ship waving goodbye to our friends. Little more than twenty-four hours after Slava waved us down, we watched him shrink into the distance. We were stunned. So much had been packed into such a short time and the generosity had been so spontaneous. I thought about what we had given them in return – it amounted to little.
Off The Rails Page 22