Off The Rails

by Chris Hatherly

  We stormed down the banks of the River Karagem. We’d crossed it where it started, just below the glacier, the previous day, but within a few kilometres it had become a deep, wide torrent of raging white water. We stomped down the valley across slippery rockslides and through rough, wet scrub. We crossed tributary rivers running off glaciers; the water was so cold that my calf muscles cramped up and my feet snap-froze so badly that I reached the far side crying out in pain. We both faded around mid-morning, but after a small and invigorating lunch we were back on foot and charging through a heathy swamp, southwards along the banks of the river.

  It started raining later in the afternoon, but things improved when we found an overgrown vehicle track next to a long disused field. We literally raced along for a few kilometres before unexpectedly spotting a large wooden walker’s hut in the distance.

  We approached it eagerly. People often leave surplus food behind and we gloated about our chances of finding something extra to eat. If we were lucky, there might be an abandoned block of chocolate. Or maybe someone would have left behind a packet of pasta and a tin of meat.

  We raced to the door and I swear I actually saw Tim drooling. But, to our dismay, inside was not the cupboard full of ownerless food we’d been hoping for, but half a dozen startled girls wearing the T-shirts of the Moscow University Trekking Club.

  I could see the bitter disappointment in Tim’s eyes. He turned his face into the drizzle and glared heavenwards. I could almost read his thoughts. Food, God! It was a nice warm hut full of food that we wanted! Not a nice warm hut full of beautiful girls, darn it!

  But then, as though in answer to his ad hoc prayer, one of the girls moved away from the table to reveal a huge pile of freshly cooked pancakes. Our knees begun to wobble violently and Tim started drooling again.

  One or two of the girls still looked frightened, but the others were intrigued. One of them cautiously invited us in to share a pancake and dry out by the fire. We left our packs outside the door, stripped our dripping jackets and headed inside for a comfortable hour of conversation and a mouth-watering pancake or two as our clothes steamed by the fire.

  A little later, we were joined by another large party. They had arrived earlier in the day, and now they were returning to the warmth of the fire after setting up their camp in the forest. One couple was carrying a six-month-old baby on a ten-day walk along a similar route to the one we’d taken. Another man said that in the twenty years he’d been walking in the Altai Mountains, we were the first foreigners he’d ever encountered.

  The most important thing we learnt, however, was that only two days’ walk away – about forty kilometres, and just off the edge of our map – was a little village from which we would be able to hitch a ride back to the main road! We would no longer have to walk at a forced march and more importantly still, we no longer had to ration our food.

  We talked for a few hours then went to set up our camp and have dinner on a sandbar by the river. I crawled into the tent, stuffed to the point of exploding, and drifted off to sleep while looking out through the mist at softly shrouded stars.

  Half a day later, we were sitting in the grass near the top of a high pass on a huge, rolling plateau. We were almost 3000 metres above sea level, with the steep and rocky mountains behind us. All around were huge, softly rounded hills flanked by steep glaciers that descended onto the shimmering steppe on the horizon. We’d passed some yaks earlier in the day – Tim had chased them up a hill with his camera – and now we sat with our boots off, finishing off the remains of our lunch, watching as a party of five toiled slowly towards us up the slope.

  They looked even more haggard and emaciated than Tim! I looked closely at the guy in front and decided that he’d recently added two new holes on the smaller side of his trouser belt. They dumped their packs and stopped to talk.

  ‘Whereabouts have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, we’ve been out exploring glaciers and climbing mountains just over the border in China and Kazakhstan.’

  ‘Wow!’ These guys were hardcore!

  ‘We’ve been out for twenty-six days, and now we have to hurry because we’re all late getting back to our jobs and our families in Moscow.’

  We walked with them and were amazed by their stories. They’d carried only 500 grams of food per person per day during the trip, and each of them had fallen down at least one crevasse. They were doing it for the record, apparently, and they told us of a whole new world of Russian adventure walking.

  Apparently, groups of adventurers went on expeditions every year then submitted a detailed report, complete with photos and descriptions of the climbs, the new routes and the difficulty involved, to a panel of judges. The winning group was awarded a prestigious prize – the leader of this particular group had received it once. But more amazing was the news that there was a whole library of these expedition reports, complete with hand-drawn maps to previously untrodden places sitting virtually unknown in Moscow. This untapped source could be a gem, I thought; and my mind fired up instantly, making grand, but momentary, plans to set up an adventure travel business bringing tourists to the wildest places in the former USSR.

  We agreed to ride with them back to the road, and if possible, to the train line. There were five of them, too many to fit into one car, and so with the two of us, we could split the price of two taxis seven ways and save money all round. This sounded fair enough, but we were dismayed later that evening when we found a loaded hay truck from the village, the owner of which was willing to give us a ride.

  The Russians agreed instantly, but I felt that it was a bit of a shame. We’d been planning to walk the rest of the way into the village the next day; and both Tim and I were sad to find the opportunity gone and our trip finished so abruptly. But like they’d said, it would be cheaper to catch the taxis as a group; and with native speakers to do the bargaining, it would save us a lot of hassle. We threw our bags on top of the huge pile of hay and climbed after them.

  That was it. Fifteen days of walking over in a flash, with only endless hours of transportation to take us back to our bikes.

  The truck lurched away, and as it started trundling down the road, I looked at Tim, sitting high up on a pile of hay, smiling sadly. He caught my gaze and shrugged.

  ‘Ah, well. Looks like that’s that. I suppose we’d better go check out Mongolia.’

  Riding Rough

  Ulan Ude – Gobi Desert, Mongolia

  Early Autumn 2000

  ———

  Tim

  Rain fell, sometimes hard, sometimes as spittle, but never consistently. Cars crashed through swelling puddles, sending a wall of brown water towards shopfronts and unlucky pedestrians. Disco music blasted from a plastic marquee where a drunk couple danced. Beyond them, a babushka with bowed legs hobbled along, clutching a plastic bag full of food scraps scavenged from overflowing bins.

  My head throbbed and I wandered in a daze. Chris and I had arrived in Irkutsk earlier that morning; we were spending a few hours apart before our evening train to Ulan Ude.

  As aimless as the rain, I turned into a shopping centre. Racked by tremors of hunger and bewildered by the contradictions of the city I took refuge in a café and bought a beer to settle my nerves. There I opened my diary and toyed with the idea that the shopping centre was a veneer slapped over the reality of the destitute, the unhealthy, and those who struggle to make ends meet. Yet, neither those who wore the designer labels nor the dank rags looked like they had any life in them.

  For fifteen days in the Altai we had not known the date or time, or heard so much as a distant car. The rivers had gushed through precipitous gorges with crystal blue water, and mountains soared above lush forest and high alpine plains. I had felt at ease and no matter what the conditions, they never appeared as hostile as the city. The day I’d walked ahead of the others, I climbed a peak and lay a photo of Bruce, together with a flower, under a rock. I couldn’t think of a more ideal place to let his spirit rest.


  I was convinced, that despite progress, the wilderness and simple ways could still be of benefit. In the wilderness there was no room for the bullshit splattered across television screens and the hyped-up advertising campaigns. It occurred to me that there is no mountain too high or weather too hostile – it is simply the way things are. In the end you are forced to be true to yourself, and the important things really become clear. There is no point lying to nature because it won’t listen. Furthermore, once you step outside cities and roads, money is meaningless. On the alpine plains a CEO could shoulder up alongside a factory worker and neither would be advantaged.

  Realistically, the experience in Altai reinforced the notion that it’s important to look after nature, and keep areas of wilderness even in an advanced world. It didn’t mean cities should be obliterated. In some ways, the state of the earth could also reflect the state of human health. Getting out and experiencing nature could be promoted as a way of balancing city life. As a source of solitude and replenishment of the human spirit I know of nothing better.

  But what of the guilt I felt sometimes as a ‘wealthy’ westerner passing through Russia? Was it really escapism? Perhaps, but only if I returned to Australia and forgot what I had learned. I remembered the message I had read in countless mountaineering books: ‘We don’t go to the summits to escape, but so that when we come down we can live a better life in civilisation.’ As long as I could apply what I learned from our adventure to life at home, then it would have all been worth it.

  Rather than feeling guilty, it was probably better to understand how privileged I was. I had the opportunity to live a healthy life in the city, and the resources to visit the wilderness and foreign places. In short, I had the freedom to appreciate the advantages of many different environments and ways of living.

  ———

  ‘Should I get the banya fired up?’ someone from behind me said. I cringed. We were at a bus stop in Ulan Ude, waiting for transport to the place where we had left the bikes. By some coincidence Misha, our Buryatian friend, had seen us on his way to work. I had had a month to forget about the unfortunate experience in the banya, but suddenly it all came back.

  After some rushed, much-needed repairs to the bikes in Misha’s yard, we wobbled out of Ulan Ude and into the setting sun.

  I hadn’t been on the bike for a month, and the sudden flurry of air enlivened my senses. The days of stagnation on the train vanished, leaving behind an ability to think more clearly. Even as we slipped out of the city we were setting our sights on the next goal – reaching Ulaan Baatar in Mongolia. There remained 350 kilometres to the border and a further 450 to the Mongolian capital.

  The familiar forest of spruce, pine and birch quickly dissipated, to be replaced by thick hardy bushes and stocky trees. Parched green hills rose well above wide flood plains and shallow streams. The ridges looked like the bony spine of a rotting corpse. When the sun was low, the grass appeared not green but a dry yellow. Gradually, the grey earth became red, punctured by islands of tight-fisted grass. The view spanned clear horizons and although pyramid-shaped hills rose here and there it lacked prominent features; distance became harder to gauge. Suddenly, I felt like a tourist in an alien land. Camping on the sandy earth left me pining for the seclusion of the forest, and made me realise that Russia had become a second home.

  It wasn’t just the landscape that was changing. The Buryatians, although Russified to a point, were distinctly different. The following evening, near the town of Gusinosersk, I was hailed down by a man intent on talking.

  ‘You know that this, Buryatia, is the home of Genghis Khan. You see, up in those mountains the Russians mine the diamonds and gold. We cannot. As Buryatians, disturbing the earth is sacrilege. By the way, you see that smoke stack there? That is the highest in Buryatia,’ he said, pointing to an unremarkable chimney rising from a rusty old factory. ‘You understand, we have clean, fresh air. And by the way, have you noticed how here in Buryatia all Russians work and we stand around and watch? Our God forbids us to work.’

  I wasn’t convinced that he spoke for all, but most likely there was an element of truth in his eccentric ravings.

  Further along the road we passed blue satin sashes tied to the branches of trees. Cars often stopped and the passengers offered drips of vodka to heaped cairns: one flick of vodka to the sky, one into the air, and one onto the rocks. As far as I could understand, it was for good luck and happiness; and it was bad karma to not stop at each and every sash and cairn.

  Some of the Buryatian superstitions bore a resemblance to common Russian beliefs about good luck and the right way of doing things. Russia was a blend of cultures ranging from Europe to central Asia and the Far East. This complexity always made it appear that the culture was plagued with contradictions. For example, Russians were caught up in systems and laws similar to that of the Europeans, yet turned to ‘destiny’ and ‘luck’ to show them the way; they could be intensely cold and yet be the most hospitable and open on earth; they were overtly materialistic and yet deep-spirited; they could be incredibly moral, hard working and disciplined and yet be openly lazy and apathetic; they were great ones for following pragmatic plans and yet thrived on spontaneity.

  The country escaped definition – it wasn’t Europe, it wasn’t Asia, and it wasn’t even a northern or southern culture.

  That evening, as I pedalled fiercely to reach a hilltop, a petrol tanker stopped in front of me. The driver stepped out, motioning for me to stop. ‘C’mon, have a couple of shots of vodka with me,’ he urged.

  ‘Oh, no, I had better not. I find it pretty difficult to ride after vodka,’ I replied.

  He peered down at me in sheer anger and puzzlement. ‘And you think it’s easy to drive a petrol tanker after a couple of shots of vodka?’ he yelled.

  His pleading trailed off as I breasted the crest and set off down the other side. The bike whizzed with ease, and I felt the sweat cooling. As the sun glided down to the west and the land opened out before me, it occurred to me that the difference between western and Russian culture was perhaps rather simple. A Russian almost always first thinks with his heart, and then with his head. That would explain the lack of rationale at times, and also the spontaneous generosity and flexibility. Russia was starting to make sense … yet ironically it was fast becoming a memory.

  The light of evening soon became fragmented by craggy hilltops that cast long shadows. The translucent grass blades became dull and still. I was brought back to the here and now by the sudden cold and stopped to put on a jumper. As I did, a Volga car – the Statesman of Soviet cars – pulled up. The brake lights glowed like mini suns at dusk. It was a Buryatian couple wanting to invite us to dinner.

  As we approached their settlement it was the barking dogs that struck me first. Then the shouts of a woman telling the dog to shut up. The village was situated in the shadow of a hill upon dry floodplains. In the still air not a bush trembled and from a distance you could make out a thousand conversations. It seemed that the dust had settled in streets that were usually enveloped by torrid dust clouds stirred by wind, four-wheel drives and cattle. Like the wooden villages of the north, this too nestled into the landscape with minimal disruption to the view. The houses, however, were built with stone and layered with an earthy paste. Many appeared to grow from the earth itself.

  Our hosts for the evening owned a modest home, yet it was probably one of the larger ones in the village. The Volga and an Uaz, a Russian-made jeep, parked out front meant that they had probably held roles of importance in Soviet times. The man wore a tightly buttoned shirt and had a plump neck. His dress pants, although old and well-worn, were spotless, in line with the rest of his attire. I could only look in amazement at his mirror-gleam shoes; they seemed to have an uncanny ability to repel the dust they trod upon. His face was wide, with cheekbones that panned out like two inverted frying pans. His nose barely rose higher than his cheeks, and his eyes resembled slender crescent moons. The curvature of his eyebrows equalled a mou
th that constantly cut an arcing line beneath his heavy features. Meaty forearms and legs complemented his thickset torso.

  He cast a proud figure, yet seemed humble. What I didn’t know was that he was almost sixty and a grandfather. The couple ushered us into the home, tut-tutting, as if to say, ‘don’t be silly’ when we proposed taking off our shoes. Not for the first time, I was left wondering whether I would take someone off the street with such ease.

  The man’s wife was also thickset and muscular. Her agility and thick black hair were deceptive – she was almost sixty.

  It wasn’t long before we were seated in the kitchen. Although we had been showered in meals and hospitality all through this journey, I never took them for granted. Even a day on the bicycle, let alone a week, made a home-cooked meal hard to resist. Along with the meal, of course, came the ubiquitous bottle of vodka.

  On this occasion Chris and I felt that alcohol could only prove beneficial. If our hosts wanted to celebrate, then damn it, we would too!

  It turned out the man was the former director of the collective farm. He had worked in the fields with sheep, and in the office with local government. As he drank, his smile grew. He told us again and again of his Mongolian friend, a cosmonaut. Family albums by the armful arrived and we spent an hour flicking through the black and white photos. They had four children and nurtured high hopes for their futures. It struck me that these concerns were no different to those of parents in Australia.

  But then his smile was crossed by a look of anger. ‘It’s all messed up now; no one knows what tomorrow will bring,’ he said, lamenting the changes that had befallen his country. Looking at the photos and listening to his heartache, we were in no doubt that the Russia we were experiencing was a very different Russia to that of ten or fifteen years ago. The glossy photos of cosmonauts and rockets with the USSR symbol gave the impression of a time of glory, optimism and excitement. Compared to those glory days, our friends seemed to be living in a country shattered to pieces. Nowadays, it seemed that Russia was still reliant on systems set up during the Soviet Union, even though those very systems were falling apart. As the public buses ground to a halt, the hot-water pipes rusted beyond repair and the power stations fell into further neglect, what would the future bring to Russia?