Fortunately for us, the man happened to have a tourist map of Mongolia, which had a scale of 1:2 000 000. Little did we know that it would become our sole source of navigation later on.
As we rode out of town the following evening, it felt as if we had been wished good luck and sent on our way from Russia itself. It had been the final spontaneous display of everything that encapsulated the warmth and generosity of almost twelve months in this wonderful country.
———
Two days later the border of Mongolia was in sight.
With a bowl of porridge in hand, I wandered towards a nearby hilltop and sat beneath a lone tree. Leaning against the trunk, I breathed a sigh of relief. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts; I wanted to think about what this day would bring.
For more than two years I had been living in the northern forest lands of Finland and Russia. This part of the world had become my life, my passion and home. Now that we were leaving, I wanted to hold onto it like a baby to its mother.
I peered into the distance and tried to adjust my eyes to the details of the horizon. I thought that if I looked hard enough I could solicit some kind of certainty about my future.
‘Hey, Tim … ready to go?’ came Chris’s voice.
From our camp site, we descended towards the border town of Kyakta. ‘Mongolia 10 km’, read a sign. The bikes sliced through the mist, freewheeling, gathering speed towards the end. I was tempted to pull on the brakes. It all felt too early to be leaving Russia.
The road abruptly flattened out and we rolled into the centre of town. Several cows lazed about the bus shelters, others lay in the middle of the road, in the full knowledge that drivers would avoid them. Box-shaped kiosks lined the main street; and as our momentum slowed, we observed tubby women in blue and white aprons preparing for a day behind the counter.
As we neared the town centre, I was puzzled by a vibrant display of reds, yellows and pinks in the mist. They seemed to melt and swirl into one another like running paint in a watercolour. I squinted into the mist, trying to work out what it could be.
‘Children!’ I burst out as the present snapped into focus. They were children! There must have been about a hundred of them. The girls wore black dresses and white tights with frilly ribbons in their hair. They walked hand in hand with their mothers and clasped gigantic bunches of flowers. The boys, no older than eleven, wore bow ties and also carried flowers. Their crewcuts had grown out to thick tufts of hair and had been slicked back meticulously. The vision contrasted starkly with the kids we had seen over the last months just lolling casually by rivers and playing games on the street. There was something familiar about this sudden change in tempo, but we remained stumped. It was Chris who clicked first.
‘It’s the first of September, the first day of school!’ he shouted.
But the haircuts and long pants had a greater significance than the first day of school – summer was over and autumn had begun. With the warm weather behind us, it was clear that there was no time to waste.
We had things to do before we left the world of vodka, babushkas, taiga and pryaniki behind. The first was to call Baba Galya. The second was far less significant, but equally as satisfying: stuffing ourselves with a final meal of pelmeni at the local stolovaya.
With the camera rolling on a tripod fixed to the back of Chris’s bike, we pedalled off in the direction of the border. Eight thousand kilometres of cycling down, I focused in on the final stretch.
Our hopes of surging through the border were short lived. I pulled on the brakes in a panic. The road ahead was locked off by giant iron gates. Traffic was banked up and truck drivers sat at the wheel chewing sunflower seeds. Nearby, Mongolians sat around piles of bulging striped bags. A lady wandered about, desperately trying to sell ice-cream from a milk can. Where was the road? Where was Mongolia?
The crooked door of an aluminium shack eventually swung open and slammed backwards into the wall. A soldier in a fading khaki uniform sauntered out. He smiled and spat out sunflower shells on the ground. ‘Sorry, you’ll have to wait. We are closed for lunch right now. We will open at two,’ he said, before returning to his shack.
We waited for two hours before a soldier returned with our documents.
‘Sorry, guys, your visas are good, but there is a problem. Do you have permission from the general in China or Moscow? Because we only accept three nationalities at this border – Russians, Mongolians and Chinese.’
‘No, we don’t have permission. How do we get it? Do you have their contact addresses? Can you possibly give them a call?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘Well boys, I have no idea. I don’t know the addresses, and in any case we have a pecking order in the army. Phone calls can only come down to us from higher places. We can’t call them,’ he replied. ‘I tell you what you have to do. You have to go to Naushki. It is about forty kilometres from here. There you will have to put your baggage on a train and cross the border as a passenger. If you put your bikes into top gear, you might just make it for the evening train. So, guys, where have you cycled from?’
We set off with a vengeance, pounding the pedals and battering the bitumen as if it was the heart of Russian bureaucracy. Sanity, it seemed, had been left by the wayside in this instance. We didn’t know what the time was or when the train was leaving, but our frustration fuelled our speed. My legs became swollen as we powered up that long, steep hill and passed our old camp site.
We managed the forty kilometres in two hours, and arrived screaming through Naushki. Drivers swore at us and I swore back. I pulled into the railway station, bottomed out in a puddle and landed flat on my bum. Chris ran inside to buy tickets.
I lay in a heap with the blood throbbing through my veins. A door slammed and Chris emerged. ‘The train is leaving in one minute. They won’t sell us tickets and the next train doesn’t leave for twenty-four hours. Bugger it!’ he growled.
Naushki was a seedy little place overrun by soldiers, drunks and local traders from Suchbaatar, the neighbouring town in Mongolia. With little choice, we spent the night in the station’s waiting room. After lying down, we were joined by eight Mongolians, all fighting for a piece of our sleeping mats. In the end I had a thirty centimetre portion and lay squeezed between a man who smelt of vodka, and a couple who wriggled closer and closer, elbowing me in the back.
Along with them came hordes of blowflies that crawled over the floor and onto my face. At 5 a.m. we were kicked out by a furious cleaning woman wielding a broom. At first she told the Mongolians to leave the ‘poor foreigners’ alone. But when I raised my sleepy head and she got a look at me, she ordered us out as well.
Several hours later the train arrived and we scrambled aboard. After convincing some very unhappy conductors, we squeezed the bikes into the narrow aisle. Once inside, I collapsed onto a bed. ‘Finally, it’s over,’ I whispered.
In transit I felt untouchable – the world lay beyond the thick glass. For a while I could truly relax … or at least I thought so.
‘All right, mate?’ said someone with a distinctly English accent. I rose from my dreary half-sleep to see a clean-cut man with a crisp, untainted backpack and a Lonely Planet guidebook.
———
The comfort and security of the train ride was short-lived. In half an hour or so we arrived at Suchbaatar. The encounter with the Englishman made me feel uncomfortable about myself – I too was ‘one of them’. Inevitably, I thought, we were foreigners, and to think we had turned native would just be kidding ourselves. In reality, I hadn’t worked for money in more than twelve months. Even living in the forest on four dollars a day had probably left us looking out of place and incomprehensibly rich. Our bikes, for starters, cost more than the average Russian wage for two years. How had the Russians really perceived us?
By the time the train doors opened, I was itching to slip back into our routine. I stepped out of the carriage and made my way across the tracks to the station platform. Before riding on, we would have to reassemble
our bags, which had been stripped off at the conductor’s demand. The sun had already set and I felt an urgency to get going before total darkness descended. I was nervous. I knew almost nothing about Mongolia. All we had was a very basic tourist map. We didn’t know the currency or a single word of Mongolian, and we weren’t even sure where Ulaan Baatar was.
There was a rush of activity on the platform as Chris dumped the rest of our bags down. It was already dark and the group of children had multiplied to a seething mass. I caught glimpses of shiny eyes and teeth in the glow of a distant streetlight.
We dragged our gear against a wall so that we wouldn’t be totally surrounded. After mistaking a prostitute for a money exchange woman, we eventually changed some Russian roubles for the Mongolian tugrug. Finally, we pushed the bikes into the darkness.
‘Which way is Ulaan Baatar?’ I asked Chris.
‘I don’t know … that way I guess,’ he said, pointing into the dark.
In an instant, the kids caught onto the idea. They rushed from behind and clung on, pushing and pulling. Some threw rocks, and I was peppered with gravel. ‘Where’s the bloody road?’ I yelled.
‘Shit, I don’t have a clue!’ Chris called, from somewhere ahead.
I was out of control – the kids were pushing me over bumps, rocks, a gutter, and suddenly towards oncoming headlights. I couldn’t stop, yet I couldn’t break free. In a last ditch effort I swung my arm violently to the right and hit something. The bike suddenly felt lighter, giving me the chance to break away. I realised that we were riding on a gravel surface. It must have been the main road, but there were no streetlights, and the few motorbikes that chugged by were blinding us with their headlamps.
‘Let’s find the edge of the road!’ I yelled, between breaths. A few more stones hit the road near our bikes, but soon we were in the outskirts.
We cycled until we hit a smooth surface and made for the ink-black sky and earth ahead. When the town lights were finally out of sight we pulled over and made camp.
As we retired for the night, I surrendered to the fact that we were merely tourists in Mongolia. The only thing we could know with certainty was our cycling routine. We were, in effect, just passing through; and I wasn’t sure that I liked it.
We woke to a miserable morning. The lack of forest seemed to let the clouds press close to the earth. A light rain fell, and it occurred to me that the narrow corridor between the overcast sky and the ground was liquefying. Something overnight had turned inexplicably stale between Chris and I, and I pedalled behind him without a word. It was close to freezing and I watched my bare kneecaps slowly turn pale blue in the wind. Ten minutes later the cold in my toes returned.
It was probably coincidental that cold weather had arrived on our first day in Mongolia, but the logical reason was that Mongolia is a large plateau sitting at an average altitude of 1600 metres. From here on we could expect colder temperatures from which there would be no escape until we dropped down to the plains near Beijing, 1600 kilometres ahead.
By the time I caught up with Chris my big toes were already numb. The frostbite from winter had left the tissue especially susceptible to another dose; I stamped around before putting on my heavy hiking boots. ‘I really can’t afford to risk frostbite again,’ I said. ‘My health is more important than getting to Beijing by bike. I’ll walk the rest if it means avoiding frozen toes!’
‘Yeah, well, there’s no way I’m not riding to Beijing!’ Chris snarled. He was already counting down the days.
Soon, I noticed a bizarre trend in the road signs. The numbers indicating kilometres travelled from the official starting point of the road were decreasing. After consulting our compass and map, we realised that we were three kilometres from the Russian border at Kyakta. We were heading back to Russia. True professionals, I thought, as we spun around and headed back towards Mongolia.
My spirits soon lifted. We crested a high saddle and before us the land panned out in a sublime, silky blanket of green. The clouds had begun to rise, revealing the treeless landscape and the smooth bitumen road that shrank into the distance. Mountains rose to high, rounded peaks. Time and erosion had mellowed the earth. The beauty wasn’t raw and spectacular, but all the same it was awe-inspiring. We rode down and up, saddle after saddle. When sunlight came gushing through a break in the clouds it was warm enough to remove my jacket. Then, as the misty white clouds rushed to fill the gap, I was cold again; such was the fragile balance. With this fragility came a heightened sensitivity to everything. I likened it to the feeling one gets atop a lofty mountain summit.
The only breaks in the view were tiny white flecks – ger tents scattered sparsely across the steppe. The ger is the traditional home of Mongolians. It is a round, collapsible tent made of felt and canvas. Tendrils of pale smoke rose from the gers, horses and sheep milled around. From this distance they looked like armies of grazing ants. There were few major scars to the earth – even the gers were impermanent. Several times I heard the muffled pounding of earth and turned to see a horseman galloping alongside. The men sat straight-backed and smiling while their horses chose the path. Their faces bore round prominent cheekbones and wide slanted eyes. Some wore velvet hats with a golden point rising well above the head. Most were wrapped in a long maroon felt cloak called a dele. Intricate decorations of silky ribbon lined the cuffs and seams, and they wore knee-high leather boots with similar decoration. All I could do was wave and smile back. Although I couldn’t communicate, I didn’t mind – it seemed to play into the hands of a country graced with simplicity.
What struck me most was the absence of fences. Come to think of it, the border had been the first real fence we had seen since the beginning of the journey. Without artificial boundaries, the natural lie of the land became clear. I rode a good distance behind Chris and went through much more film than usual. As the bike rolled smoothly along the slick surface, I raised my eyes so that neither the bike, my legs, nor the road was in sight: it felt like flying. Perhaps, I fantasised, we had entered a long forgotten kingdom in the clouds.
It rained almost without break for the next three days. The dampness and a growing exhaustion rubbed out the novelty of the landscape after two days. I sweated profusely beneath my raincoat but my toes still went numb. Although we had ridden approximately 8000 kilometres, and our legs had become stronger, I was acutely aware of each painful crank forward. Distance, it seemed, was undeniable. The land doesn’t lie, and there were definitely no shortcuts by bicycle. Like the hills that were the stumps of an ancient range, I felt worn to the bone. Even with the promise of the Internet in Ulaan Baatar, Chris was looking unusually sapped as well.
We had not had a real break for two months, and even then it had been minimal. We had lost a lot of weight on the Altai trip, and no matter how many bland meals we ate, putting it back on seemed beyond us. The exhaustion made me introspective for most of the time, making me feel guilty that we were not interacting with the people. During the entire ride to Ulaan Baatar we did not stop at a single ger.
I felt full of experiences from Russia and unable to face a new language and culture. Russia had been the focus of our journey. Now that the intense battle was over, we were limping towards the finish line. More than anything I just wanted to rest, to lie down on a bed and sleep until tiredness evaporated.
We began ascending higher than we ever had; sometimes it was as much as 1000 metres before we plummeted into one of the countless valleys. We passed in the shadow of spectacular peaks encrusted with rocky outcrops. Each saddle was marginally higher than the last, and in this way we progressively rose higher. The road seemed long and unending.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, a couple of sumo-wrestling-sized men with frankfurt-thick fingers waved us over to their hut. I was disappointed that they weren’t living in a ger but a rusty train carriage. With pride they showed us how to slaughter sheep by hand, the Mongolian way. We were obliged to take part in ripping the skin from the carcass and squeezing the faeces from
the intestines. Later, in the grimy inside of the carriage, we ate fresh fatty mutton in fist-sized chunks. The infernal buzz of blowflies was relentless as the men slurped and gnawed away at the bones and sinewy pieces of flesh. Their equally big wives shared chunks of meat with their three-year-old daughters. They tore the flesh apart like lions sharing prey with their young. The rain had eased in the morning and been replaced by a blue sky and baking hot sun. I didn’t want to ride in the heat, but the thought of spending more time in the carriage made my stomach churn.
In the evening, my bouts of diarrhoea began. Long after dinner, the violent convulsions in my digestive system calmed and I crawled sedately into my sleeping bag. Through the fly-netting of the tent door I gazed at the spectacle of a starry sky. Taking deep breaths, I felt my leg muscles loosen in the warmth of the puffy down, their job over for the day.
As though from a great distance, somebody began to sing. I held my breath and listened. It was a woman’s voice. Gradually it became louder, and with it came the rhythmic pounding of earth: she was riding a horse. Her shrill, high tones trailed and echoed clearly across the valley in the still cool air. Although I couldn’t see her, I imagined long flailing hair and a loosely fitted dele that flapped like a royal robe. The sounds came frighteningly close to our tent before veering away and petering out into the night. For me it was a surreal touch to a world that was already fantastic. Just before zipping up the tent, I was stunned by a momentary flash in the sky: a shooting star. It was moments like this, I thought, that re-kindled the motivation and energy to go on.
Off The Rails Page 26