Tyumen. Enter Oks, an interior designer and a friend of Boris and Masha's from Yekaterinburg but originally from Nizhny Tagil, a former closed city in the Urals and now a bit of a rough spot with a large ex-prison population. She lives with Anja, who works as an accountant and is also from Nizhny.
Oks loves travelling, cycling, snowboarding and immersing herself in the sweet mist of a waterpipe while day dreaming, recollecting past experiences, reading a book or enjoying the company of friends. Oks likes Nabokov, a master wordsmith and dislikes Tolstoy, because he preaches the reader. One evening Anja, Oks and I go to a lake near Tyumen. We catch sight of a swimming nutria, we drink sweet wine and tea and the girls smoke. A tattooed drunkard in swimming trunks invites me to see arctic bears and to ride on his watercraft. As darkness sets in, the mosquitoes and the drunks disappear, the moon looks at herself on the water and we improvise haikus. Suddenly a car pulls in by the shore and 3 beautiful and wild girls jump into the cold water, they jiggle, they dance and leave as suddenly as they have arrived.
Tyumen is a very pleasant and clean city, with many tree-lined streets, well preserved historical buildings and well arranged flowers on the pavement. Oks shows me great examples of classic wooden architecture, derelict dachas by the river, an amusement park, the refurbished riverside esplanade and the best ice cream stalls.
The day I leave Tyumen is very hot. Having read accounts of earlier intrepid cyclists in these lands, I'm dreading the attacks of the vicious horse flies and the infamous Siberian mosquitoes but I'm lucky and I don't have any significant problems to report. In fact, insects have been worse in European Russia in June and July. Perhaps the season is now over as nights are getting nippy.
After Tyumen the landscape presents a mixture of fields, forests, meadows with cows and stacks of hay. As I get closer to Omsk, the marshes increase and you can see many interesting birds here. The day I arrive in Osmk is cold and wet and after the rain, I make the acquaintance of some rather large mosquitoes.
I sleep in my tent every night from Tyumen to Omsk. With (often dreadful) hotels a long distance apart, stunning scenery, mosquitoes not being a big problem and many cozy spots to choose from, camping seems to be the sensible thing to do.
On the fourth day after Tyumen I bump into Hans, a Dutch biker returning from Mongolia. He tells me about a French woman cycling to Mongolia, but he doesn't know where she might be. Later, I meet some Turkish lorry drivers going from Samsun to Krasnoyarsk. One of them, Achmed, speaks Italian and has seen the French cyclist some 10 kms back, near Ishim. I decide to wait for a couple of hours to salute this courageous tourist but no one comes and decide to move on.
Traffic gets quite heavy 100 kms or so before reaching Omsk, the former capital of Siberia and of White Russia.
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