Altay mountains

In Byisk a kid on a bicycle leads me to Trial Sport, where I'm welcome by very friendly staff. They're all into cycling or some type of outdoor sport and they help me with the bike, give me a discount on my purchases, feed me, let me use their computer and make me feel very welcome. As I'm cycling alone I cherish these moments of human warmth and friendship. One of them, Serguey, invites me to have a banya and spend the night with a friend of his. It's almost 7 in the evening and getting late for camping and an invitation for banya is irresistible. Serguey leads me to Timofey's house.

Timofey lives in a wooden house with his wife Lena. He's 38 and owns a small stall where he sells clothes and in his spare time, he paints and loves going to Altay to fish, hike or camp. He's also very religious. He takes me to his local church, gives me a stripey Saint Petersburg sailor shirt, an amulet, a jar of honey, some cucumbers and tomatoes. Finally, he gives me his blessings for the road. 

After over 2,000 kms of flatness and insects, the Altay mountains are a welcome sight to sore eyes. Traffic is very light after Gorno-Altaysk. Mountains, forests, rivers, sun, light traffic and excellent roads make this part of Altay a cycling paradise and a magnet for Russian touristsm who often camp by the side of the road. As the flatness becomes mountain, Russian faces give place to more and more Asiatic faces.

Shortly before Chemal I meet a very interesting character who gives me two thumbs up as cycle past him. He's in his 60s or 70s, is wearing a hat and a blazer and looks like a dandy. Something tells me to stop and we strike a conversation. Alexey is in his 60s or early 70s and is a self proclaimed cowboy and an excellent artist. Alexey brings me vodka, food and cigarettes and he talks about Goya. He takes me to his ramshackle house to show me strikingly beautiful wood carvings that contain traditional Russian and Altay motives and some that are interpretations of Greek myths. I'm very inspired!

After Chemal, tourists are rare. As I'm sitting by a river for a rest and absorbing the paradisical beauty around me I witness a gruesome episode. A Rusian lorry honks the horn to ward off sheep on the road but the aniamls don't move fast enough and the lorry runs them over. In total, 9 sheep dead or half dead with blood and guts spilling out bring an end to this paradisical instant. I'm shocked.

Wild camping becomes more difficult as there always seems to be someone wherever I go. One evening is a fisherman, another is a logger's camp, etc. One time, I find a really good place where the grass has been cut, but as I carry my bicycle there, I find a group of about 6 people making stacks of hay. I'm too tired to move somewhere else so I just ask for permission to sleep there, to which they have no objetction. As the sun sets, the farmers put their tools down and withdraw but across the road, 700 metres away, the loggers are still busy working and I can hear them well into the night and I wonder why they'd be working when it's quite dark. The following day I understand why the loggers were so busy. A lorry is liying on its side with trees spilling on the ground. There's ice on my tent and I'm really cold but the other side of the mountain is hit by sun light so I go there to inspect the accident, make some time and wait until the sun hits my tent and I can get ready to go. One of the guys who was cutting grass the day before comes to talk to me. I don't understand very much but I guess one lesson to take away would be 'you have to make hay while the sun is shining'.

One evening I follow a small track to a place where the trees have been chopped. In the night, I'm startled by the sound of plastic bags and pots outside of my tent. Some dogs have managed to stick their head under the porch of the tent and are scavenging for food in my bags. A few stones send them packing. In the morning, a car is coming up the track. The driver and the passenger get off and invite me for breakfast at their cottage at the end of the track. Crossing a creek trickling down from the mountain, I reach a Russian wooden house and next to it, a traditional Altay construction which resembles a ger in shape but it's made of wood and has pointier ceiling. My hosts are a very hospitable Altay family who give me an excellent breakfast and a bag of a very bitter cheese that that for some reason clogs my throat.

In Aktash, I meet some friends's of Tima's. Jane teaches English at school and his husband is a road engineer. They have a 5 year old son who wants to be a tourist when he grows up and is completely fascinated by Spiderman and my bicycle. Between Aktash and Kos Agach, the landscape starts changing. Kos Agach is a dusty town on the flat and dusty steppe, surrounded by mountains. Many people here are ethnic Kazakhs.

30 kms after Kos-Agach, I meet Ondrej and Hana, the Czech guys, who're camping 200 metres away from the road. The following day I notice we're surrounded by a multitude of large grasshoppers with the ability to fly, have black wings and make a very peculiar noise. After 20 kms we reach Tashanta, a shabby Kazakh town on the border with Mongolia.