U-turn

Quick post. Shortly before Novosibirsk the Czech guys and I go separate ways. Novosibirsk is the third biggest city in Russia and sits exactly in the middle of the country. The local studies museum has a small section on shamanism with explanations in Russian language only. Coincidentally, in the same venue there's special Marc Chagall exhibition. Chagall is one of my favourite painters.

After one day, I hit the road again in direction to Krasnoyarsk. Camping proves stressful as mosquitoes and small flies are plentiful. In fact there are so many flies that it sounds like it's raining flies under my hoodie. It's time to reassess my situation. I have 2,400 kms from this point to the Mongolian border via Krasnoyarks and Irkutsk. I must enter Mongolia before the 2nd of September. That means I have to do 100 kms a day without any rest and without any time for unpredictable events, such as mechanical problems or heavy rain. And I'm fed up with the insects. It might be like this all the way to lake Baikal. On the other hand, I could return to Novosibirsk and enter Mongolia through the Altay mountains. No mosquitoes in the mountains, but it involves 1,400 kms of unpaved roads in Mongolia. I don't know if my bike can take it but it's worth trying. More time in Mongolia and less time in Russia.

In Ojac I take an 'electrichka' train back to Novosibirsk. While waiting at the train station, I meet a man who loves football and gives me a bag full of cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers from his dacha and helps me get the bike on the train. I sit next to his neighbour, lovely Valentina, from the Ukraine, in her 50s and who, before getting off, makes sure our neighbour passenger agress to help me in Novosibirsk. This time, I stay with Serguey in Academgorod. Academgorod is the 'Sillicon valley' of Siberia and Serguey is a C++ developer from Yakutia and a keen cyclist. He's going to Crime on a cycling tour this September. Serguey finds it amusing that I think mosquitoes are too much. In Yakutia they're much worse. Serguey loves Russia and dislikes people who want to leave their country. He loves the fact that people are self reliant, can fix things themselves and  they fix things themselves. He believes in science and walks everywhere. And he walks fast! Serguey helps me find a dentist (this time is final), a hairdresser and a good bike shop where I buy 20 inch BMX tires.

Greta Garbo and Zinedine Zidane

In Omsk, my host is Pasha, a 42-year old Russian hindu who works as TV producer and also owns a small business that installs alarm systems on cars. Pasha looks much younger than his age, does a lot of work-out and yoga and follows dietary advice from his guru in India. Pasha is very spiritual and finds wisdom and inspiration in different religious traditions from around the world. When he was a child, Pasha's teacher at school told him that the Russian cosmonauts had gone to 'heaven' and had not found God. Pasha reported this to his grandmother, who was a very devout Orthodox, and she replied 'they need to go higher!'. Pasha explains to me a theory by which a new race of people will be born out of Omsk to be stewards of a better and more environmentally friendly world. We go on a very long tour of Omsk on Pasha's four wheel vehicle. I'm afraid it might be rude of me to tell him that I'm (car) sick after five minutes so we get on with our our bouncy expedition, which, Pasha being a big fan of recent architecture, includes many modern buildings, and that makes me even more sick. After four or five hours I suggest that we stop to eat and call it a day but Pasha responds that he doesn't need to eat.

At the local bike shop I meet Alosha and Vova, two members of the cycling club in Omsk who invite me to join them for their daily ride with fellow club members, two of which carry huge home made ghetto blasters attached to their sturdy downhill bikes. I'm in bike heaven! Everyone is very curious about my bicycle and I learn that any kind of cycling is considered an 'extreme' sport in Russia. The next day, Vova, Alosha and Timur escort me out of Omsk!

Two days after Omsk, a man at a cafe tells me that he has seen two cyclists pass by an hour earlier. After a month and a half of not seeing a single long distance cycling tourist (except for the Ukrainian guy with the one pedal bike), I want to say hello to these guys so I set out to catch up with them. After a few hours and asking a few people I can't find them, so I figure they're either hidden in a cafe or they are in Tatarsk. Not long after leaving Tatar behind I see the unmistakable shape of touring cyclists on my mirror! My surprise and joy are double because these are none other than Zinedine Zidane and Greta Garbo!

Zinedine and Greta are in reality 28-year-old married Ondre and Hana and they're cycling from the Czech republic to Mongolia and after that they will fly to South East Asia where they will continue their one year grand tour before returning to their country, settle down and resume their normal lifes, Ondre as an architect and Hana as a translator!

The same day we bump into Markus and Markus, two brothers in law from Corinthia, Austria, who're participating in the Mongolian charity rally and driving a small Daewoo car across central Asia into Mongolia. We decide to all camp together. After many perfect wild camping nights the mosquitoes are very numerous and aggressive. Hordes of mosquitoes while camping will become a permanent feature between Omsk and Novosibirsk. An open fire improves things. The Austrians are complaining that going to the toilet in the forest is very painful but Hana braves the insects and takes a cold shower. The rest of us drink pepper vodka, Russian beer and home-made Austrian schnapps.

These are great days of companionship, laughter, mosquito fighting, quick dips into rivers, ice creams and roasted bread. As we get closer to Novisibirsk days are getting hotter and wetter. The day we reach swampy Barabinsk, it's sweltering, wet and hazy. It all looks unreal.

More sketches

Here.

Tyumen to Omsk

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.

Beavis and Butthead

Lots of new photos here. In the centre of Yekaterinburg there is a statue that local teenagers doing stunts on their BMX bikes and skateboards call Beavis and Butthead. They represent Tatischiev and de Gennin, who founded the city in 1723. Yekaterinburg is situated in Asia and is the capital of the Urals.

My hosts are waiting for me by the Ford dealership. Boris and Masha are a couple in their mid twenties. Boris owns an on-line shop selling home appliances and Masha is a secretary at a software development company. They're both outdoor pursuit enthusiasts and love snow-boarding and cycling-touring (but have only done it abroad). Last year they went on a bike tour in Turkey and they're planning a month long adventure in China in september.

President Mevdeyev of Russia and Angela Merkel of Germany are in town, which means I am able to take hot showers. In the summer time the local government often switches off the water to carry out repairs.

Boris and Masha finally shed some light on the mystery of the evenly spaced cracks on the Russian roads. In the old days, some roads were made using concrete slabs. When it's too expensive to rebuild the road from scratch, the concrete is covered with asphalt while the gaps between the slabs remain.

The day after I arrive, Boris and I go for a walk by the river, we talk about extreme sports teenagers, snowboarding, Lenin, cars as status symbols, oligarchs and economics. When I mention to Boris that I found Kungur to be beautiful yet rundown, he concludes that in Kungur they still l believe to live in Soviet times and don't understand that: 'something does not come from nothing'. It's hot and we want a beer, we spot a cafe but two guys napping under the canopy tells us the bar is out of order.  Masha joins us after work. First we eat exquisite homemade pirogi, followed by a couple of pints and Beatles music at an underground bar suitably called Yellow Submarine. We end the night at a fancy cocktail bar to bid farewell to Cyril, a friend of Boris and Masha's who's moving to Moscow. There I meet other friends, including a young woman who has just returned from cruising in the French Riviera and Maxim, an extrovert and witty engineer and entrepreneur, who sells porous aluminum and LED lamps for industrial uses and has traveled extensively in Europe. Maxim gives us a lift home on his car and takes a scenic route via the most outstanding architecture of Yekaterinburg. Amidst charming old wooden building, a new city is emerging. Construction is everywhere, flashy skyscrapers and luxury shops are popping up on every corner. But for Masha, modern architecture has no soul.

The following day Masha and I are heading for a jazz concert in the park but end up sidetracked by a crowd at the Church on the Blood. This church was built recently on the site were the Czar Nicholas II and his family were kept captive before they were executed by the Bolsheviks on the 17 of July of 1918. Nicholas and his family have been canonized by the Orthodox church and many believers are here to pay their respects, mourn and pray on the anniversary of their deaths. A choir sings lovely tunes and the mass ends with moving and delicately beautiful bell music. There are some cossacks from the Ukraine but most of the attendees hail from villages from around Russia and beyond and eat pirogi (stuffed buns) and drink kvaz (fermented bread drink).

On the way to Tyumen I gradually loose the mountains as I approach the flatlands of Siberia. Swamps and marshes become more numerous and so do the insects. Clouds of tiny black flies flash mob around my face when I make a stop. The forest is merrily brimming with flowers. It's berry season and punters sell wild berries by the road. One night, I find what seems to be a perfect spot for wild camping, the grass trimmed, hidden by the trees, close to a cafe and a banya... but close to a swamp also. My tent is visited by frogs and a critical mass of mosquitoes.

On a hot and sweaty day I arrive in Tyumen.

Opera at the former Gulag prison

 Shortly before Perm the clock jumps two hours forward. Perm is an industrial city of around one million inhabitants in the heart of the Urals. My host is Albina, a Tatar woman of 26. She works as a project manager for an international venture carrying out an urban regeneration project on the former grounds of the derelict Porm Pert on the river Kama. 

Albina is having a few days off and shows me around Perm. We visit the excellent Art Gallery, which houses a remarkable collection of predominantly, but not only, Russian art, including icons and religious wooden sculptures. Outside of the museum, elderly people dance merrily to the tunes of an energetic blonde singer. It's Friendship and Love day and is hot. We go on a cruise on the Kama river. The boat is packed with celebrating Russians having picnics, drinking and dancing. Later in the evening, we join Albina's colleagues at a 'banya' next to the Kama river. Marek, Albina's boss from the Czech republic, tells me about the history of the country and extolls the virtues of Russian women.

Next day we go to see Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera performed within the former Gulag prison for political prisoners, Perm 36. After the perforamce we meet for dinner with Anastasia, who works at the Perm Opera and a group of German holidaymakers. They are Fabian, a lawyer at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Dorothea and Anna, both working in Georgia for GTZ, a German International cooperation organisation and a fourth person whose name I can't remember and is an engineer working on a project to turn C02 into petrol. 

Next day I continue to Kungur, a beautiful yet somehow rundown city sandwiched betwen the Iren and Sylva rivers. My host Roman is away for work and I'm welcome by his charming and hospitable girlfriend Mariana. While I visit the ice caves, it starts raining cats and dogs and decide to stay another day. Mariana shows me all the landmarks and architecture of note, including an art déco wooden house out of a fairy tale. Crowds of teenagers hang out in the parks. 

The following day is cold, my stomach is upset and I don't feel like wild camping. In Acit, they tell me the next hotel is 40 kms away but I've already cycled 110 kms and it's 10 in the evening. I inquire about accommodation alternatives and Igor, a paramedic of the Catastrophic Medicine unit, offers me a bunk bed in a trailer. Igor looks like a Lenin who's realised that communism is not worthwhile after all, has shaved and decided to go pleasure sailing. The next morning, Igor shows me a brown bear in a cage next to the café. The bear was caught as a cub in the forest. Igor tells me that he earns $200 per month, that politics are boring, that his real profession is pilot and wants to buy a second-hand autogiro.

Two days later I arrive in Yekaterinburg. 10 kms or so before Yekaterinburg there's a monument and a café that mark the border Europe and Asia. Asia is represented by a dragon, and the European side by a rooster.

More photos

See more photos here.