Archive for August, 2009

Osh, Day 11 (740km)

The Abdirahmanov dynasty are a well known family in this part of the world. They have the third biggest flock in the region, enjoy luxuries like jam with their bread and live well for nomads. They have a crystal white yurt, the interior covered with Shydraks (felt rugs), carved wooden doors and fur lined clothes. After a long day of shepherding, milking around the family yurts, the sun began to set over the jailoo once more and a boy mounted a horse to fetch the herds from the high pastures. I was keen to help after failing so miserably at milking a mare and proving I was physically uncapable of hauling water from the nearby stream at this altitude and so volunteered to go along to help.

The family seemed quite surprised at my request; why would i want to go and fetch the sheep, it was a job for boys! Eventually they agreed though and a horse was saddled for me. Yet it seemed that i hadn’t volunteered to help, but infact volunteered to fetch the sheep.

‘But i don’t know how to round up sheep’ I complained. ‘I also don’t know where the sheep are, how many of them there should be and which ones are yours’.

Sultan was quick to dismiss my concerns ‘You will know. Don’t worry’ with which he pointed up the mountain side in the direction of the sheep. I trotted off into the hills for a baptism of fire in shepherding sheep with a lame horse (a bad workman blames his tools).

The sheep safely in their pen for the night and the clouds turning pink over the lake, Sultan showed me the marks and wounds on the horses from wolf attacks only a week before. As a precaution now he sets chinese fire crackers off every night, throwing them overarm into the distance which reverberate around the quiet valley. We light gas lamps around the pen to further discourage Mr. Wolf from having a shashlyk party and go to sleep once more in the yurt.

From Song Kol it was a 400km slog over an awful road to the Uzbek town of Osh. Upon finally reaching tarmac after riding on appauling gravel roads, i found myself averaging over 35kph due to the ease of my new passage. I now sit at the head of the Pamir Highway which i expect to complete by early september. Expect the next excert from the town of Khorog, at the end of the highway and the Wakhan Afghan valley. With the grace of god the 4500m passes will be beaten, as they say in these parts inshallah.

See you in a fortnight!

2009
08/17
CATEGORY
The Pamirs
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Song Kol, Day 7 (369km)

I left my riverside camp beside Sary Bulak village with tired legs and the knowledge that within 50km i would arrive at the prize of Song Kol; a beautiful lake set amongst rolling pastures and summer jailoos (high altitude summer grazing). Within a few hours I would be camped up beside the lake with my book, a beautiful selection of salamis and cheese from the bazaar in Kochkor and go for a swim; i even had purchased a cigar for the occasion. The previous day had been surprisingly reassuring as i had entered the central Tian Shen mountain range and covered nearly 100km without too many problems

Sary Bulak is a village constructed from chinese sea containers, a common sight in cetral Krygyzstan, made only to serve the road and serving tired travellers greasy mutton and the occasional stale snickers bar. Snickers bar in mouth i begun the 50km climb away from the tarmac on a corrugated road, past glacial streams and away from the connected world for a week or two.

By mid afternoon i had climbed only 39km, i had left the camp at 8am. My average speed had reduced to 8kph and I was seriously starting to doubt whether i had the power to go on. I started to push my bike solemnly along the road , through the dust and felt once again thouroughly miserable.

Spitting blood and now struggling to push my bike along the dirt road, I saw a crest in the road; i had now been climbing solidly for 43km, it could well be the end of my ordeal, perhaps I had finally broken the 3400m pass to reach the Jailoo and lake. From the horizon a european party came into view on a horse tour. The lead rider could well have been Camilla Parker-Bowles and was trotting along with an authority as if she was performing for the crowds at horse guards parade. She didn’t so much as flick me a coursery glance as i administer myself CPR in the dirt for the tenth succesive time in the last kilometre. From the depths of my good nature i managed to muster a ‘Afternoon’ from the depths of my lungs, it was reciprocated with seeming surprise and shock as the women looked down from the side of her horse. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed me on a lowly bicycle, while she was riding on a fine nomadic steed and enjoying her cultural experience.

‘I don’t spose you could tell me how many more kilometres it is to the lake could you?’

‘WHAT?!’

‘How many kilometres is the lake?’

‘How should i know? I’m riding a horse.’

‘But surely you must have been riding for a period of time, and cover on average an average number of kilometres. So how many hours have you been riding?’

‘In which case… 30 kilometres. Have a nice ride.’ With which she rode off down the pass and was followed my a number of snotty girls, probably named Florence, Tibby, Tabby and studying theology at the University of Durham.

I sat by the side of the road in a state of panic and shed a tear. I ate my last fruitella from home and begun to plot my suicide. In the distance the smoke plume from a Lada fighting its way valiently up the pass came into view and i watched it in a slight daze as if it was a mirage. The krygyz driver passed me, honked his horn and came to a screaming halt. Moustache on lip and gold teeth glistening in his mouth he started to babble on in Russian and offered me a drink of vodka. Then he danced around my corpse with a camera phone and posed for various pictures with my bicycle . He was about to jump on his car when i mustered some enegry.

‘Pass. Pass. Kilometre?’ I demanded making a mountain shape with my dirty hands. The driver held up three fingers. Fuck. That meant thirty kilometres. The English horse ridey lady wasn’t as thick as she looked.

‘Thirty Kilometres?’

‘Nyet Nyet Nyet.’ He held up three figures again ‘Metres’.

I looked at the ridge infront of me and suspiciously pushed the next thirty metres passed the snow in the road. In the near distance Song Kol glistened from the near distance, surrounded by rolling meadows and surrounded by small yurt camps and large flocks. I was at 3400m and suddenly my energy seemed to have returned to my body. Again i was the powerful adventurous cyclist, not the tearful, lost, amatuer I once was.

Flying through the meadows i narrowly avoid running over a number of marmots, which stand on their hind legs whistling as they dart through the grass. I finally reach the lakeshore and camp up.

The weather is glorious and i am surrounded by snow capped peaks, as the sun slowly turns pink on the horizon. I am about to plunge myself into the icy waters when a boy on a horse arrives by my side.

‘Hey you English man. You’ll stay with me tonight’

‘Where?’

He points towards a perfect white yurt camp sitting up on the campsite. ‘We have sheep to eat’. I’m persuaded. It looks like i’m staying with Sultan’s family. This should be an experience. I pack up my things and merrily push the bike upthe hillside.His grand father waits for Sultan’s return, looking though a pair of Soviet binoculars, while resting on his staff. ‘Salaam Aleikum’, he is quite forceful, it’s time for a good hearty dinner.

2009
08/15
CATEGORY
The Pamirs
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Issyk Kol, Day 3 (178km)

Approach a Krygyzstani and inevitably they’ll ask if you’ve vistied their great lake Issyk Kol, and inevitably you’ll respond ‘No. I’m just here to head for the Pamir highway’.

‘Oh you must visit Issyk Kol’ they’ll volunteer, so it seemed a logical thing to do, to haul myself and my bike 180km east of my axis of travel in order to see a pond on the sole basis that it stimulates so much national pride and joy in its people. So instead of turning south towards the highway on a fine summers day in Bishkek i began my journey through the industrialised heavily Russified north. I weaved my way through fields of barley and wheat, and alongside the sinister red and white striped chimneys sinonomous with any cold war film and the USSR, heavily laden I was shadowed by the Ile Alatau range seperating me from the Kazakh border.

I made the first 50km with considerable ease. I even started to think that the whole Pamir lark would be abit of a doddle; i was obviously in far better physical shape than I had expected. But eventually what began to wear me down was the constant drone from every car, and every roadside cafe playing re-runs of the Eurovision song contest. I must here Alexander Rybak’s musical masterpiece ‘Fairytale’ around a thousand times, and crash the bike a couple of times because my fingers are stuffed in my ears instead of on the handle bars and a couple more times because i am air-fiddling along to the wretched chorus without any physical control. Or perhaps it was the constant rain and headwind that did it coming from the North, but by 94km my moving average had reduced to around 7kmh and so i camped up by the side of the road damp and tired.

The next day the mountains which had been on the horizon for a day came closer and brought me more and more horizontal rain. I started to feel quite down about having to cycle to Dushanbe. Hauling my way up the gradually rolling inclines, i decided that Bob Dylan’s ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ was a suitable motivational tune for my ipod and while droning along to this somber tune at a petrol station, sitting out another flash storm, the poorest looking man i have ever seen in my life walked up to me and dropped me a 20 com note. I really must look a terrible starte to be given 20 som ($0.50!) by a complete stranger so decide to buck up my ideas. I jump straight onto my bike and power along through the rain to ‘Highway to Hell’.

Finally the concrete beach resort of Balychy came into view. It’s the kind of place where John Le Carre would set some sort of spy mystery; the hero meeting the villian in a soviet beach hut, while all around the grey beach is deserted bar a donkey and a pack of dogs. It must have been grim to have been a Russia and still grim to be Krygyz on holiday here, so seeing as i’m neither i push my way through around 4km of marsh and swamp land to set up camp on the lakes shore.

I’m wet tired and can’t even motivate myself to take a dip in the second biggest alpine lake in the world. I slip into my bed as another storm rolls in and sit inside my tent singing loudly to myself to try and drown at the pitter patter of rain on the canvas. At some point i wake up and walk outside; it seems it might well be morning again. Behind my tiny tent, the mighty Tian Shan range which runs all the way into China, is glistening with snow and the lake is blue and calm. Even Balychy’s concrete starts to look a little bit appealing as a flotilla of boats drift into view. I hop skip and jump into the lake for a dip and the world is a better place. The Pamirs will be a doddle after all.

2009
08/14
CATEGORY
The Pamirs
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Bishkek. Day 0 (0km)

Bishkek is a city with an identity crisis. Its wide Soviet boulevards are lined with the concrete of the USSR and its soldiers sport cold war wide brimmed caps as they indiscriminately stop Ladas in the street.

I decide to pay a visit to the museum in the suitably named ‘Freedom Square’ to find that nobody bothered to inform the curator about the end of the red revoloution, so as I move from room to room in complete silence and semi-darkness, I find myself admiring statues acting out the great proletariat revoloution. I wonder outside to find myself in the centre of a big sandstorm blowing in from the Kazakh steppe and so return inside to view a film on the peoples of the motherland and the happiness of all their lives. The final and perhaps clearest legacy of the Russians has to be the quality of the toilet paper. It’s apparently sent to all CIS members by the devil himself (perhaps Stalin) and sandpaper compares favourably. Samples are in the post to all of you who joined my fan club.

It’s only when the sandstorm clears that things start becoming a little clearer. Someone has scrawled across the forty food high statue of Lenin which stands proudly in the city ‘Michael Jackson not dead’, but its the mountains of the Tien Shen range which surround Bishkek which dwarf this monument and any legacy of the USSR which is impressive in this sea of grey blocks. The peaks stand glowing white to the south of the capital, running all the way into Western China, and it’s the sino influence which is most important here despite Stalin’s best efforts.

I’m waiting for a Tajik visa and hence am stuck in this Soviet nightmare, while the beaurocrats of Central Asia flex their muscles in a way which former soviet banana republics only can. I’ll get on my bike and head for the hills tomorrow.

2009
08/02
CATEGORY
The Pamirs
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