Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lage was unmarked, of course. 'Then take a left, then a right, then go about two
kilometres around the village until you see a little track going off to the right past
an old shed.' I nodded and Tim looked at me to make sure I'd got it. 'Then you
just head east for about fifteen kilometres. The track doesn't continue, but there's
quite a few other tracks out there on the steppe, so good luck!' We shook hands and
began to move off. 'Oh, by the way,' the man said, 'where are you going?'
'To China!' Tim replied, brightly.
The man snorted derisively again, checked himself and laughed. He walked
back towards his huge machine muttering to himself. Probably evil things about
stupid, crazy Australians.
Halfway to Ribinsk a huge cloudbank appeared on the horizon. By the time
we'd reached the turnoff it was pouring. The hard clay track had become perilously
slippery and to make matters worse, there were a dozen people sheltering from the
downpour under the old shed that we'd been instructed to keep an eye out for.
I slipped in the mud and fell first, rather than Tim, for a change. The onlookers
who had been staring at us agape cracked up laughing. Tim looked round to see
what they were laughing at and he came down, too. The laughter doubled, then it
doubled again as we struggled to our feet, smeared in red, claggy muck. The shed
was about seventy metres away, just too close to comfortably ignore the audience. I
slipped over again and swore. I looked over at Tim and noticed that he was actually
having fun.
'We should go over and charge them five roubles a head for the show!' he sug-
gested, happily. My foul mood gave way in the face of Tim's good spirits and I
laughed, too. That'd be about right, I thought ruefully. Tim's always more comfort-
able being covered in dirt and muck than I am …
We slipped over a dozen more times before the audience started getting bored.
The road was now sticking to our tyres, and our mudguards and brakes were so
jammed with gunk that the wheels wouldn't turn. We made slow progress, stopping
every five minutes to scrape away the mud with sticks but, luckily, the rain didn't
last long and the road eventually dried out.
The next day the real fun started. The track we'd been following petered out
completely and left us facing a broad, flat plain. We followed a cattle pad through
some long grass for a few hundred metres then climbed a low ridge and took a good
look out over the surrounds.
The view was the most expansive we'd seen for months. Looking north, I could
still make out regular clumps of birch forest scattering the plain. Looking south,
