Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Well, just let me think.' He scratched his head and glanced at me with a twinkle
in his eye. 'That's right, the gear changer snapped off a few days ago, then yes-
terday I had a little problem when the entire bike snapped in half, but nothing too
serious. How about you?'
'Wow!' I said, impressed. 'I had a couple of flats and my handlebars came a
bit loose a few days ago, but …' I paused for a moment. Tim was struggling to
keep from laughing, but it was useless. A grin erupted from somewhere beneath
his beard and a moment later we both cracked up laughing.
After a week apart, it really was great to see Tim again. I'd missed his company
more than I thought I would. I'd enjoyed the freedom to ride in uninterrupted con-
templation, to think and ponder the world for hours on end. And I'd also needed to
get away from everything about him that annoyed me, but I'd missed his company
all the same. I'd missed sitting under the stars by the campfire and chatting about
the world and our respective futures. I'd missed hearing his unique comments and
ideas, some of which irritated me to distraction, but most of which intrigued me as
a very different way of seeing the world.
I got the fire going and put some water on the boil. Then Tim showed me the
jagged, brutal-looking weld line across the frame of his bike and the way that he'd
rigged up his broken gear changer. I was impressed at how well he'd managed to
pull through in the face of such disasters; and I could see that as casual as he was
being about it all, he was proud of himself.
We sat by the campfire well into the evening, catching up and laughing at the
confusion we'd caused in the villages as we passed through a day apart. One group
of kids I'd met in the village of Kotchki had got it into their heads that I was in-
volved in a long-distance bicycle race from Moscow to China. When they saw Tim
roll in the next day they had urged him to pedal faster: 'C'mon, hurry up! The first
guy's only a day ahead of you!'
———
The next day we rolled into Novosibirsk to meet Nina Koptyug, the lady who was
to be our host for the week. Nina and her husband Ivan were academics. She was
a professor of English and Ivan a physicist. They lived with their daughters in the
suburb of Akademgorodok, or 'Academy Township', which in its heyday had been
a driving force behind Soviet science and technology. At its peak, the township
housed up to 65 000 of the USSR's top scientists and their families; Nina and Ivan
were children of the very cream of this intellectual stock. Nina's father had been the
director of one of the institutions and had moved on to become a member of an elite
