Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was this railway that had sparked my first dreams of Russia. The
BAM
was
fundamental to the journey for me, and I wanted to make the most of it.
———
We rolled into Taishet in the middle of the morning a few days later and, as
usual, we caused a bit of a stir. Cars veered onto the opposite side of the road as
drivers turned to gawk over their shoulders. Kids yelled and pointed and the elderly
stopped to shake their heads in disbelief as we pedalled by.
We rolled down the main street until we found a park sporting a rusty but im-
posing Soviet tank with the nozzle of its cannon pointing high into the air. We
investigated the tank for a time while a group of teenage cyclists on well-loved
and heavily-patched bikes spied on us from a distance. All around the tank lay
shattered glass and litter. The sides were streaked with crude graffiti and white bird
crap. From inside came a concoction of very nasty smells. It seemed strange that
a people who lusted so strongly for the 'good old days' of communism had let an
icon of Soviet power decline so drastically. I wondered if the defacement of the
tank had occurred only in the past decade or whether, isolated so many thousands
of kilometres from Moscow, the people here had never paid much attention to the
grandeur of the Soviet war machine.
We turned our attention to the group of kids circling us at a distance. They were
moving gradually closer, and one of them looked as though he was plucking up the
courage to come over and find out who and what we were. Their hesitation disap-
peared once they realised that we could speak Russian. The usual questions pro-
gressed to general questions about the bikes and a good deal of awestruck pointing
at our racks of Shimano gears.
A few kids escorted Tim to the market, while I found a slab of wood and sat,
minding our bikes and chatting to two boys. They were both mad-keen cyclists and
spent every minute, when they weren't at school, riding. They offered to escort us
out of town later that day and we willingly followed them along a rough, bouncy
track that served as a shortcut. We stopped in a village to fill up at a hand-pumped
well, and as we headed back onto the road, I begun to hear an ominous clicking
coming from somewhere underneath me.
I investigated and was surprised to discover that my rear hub had come loose.
I'd checked and tightened it only a few days before. The clicking noise was prob-
ably the sound of the ball bearings and the inside of the hub starting to disintegrate.
This was a lesson that I'd learned well on my trip around Australia - ignore the
sound of a self-destructing hub at your peril. So, I dragged out my tool kit to put
