Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
After some readjustments, we pressed on. I was testing fate and counting on
luck. We were in the middle of nowhere with a mortally wounded bicycle. The only
sensible option would have been to turn tail, hop on a train and buy a replacement
part in Moscow. But I didn't want to waste that much time and Tim certainly didn't
want to hang around for a fortnight until I returned. While there was still even a
glimmer of hope, we decided that it would be best just to keep on riding.
'And besides,' Tim said, 'even if you can't fix it, even if it dies completely in
another two hundred kilometres, at least we will have gone two hundred kilometres
further. And we'll
still
be in the middle of bloody nowhere. There's not really much
to lose.'
I spent an hour modifying the brace and made it to the top of the next hill before
it needed adjusting again. I was so absorbed in the impending disaster that I hadn't
been paying much attention to the scenery, but Tim had.
We'd finally branched off the main route through southern Siberia. We'd left
the trans-Siberian railway and adjacent highway behind, and with it we'd left the
main logging corridor. Our new route along the
BAM
was relatively new, and had
only recently been set upon by the mechanical teeth of the timber industry. The
result was that although wagon after wagon of ancient pine logs rumbled past, we
were able to fully immerse ourselves in the taiga forest for the first time since we'd
entered Siberia.
I looked up from the greasy, troubled mess of my bike hub and let my gaze
float towards the northern horizon. Before me, the familiar trio of pine, spruce and
birch stretched out in a mottled green sea, interspersed with their native Siberi-
an counterparts: fir, larch and what the Siberians call cedar but is actually a vari-
ety of pine. The whole expanse extended over one and a half thousand kilometres
northwards in a vast undulating continuum, broken only by secret river valleys and
rocky ridges, until finally, it merged with the empty rolling tundra and then the
Arctic Ocean.
We set off again and I suffered two successive flat tyres. After a day and a half
of non-stop bike repairs, this was enough to test the limits of my patience. It was
getting late so Tim rode on, out of range of my curses, to wait in the next village,
Kvitok. I patched my tyre and limped on to find him waiting for me outside a shop,
in the middle of a seething throng of sidecar motorbikes, Ladas and kids on bi-
cycles. He'd managed to completely snarl the main intersection of the village.
I rode up unnoticed and stood up to catch a glimpse of Tim over the heads of
barefoot kids straining to see the excitement. In Tim's hand was a bulging bag of
