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My eyes boggled in disbelief and I let out a choked cry. I flung my raincoat to
the ground and hopped around in erratic circles. I took tentative slaps at my genit-
als and howled hopelessly for mercy. Tim was doubled over with tears of laughter
in his eyes. I spotted a creek where it crossed the road only twenty metres ahead.
I lurched, hopped and ran towards it. To add to my other concerns, my hair had
become a nest of trapped mosquitoes as well. Unable to get out of the thick mop,
hordes of them had burrowed deeper, making a pincushion of my scalp. I slapped
at my head and mashed a few hundred insects into my hair-do. Fresh forces had
breached the holes in my T-shirt, and I was starting to suffer heavy blood loss from
my belly and armpits as well.
I reached the creek on what felt like the verge of consciousness and scrambled
to get out of my clothes. I got my shirt off and freed one leg from my shorts before
a sudden wave of bites on my exposed bum toppled me headlong into the freezing
water.
I lay in the ankle-deep trickle, twisting and flattening myself to get everything
under the surface, then sensed rather than saw the tide of dead and drowning moz-
zies drift slowly by. I lay still. The roaring agony of the bites slowly subsided and
my consciousness made the slow journey back to reality.
———
We woke the next morning to persistent rain. We struggled on for a few kilometres,
but the swamp we were trying to push through was getting soggier by the minute
and the service track was now little more than a submerged cattle pad. We battled
fallen trees and huge trench-like puddles with perilously slippery edges that
stretched for hundreds of metres. Our progress was ridiculously slow. It was still
700 kilometres to Lake Baikal and we decided, eventually, that this just wouldn't
do.
The previous day the road had deteriorated gradually but steadily from a wide
sandy road to a rutted, corrugated trail to a muddy bumpy service track that went
through rather than around dozens of deep and fast-flowing creeks. Each village
we passed marked a further deterioration in the road.
Eventually we reached the small, rundown village of Savelyevsky. Dirty chil-
dren in bare feet chased chickens down the wide, muddy main road lined by a
dozen ramshackle log houses. We caused the usual stir on our arrival. The children
stopped chasing the chickens and ran over to ogle us instead. A gangly teenager in
oversized, grease-smeared overalls had slithered out from beneath a broken tractor
to have a stare, and a gaggle of stout old babushkas squawked questions in a loud,
