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unintelligible dialect. A middle-aged woman with hair tied back in a brightly col-
oured headscarf, and carrying two buckets of water, approached and gave us a level
stare. 'And where do you two think that you might be going?' she asked firmly,
placing her buckets on the ground and hands on her hips.
We looked at each other uncertainly.
'Um, we're following the train line to Baikal.'
The stare continued. 'Um, could you point us towards the road?'
'There is no road,' she declared.
'But our map …'
She cut us off with a shake of her head. Her firm features softened slightly to an
expression of faint tenderness. Maybe she'd noticed the rows of inflamed red mos-
quito bites on our legs and arms, or maybe she'd just noticed that we were dirtier
and more bedraggled than most of the kids in the village. 'We do have a road,' she
admitted, hesitantly. Our faces brightened. 'But it's only a winter road.'
'Huh?'
'It's a winter road - you can only get through in winter when it's under two
metres of snow. And then only in a tractor.'
'Oh.' We paused. 'Do you think that we could get through on our bikes?'
She looked at us uncertainly, shaking her head. We chose to interpret this as a
confirmation. What with the language barrier and all … 'Great! Could you point us
towards the road then please?'
She raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth to protest, but then obviously
decided that she was dealing with foreign idiots better left to their fate. 'Cross the
railway here in the village then follow the track to the east,' she said abruptly. The
tender expression had disappeared. 'It takes you into the swamp.'
———
We held a conference on the edge of the slimy, swamp-ridden stretch of road and
decided that it was time to try the railway.
We heaved our bikes one at a time to the top of the steep, rocky embankment
and leaned them against a towering pillar that rose up and over the double tracks
of the BAM . It supported one of tens of thousands of spans of electric cables. A
thunderclap galloped towards us from somewhere in the distance then reverberated
loudly in the humid air. The mosquitoes still roared, but up on the embankment,
some ten metres clear of the road and the swamp, they were slightly less infuriat-
ing.
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