Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We pushed the bikes tentatively. They rolled forward a few centimetres. They
didn't tumble over. Things looked hopeful. We pushed a bit further and the wheels
started to diverge. We straightened up and pushed on. We made another fifty metres
or so before one back wheel thumped off the rail and onto the sleepers. Things no
longer looked so good.
We conferred briefly and decided that it might be possible to ride. We climbed
aboard and gently eased the combined mass of our bikes, gear and selves onto a
dozen creaking hose-clamps. The bikes wobbled dangerously but stayed upright.
We pedalled cautiously, trying to stay synchronised - and the thing went to pieces.
I ranted for a while, shook my fist at the sky, the forest and at the endless rails.
And also, once or twice, at Tim. After a bit, I settled down enough to take some
pleasure in sawing through the three connecting beams - destroying eight hours
work in two minutes - while Tim caught the moment on camera.
Late that evening I sprawled on top of my damp sleeping bag in our damp tent
writing a letter to Nat, while Tim sat outside trying to make a fire out of saturated
twigs and soggy branches. The stifling air was equally thick with mosquitoes and
raindrops. I listened to Tim's hopeless anguish through a constant rumble of thun-
der interspersed with bangs and flashes: 'Come on, come on, light damn you, come
on - piss-off-you-bloody-little-buggers! - come on, light, please, come on, light,
dammit!'
He gave up at around midnight and we went to bed, exhausted, wet and starving.
The next day we continued a long slog. The sawn-off poles still attached to the
bikes made good grips for pushing, and push we did. We tried pushing along the
rocks on the outside of the rails, along the sleepers in the middle of the track, and
along the service track below, now ankle deep in oozing, sticky mud. In the end,
Tim worked out a method of balancing his bike on one of the rails and wheeling it
carefully along. While it was possible to walk fairly quickly this way, a momentary
lapse in concentration would see the front wheel slide from the rail, bringing pro-
gress to an abrupt and often painful halt.
About mid-morning, we ran across a maintenance crew repairing a stretch of the
line. About half of the fifteen or twenty men were hard at work sleeping off the ef-
fects of a crate of empty vodka bottles. The other half sat smoking on a fallen log.
One man walked out to greet us with a handshake and a friendly smile.
They were from Taishet, halfway through a three-week spell working on the
line. We joined them for a lunch of stew and before we left, the crew foreman
