Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
fiddled a bit with an ancient-looking radio and let all the crews working down the
line know that we were on the way.
We hit the tracks again and pushed on through the evening. It was exhausting,
but eventually a station came into view. Half an hour later, we were being ushered
along the road by an excited young man and his little brother.
Our new friend was called Vadim. He had got wind of us from a train driver
the day before and had been waiting impatiently all afternoon for our arrival. He
hauled us aside and quickly invited us home. Exhausted, we were more than happy
to take him up on the offer, but I began to have second thoughts when we were
shown into the house.
It was a filthy one-room shack full of buzzing, black blowflies. His mother sat
by the window, wrinkled and dirty; she swore at him violently as he came in. We
sat down on one of the grimy beds and listened as Vadim boasted of his gypsy herit-
age, but after a little while, we found that we had run out of things to say. There was
a bowl of sour berries and some fermented milk in the kitchen, but there seemed to
be no other food at all. I went back to my bike and returned with a loaf of bread.
Tim and I tore off some chunks for our dinner and Vadim and his little brother dug
in hungrily as well.
There were plenty of beds around the walls of the single room, so Tim and I
each chose one. I sunk into mine - almost to the floor - and tried to lose myself in
sleep and dreams of being elsewhere, away from these horrible surroundings and
back at home with Nat. It wasn't to be, however. Vadim snored like an earthquake
and his mother spent the night hacking, coughing and swearing as though she was
about to die.
We rose at first light, and left quickly. The only good thing about the village,
from our point of view, was that it was where the road started again.
Gratefully, we pushed our bikes through puddles of mud and back onto the wet
gravelly surface. We could ride again, and although it was still raining, things felt
like they were due to improve. We pedalled through the morning until we reached
the village of Turma. Here, we were invited in for a delightful lunch by a lovely
old lady and her husband, a stark contrast to the night before, and we stayed with
them for a couple of wonderful hours before pedalling on.
It had taken us almost two weeks to cover the 400 kilometres from Taishet, but
we had come through and triumphed over all the challenges. It was only thirty kilo-
metres to the city of Bratsk; after that, who was to know? That night, for the first
time in a week, we camped to the side of a bitumen road.
