Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tim's birthday fell on 7 December, and he'd long planned on returning to Aus-
tralia a twenty-two year old. The seventh, however, was also the anniversary of my
relationship with Nat, and a date for which I'd dearly love to be home.
Hard feelings rarely lasted long, the issues mostly dissolving into irrelevance
shortly afterwards. We carried on riding, with the weather getting warmer and
green patches of grass beginning to emerge on the southern sides of the rolling
white hills. We rode through small and large villages and turned off the main high-
way on to progressively smaller roads. A lot of the locals had never been further
from home than the next village and couldn't tell us much about the road ahead. As
we travelled further, the warnings became more persistent.
'You won't get through!' people yelled from their windows. 'There's no road
up ahead!' We laughed and carried on, feigning incomprehension. We were young
and unstoppable, and besides, we had our 'reliable' Russian road atlas that showed
us a road carving its way from here all the way to Mongolia.
It was a couple of days later, the morning after we'd pitched camp on our first
patch of snow-free grass for the year, that we reached the village of Luptyug and
realised what everyone had been talking about.
It was sixteen kilometres to Klyuchee, the next village, and between the two
villages ran a provincial border. We turned onto the road, the bitumen ended ab-
ruptly, and I crashed painfully. The dirt road was covered in ice and embedded with
fist-sized rocks. We were riding on studded ice tyres - the larger rear ones bought
in Finland, and the smaller front tyres hand-studded with hundreds of steel screws
and glue. These helped to an extent, but the going was perilous and the falls bruis-
ing and painful. Within a few kilometres, the road deteriorated again. I waited for
Tim to pull up beside me and sat surveying the scene ahead. Nobody, but nobody,
it seemed, travelled this way.
The two provincial authorities had obviously not been able to reach any agree-
ment on who would maintain the road across the frontier. The result was that for
four months of the year the two villages were cut off from each other by a two-
metre-deep tract of snow.
Before us was a trench - a tractor had obviously got through in the past week or
two - and we began the arduous task of pushing and hauling our bikes through the
slushy snow. It was perhaps more of a moat than a trench - a half-frozen moat in-
terrupted by regular islands of snow. A pattern quickly developed as we made our
way through: we would wheel our bikes carefully along the slippery islands then
