Travel Reference
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into my head. The worst thing was that I had seen the caring and genuine side of
him. How could he lie so blatantly and not be ashamed? I put it down to the drugs,
but really there was no excuse. In hindsight it wasn't a lot of money, but it meant a
great deal to us - five days of living costs and a further depleted budget.
It wasn't just Sergei we were escaping, but the city itself. Perm had felt like an
island of unhappiness cast like a stone into the paradise that was Russia. Come to
think of it, all cities had the same effect. It usually took an hour or so of riding
to get through a city, from one end to the other, before we were back among the
solitude of lonely roads. In that hour we encountered more problems than in weeks
of riding.
For hours we rode in silence. The landscape seemed to have irrevocably
changed; the northern forests were a thing of the past. Fields stretched to every
horizon, ploughed by old Soviet machinery. Rusty signs proclaimed each former
collective farm a 'paradise'. The phrase Slava Trudu was forged in steel along the
roadside and painted onto the rooftops of houses. Roughly translated it means 'hail
labour'. Most of the old propaganda was peeling off and rusting.
With the dry earth and hint of summer growth, I was suddenly overcome with
chronic hayfever. This seemed to be a substitute for the ticks that we encountered
in the forest. I wondered if there would ever be a time when the environment gave
an ounce of mercy.
We found some comic relief from our problems by discussing the superhuman
strength that overcomes a person when they desperately need to find a toilet. We
had both been in such situations, in the midst of considerable traffic and with no
private place to relieve oneself. When you could no longer hold out, you would
dump the bike on the roadside and make a desperate dash for the nearest bushes or
cluster of trees. When it was all over, you would turn around to find that in the pro-
cess of getting there, you had jumped two-metre ditches, pushed through brambles,
even squeezed through narrow gaps between trees, which, under normal circum-
stances, would have been physically impossible to fit through. Getting back to the
road was often near impossible. It reminded us of stories about people who had
suddenly found the strength to lift up a tractor or car to rescue someone trapped
underneath.
A refreshing wind brought relief as we finally hit the Urals. The small rounded
hills were a welcome change from the treeless plains. Once again the road carved
a path through the forest. The birch had begun to sprout fresh translucent leaves.
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