burnt and muddied in Irkutsk

I'm in Irkutsk. I didn't take the train, despite my plaintive melodramatics. Instead a grueling week which in fact, after the fact, I wouldn't change at all. The daily distance imperative threw all else into sharp relief, the clarity of necessity. There is a peace in committing to doing something regardless. I attacked my bug with more drugs, drove it to hiding in my lungs; deep enough to only cough through the hills and mornings. I was glad to ride. The traffic quelled a little after Krasnoyarsk, the kafes are further apart and the forests closer together. Siberia is a difficult space, wild and freeing. I didn't expect to be able to sit amongst so many mosquitos, or to rest in such swamps, or to find their flowers so beautiful. There's an absence of that civilised tendency for land and water to preclude one another. One night I almost sank in mud, past my knees. It was a huge struggle getting myself out and then getting the bike out without getting myself back in. Mosquito clouds above, expletives below. The mud clung for days. One flipflop peeled its sole and muddied and burnt I enter the little kafes with the flapping limp of an idiot. No wonder I get the surly treatment! Limp-flap-cough, five pancakes cream please. I don't hang about much, anyway, just sometimes washing my face in the little cistern sinks, limp-flap-splash, staring silence. Perhaps they don't get Channel One out here.

I lost those wretched flipflops in a different bog and the next day found some nice leather replacements on the verge. I met some villagers who gave me some bread. An older Russian man cycling the same way but rather more slowly. Some French 4x4s covered in those tacky rally stickers passed without so much as a wave but I caught them up later, setting deck chairs and making salads. My school French is now so buried beneath a year's mauled vocabularies that we got little further than un peu de l'eau, spasiba beaucoup and adieu as I left embarrassed. There was a brief violence, also, with a drunk motorcyclist who wobbily tailed me shouting who knows what and dollar!  On his second attempt at ramming me I managed to jab his steering and topple him. I was angry actually and shouted at him, lapel-grabbing even, before feeling silly and getting on my way. I've encountered so little aggression on this trip, and then it happens and is comically benign.

Irkutsk looks bustling for a city so islanded by land. I'm Couchsurfing in an extended-family home. I'm in my third time zone in three weeks. I'll rest a day or two here; Mongolia is close but the road is not straight.

Krasnoyarsk

Tulun

timer fail

Irkutsk