kaleb's blog: From Russia with Lurgy

Approaching a strange city in the evening of a long day there's always the question of when to stop. The longer the day the greater the attraction of proper provisions. The larger the city the greater the reach of its walls; the further out the infrastructure and conurbations clog the camping spots. You can't know when the easy-to-camp zone ends until you're past that threshold. The closer-in the less time; the faster, the darker and more populous. I love this, the chance and excitement of it. I remember racing for Igoumenitsa because I hadn't food or currency (the Albanian border having been Sparse) and arriving with the night to sneak sleep on a spit of city beach after a Greek feast. A similar night on a jetty outside Bandar Abbas. Less good, behind bill-boards in Bursa. A frantic snow-race into Samarkand... Loads of examples; win or lose it's tomorrow in the morning. Approaching Kemerovo then, the familiar quandary. Two empty days, low food, hundred-mile hungry, sun already set... The highway dissolved, I missed the shops, crossed, crossed, recrossed the river, got lost, cross and ignored and just a carton of milk and biscuits to put my tent on a hard bit of mud in an otherwise swamp that advanced through the night. In fact the morning is only tomorrow if you sleep. I wasted an hour killing mosquitos instead of deswamping my home and then tried to leave town. Another hour up and down and round and round the hilly ringroads, the trunk roads and signless spaghetti junctions, lost in the city's morning; its tarry calescence and filthy coal trucks. Sunburn and sore eyes, a twinge growing in my throat. I'd have called Mum but for the time difference and having spent all my phone-roubles on two minutes with Dad yesterday afternoon (just long enough to precis the trees and topography, of course). Days often redeem themselves. There was a woman, eventually, at a petrol station who gave me the sweetest cak de la? (Russians don't ask unless they mean it) and I dug deep for difficult morning. She gave me a tin of cola and made a real effort to show me the (easy and obvious) way back to the M53, my trans-Siberian road. A year ago I think I'd have cried. I cry less, I notice.

Anyway, Russians. They're reading along, I see (I collect data, too), especially since my little press jaunt (again!) in Novosibirsk. That actually felt a little degrading. Fix something for the camera. Do your tent. Wait hours. Ride through the traffic again etcetera, but they did give me a map and the resultant little bit on Federation TV made me look friendly enough so I've been hoping it'll start winning me some road meals and invitations... Not yet! Just loads of photos with motorists. There he is! Quick get the foto-apparat. Yes something has changed since riding past Islam, as it were. I've never been quite so capably ignored as by Russians. It's perhaps unfair, having spent the last several months on the receiving end of that famed, dutiful Muslim hospitality, to apply my expectations. But I had gotten used to being regularly fed... I am unfair; three charming incidents: A young security guard in Novosibirsk wandered over to show me an internet clip of himself and fellow Sibir football fanatics fighting and was heartily delighted at my suggestion of, perhaps, hooligans? (Yes yes! Subkultur! Like Angliski!), and then quite unexpectedly insisted I eat his lunch. A muscled, macho-glam man and his velvet-leopard-skin girlfriend picking armfuls of bright orange flowers whooped and waved to give me a bouquet as I passed. Two brothers flagged me on the M53 in fits of hilarity to offer several kilos of frozen fish. Ever polite I accepted a single fish, which was duly peeled off and packaged enormously. Some kind of Carp? (Twenty miles later I gave to it a kafeci devushka. No chance it'd fit in my pan and I've no time for fires at the moment, sadly. My Russian improves - I don't eat fish take this fish please it is good fish and she did. I do eat fish.)

It's harder work again, that's all, getting what I need. Is there water, please? - Nyet - How far is the next water, please? - there isn't. That default nyet. I think you just have to ask a little more. Perhaps I'm getting the hang of it. I've anyway little time for sociability. The physical bit has been difficult. I was winning for a while, I even got in front of the wind, and then a change. Some tonsillitic lurgy attacks me and I struggle to rest and eat properly. The last two days riding were extremely difficult. My throat is like a wound, coughing fits taste chemical and I lack the requisite meat-doughnut appetite. One little place (the Siberian settlements look like big-shedded allotments to me) had a post office dial-up computer next to the pharmacy and pleased with myself I used it to translate a prescription: BIG TONSIL PAIN. RELIEF PLEASE. ANTIBIOTICS? Whatever they are they're not working, although the devushka was amused.

So I've been in Krasnoyarsk a couple of days, resting to a recovery that feels distant. My CouchSurfing hosts, bless them, graciously suggested it would be a pity not to ride the Trans-Siberian railway while I was here. So I'm wrestling with pride and all the other things. I'm not sure. Tomorrow I'll either ride out or settle into an eighteen-hour train compartment to Irkutsk. From the last five hundred miles I get the impression that there's little novel to see, anyway. Although there is something to be said for the sun - and that famous train - flashing through endless Birch rows. The odd Owl. Stormy skies over superlative space. You'll hear from me far sooner if I do get the train!

He was used to being called a freak...

A bit of press, spot the made-up bits