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Bogged! Heading deep into the Kolyma Region, Siberia
The Rangers of Atka, Road of Bones
Breakfast with the Caravan of Love, Road of Bones
Kamaz rescue, near Yaktusk. Careful with my bike!
Sascha and Sergei, Nord Brotherhood, Yakutsk
Big Mama and fish, Lena River, north of Yakutsk
Siberian sunset, Aldan River, Tommot
Lean, Alyona and the Cook, Trans-Siberian Railway
Mischa, who looked after me like a son in Kazakhstan
The inscrutable Mr Shu, mechanical genius
Taklimakan Desert, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China
Atlas Silk being woven on loom, Hotan, China
The Roof of the World, Pamir Plateau, Tajikistan
The Registan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
The Author, Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan
The Road Gets Better From Here ____________________________________________________________
A novice rides solo from the Ring of Fire to the Cradle of Civilisation
Adrian Scott
To my parents – for sparking the flame; to my wife and family for keeping it alive, and to everyone who I met on the road who sustained it
We travel not for trafficking alone; By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned; For lust of knowing what should not be known We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand Flecker
Table of Contents
Crash! ..............................................................................................1 On the Road ....................................................................................5 Slow but Friendly Progress ............................................................11 The End of the Road?....................................................................21 Caravan of Love ............................................................................31 The Dirty Dozen .............................................................................47 Big Mama's House.........................................................................61 Strange Bedfellows ........................................................................79 Family Feud in Kazakhstan.......................................................... 105 Chinese Walls.............................................................................. 129 On the Roof of the World ............................................................. 155 A Tale of Two Sisters................................................................... 185 Land Mines and Landslides ......................................................... 197 A Night at the Opera .................................................................... 211 The Golden Road to Samarkand.................................................. 235 Mosques, Medrassahs and Caravanserai .................................... 251 An Uzbek Wedding ...................................................................... 273 Into The Twilight Zone ................................................................. 307 The Kingdom of Turkmenbashi .................................................... 315 Across Persia............................................................................... 347 Storms over the Black Sea........................................................... 385 The End of the Road.................................................................... 395 Epilogue....................................................................................... 397
Crash! My head slammed into the hard gravel track with a sickening thud. Colourful particles whizzed about inside my head in a wonderful show, like fireworks exploding inside my skull. Then there was darkness and silence. For how long I cannot say. And then, suddenly, there was a blinding white light and pain, and then more pain, followed by fear and self-doubt. Why was I here? What was I doing? This was not the adventure I had planned. * * * One week earlier I had been sitting alone on an airplane heading for a remote corner of Asia to begin this adventure of a lifetime; I'd left my wife, my children, my comfortable home and my job all behind, to ride a motorbike 20,000 kms across ten countries and an entire continent. What was I thinking? Endless nights of pouring over maps, calculating and recalculating routes and itineraries, scouring obscure sources, dreaming of far off places had all ceased and I had now reached the point of my adventure that for so long had seemed so far away: the beginning. I can’t recall a distinct moment when the idea of the journey changed from just a notion into a distinct and concrete plan; it just evolved out of a life-long interest in these places and people and their history. Perhaps sailing around the South Pacific as an only child with my parents on Soviet cruise ships in the 1970’s was to blame. Or perhaps it was growing up next door to a proud family of Ukrainian refugees in a working class suburb of Sydney that drove this obsession. More deeply, perhaps it was the universal empathy one must feel for a people who have suffered so much and for so long; losing 20 million stoically defending their country in a war they did not start – and that’s before you count the millions of “non-persons” silently debited from the population in Stalin’s paranoid purges of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Then there’s the misery and hardships inflicted upon them by the great failed Communist experiment. And, beyond Russia, there were the incredible tales of monks, merchants and marauders that illuminates the history of the Silk Roads that piqued the interest of an impressionable and insatiably
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curious child – from Scheherazade’s 1001 Nights to the adventures of Marco Polo and the conquests of Genghis Khan. But the question of how to travel so far over such a variety of terrain in such remote areas always remained. The prospect of hitching didn't appeal – not for safety reasons – but more because I did not want to be always relying on the help of others for transport, and driving a car was far too complicated, especially across frontiers (and was probably impractical anyway in the bogs and swamps of northern Siberia and along the rutted mountain tracks of the Pamirs). So, logically, the motorbike selected itself as the only real option. But there was only one problem; I had never ridden a motorbike in my life nor taken any real interest in them, and my mechanical expertise did not extend beyond filling up my car with petrol each week. And then there was the paperwork required to cross an entire continent on motorcycle. But in the end, to an overly enthusiastic novice, these were just “details” that needed to be sorted. I took a crash course – literally – in motorcycle riding and worked the arcane back-channel bureaucracies of the more obscure countries on my itinerary, slowly but surely filling my passport with a colourful collection of visa stamps. And, along the way I took high tea with Honorary Consuls and was extended wonderful hospitality and generous diplomatic concessions by many Foreign Ministries. It was only at about 3am on the morning of sailing, as I sat in my garage aggressively disassembling the critical parts of my motorcycle so they could fit into the small packing crate I had built, that I began to have second thoughts. Wheels, petrol tank, handle bars, brakes, clutch and more pieces – whose purpose was still a mystery to me – all lay strewn about the floor as I tried desperately to keep a mental tally of them all and the sequence in which they had been removed so that I might have some faint hope of successful re-assembly once I arrived in Russia. Six weeks later I was standing in the office of the Master of the Port of Vladivostok, like an errant schoolboy reporting to the principal, explaining why he should even contemplate releasing my bike from bond storage so that I might ride it across his country. He was a big bear of a man, fifty-plus with a round fleshy careworn face and warm brown eyes. He wore a smart crisp military uniform and carried enough metal on his shoulders and shirt front to smelt into a nuclear submarine. He read my letter of introduction slowly, scrutinising each word and sentence as if there were some hidden meaning contained within them. He looked me up and down, barked questions at me, before making some hand-written 2
corrections then stamping and signing my release, saying “Welcome to Russia. Have a great journey – but be careful, the roads are dangerous and the bears are hungry this time of year.” The next day, after some final bureaucratic hurdles, I retrieved my bike from its container, re-assembled it (slowly) and rode back to Vladivostok Airport whereupon I promptly disassembled it again for the promised flight to Magadan. But this time I had to reduce its footprint even further so that it might fit inside the hold of the small Soviet-era hulk that would carry us to Magadan. The Chief of Cargo was called, and armed with his official tape measure and plane specifications he gave my bike a thorough once over before shaking his head solemnly and saying laconically "Is too big for plane. Is not possible. Goodbye." Undeterred, I continued late into the night, reducing my motorcycle into so many small pieces that I could have posted it to myself. But I did eventually get the required approvals and three days later found myself on the tarmac at Magadan Airport, alongside the cargo crew desperately trying to retrieve all of the pieces of my motorcycle which had been packed in randomly with all of the mail and other parcels and supplies on this weekly lifeline delivery from the outside world. I worked under a low-slung but bright midnight sun, slowly reassembling my bike and, once they had finished their work, Sasha and Kostya – two workers who had been intensely curious at this outsider and his strange cargo – drove me into the nearby town of Sokol to find petrol and oil. Petrol, or “benzin” as they called it, was easily found, but there was no oil – one of them joking to me that there was plenty of it here – trapped under the ground! Sokol was a bleak spread of anonymous apartment blocks and wooden huts all sinking slowly into the permafrost. We eventually found a half-used canister of engine oil in the garage of one of Sasha's friends who looked as if he had just awoken from winter hibernation. No one, including me, knew whether it was actually suitable for motorcycles, but they all re-assured me saying proudly that it was “Russian oil, good for anything!” I finished loading my bike – which unfortunately had now become very top heavy and unstable – and finally got onto the road to Magadan just after 2:00am. The weather, however, quickly turned foul; it got very cold, dark and a thick fog set in, striking at me like ghouls in the night as I travelled across the low marshlands toward the sea. And then the rain came, freezing driving rain, and I was reduced to a crawl, shivering uncontrollably from the cold and concentrating hard on the road ahead as 3
it emerged from the gloomy shadows just in front of me; it wasn’t meant to be like this – was it? Magadan appeared like a city under winter siege; its dim gas lights gave it a sickly yellow glow, everything was battened down and the rain had now turned to sleet. With only a very basic map, I quickly got hopelessly lost and ended up taking one of the many drunks, whom I had passed loitering on the streets, as pillion to direct me. We eventually landed at a hotel where the young lady on the night desk gave me some tea and bread and what remained of her dinner (which she politely claimed said no longer wanted). There was even a garage where I was able to lock up my bike. I spent the next day and half catching up on sleep, laundry, checking out the sights of Magadan (very few), communicating with home and making final preparations to the bike for my journey. Magadan was grim, but at least there were some signs of development, the shops were full, the streets busy and the people, on the whole, seemed relatively happy. The city straddles a small hill; on one side the ramshackle wooden cottages of the old town roll down to the sea port, and on the other, facing inland, lays the modern city centre where the apartment blocks are scattered over the terrain like a sequence of giant cement dominoes. Many of the streets were lined with small fir trees, giving the place a surreal Christmas feel. I found a small produce market and stocked up for my journey. Sturdy looking Babushkas operated many of the stalls, supplementing their woefully inadequate state pensions by selling the fruit and vegetables they had somehow managed to grow in the short summer months.
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