Our Heroes Sung

On our way south from the strawberry farm in Mount Barker to Esperance, we were joined for lunch by a couple on holiday from England.  They were keen bird watchers, and were excited to tell us that they had just seen a wedge tailed eagle, the largest bird of prey in Australia.  Before they left, they went to their car and returned with some packets of noodles, and a bag of nuts.  As she handed them over to us, the woman said only, “My niece travelled in Australia a couple of years ago.  People were very kind to her.”  Her simple statement needed no further explanation.  

I feel permanently altered by what we’ve seen; have been rendered gloriously insignificant by vast mountain ranges, washed clean by rivers, and have been recalibrated by the distance we travelled.  But what has really changed us, is kindness.  And my god, there is just so much of it.

He aha te mea nui o te Ao?  He tangata, he tangata, he tangata!

What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people!

Charmed in Kazakhstan

First of all, thank you to all the people who didn’t run us over, didn’t steal our things or slit our throats while we were sleeping.

Sleeping at a quarry, too tired to put up the tent  Shymkent, Kazakhstan

Thank you to Scotland! Douglas and Muriel, for your endless support, your practical help, technical assistance (texting weather reports to us, stormbound on Little Andaman, wondering if the ferry would sail; texting step by step instructions for Stuart’s gear adjustments before we crossed the Nullarbor), and for optimistically sending us replacement thermarests, dry bags and stove parts; some of which are still gathering dust in Istanbul.  

Day 1, Turriff to Dufftwon.                                                   Clean clothes, pristine panniers, all downhill from here

Thank you to Scott and Lisa of Dufftown and your crazy dog Yogi. Your house was the first official stop of the trip. Thirty miles from Turriff; I remember being nervous as we set off. Will we make it? How much food should we take? When should we schedule our breaks?  Baby Donald has now made three! Congratulations again.

Day 2, clothes still clean, saying goodbye to Scott and Lisa

And to Craig and Louise, you put up with us crawling the walls for a week in Aviemore as we waited for our passports to come back from NZ Immigration. We were coiled springs, ready to go, edging perilously close to couch potatodom. “Where are the elite cyclists who rode here from Dufftown?” they asked each other when we were out of earshot. Louise baked bread for us over a barbecue one evening and suggested that we learn to do this for the trip. Louise’s bread has since been baked in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. One of the best tips of the trip. 

Louise rode the first couple of hours with us, just to make sure we were leaving.

To Saul and Nic in Pitlochry, for the barbecue and beer after our ascent of the cloud piercing Drumochter Pass. Our leisurely departure the following morning turned into a garbled goodbye and a mad rush for the train station as we realised we had one day less to reach the Newcastle ferry.  

Thank you to Ross, Nicola (for my St Christopher), Granny and the Cockburns of Glasgow; with a very special mention to Debbie for your instant enthusiasm, excitement and unwavering conviction that we would and more importantly, should do what we were planning to do.

Much love to the Moss family in Chattam; for the lasagne, the bed and the gorgeous positivity with which you sent us on our way the following morning, we had a wonderful time.  

And we can’t forget the mystery man of Newcastle, on his way home from work. When he found out we had ten minutes to make it to the ferry, he rode us through red lights, across busy intersections and got us there with seconds to spare. Without a backward glance he flew past the entrance, a quick wave said that was it and he was gone. Four pints and two large wine glasses of peanuts in the ferry bar later, we realised with a shock that this was it, there was no stopping us now.

Stuart loaded up, ready to climb the ship’s stairs

Thank you to the gracious and inspiring Andrew and Friedel, two Canadian cycle tourists who  live in the Netherlands. They now run a fantastic cycle touring website called Travelling Two. I wrote to them before we left, thanking them for the advice and inspiration that we’d found on their pages. Friedel responded with an invitation to stay if we were passing through Holland. We turned up starving in their town at 9pm, phoned them, and they rode out to meet us and take us back to their flat. They were generous with their hospitality and experience, and the perfect place to begin our European cycle. They rode for a couple of hours with us the following morning, stopping off to buy us a block of cheese (she knows my heart!) at a specialty shop, then treating us to coffee and apple strudle.  When I thanked them, Friedel said, “Oh, trust me, this is nothing.    This is our way of paying back some of the kindness that we’ve been shown.”

With Friedel and Andrew, all set…

Onto Germany, unt eine grosse Danke Shoen to the magical Mirjam and Cyril, the anthropologists of Cologne, cousin and cousin in law of my sister’s friend.  Pure inspiration! Mirjam is also a filmmaker, currently making a documentary about the local Kyrgyz resistance to a Canadian gold mining company who in 1998 spilled two tonnes of sodium cyanide into the  River Barskoon.  The people who live there are still struggling, still affected, still uncompensated.  She’s brave, commited and passionate. Cyril kept us laughing and enthralled with his stories of travel off the beaten track. They cooked for us, gave us second, third and fourth helpings, along with a bottle of wine that never seemed to end. Breakfast was fresh bread from the bakery, cheeses, boiled eggs and ham. I loved their kitchen, their wall to wall books, their Kyrgyz wall hangings. I think I wanted to be them.  Cyril gave us another tip for the trip, “Go easy on the fermented mare’s milk”.  But as he knew, this is easier said than done.  Perhaps we should have learnt how to say, “You are very kind, but this will make me shit through the eye of a needle” in Kyrgyz before we left.  Come to think of it, we should have also learned how to say this in Kazakh, Azeri, Mandarin…

Cologne Cathedral

Danke Shoen to Meister Gerhard, first master stone mason of the Cologne Cathedral.  We approached Cologne without a map, and asked someone for directions to get into the centre.  The woman told us just to look for the spires and head straight for them.  I must here confess that at this point in time, I was ignorant of the existence of this magnificent building.  Which only made turning a corner, seeing the tip of the spires, and then watching this edifice grow before our eyes all the more astonishing.  As we sat in the centre of the city that afternoon, waiting for Mirjam and Cyril to finish work, a man rode up to us in his cycle taxi and offered us his home if we needed anywhere to stay for the night.  He had once ridden for six months in Scandinavian Lapland.

A few days of riding down the Rhine later, we arrived late one evening in Stuttgart.  Reaching the outskirts of a large city as the light is fading and looking for somewhere to put a tent just feels like every kind of wrong.  Most people look for hotels.  We were hoping for a holiday park in the city centre.  Enter Dirk and Sonja, on their way home from dance class.  They took two strangers and their bikes and all their bags into their flat and made up the sofa bed.  Our love to you both, thank you.

Dirk and Sonja

Though working early the next morning, Dirk stayed up late to download a map onto our GPS that would take us on forest paths through beautiful woodland all the way to Calw, in the Black Forest.  

Danke Schoen to Peter in Switzerland, for letting us camp at the angling centre, and for letting Stuart fish for free under the Leinzer Spitz.  Our legs then took us to the first mountains of the trip, and it was over the Offenpass and the Fluelapass to Italy.

Our future in the distance, gulp…

Grazie Mille to Marianna and family of South Tyrol for letting us camp underneath your trees, and for the miraculous pasta sauce. When I first saw the sauce to pasta ratio, I thought, this is never going to work. But this is what large jars of Dolmio sauce have done to our culinary imagination.   The flavour that this woman infused into the sauce, with apparently just tomatoes, a carrot, an onion and a few cubes of ham….  I will also never forget the block of quartzy parmesan that sat in the middle of the table like a meteorite crashed to earth, redolent of outdoor markets, fresh mountain air and a better way to live.

Thank you to the Dolomites for being as stunning as we’d imagined , to roadside chapels, and never ending downhills on perfectly smooth roads…

Hvala to Slovenia for having a river as beautiful as the Soca, a trout as pretty as the marble, a road with as many bends as the Vrsic Pass and for having train drivers as kind and funny as the train drivers of Maribor.  We feel so lucky to have happened upon their holiday on that rainy afternoon.  Na zdravye! Matej to you and your fine friends.  We even had a slice of Aberdeenshire in the Slovenian mountians; thank you to Maureen (one of our top commenters) and Dave of Turriff, for bringing over our books, our maps and for the enormous lunch.  We loved our afternoon with you.

To new friends!

A great road, recommended!

To my family in Dracevica, Croatia.  I’m sorry I turned up unannouced, but none of the phone numbers I had would work. You made us feel so welcome, and we love remembering our tour of Great Grandma’s house, to see the pictures on the wall, and the well she drew water from.

My great grandfather’s church, Donji Humac

The well, note the grooves worn by years of drawing water

Inside great grandma’s house,                                       she left when she was 19.

Much love to Hannah Darvill, cycling solo from London to Greece, it was very, very cool to meet you. Thanks for the inspiration, and the thoughtful advice on how to use that damn Mooncup! It has been banished to a drawer, but whenever I need to feeI like a failure, I take it out and look at it.  

Thank you to the Adriatic Sea for being the clearest, most sparkling, most beautiful water to swim in.  

Hvala to  the Montenegrins who bought us coffees, beer and bread the day that Stuart spent the last of our cash on a fishing ticket – you got us out of a tight spot, thank you. Hvala to Nikola who invited us back to his house, through streets laced with makeshift volleyball nets and children playing. We left our bikes in the centre of town, with everything on them, and they were fine, just like you said they would be.  

Montenegrin Splendour

To our Serbian friends that we met in Montenegro, Hvala to you too.  We rode past your house, perfectly sober, on our way to the campsite.  Two hours and five glasses of slivovitz later we realised we had better go and put up our tent before it became too difficult.     You showed us how to dance the kola, made us dinner and made us laugh. “Let’s drink! To all the working people! Lets drink!”. toasted Sime, again and again and again.  When we left the next day he worried, “But where will you sleep!?”. You don’t have to worry anymore. We have beds now, but honestly?, I think I was happier with the uncertainty.

Let’s Drink!

Thankyou to Montenegrin wildflowers and butterflies for dusting our paths with magic every single day and much admiration to the inspired person who put a basketball court in the middle of the Durmitor mountains.  I used to think that the tennis court on the road to Amhuinnsuidhe in the Isle of Harris was the world’s most remote sporting facility.  But now, I’m not so sure that it is.

Shoot hoops not cyclists!

And oh!  Hvala, Hvala, Hvala to Jasna, Admir, Ammar, Nana, Edo, Lejla, Minka, Minka’s husband whose name I forgot (sorry), Dina and Ilda.   Our time with you was precious.  Thank you Admir and Ammar for coming down to our campsite with coffee and cups and then taking us back to your house to stay.  Thank you Ammar and Edo for tirelessly translating all weekend.  Thank you Jasna for the love.  We learnt from you, and from here, I’m still learning from you.  Ljubim te, Ljubim te, Ljubim te!

Admir, Ammar and Stuart

Ilda, Heather and Jasna

Hvala to the two ladies sitting out the front of their half broken house on the border of Bosnia and Serbia. It is not easy to ride past those houses, to keep pedalling while absorbing what has happened here. But you jumped to your feet, happy  to see us and our smiles to you, and you shouted out ‘Sretan Put!’, Safe Travels. You showed me what resilience is, and I am grateful.

To Decimer, Lucky, Ilana, Velio, Marco, Petko, the family from the bike shop and all of your other friends (you’ve got so many!) from Arilje in Serbia. Your hospitality was huge. And Ilana, you’re brave, fierce, wonderful and unforgettable. I wish I could have spent more time with you.

Decimer and Marco, Jivile!

Hvala to the old woman from the shop who gave us lumps of sugar as we went to leave. I remember your tiny, worried hands, and the tight way they squeezed mine. Sretan Put. And thank you to the man in the shop, 12 kilometres from Bulgaria, who made it such fun to spend our last dinars. Your wine was quite simply undrinkable, but all the more memorable for it!

Our audience of sunflowers, Bulgaria

Blagodarya to Bulgaria and your fields of watchful sunflowers – to Hillary and Jenna from Canada for the campfire and conversation, to the couple that gave us extra apples when you found out how far we had to go, to the fishermen who let us camp at the lake and to the man from the bike shop who got his friend to drive across town in five o’clock traffic to get us inner tubes  from the competition.  

Tessekur Ederim to Turkey.  Thank you for the amazing skyline of Istanbul, and for teaching me to ride in city traffic.

Fishermen on the Bosphorus

We love to remember the  little boy who climbed the tree to give us plums, scattering them on our table like marbles;   the builders who shared their lunch with us at half past eight in the morning, and Ali from the backpackers. When finding out I was from New Zealand and not Australia he remarked “Oh, that is why you’re so sweet”. And clasped hands and dewy eyes towards the myriad of rulers and workers over the centuries who have shaped the Aya Sofia into the overwhelming space it is today.  

Inside the glorious Aya Sofia

Hanging lamps make marvelous shapes on the floor

Merci tres, tres beaucoup to the Frenchman who spent an hour helping us find our bus in Istanbul and then vanished back into the crowd. Didi Madloba to  the Georgian man who gave us biscuits and water and for the quick lesson in Georgian as I was getting onto the bus. I wanted to make sure I remembered the word for thank you, so I repeated it ten times to him as he put my luggage onto the rack. He went bright red with embarrassment, thinking my gratitude too effusive for the simple thing he had done.

Georgian Churches

Didi Madloba to Georgia for regularly showing us how to go from sober to drunk in 60 seconds. For policemen that tell us to ride the wrong way up motorways.  For kind men who insist we take not one, but two watermelons.  For Ladas with packed with watermelons in the backseat,  the boot,  the passenger seat, and the roofrack. 

Georgian Lunch

Pikria, Levani, George, Alto, Rusica, Eva and family, we loved our beautiful days in Tianeti.  We milked cows, made kinkhali, and were driven by jeep deep into the mountains for Stuart to catch his Georgian fish.  We were read fairy tales, taught to toast in proper Georgian style and made to feel part of the family.

George prepares to barbecue

George, Alto and Heather

And to Giwi, for the lunch and the vodka, and the vodka, and the vodka, on our way to Tusheti.

Vodka at lunchtime, why so late?

Didi Madlboba to the road worker who invited us into his cabin and gave us beds, watermelon and vodka on the long and windy way back from Tusheti. He ended up with a houseful as more people arrived at two in the morning.  We made coffee for everyone the next day, and tried hard but hopelessly to speak Russian. 

Zdrastvuytye!

Didi Madloba to the unforgettable Rezo and your generous family. Who knew being force fed and then marched to the toilet to make more room for the next course could be such fun? I now know what the geese who become Foie Gras feel like. Impossibly stuffed.  Gaumarjos!

The Brothers

Sag Ol to Azerbaijan for being one of the friendliest nations on earth!  Though Georgia clearly didn’t like our chances…

We need luck?  Leaving Georgia for Azerbaijan.

Sorry for spilling wine all over the floor of the hotel.

When cyclists unpack! Note the line of salt along the floor – this one’s for you Tony!

Step away from the gears!                                        Filling up at a spring, Azerbaijan.

Sag Ol to the teahouses who invited us in and gave us lunch and tea. To the policeman who paid for our soft drinks, to the shopkeepers who gave us extra vegetables and boxes of dates. Sag Ol to the father and son who chased me on their tractor just to hand me a melon.  And this is not a melon that people eat, it’s one to hold onto and simply smell.   Take heart!  Whenever life lacks colour,  I think of this melon in the Caucusus.  And to the mechanics on the outskirts of Baku. Thank you for the keys to the empty apartment, and for taking us out to dinner. The horror of what came next we could have done without, but your hospitality was beautiful. We’ll just be sure to avoid the crumbed fish next time.

To Jakob, who we first met in Georgia and then again in Baku, waiting for our boat to Kazakhstan.  Thanks for the fun, the bad science jokes (were they even jokes?), and for doing our shopping before the mad dash to the ferry at 2am. To Michael, for your wisdom, your refusal to bow to The Man, your humour, the foot massage and your spirited goodbye at two in the morning. You told me that we are the stories we tell, and you are right.  

Sag Ol to Anar, who we met one day on the street in Baku.  He gave us his card and told him to let us know if we ever needed anything.  He must have been surprised a few months later when 150 Azeri manat arrived in the post.  We had left Azerbaijan in such a rush, that we forgot to change our money.  Anar changed the manat into Euros for us and posted these back to Scotland.   If Diogenes was to walk through the streets of Baku with his lamp, you would be the honest man that he would find.  

Micha, Afghanistan bound

To Mischa, the Parisian adventurer, our shipmate on the way to Aktau.  I am better for knowing that there are still people in this world who will take a month off work, and with their large vintage camera will set off for Afghanistan in their Birkentocks.  On their first cycle tour. Merci for helping us navigate the horror that is train travel with bikes in ex Soviet republics.

Aslan, a very drunk Norbuk, and Stuart on the train.

Au revoir Micha!

And Spasiba to Sasha, for coming to say hello, helping us find the train station, translating for us as we bought our tickets  and then taking us back to your house for food, fires and a bed next door to the rabbits.

Our host for the evening, Sasha

Our roommate, Thumper.

Kazakhstan was a hard ride, but we were charmed by the big hearted people we encountered every day we were there.  Rakhmet to the family who stopped their truck, and without explanation put our bikes in the back and made space for us in the front.

The road is lo-ong…Kazakhstan

I remember it as one of my favourite times on the trip.  Music was blasting from a cheap set of speakers, Mirat was dancing. We’d stop occasionally for camel’s milk, cold beers or dried fish.  We visited a roadside graveyard, stopped at truckstops for chicken soup, and they woke us up to see the cosmodrome where Yuri Gagarin was sent off into space.  Every full moon I have seen since that night reminds me of them, and the way we watched it through the windscreen together.

Photo stop in the desert

Rahkmat to the four boys on their way home from market, who raced over the road and smashed their last watermelons on the ground for us.  You made us incredibly happy. 

Peace!

We loved the chaikanas in Kazakhstan.  To battle a headwind all day, to breathe sand and lose the film over your eyeballs is manageable when you know that sooner or later you will come across a chaikhana.  It’s a restaurant, but every table is edged with beds, piled with pillows and shielded from the sun with curtains.  You can lie your sweaty, dusty body down, fall asleep if you wish; they’re quite simply heaven.

Heather as Beast

Slightly more refined, post dinner

And where to start with Kyrgyzstan? Rakhmat for the images seared onto our brains, of sharply drawn mountains, horsemen galloping over hills, and beautiful children running out to greet us.  

Two brothers who ran over fields to come and say hello on the way to Son Kol

Hard to forget were the huge dogs that also ran over fields to greet us.  But… we never wanted this to be easy.

Thankyou to Stefan and Nikola, cycling from Grenoble to Beijing.  There is noone with whom we would rather drink vodka at seven in the morning and then buy a sheep.

Bottoms Up, then let’s go buy some livestock!

Nikola celebrating the purchase with a dance

Stuart and Nikola, the worse for wear after a sleep and a sheep in the taxi.

Rahmat to Rosa and your family for looking after our bikes while we visited the Karakol market.  Dolly was intended as a gift, but thank you for sharing so much of him with us.  

Washing hands before dinner

And Dolly!  Forgive us!

Hello Dolly, Part One.

Dolly 8 hours later.

And then 10 hours later

Rahkmat to Jumarbek and Sultanet of Son Kol for inviting us to stay and sharing all you had with us.  I loved working with you Sultanet, I loved your independent, fearless daughters.  Thank you for leaving me to roll the kooroot, for showing me how to make a handful of meat feed six people and for the best bread we have ever eaten.

Moonara and Sumara

Thank you to Micha and Sashka the truck drivers who gave us lifts to Osh when our Kyrgyz visa was running out.  Sashka travelled with two budgies in a cage, and I imagined him to have stepped from the pages of a book. 

Intoxicating Kashgar, oh!  When we turned off the flashy modern main road of China and found ourselves on the Silk Road, surrounded by spices, silks, donkeys and magical medicine shops, we were enchanted.  Life is challenging and unpredictable now for the Uighurs of Kashgar, but we are grateful to have seen your fascinating town, and to have lost ourselves in your colourful streets. .

Heather decorating some Kashgar naan

Sheep for sale at the Sunday market

Hello to Neil and Ann, it was a real pleasure to meet you on the street that afternoon and to still find ourselves on the same corner almost an hour later, captivated by your stories.  Thank you for sharing the achingly bittersweet Ella Maillart story with me.  The story was a gift, and I treasure it.  

Sunday market, Kashgar

Shukria to Pakistan.  Our favourite change of plan, when we realised we were unable to resist the Karakoram Highway.  I wasn’t brave enough to ride the whole way, and this bothers me now.  Whether on a bike, walking a narrow mountain path, in a market place or shrine, each moment there was special, challenging and beautiful. Insh’allah, one day I’ll go back, a little braver.  

A welcoming party, Husseini

 Shukria to the men on the bus from Tashkorgan to Pakistan; for my Urdu lesson and for sharing your naan. 

Maeuil, Heather and Rakaposhi (7788m)

Thank you to Nazeem and the musicians of Karim Abad, for inviting us to your house for the music and the Hunza water. And here was us thinking we wouldn’t be drinking in Pakistan! Thank you to Maeuil for taking me carpet shopping that morning, and then mopping up the glass of Hunza water that I spilt all over Nazeem’s carpet later that night.  “That is 800 knots per eeench Ezzer!” Thank you Nazeem for taking us to the Ulter Meadow the following day, to see yaks in the sunshine, listen to avalanches, and be struck silent  amongst those incredible mountains.  

Shepherd’s Hut, Ulter Meadow

Shukria to  Madina Guesthouse in Gilgit, it was a beautiful place to stay.  There we met Leigh and Stephen, New Zealanders cycling from Kazakhstan to Singapore.  We met them just after they had finished a two week trek to K2, realising a childhood dream of Stephens.  Your friendship and fresh perspectives that you’ve shared with me post trip have been much needed, thank you both,x.

Leigh and Stephen, small world!

Shukria to the two boys who rode us effortlessly through traffic in Lahore to find the backpackers.  We met them again a few days later in a sufi shrine and none of us could believe our luck.

And oh, my shining light of Pakistan, Sajjad Hussein, my brother! When I see that country on a map now, I see your beautiful face beaming out at me. You are UN BE LIEVABLE and UN FOR GETTABLE. Thank you for looking after us, for getting us to as much music as you could, and for the continuing friendship.

The heart of Lahore, Sajjad!

And Gerrite, our flying Dutchman! We are so happy our paths intersected and that we could share that indescribable night at the shrine with you. Together we then experienced the full frontal assault of cycling in India.  You made everything fun, (she says in a death metal voice). Gerrite rode on to Nepal, trekked to Annapurna, then ended his trip with a holiday in New Zealand.    We are thrilled to know you, and I know we’ll always be friends.  

Heather and Gerrite, in a rare moment of calm at the sufi night.

The unforgettable night of Qawwali

And at the risk of sounding like Alanis Morisette, Thank you India. 

For the beauty,

Chicken seller, Kolkata

Shipmate, Andamans Ahoy!

the colour,

Flower seller, Kolkata

the lessons,

Chennai

Chennai

and for looking after the Tibetans.

Tibetan prayer flags, Macleod Ganj

Thank you to Tenzin Palmo of Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery for meeting with me. I discovered your books years ago, and to think our bike ride ended up winding past your door is so strange and so wonderful. I didn’t quite master mindfulness while bike riding, but I’m working on it now.

 

And Dhanyavad to Ranjan of Little Andaman, for the fun, your beautiful laugh, and your inventive, passionate cooking.  

Christmas with Ranjan

Kia Ora to Christine in Perth.  Thanks for the bed, the maps and the pizza after our flight from India.  Sorry we arrived a day early, and sorry for getting you in trouble with Andrew, “What do you mean they’re going to cross the Nullarbor!  It’s January!  Didn’t you try to stop them?”

The baton of hospitality was well and truly picked up and run with by the wonderful people that we met in Pingelly, Western Australia and onwards.  Ten months of cycle touring under our belts, and we managed to run out of food and water on our second day in Australia.  HOW EMBARRASSING!!!  

We owe our lives to Wilma Warburton’s cheese and tomato sandwiches!  Thank you for coming back.  And we are so grateful to John Price who saw us a few hours later, debilitated by the detour, getting ready to go and lie in a creek.  When we finally limped into his town of Pingelly that evening, he came out to meet us and told us that we’d be staying at his house.  At this stage I recall I was cross legged in the dirt, nursing a bottle of coke like a baby, eyes rolling about in my head.  And he still offered!  Thanks to John and Helen for your kindness, and to your friends Lynne, Noel and Sheila for looking after us the following night.

Jim and Annabel of Broomehill, who risked their reputations by letting us chef and waitress in their restaurant for the evening, we had a fantastic night.  Neil and Sandy shouted us to the races the following day; we wish we’d won big on the horses so we could have bought them all a bottle of champagne. 

Thanks to the strawberry farm, for being a lovely pocket of nationalities nestled amongst the gum trees. It gave us a feeling, for just that little bit longer, that we could still be anywhere.

Bobby and Heather

Thanks to Kaye and Gil for carrying half our groceries across the Nullarbor. What joy we felt when we saw those cans of chick peas and kidney beans and the bag of corn chips in pristine condition. And to John and Wil for the bananas on the Nullarbor and the offer of a bed if we rode past their house.

Gil and Stuart

Thank you to Mum and Dad, Brendan, Erin and Penny, Nicki, Eden, Briar and Riley. My beautiful nieces and sister Erin made the most amazing banner and we loved it so much. Uncle Barry, Aunty Nancy, Aunty Bev and Aunty June, thank you for coming to the airport to make sure we were back in one piece. It was a superb welcome home, thank you.

Thank you to our stove, tent and sleeping bags; for going above and beyond the call of duty and sheltering us and cooking for us every day for almost a year.

Thank you Phil for setting up this blog and for your remote admin support.  Poor you came over for a goodbye dinner and spent the whole evening on the laptop.  It was appreciated.  Thank you to all the people that read it, followed it and commented (really, really loved the comments).    Thank you also to starry skies, tailwinds, long downhills and women in headscarves shot through with gold thread.  Thank you to sufi dancers, thunderstorms and mountain passes.  We had the time of our life.

The Abano Pass, Upper Caucusus

Most of all, thank you to people who invite strangers to stay.  

Jumarbek and Family

 

Roadhouse Blues

When planning this trip, my biggest fear was not getting kidnapped by Al Qaeda, getting our bikes stolen, or being attacked by bears. It was developing thighs disproportionate to the size of my torso. Someone, please hand that lady a muumuu! These fearsome thighs were in very real danger of being realised on our big push across the Nullarbor Plain.

The superlative Nullarbor Plain! Not only does it boast the world’s longest golf course, it is also the largest piece of limestone in the world. It began life at the bottom of the sea, forcing itself up between 26 and 5 million years ago. From it’s westernmost point in Norseman, to Ceduna in the east, it is 1200kms long. Once inhabited by the Spinifex Wagiri Tribe, now the only settlements one is to find along the Nullarbor are the small towns along the railway line further inland, or the roadhouses on the Eyre Highway, of which there are 12. If you include the kiosk at the Fraser Range station, riding the Nullarbor is like cycling from John O’Groats and stopping just shy of Lands End – with only 13 places to fill up your water bottle. It’s a beast.

The first European to Cross it was Edward John Eyre, who described it as “a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets to in bad dreams”. He was reputed to have said this before he attempted the crossing. I haven’t found any quotes for what he said afterwards, but I imagine they went along the line of “Thank f*&k for that”. His first attempt was in November of 1840, but was abandoned when three of the party’s horses died of dehydration. Undeterred, he set off again in February  the following year. His party reached Caiguna, but with dwindling supplies and sorely tested patience, two of the three aboriginal guides mutinied; killing Eyre’s companian John Baxter, then making off with the remaining supplies. Eyre, along with Wylie, his remaining Aboriginal guide survived on bushcraft and the good fortune of obtaining supplies from a whaling vessel which was anchored in Rossiter Bay. They completed their crossing in June 1841.

The first car drove across it in 1912, which makes it even more impressive to learn that the first cyclist to cross it, Arthur Charles Jeston Richardson, did so in 1896. It took him 31 days. With the help of tarmac (completed in 1976), and our friends Kaye and Gil carrying half our groceries, we were hoping to do it in seven.

Someone almost as slow as us!

We had decided to forgo the option of posting food parcels to the roadhouses as some cyclists do. We planned to carry as much food as we could and have occasional meals in the roadhouses when we reached them. We knew they would be horribly expensive, but thought it would be good to have something to look forward to (we are easily pleased). At  most, the roadhouses are almost 190kms apart.  But having realised that after ten months on the road we had become machines, we hoped to avoid any days in which we wouldn’t pass one, thus minimising the possibility of running out of water.

Water is what requires the most planning for a trip across the Nullarbor. Nullarbor is a latin word, which means no trees, but the aboriginal word Oondiri is far more accurate, it means waterless. Water is in short supply for everyone on the Nullarbor; the roadhouses have it brought it on tankers at great expense so do not give it out. In the bathrooms, the water is usually desalinated bore water and not fit for drinking. On a bike, with the potential for the ride to take up to two weeks if we struck headwinds, water was definitely our biggest concern.

We had bought ourselves an ungainly 20L water container in Albany that fit perfectly across my rack on top of my two back panniers.  On the morning we left Esperance though, Stuart found an empty 10L water container  in the rubbish bin. We filled this up, as it was definitely more user friendly than the bigger one and set off at half past five.

The tail wind was true to its word, and we reached the portenteously named town of Grass Patch just after ten o’clock that morning. I realised that vegetation was going to be in short supply if the arid town that we had just rolled into was named for its greenery.

The road house sign said it was open at ten, but the door was still locked. The loud noise from the television inside suggested someone was in there, but they didn’t hear us knocking. Just as we were about to cycle off, the door opened for business, and a Wanda Jackson look a like greeted us with a nasty stare as we walked in to buy some cokes. Heavy eye make up, black hair piled into a bouffant on top of her head, she was all we wanted and more from a roadhouse proprietor, except maybe she could have been a bit nicer. No bother though, we were bracing ourselves for the worst when it came to the roadhouses. Stuart had met a Swiss cyclist a few weeks earlier who had just finished the crossing “I like all the Australians that I’ve met, they are all so nice” he said, “except the ones who work on the roadhouses across the Nullarbor”.

The next settlement was Salmon Gums, where we stopped for lunch at the service station. After two cheeseburgers, a huge bowl of chips, then icecreams, another packet of chips and two chocolate bars to go, the lady asked us where we were heading that day. We told her that we were carrying on to Norseman, 100kms away. “I don’t know how you people do it!” she said. With a cool nod towards our empty plates, piled high on the counter, I affected my best western voice, “That’s how, lady” I drawled as I swaggered out.

We reached Norseman and decided to stay at the caravan park instead of wild camping. That way we could fill up our water bottles and have potentially our last shower for a number of days. “Bring it on!”, yelled my inner Huckleberry Finn. The woman who checked us in was in a humorous mood, launching into an assault on my accent; six and sex, fush and chups!, ha ha. “Look lady, I’ve just cycled 200kms and I’ve heard all these jokes before. Just show us where to put the tent”, said my inner John Wayne, elbowing into position next to Huckleberry. She then realised that for one dollar less, she could offer us a fully equipped caravan, complete with kitchen, TV and bed linen. With nothing to prove to noone, we grabbed the deal of the century with both hands and moved into the caravan.

We woke to an ominous charcoal sky, lit up by forked lightning. It was spectacular to see, but slightly intimidating as you ride your steel framed bike onto a large, treeless expanse of limestone. Leaving Norseman and turning right onto the Eyre Highway was exciting. There was no turning back, we were going to cross the Nullarbor! I was afraid of headwinds and running out of water. Stuart was afraid of being tremendously bored. Either way, we were on it.

After a couple of hours we saw two cyclists coming our way, which is always a joyful thing. We rode over to meet them. They were German and British, riding identical bikes. The German man travels everywhere with two bikes, and finds someone to cycle with him as he travels. It was their last day on the Plain and they were looking forward to hot showers in Norseman. They didn’t seem to be carrying outlandishly sized water containers like ourselves, so we asked them how they managed with water on the way. An awkward cough preceded the admission that they had a support vehicle travelling with them, carrying 90L of water. I then noticed that each bike had a small pack attached to the frame, with the Bosch logo on it. I jokingly asked if they were travelling with cordless drills. Another awkward cough preceded the information that these were in fact motors!!!

I quickly asked for a swap. Nothing doing, so we headed off on our way, the hard way. Bring it on, said my inner John Wayne. As we rode off one of the cyclists called out that there was a really good supermarket coming up, with cold beer and lots of fresh fruit, only 1200kms away. “I’ll give you oranges!” I yelled back, though I don’t think he heard me over the roar of the Bosch.

After 100kms we reached the Fraser Range Station, which lies 2kms off the road. We thought we’d visit, and see what they had in their shop. On the way in, we met a lone cyclist, well almost alone except for the huge toy kangaroo he had hanging off his bar bag. He was clearly not worried about wind resistance. He was glad to be finishing, telling us the Nullarbor was really boring.  This was just what Stuart wanted to hear with 1100kms to go.

Practical Joke on the way to Fraser Range Station

The Fraser Range shop was shut, but had a small note on the door saying to call Johanna through the VHF radio that was left there. We did this, and soon Johanna came riding down on her quad bike and opened the shop for us. We bought a few extra supplies, including a reasonably priced block of cheese. Apart from getting huge thighs, one of my fears in life is running out of cheese. And yes, I do realise the irony of this. Johanna told us to go and make our sandwiches in the camp kitchen and to help ourselves to the free tea and coffee there. She opened a small carton of milk for us, and said, “Here, this is free for you to use”.

Heather falling for it

The camp kitchen was a beautiful, rustic affair. A huge wooden table dominated the room, an enormous rack hung above it with a profusion of pots, pans and frying pans. We stayed an hour, soaking up the quiet ambience of this remote farm, filled up our water bottles and carried on our way.

We reached Balladonia at about half past eight that night, after 187kms of riding. We were dining in the roadhouse that night, so braced ourselves for our first Nullarbor roadhouse experience. It was a pleasant one, with a friendly German backpacker behind the counter. We ordered two hamburgers, chips, and two cold bottles of VB.

I will remember this as the best bottle of beer I have drunk in my whole life. Determined to stretch after each day’s cycle, Stuart went outside and busted into some hamstring stretches. The two beers sat waiting on the table; like an advertisement. Beads of condensation were forming on the necks. I was torn, go outside and stretch, or just pop that top and drink the most hard earned beer of my life. I did both; threw a leg up on the back of the seat , stretched and skulled. A real lady, mum, you’d have been proud.

The signs in the toilet said the water wasn’t fit for drinking and below this there was a sign repeating this in different languages. Under the Australian translation it said “Water’s a bit dodgy. Try the beer instead”. We filled up a couple of bottles to use for coffee in the morning then rode another couple of kilometres until we found some trees, put the tent up behind them and fell into an instant sleep.

We were up and riding by five o’clock the next morning, wanting to take advantage of every hour before the wind got up. 40 kilometeres into the next days ride, we hit the famous 90 mile straight. 146.6kms of absolutely dead straight road. Not so much as a kink, or a even a hint of a bend. It’s the longest stretch of straight road in Australia, some say the world, but a quick look on Google tells of a 280km straight road in Saudi Arabia. We’re in no rush to tick that off our list, this one will do just fine.

This was clearly taken BEFORE starting the 90 mile straight…

It is very straight, yes. But one never actually sees huge sections of it lying out straight in front of you, as there are subtle rises and falls along the whole section. The straightness combined with a headwind played with our minds a bit, and it became impossible to tell if we were going up hills or going along the flat. My mind started to think crazy thoughts. I was imagining riding into the next roadhouse at Caiguna and ordering a coffee, but then bizarrely, I started to worry that it might be given to me lukewarm. I rehearsed what I would say if this was to happen. This is the reality of what goes through one’s mind on the longest stretch of straight road in Australia. It all turned out to be pointless though, as my coffee was piping hot. I imagined how disappointed Tenzin Palmo would be with me.

The toilets at Caiguna had no signs warning against drinking the water, so we filled our bottles up and rode on for another few kilometers looking for some trees to hide the tent in. We cooked our dinner under the huge, star filled sky. The Southern Cross was framed perfectly between the branches of two trees. Once darkness falls in the outback, there are no cars on the roads only roadtrains and kangaroos, (hence the lack of cars). It was a strange feeling, like a funny section of the trip and of life; just us and the late night road train truckers in this enormous emptiness. Their lights would briefly light up the darkness, then they’d be gone.

Emus on the Nullarbor

We began riding the next day an hour before daylight. Cycling in the dark, we felt like early concert goers, slipping into our front row seats to wait for the magnificent Nullarbor sunrises. Which were positively Homeric. On our own personal Odyssey, we would watch Dawn stretch her rosy tipped fingers across the sky; the wheat coloured grasses would sparkle, glow then ignite as the flaming oranges and pinks exploded above us from the East.

We were brought quickly back to earth 40kms later at the Cocklebiddy Roadhouse. Unaware that the coffee was self serve, we asked innocently if we could have an extra shot of coffee in our cups. The snarling woman behind the counter barked “It’s self service! You can put 20 teaspoons of coffee in for all I care”. I am easily rattled by rudeness, and was really shocked. This no doubt contributed to our indecision about what we wanted to order from the menu, so we paid for our coffees and told the lady we would decide what we wanted in a few minutes. Next door, we made the mistake of pouring our coffees into takeaway cups instead of the ceramic mugs. We sat down and looked at the menu, not sure if we would treat ourselves to one of the more expensive dine in options or get takeways at the counter next door. Yes, perhaps it was an obvious question, but I was tired, and I asked what the difference was between the bacon and egg sandwich to-go, and the bacon and eggs on the restaurant menu, besides the eight dollars. Be aware, we were just two broke strawberry pickers, and roadhouses are really expensive. We just wanted to be informed so we could spend wisely. “You get TWO eggs, and TWO bits of bacon and BESIDES, you’re eatin’ in the RESTAURANT!” she thundered in response. At that I had to physically leave. 

The lone diner came out of the restaurant and asked about our trip. As I was answering, Stuart emerged from the restaurant as he’d been asked to leave because he was drinking from a takeaway cup. This man fished about in his bag for two oranges and two passionfruit, saying that we’d need these a lot more than he would.

I flat out refused to spend any of our money at Cocklebiddy, but Stuart convinced me that we would be cutting off our sunburnt noses to spite our prematurely aging faces by not buying something to eat there. We still had another 90kms to go that day, and we needed to make our own food last. Stuart braved the tempest indoors to go and order from the takeaway counter while I finished my coffee outside like a moody five year old beside the sign that said “Cocklebiddy Roadhouse, Good Old Fashioned Country Charm”.

We got our first Nullarbor flat tyre later that day, and stopped off in a layby to change it. A caravan pulled in to have their lunch, and a woman came over and gave us two cold cans of coke.

A few hours later we reached the Madura Pass. We climbed to the viewpoint and saw below us the Roe Plains; a sand coloured earth covered in small trees. The simplicity of it, the endless stretch of it, was astonishing.

The Roe Plains

Below the pass was the Madura Roadhouse, and the barmaid there redeemed all Austalian Roadhouse workers for the time being. We were running low on lunch things for the next day, and she organised some slices of ham, cheese and a loaf of frozen bread from their kitchen for us to take away. We stayed for a while and  talked with some New Zealanders who were moving from the Gold Coast to Western Australia.  I realised with embarrassment that I had a huge oil stain on the front of my shorts, where I’d spilt the can of fish I had opened for lunch earlier that day.  

Just before we rode off, we bought a custard pie from the shop, and made spectacles of ourselves in the carpark as we fought over who had the bigger half. A family walked past us, and we quickly pretended to behave and nibbled on our sections of pie.

Roe Plains at sunset

Leaving Madura was simply stunning, I had one of those moments when you feel truly in love with a landscape. The world just seemed so big and uncluttered just then and I loved it with all of my heart. It was a transforming emptiness. The sunset was as extravagant as the sunrise, and would shoot gorgeous colours over the sky in front of us. We had to keep stopping and turning around, it was changing so fast, and so spectacularly; pinks, purples, reds and oranges were being rolled into a ball then spread across the sky.

Nullarbor Sunset

Soon we came across a free campsite on the side of the road, quite full with caravans and campervans. We thought we’d treat ourselves to a bit of civilised camping, and make use of the picnic tables. We were blinded by a huge torch as we pulled in, then heard a familiar voice, “Good effort guys, it must have been that custard pie you ate!” It was the family from earlier, out on a nighttime walk to look for rabbits. They had an old 70s style caravan, out of place amongst the super flash and modern caravans that are so common in Australia now that everyone seems to have taken to the road. We loved this family’s DIY holiday – take the kids to the Nullarbor and look for rabbits. They were having the time of their life, we heard them screaming and laughing in the trees as we ate our dinner.

Victor Charlie Charlie Victor, This is Broken Hill to Cooper’s Crossing, we’ve got a cyclist on the runway

Our days of outfoxing the wind were over the following morning. We were riding by half past five but the wind started to push us back by 9 o’clock. Direct head wind on the Nullarbor Plain, our biggest fear. Not for us the legendary tailwinds we’d heard about, we had picked the wrong time of year to travel east. We were knocked back to about 11kms an hour, with myself unable to keep in Stuart’s slipstream. I was trailing badly. Stuart remembered a friend of ours who was once competing as part of a pair in a mountain bike race. This guy’s friend was exhausted, so they joined themselves together with a bunjy cord. We recreated this with two old inner tubes looped together and I must stress that Stuart wasn’t actually pulling me along, rather the tyres were simply a good reminder of where the slipstream was, giving me the ever so occasional reminder of this if I started to slip behind.

This worked a treat, and also felt so funny that it served as entertainment aswell. That is until we saw another cycle tourist coming towards us, CRINGE!!! It’s very hard to hastily hide the fact that you’re getting towed by two old inner tubes. I may as well have had a BOSCH motor attached. This guy was from England, and was riding from Brisbane to Perth. He said he’d had a hell of a time, headwinds the entire way down the east coast, and had come close to packing it all in. When his laundry powder contaminated his powdered milk he really wanted to give up. He certainly deserved the tailwind he was getting, so we wished him all the best, and carried on our hysterical way.

Not long after that, we heard some beeping, and turned around to see Kaye and Gil. They pulled over in a layby, and made us beautiful sandwiches filled with lettuce, tomatoes and avocados.  They also gave us a gift of ten litres of sweet, clean water; heaven sent. The rest of our groceries were retrieved from their car, quickly packed into our almost empty food panniers, and we were back on our way, with plans to meet up with them in a few days time.

Kaye and Gil, our support vehicle!

The wind was unadulteratedly horrendous the rest of the way to Mundrabilla. We made it to the roadhouse on a slow puncture, and decided that we were in no rush to move on. We had our staple of burgers and chips, served by a young backpacker from Edinburgh who gave us extra chips. Och aye!  We sat outside after eating and fixed the puncture while listening to the road train drivers pass the time. One of them obviously thought the conversation was lacking in energy, so threw in an explosive conversational gambit, “Why is it that in the used car section of the paper, it’s always Fords that are for sale?” Then he sat back to watch the fireworks. Ford v Holden is the NZ and Australian equivalent of Celtic and Rangers, though the history is not so old, or bloody. Your allegiance is usually dictated by birth and it is common to wear t-shirts to show where your loyalty lies.  I’m not even into cars, yet if asked, I know I’m on team Ford.  First On Race Day!

Heather breaks two laws at once for the sake of a photo!

We waited as long as we could, but knew we had to get back into the wind at some point, so we left the friendliest Roadhouse on the Nullarbor and continued east. We’d hoped to make it to Eucla that night, but admitted defeat at half past eight, with twelve kms to go. We were struggling to find anywhere to put the tent up. We found a carpark, but the human excrement beside the rubbish bin gave us a bad feeling about the place and provoked the question “Why? Why? Why?  With all this space around, did you do that in a carpark?”. We carried on, finding an old road, cycled up it a bit and found some grass. The wind was howling, I made the quickest chilli known to man while Stuart wrestled with the tent, and then we fell asleep.

The alarm went off at 4:15, and I woke up feeling awful. I told Stuart that if this was a work day, I would actually have to call in sick. But you can’t  do that in a windswept campsite just off the Eyre Highway.

We packed up, and rode 8kms an hour into the unrelenting headwind, reaching Eucla an hour and a half later, it was gruesome. While waiting for our coffees, we read the weather forecast which was pinned to the wall. 35km/hr headwinds for that day, dropping to 25km/hr the following day. That was all we needed to know. We decided to check into the campsite, and take a day off. If I was famous, the red tops would have said I had checked into the Eucla Roadhouse suffering from ‘exhaustion’, and I would have been bundled into my tent with huge sunglasses on and a head scarf. “No photos. No photos, please!” Our big push to make it across the Nullarbor in seven days was over, it was going to have to be eight. We drank our double shot coffees, put the tent up , and were asleep within minutes. It was 8am. We woke up at midday and I still felt like I’d been run over by a truck. 900kms in five days is our best effort yet, but my body was yelling out for a break.

A leisurely day of laundry and hanging around the windy and dusty campsite followed, waiting for an acceptable time to go and drink beer in the bar. We filled in some time by walking to the petrol station with the gas bottle for our stove. We filled it up, and when I went to pay the grand total of one dollar to the lady behind the counter, I thought I’d try a wee joke. “When you go over your records later tonight, it will look like the world’s tiniest motorcar came in here to fill up”. Her mouth pursed up like a fist, she took my dollar and silently dropped it into the till.  I put Australian Roadhouse workers on the list with Customs and Immigration officials as the occupations that you aren’t supposed to be humorous with.

The wind was screaming through the campsite when we woke up at 4:15, so we adjusted the alarm to seven and carried on sleeping. The wind was still up when we rode off at eight, but our rest day had worked. We felt fit and positive as we rode into it.

Border Crossings aren’t so exciting these days…

I was at the point where I was starting to get nervous about going into the roadhouses, like a schoolchild going to see the headmaster. The South Australian border roadhouse did not disappoint. We ordered bacon and egg sandwiches, and Stuart had the gall to change his mind from BBQ sauce to Tomato sauce after the lady had already written the order down on her pad. “Too late. I’ve already written it.” There was a huge sigh as she changed her grip on the pen so she could carve the letters T O M over the B B Q. That was Stuart told.

Change the clocks!

Australian wildlife is unique, as we all know. But we saw something that day that literally stopped us in our tracks. Crossing the road, was a line of furry, grey caterpillars, hundreds of them. All marching single file across the highway. We stopped and watched them, utterly absorbed. Then in the distance, heard a road train coming. “Oh god, I can’t watch” I said to Stuart. We got off the road, and watched horrified as the wind from the train blew into oblivion the hundreds of caterpillars that had managed to survive the eighteen wheels. Within a minute though, the surviving few had reassembled the line, and were continuing the march. It was a galvanising moment for the Nullarbor cyclists, perhaps not unlike Robert the Bruce’s experience with the spider. We reformed our little line and carried on crossing our big road.

Aussie Battlers!

We were excited about seeing the roadtrains on the Nullarbor, these three trailer trucks are synonymous with the Australian Outback. A nice feeling of camaraderie built up between us, often they’d give us a few honk honnnnks as they went past. We were warned very early on that there was no messing with these big trucks. The main danger is the back trailer swinging and hitting you as the truck pulls back in after overtaking. So the onus is on the cyclist to make it as easy as possible for the truck driver. We’d pull completely over to the shoulder, and the train if it could, would usually drive right over onto the other side of the road. Of course if two trains are passing each other at the same time as us we’d get completely off the road.

Stuart and a Roadtrain

A car did a U turn in front of us later that day and two women jumped out and ran towards us with their camera.  They asked if they could take our photo, fascinated that we were cycling across the Nullarbor.  They asked us all about our trip, and kept saying it was epic.  I then asked them about themselves; they were from Medicins sans Frontieres, Doctors without Borders, and were on a break from work.  I’ve always had a profound respect and admiration for this organisation, but this has become more personal since our time in Bosnia.  One evening, Jasna and I looked through her photo album, and I saw her smiling face looking out from almost 20 years ago, surrounded by MSF volunteers who were looking after her during her pregnancy.  I told these women about Ammar, Jasna’s son; multilingual, kind, disarmingly clever and one of the funniest people I have met in my life.  He is one of the beautiful results of their brave work, and I thanked them.  

The Nullarbor felt even more special after meeting the doctors; I imagined how necessary that space and silence must be after some of the places they’ve seen.

At about eleven o’clock the next morning, we rolled into the most feared Roadhouse of all, The Nullarbor Roadhouse.  We walked in, and asked for two coffees. This was greeted with an annoyed sigh from the man behind the counter, a backward glance at the coffee machine, then a look at his watch. “We haven’t started doing coffees yet”. I told him I’d been riding for six hours, and he couldn’t say no to coffee, and apart from that, it was eleven in the morning and they had a big sign outside advertising coffee (admittedly most of this was said in my head, in John Wayne’s voice, but I did get my point across). He acquiesced, then made a big deal about how we were taking too long to decide what we wanted to eat. He rudely told us to pay for the coffees and come back when we’d made up our minds about the food. We decided (unsurprisingly) on hamburgers (with the lot). These arrived without the lot “Do ya want us to sort it out or do ya just want ya four bucks back?” We opted for the money, wanting to get this stop over and done with as quick as possible.

We still needed water, and more food to take on our bikes, but now it was Stuart’s turn to be physically incapable of going back in and spending money. We were just so tired of the rudeness.  I went back in and bought ten litres for twelve dollars, which didn’t seem too bad. The man had gone on a break, and had been replaced by a cheerful lady, envious that we “could eat so much junk and still stay so skinny!” I told her she wouldn’t covet our early starts, late finishes and digging holes for a toilet, after which she suddenly seemed happy enough with her curves.

We stopped a little earlier that night, as we saw a nice clearing to the side of the road.  It was still daylight, so we didn’t have the same rush to put up the tent as we normally did.  We made coffee and as we were drinking it, Stuart broke up with me.  I looked at him, and said “But you’re the best person I know”, and then I started to cry.  He made the decision, but I completely understood and agreed with his reasons, which will only ever be understood by us.  The one thing I will say, is that it was not the trip.  We were not under any stress, we weren’t emotionally exhausted, we were not two tired kids who just needed a break, some time out.  This trip had bolstered, confirmed what I already knew about the fearless, free spirit that I had first fallen in love with.  He rode back through seven angry and barking Kyrgyz dogs, to walk me, immobile with fear, through.  He froze while putting the tent up in the Montenegrin storm, as I shook in the survival bag.  He was my best friend, my navigator.

The most honest feeling of sadness tore through me that afternoon.  It was violent, efficient, like a bad weather system moving through; ripping out fenceposts, uprooting trees, destroying buildings.  I was so grateful to be where we were.  There were no walls, noone else around that we had to fake it to – just the blue sky and red dirt of Yalata.  

With half of Australia left to cycle, we had no choice but to carry on riding.  But there was also nothing else we would rather have done.  As we pulled out onto the road the next day, a road train passed me, way too close.  I watched from 100 metres back as the truck got closer to Stuart, who wasn’t turning around.  I didn’t know if he could hear the truck.  The driver started honking his horn at him, and forced him off the road.  This was too much for me, the world had suddenly become hostile.  Stuart and I were a unit, we’d looked after each other for so long, and I saw that now, I wasn’t going to be there to look after him.  I cried all the way to Nundroo.  

The roadhouse appeared in view just on lunchtime, bizarrely, and we were pleased to find another Scottish backpacker behind the counter.  She was funny and nice, it was a relief to not have to battle with scowls as we spent our money.  It was another windy day, and a customer was telling her how his fuel conversion was a horror show as he drove into the wind with his 4×4 and his caravan.  I went up and paid for lunch, and told her that we also had the same problems, trying to work out how many kilometres we could get to the pie.

In movies, girls who get broken up with go one of two ways.  There are the Bridget Joneses, eating tubs of Haagen Dazs in their pyjamas and watching sad movies all weekend.  Or the girls who can’t eat at all, stomach in knots, growing thinner (that’ll show him!), with each day that passes.  Not I.  I was in the unique position of still needing to ride 100+ kms a day, so had to keep shovelling those pies in.  Wiping away tears and snot while determinedly squirting that last bit of tomato sauce onto your mince pie is not the last image one wants their ex boyfriend to have of them.  Bits of Crunchie bar congealing into the sunblock at the corners of my mouth, as I say again, “We need to keep trying”.  Have I done the right thing he may ask himself months from now, ah…yes.

Finally, a wider load than ours.

The road completely changed from Nundroo on. It was getting more populated, farms were starting to appear and there were more cars on the road. We missed the earlier camaraderie of the Nullarbor. If you’re properly on it, you’re on a big trip; whether you’re a trucker, a caravanner or a cyclist, you’re in it for the long haul. Everyone waves at everyone, it’s like being on a really long and really dry North Uist. 

On the Saturday that we rode from Nundroo to Penong, our second to last day of the Nullarbor, there were a lot more roadtrains, coming at us from both directions, often passing at the same time. There is no shoulder on the South Australian side of the border, the road goes straight onto gravel, so having to move off at speed was almost as dangerous as staying on the road. We had a tailwind that afternoon, but the amount of trucks made the going really tough. We got to Penong well before dark, but decided to stop there as we really wanted to get off the road.

Roadtrain Ahoy!

The caravan park was unattended, but there was a note on the door with the owner’s mobile number and a cordless phone left on the table. We phoned him, and a minute later he came back from the pub and checked us in. Our kind of town! He told us that Wednesdays and Saturdays were the busiest for road trains on that stretch, and we should have a better run of it the next day.

Conqueror of the Nullarbor!!!

The tailwind was waiting for us the following morning, and we flew off and had arrived in Ceduna by midday. We had finished the Nullarbor. Ceduna is famous for oysters, and a lot of people we’d met had told us to celebrate the crossing with a cold pint and a bucket of oysters. Unfortunately for us it was spawning season; the oyster bar was shut, and the only pub that was open was too fancy looking for a girl with stubborn sardine oil stains on the front of her shorts. So we bought a six pack and a bottle of wine instead.

Not a good move. My fragile state did not accommodate a hangover, and the next day’s riding to Smokey Bay in a headwind left me crying once again, unable to put the energy into riding and even living my life. Oh, the evils of drink!  It was like a huge balloon had been popped and that day I just wanted to finish.

We’d texted our friends Kaye and Gil the night before, so knew they were at Smokey Bay. The caravan park was fully booked when we arrived, but Kaye had kindly been up to the office and told them we were coming and made sure the owners would find a space for us. It was great to see them again, giving a feeling of continuity to our ride across Australia.

Blue Crab for dinner

They invited us for dinner that night, and just to make sure there would definitely be enough to eat, gave us a bucket and some crab nets and sent us down to the wharf to go crabbing. We loved this. Our bright yellow bucket, the deep, blue sea and a wind so strong that we needed to tie everything to the hand rails.  Life in big, bright blocks of primary colour. It was a thrill to pull up the pots to see if we’d caught anything, and even more fun to let undersize crabs go.  We’d watch them swim away, all double jointed with their claws and long legs. We ended up catching three blue crabs. The catch limit per person is 40, but we were more than happy with our modest haul. These went with the six that Gil had already caught, and the non spawning oysters that they had somehow managed to find. It was a gorgeous seafood feast complemented with glasses of cold white wine. It was fun to tell them our Nullarbor stories, and to compare our Roadhouse experiences. Kaye was always concerned about my lack of creature comforts on the road, and that night she lent me her  Lavender Body Butter to put on after my shower. They treated us like family.

The day’s catch

We went swimming and fishing the next day and avoided our bikes completely. It was our first day off in eleven days, and they were the biggest days we’d had on the trip. We cooked in the kitchen that night and spoke with some of the other guests. One couple told us they’d seen some cyclists on the Nullarbor a few days ago, and that their friend had given them two cans of coke. “That was us!” we told them. Kaye and Gil had us over for apple pie that night, and gave us advice on how to avoid the busy roads leading up to Adelaide.

Murphy’s Haystacks

We left Smokey Bay early the next day, stopping for lunch at another beautiful spot, Streakey Bay. It was ferociously hot, and there was a mean headwind, so we took five hours off and went swimming and sunbathing and ate cakes from the bakery. We camped that night next to Murphy’s Haystacks, 1500 million year old rock formations, sitting proud in a field. We arrived at sunset, and were the only people there.

The following morning we stopped off at Port Kenny, a faded town of peeling paint and closed shops.  It looked like it had once enjoyed happier days. The man at the caravan park recommended that we take a detour to Mount Camel, a beach off the main road, as that was Stuart’s best bet for catching a ‘salmon’…

The Australian Fishing News.

Although I caught a few fish at Emu Point in Albany, there was nothing worthy of a photo, mainly because I felt there was better to come. One other luxury I now had was the endless array of glossy fishing magazines I had access to. An article caught my eye which was raving about the soft bait fishing potential for bream in a south coast town called Walpole.

Size isn’t everything…

This, by Australian standards, was just round the corner from the Stawberry farm. Even though it was over 160kms away. Cycling there for a cast was out the question in our day and a half off a week. Hiring a car would eat to much into our hard earned cash, so hitching was the only option.

I have hitched in remote parts of Australia before, to get to fishing destinations. Looking back, it was about nine years ago on Cape York in far north Queensland. I had joined this small group of fly fisherman from Sydney to fish the Pennyfarther, just north of Weipa. It was just for a couple of days fishing, but I was so taken by the place I was determined to get back. I ended up getting a lift to a junction where not one car was heading to the dead end destination I was going to. 11 hours later, a Thursday Islander who saw me on the side of the road earlier in the day took pity on me. An hour and a half later he dropped me off at my destination along a four wheel drive track in the pitch black. The only the lights I saw were the reflection of the cars headlights in the eyes of the many crocodiles that were resting in the saltwater lagoon.

Hitching to Walpole, I was hoping would not be as extreme. Although, hitching in Austrailia should never be taken lightly. It was the height of summer and there were hundreds of kilometers between towns or even farm houses.

I set off after work at midday on Saturday. My first lift, believe it or not was on a push bike. Heather with her rugby player thighs and her stamina only to be matched by a race horse gave me a lift 5kms to the end of the road with me sitting on her tubus rack,(I knew the 80kg max load would come in useful).

The actual hitching was a breeze. Hitching is a great way to get a good cross section of the local population depending on the amount of lifts you get. I ended up with eight rides and a great mix of people, from a car full of Afghani strawberry pickers ‘Assallam aleikum’ I greeted them to their surprise. Someone who was returning to the town of Denmark after a ten day hike in Tasmania. A guy living in the middle of nowhere with a fresh water spring on his property who was going to take over the bottled water market, (“Do they drink bottled water in Scotland?” was the market research question). A European couple touring in a 4X4, a young father and son making honey for a living. The dad told me he cycle toured with his wife for two years in Australia and it was the freest he has ever felt. Then finally, a couple going to help their 85 year old relation on his farm near Walpole.

Reaching Walpole, I had a quick chat to the guy in the tourist information to get the lay of the land.
I then made my way down to the water only to be met by a cold stiff southerly and dirty water, nightmare.
With a heavy heart I started wandering around the coastline in the search of some slightly clearer water. The locals had already told me it would be the same the following day. One thing slightly in my favour was the fact the inlet was so shallow, no deeper than 1.5 meters. Having around 30cm visibility meant if there were fish around they may see the fly as they look skywards.

I found a long jetty, where I met another Scotsman. Only he had been in Oz for over forty years. He was a really nice guy, he even caught a bream on bait just to prove there were fish around. I fished till dark and managed a fish; What a relief. It’s amazing how much satisfaction even a small fish on a tough day can give.

Not the Australian summer weather we’ve been told about!

The following day, although the weather was still cold, at least the sun was out. From memorising an aerial shot in the tourist office I made my way to a slight sand spit near a boating channel. Fishing bright pink crazy charlies on an intermediate line, I managed around eight fish; five bream and three herring. A great day and to help round it off, the lifts back to the strawberry farm were frequent, (apart from the first one which involved an hour and a half wait). I even fluked the last lift for the last 60 kms with the strawberry farmer’s wife, who dropped me off outside the tent. He who dares Rodney!

“Aaargh! Smile for the camera with fish spine deeply embedded in thumb!”

Take 2!

Having caught my Aussie fish in WA and after witnessing first hand the size of the country, it only seems right to try and catch a fish in each state we cycle through, (any excuse to get some more fishing in).

The southern part of Australia unfortunately doesn’t have the exotic species of the tropical north, which are much sought after by the sportfishermen. One of the better sportfish of the south are the Australian salmon (kahawai in New Zealand). They only come inshore at certain times of year and it so happened that we were there at the start of the run.

The numbers were still patchy and I found my self asking random strangers through out the trans continental cycle, “Got any Salmon? Lovely!”, in a cockney accent. Anyone of a similar age may remember the tune that was going through my head at the time.

Eventually, after a number of failed attempts along the way, we were told to have a cast at Camel Beach on the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. This was an exposed, fishy looking beach, with a decent swell and deep gutters.

Calm above the surface, legs working furiously beneath

Fly fishing on a surf beach is never ideal, with long casts required into turbulent water; everywhere awash, the flyline round your legs and getting caught in between your toes. The only way to beat the beach was to wade neck deep, bouncing off the bottom to keep your head and fly reel above the water as the swell rolls in. At times even treading water with your feet whilst casting. Knackering.

Heather, mean time was sun bathing and reading on the deserted beach. Only to be dsiturbed to come down and take a few shots of the hard earned salmon that eventually sucumbed to a Lefties Deciver on the faithful Hardy Demon #8. Not the biggest salmon but definitely hard earned.

Salmon fishing in the Outback!

Victoria was slightly anti climactic as far as the fishing went, and also the only place I know of where you have to pay to fish in the sea. I managed to catch a few very small salmon but the coastline was very exposed with large breakers whereever we had access to the beach, so the fly fishing was limited to cut off lagoons and some poor excuses for streams.

This is the second time I have fished and spent time in Austrailia. It was great to have on the ground experience of just how big the country is with the bikes. It must have one of the most diverse fisheries in the world, all productive and accessible. 

Hard work over, time for lunch

We spent the rest of the afternoon riding straight roads into a strong headwind.  Whereas once I would have enjoyed the stark beauty of this landscape, loved its vastness and the thought of truly experiencing the distance of Australia, now, I just felt beaten by it.  I didn’t recognise my life, I felt sad for my family who I knew would have been planning a party, sad for Stuart, sad for us. We rode past dry fields for hours, nothing was growing.  We rode through small towns that had no water.  Everything kept repeating itself, like a Roadrunner cartoon with the background on permanent loop, just like my crazy thoughts.  The sun had bleached the sky and frayed it around the edges, the wind was pushing against me like mean kids at school.  It felt like too much effort to ride to an unhappy finish.

Don’t mind if I do

We had decided to cut across the Eyre Peninsula half way down, and ride inland across to Cowell, and then take a ferry over to Wallaroo. This route would get us to the Great Ocean Road but keep us off the busy highways. We left the coastal road before Elliston and turned onto a quiet gravel road called Rocky Valley Road. The landscape changed instantly, green trees and bushes lined the road and I started to feel better. Later that evening the sun set directly behind us above the road and the moon rose brilliant and silver on the road in front us. We’ve ridden through so many sunsets and beneath so many full moons, but never before had we been on the direct line between the two. It was a magical, frangible moment, we were on a wire connecting two lanterns.

We rode into Lock the next morning, which we decided is quite possibly the friendliest town in Australia. The supermarket had a table and chairs in the middle of it, along with a coffee machine and a pie oven. She of the stained shorts was delighted! Customers pushed their trolleys while balancing their coffee cups, stopping to talk with the shop assistants, talking about partys and how their diets were going.  A lady came up and told us she used to work at a cafe in Tennant Creek, and whenever cyclists would come to buy a meal, she’d give it to them for free. I told her she would still be spoken of with fondness in houses all over the world, and thanked her on behalf of all cycle tourists.  We asked the girl at the checkout if there was a tap in the town where we could fill up our water. A woman shopping overheard and told us she volunteered in the 2^nd hand shop next door, the fantastically named ‘Lock, Stock and Apparel’, and that we could come over in ten minutes to fill up.

She was an English woman in her fifties, and had moved to Australia when she was fifteen. She told me that soon after she arrived she moved to a remote sheep station 800kms north of Adelaide, “I just wanted to see how other people live”. I thanked her for the water, and she told me simply that they’d had rain recently, so it was no problem, and besides, they just love having visitors.  

We arrived in Cowell later that night, to find that a Ute Muster had the town fully booked. The first caravan park turned us away, and we didn’t have high hopes about the other one, 2kms out of town. They had a no vacancy sign up, but we throught we’d try our luck anyway. The owner came out of the full and rowdy kitchen, laughing when she saw us, saying that the other guests had shouted “Oh, come on! You can’t turn them away!”

The newly reinstated ferry took us from Cowell over to Wallaroo the following day. We queued up with an older couple who were touring on their motorbikes. “It’s a great way to travel”, the woman said to Stuart, “You can smell the smells, really get a sense of your, oh…” she suddenly noticed our pushbikes, “I suppose you already know that.”

With the first half of the day spent on the ferry,  then riding into another headwind for the rest of the afternoon, it was easy for the sign advertising the Paskeville Historic Pub to tempt us off the main road for a beer. A country band were tuning their strings, Folsom Prison Blues was first on the playlist, so before we knew it, the beers were in and we’d ordered dinner. Some locals told us that we could put our tent up down by the sports oval.

Our trip was a good topic of conversation, leading onto darker topics, ones that one didn’t really want to get into as night was drawing in. “Are you camping? Haven’t you seen Wolf Creek?” asked Janine, a lovely lady who came to sit with us. No, I replied, I hadn’t seen that delightful Australian melange of the Peter Falconio murder, with a few twists of Ivan Milat thrown in to really hot things up. In Australia, if it’s not the snakes or spiders that get you, it will be a man in a checked shirt and a white ute.

We were reassured that Paskeville was completely safe; the only upset they’d had was the biker shooting in 2008, where a man who’d been shot 15 times staggered into the very bar that we were sitting outside. We felt our mountain bikes heavily loaded with camping equipment, cumbersome water vessels and high vis fabrics weren’t cool enough to warrant any biker attention. We camped safely in the oval that night, with the softest ground we’ve put our tent pegs in yet! Thank you Paskeville!

It was a short wind through the Barossa Valley over the next few days, on some beautiful roads criss crossed with the shadows of a thousand gum trees. This eventually took us to Murray Bridge. We stocked up at the supermarket, and the world’s tiniest and perhaps most elderly security guard came out to chat with us. I said she must have seen a lot with a job like hers. She said, “Yes, I’ve been doing this 26 years, but I still never know where to grab people when they’re naked”. She bid us safe travels, and told us not to ride when it got too hot.

Last border crossing of the trip

After another few days of riding we crossed the Victorian Border, our last border crossing of the trip. We had a short day that day, stopping off at a small town called Dartmoor, that had a beautiful free campsite and a river. We spent the evening there with a couple who’d just sold their house and business and had taken to the road indefinitely in their bus. They cooked for us that night, gave us wine and whisky, and also tips for spotting koalas in the trees, which they said we’d be bound to see once we hit the Great Ocean Road.

A wheel good way to dry the dishes!

We camped the following night at Yambuk, a charmingly intermittent caravan park that lined the edge of the public road to the beach. We loved how casual it was. That evening as I was chopping vegetables for dinner in the camp kitchen, some men asked about our trip. I answered politely, but was beginning to find these conversations difficult after what had happened, especially when the conversation led to what we would do when the trip was finished. We still answered as if nothing had changed, it was easier.  When the men left, they gave me a gift of a bottle of wine and said “Thank you for answering our stupid questions”. I felt guilty, knowing that I probably hadn’t put as much enthusiasm into my answers as I once would have, and hoped that I hadn’t appeared rude to these men.

Another camper came and asked if we were planning to cycle the Great Ocean Road, I confimed yes and he let out a low whistle while shaking his head. “Be veeeery careful, there are some very tight corners and some veeeery crazy drivers. No, No, you’ll be fine, I’m just saying be careful. That’s all”.

The Great Ocean Road, another iconic Australian Road Trip! It started well, with a kind family coming out of a supermarket with a tub of icecream. They spooned some into plastic cups for us and let us borrow some of their teaspoons “We want to give you a nice memory”, said the grandfather before they drove off waving their spoons.

The Great Australian Headwind!

We hit another headwind as soon as we started, but once we reached the coast, and started catching glimpses of blue sea, crumbling sea stacks, and inaccessible coves we barely noticed it. We shouldn’t have, but that night we took our bikes over a barrier and wheeled them through the scrub and camped right on the edge of Australia. The ocean was crashing over and over again onto the cliffs right below us. We woke up there, on the edge of that beautiful, enormous country, and drank our morning coffee with Australia ending at our feet. We reached the Twelve Apostles, an hour later, just as the sun was rising.

Heather, The 13th Apostle

We rode onto the small town of Princetown and had morning tea with a friendly cafe owner. He said it was going to get pretty hilly from there on, but that once we were at the top of Laver’s Hill, the worst of the climbing would be behind us. The hill was fantastic, and we realised it was the first proper hill climbing we’d done since India. The cars were a bit of a menace though, too confident and too fast. At least in India they beep incessantly so you know they’re coming. Yes, I admit it, I prefer Indian drivers!

And the fourteenth

We got to Lavers Hill and stopped off at a Roadhouse. The man who ran it asked which way we were going, and then said “Cycle safe” while staring deeply into our eyes. “No, I mean it. Be careful.” We had to go back in one more time before we left, and he paused again, and said “Cycle safe guys” with another meaningful look. It was starting to get a little bit too American Werewolf in London for my liking, “Stick to the roads boys, don’t go on the moors.” We hadn’t had this many warnings since we’d voiced our intentions of cyling through Indus Kohistan on the Karakoram Highway.

The downhill from Laver’s Hill was exhilarating, and then it was straight up into another belter of a hill leading up and then down into Apollo Bay. We rode on through the early evening. It was a beautiful time to ride; there were very few cars on the road, so we had the sharp corners to ourselves and could enjoy the curves without the cars. I saw three koalas that afternoon, and I realised how much I’d taken them for granted.  Yes, we all know Australia has them, but I don’t know if I’ve ever really considered how wondrous it is that this country has tiny bears in trees, until I saw them in the wild.To ride along, and notice that the branch that is stretching above you, has a bear crawling along it, is just astonishing.  I stopped, and suddenly noticed another koala halfway down a tree trunk.  When he noticed me watching, he stopped in his slow moving tracks and stared right back.  I then saw another one, wedged between a trunk and a branch.  It was a laugh out loud, hand clapping moment.  Stuart was absolutely devastated when I caught up with him ten minutes later, he was sure I had made it up.  Three!!!

That night the fire service had organised a controlled burn to get rid of the  undergrowth that can cause bushfires. The whole landscape looked like it had been in a fight.  A heavy  block of smoke was pressing down on the ocean like a new bruise, the pinks of the sunset were bleeding out from underneath it. The hills were lit up with small orange fires, the stripped, black trees were scorched and naked. Firemen and women were on silent standby, all lit up in high vis yellow, slowly waving cars past in a single file.

Blurry I know, but I’m trying to break up all this text!

We stayed at a campsite at Wye River that night. It was our last night in the tent, our second to last day of cycling to New Zealand. We cooked pasta on the barbecue tables outside the laundry. There were signs in the bathrooms telling guests what to do if there was a fireball, saying the best thing to do would be to run straight into the sea.

Great Ocean Cyclists!

The next day was beautiful, with photogenic views of the Great Ocean Road in each direction. Slowly, slowly a headwind started to build up, and by the time we reached Anglesea it was nasty. We stopped for lunch at a cafe, and my heart broke as I watched Stuart through the window, ordering our lunch, pies again. The lady behind the counter was busy, and he stood there smiling, his usual patient self. 

Great Ocean Road

We carried on into the headwind, and the roads got busier and busier as we neared Geelong. Perhaps it’s the best way to end a year long cycle trip; in the suburbs, uninspired. We met a couple that ended theirs in Kyrgyzstan. It would be heartbrearking to fly away from those mountains, with all those horses, and those beautiful Central Asian faces. We rode into Geelong and found the train station, bought two tickets to Melbourne and wheeled our bikes inside to wait. We ordered coffees and sat on a sofa seat with our bikes parked on the brightly coloured carpet, amongst school kids on their way home and another guy waiting with his surfboard. I burst into tears.

I remembered an Australian guy we’d met in India, just as we’d made it up the steep hill to Macleod Ganj. Though backpacking when we met him, he had done a lot of bike touring. He said that even though he’d been most places, over five years of riding, he still felt jealous when he saw other cycle tourists. Because it’s never enough. In his words, nothing, but nothing beats that feeling of pulling up somewhere on your bike, and looking around at everyone else, and saying “Yeah, well I f*&kin rode here!” Amen to that.

I’d often imagined our last moment, and it certainly didn’t involve crying over my coffee in the Geelong Train Station. But that’s life. And we still f*&kin rode there.

11 months, 21 countries, 16,000 kilometres.        You beauty.

A land of magnificent distances and bright heat

Henry Lawson, the writer and poet described Australia as ‘The great lone land of magnificent distances and bright heat’. The romance of it shimmers; red, sunburnt earth, the architectural poetry of corrugated iron sheds standing proud in wheat coloured fields. We pictured it in the distance, we were going to build up to it. We weren’t expecting to run into it a day’s ride from Perth.

Stuart in the bright heat

It all started well. Our bikes were easily reassembled in  the air conditioned comfort of Perth Airport beneath some uncomfortable glances from car hire staff. It’s quite hard to clean chain grease off linoleum when you’re being watched. We then spent a wonderful evening with our friend Christine, overlooking the city from her apartment and eating much dreamed of pizzas.

Our first stop on leaving Christine’s was the bike shop, as we needed a new tyre. Stuart also needed new gears for his bike, havng ridden all of India with slipping sprockets, but these had to wait until we found a job. While Stuart was fitting the tyre, I went to the supermarket, and bought some lunch. I bought half a chicken, a loaf of bread and a bag of lettuce. With hindsight, perhaps I should have also bought cereal, milk powder, coffee and sugar. We ate half the chicken and bread in a park, then headed out of town. As we rode down the Albany highway, we passed a few more bikeshops, then randomly on the third or fourth shop, Stuart said he wanted to go in and get them to have a quick look at my bottom bracket, as he felt it had a little too much play in it.

Sunny Perth

I wheeled my bike in, hoping the bike mechanic  had time to check my bike over. A few minutes later, holding my rusted bottom bracket in his he hand, he asked “Where are you going with these bikes? Don’t tell me across the Nullarbor”. We nodded yes. I think at this point the mechanic sat down and looked at the floor. Stuart and I exchanged a Wallace and Gromit type grimace. 

The shop manager who had been listening to the conversation approached Stuart and asked, “Did you used to work in London? In Selfridges?”  Bizarrely, he and Stuart used to know each other ten years ago when Stuart worked for Sportfish and Paul worked for Tiso. Of all the bikeshops, in all of Perth… Paul was very kind, only charging us for the part and not the labour. He also gave us a  tube of  energy tablets, saying “Here, these will get you across the Nullarbor”.

New bottom bracket and energy drink in hand, we left Perth with all the v8s, ones of them even taking the time to blast his horn and do the fingers.  Ah, Australia, good to be back.  We stopped off at a roadhouse and had a coffee, filled our waterbottles up with metallic tasting water from the toilets and set off. And then hit the Perth hills. They went up for a lot longer than we were expecting. Now, I’m not saying they compared in anyway to cycling in Northern India, but when you imagine Australia, for some reason you imagine a big flat desert, and unexpected hills sometimes hurt a whole lot more. We climbed and we climbed and we climbed, cycled until about an hour after dark, all lit up, before putting the tent up at the side of the road. We made chicken sandwiches, and I acted like a complete cavewoman by crunching on small bones and swallowing cartilage whole. Stuart asked between bites “Do you think this trip has turned us into pigs?”

On the road again

We woke up starving, and without coffee, just the dubious tasting water. It was a fragile moment, but nevertheless, it made for our fastest decamping in the history of the trip. We rode another 20kms to North Banister, and parted with $22 dollars for two coffees and two toasted sandwiches. I gripped the counter and had to be helped to my seat.

We left the Albany Highway at this point, looking for quieter roads that showed us a bit more of the country side.  It was beautiful riding, a perfect Australian morning. The air was still a little cold, and we rode through the pine trees, which have a smell I’ve only smelt in Australia.  It’s  like the whole landscape has been scrubbed clean then given a spin with fabric softener.

We reached Wandering to find a school which was closed for the holidays, a post office and a pub which didn’t open until 4pm. Oops.  We quickly learned that just because the town has a name, it doesn’t mean it will have a shop.  Luckily the owner of the pub was there and he filled our three water bottles from the tap outside. The next town was Pingelly, 40kms away.  The sky was cloudless, the sun starting to appear malicious.  We wondered if our water bottles would be up to the job.

The Wanderers

After about 25kms our water was finished and we came upon a heartsinking sight. A road diversion. The main road to Pingelly was blocked and all traffic was diverted onto a gravel road. Unwilling to commit to the diversion before we knew more, we stopped and waited to ask someone in a passing car. Wilma, the lady who stopped told us that a bridge had been washed out in a recent downpour, but she felt we’d be able to make it over with our bikes. She was just about to phone the council to double check for us when the postie drove past, who told us that it wouldn’t be passable and we’d have to take the detour. This was grim news, the day had become ferociously hot, and we were now faced with an extra couple of hours of riding on gravel roads. We tried to look brave.

Wilma drew us a map to make sure we didn’t miss the road which would lead us back to the main road, then took our water bottles which she was going to fill up at her son’s house. When she returned, she also had two cheese and tomato sandwiches. Praise Be to the Wilma Warburtons of this world! How we loved this woman!

Renewed, we pedalled on, and crossed a small bridge, and took the opportunity for a quick swim. A ute pulled up, driven by John who had seen us from his field. He asked where we were going and told us we weren’t too far from Pingelly. He also broke the bad news that the postie was wrong. The bridge was to be reopened the following day and we’d have been able to take our bikes over no problem.  Learning fast, we double checked that there was a supermarket in Pingelly, which there was. 

Are you sure we're out of croc country?

We were back on the main road after the swim, detour completed, albeit unnecessarily. Things then went rapidly from bad, to very bad, to the very worst. We had a head wind, we’d finished our water, and the road was permanently undulating. Within about an hour, I had got to the point where I couldn’t cycle more than 100m before stopping, letting my bike fall to the ground and walking on jelly legs to any patch of shade and lying in it. Sinking gratefully into soft piles of leaves and sticks, fully aware that snakes and spiders also felt comfortable in such surrounds. I did not care. I was deranged with thirst. We had already dissolved eight of the Shotz tablets in the small amount of water that we’d drunk, and soon we progressed to eating them neat. Sometimes two at at time. A sharp angry fizz as the tablets hit our empty stomachs. My arms lay limply at my side. Head lolling. Eyes unfocussed. I had hit the wall spectacularly.

How the hell had we let this happen? We had been paragons of self sufficiency for the past eight months. In our heyday we set off into the upper Caucusus with five days worth of food in our panniers. I even made dough and cooked bread at the side of the road in Tusheti for god’s sake. Now here we were, a day’s ride from Perth, out of water, not even a bread crumb in our bags, and chewing on tablets.

Bread making in Georgia mid bike-ride - proof we were once self sufficient!

With two kilometres to go to town, Stuart, who was struggling but not quite as incapacitated as myself said he’d ride ahead, sort himself out and then ride back out with water. Kind of like how during a plane crash the adults have to fix the oxygen mask to themselves before they can help the children. I bade him goodbye with heavy heart, like Wills saying goodbye to Burke on their ill fated expedition  I was not expecting to be alive when he returned.

Somehow, with embarrasingly frequent stops, I made it to town, and began coasting down the small hill into Pingelly. I passed a man in a ute, who asked me  where I was  going. It was embarrasing, in my state, to nod assent to his question of whether we were planning to cross the Nullarbor. Barely able to stop himself from rubbing his hands together with delight, he settled into a comfortable position in his seat, hitched his stubbie shorts up a little higher and then began on the ghastly details as to why this would be unthinkable. I was so close to water and food, and it was too cruel to have found myself held up like this. I was swaying with my bike. I saw Stuart out of the corner of my eye, on his way up to me. Uncharacteristically I turned to the man, and held up my hand and said “Must go” and rode off. I was monosyllabic by this stage.

Stuart met me with water, coke (a cola) and a bag of chips. Bike braced itself for its clatter downwards, and I fell to the dusty ground myself and sat cross legged, skulling from the bottle, cramming fistfuls of chips into my mouth. All I needed was a soiled nappy and my degeneration into a helpless baby would have been complete. Unphased by my abrupt close to the conversation, the man in the ute had driven down to our spot to resume the conversation. “She told me you plan on crossing the bloody Nullarbor!” He told us that we shouldn’t consider this in January or February.  We told him that we needed to look for work for a month anyway, so he needn’t worry. He was on a roll by this stage, and had gone quickly from heat to head winds to road trains in his determination to put us off. “If one of those things hits ya, they won’t be picking you up off the road, they’ll be scraping you off”. I just sat there and licked salt off my fingers.

This man had a farmhouse about a 100kms from where we were, and he kindly told us we could go and stay there to wait out the hot weather. It was 25kms from the nearest shop. We’d have it to ourselves during the week, but he’d be out on the weekends to mow the lawns. 

Heather and Stuart wait out the summer.

We thanked him, but told him we needed to find work, so we’d keep cycling until we found it.

What have you done with Stuart?!!?

It was at this stage that another ute pulled up, and  John, the farmer from earlier asked us where we were staying that night. We told him that we planned to stay at the caravan park. And once again, Praise Be to the John Prices of this world! He told us that we’d be staying with him, his wife Helen was on her way back from Perth, and we’d have dinner when she got back.

He gave us a cold beer at his house, some chips and dip and the trauma of the previous few hours began to recede. We looked reasonably normal by the time Helen arrived home.  Her heart was as gold as her husbands, and we were so interested to learn of the charity her sister has set up in Cambodia, Stitches of Hope, which teaches people to sew so they can make their own living. Helen has been three times to help teach, and the last time they were there, the charity set up a fish farm with the locals, providing even more of an income.  It was really inspiring.

We had a beautiful dinner, finished off with fruit and icecream.   Before heading to bed, we told John and Helen that we were early risers and would probably be up quite early. At ten past eight the following morning, we were woken by John wanting to say goodbye before he went to work. He was a true gentleman, and we were so happy to meet him. He polished his boots before setting off, saying “You just never know who you’re going to meet!”

We were heading to Wagin that day, about 100kms away. Helen was going to pick up her computer half way there, in a town calld Narrogin, so we arranged to meet for lunch. We set off after breakfast; loads of water on the bikes, food bags packed after a trip to the IGA and positively flew along. It was just as hot as the day before, but oh, the difference being hydrated made.

Helen had good news when we met her, Lynne, a friend of hers was visiting her mother  in Wagin that night, and we had been invited to stay. It seemed that Western Australia had grabbed the hospitality baton and were running with it! After a gorgeous lunch with Helen and an easy 50kms, we reached Wagin, visited the Big Ram (I’m surprised we don’t have one of these in NZ, to go next to the big kiwifruit, the big sandfly and the big carrot) before riding to Sheila’s house.

The Big Ram at Wagin

Sheila’s house was easy to find, she greeted us warmly and gave us a cold beer (love Australia!), and Lynne and her husband Noel, from New Zealand arrived about five minutes later. We had a great night, they were all so easy to get along with, with that gloriously irreverent antipodean humour. Lynne suggested that they could act as support vehicles for the next part of our trip, saying that they’d drive ahead with a flashing light on their car and a sign that said ‘Idiots Ahead’. Noel told us to be wary of the attack kangaroos as we neared Albany, known for targetting cyclists. Still in recovery from the dehydration episode the day before, we had an embarrasing few moments when we believed him, making us the brunt of more jokes.

The next day we decided that we needed to start looking for work.  Our map showed that we were approaching the wine growing region and we thought vineyards would be a good place to start asking.  We rode into the town of Katanning just on one o’clock and went to the supermarket, which had just shut and from the sounds of it, no supermarkets in the next 100kms would be open the following day either.  Stuart pleaded our case to the manager, who let us in to do our shopping amidst all the staff packing shelves.  As we were packing our bags out the front, two teenaged boys came up to us and asked us where we’d cycled from and where we were going.   “F*&k that” they said before wandering off laughing.  We realised we were no longer cool. 

At a gas station in Broomehill later that afternoon we asked the woman there if she knew when the grapes were going to be harvested. She told us that the owners of the vineyard ran a restaurant around the corner, and we should enquire there.

We walked into a most beautiful old building which had been turned into a restaurant. Two couples were there, each seated on either side of the counter. We were told we were just in time for a wine tasting, and invited to sit down.  Stuart asked when the grapes were due to be harvested as we were looking for work. Jim told us we were a bit early, that they wouldn’t start for another month or so. Then Annabelle asked Stuart if he happened to be a chef. She told us that their chef and waitress couldn’t work that evening, and we could do a turn in the restaurant. “You think I’m joking don’t you?” she asked.

Cycle tourist by day and chef by night!

Within half an hour we were showered, our bed for the evening had been made up, and Stuart was in an apron and picking fresh basil from the herb garden. He was head chef, and I would be his helper. There were two tables booked, one for four people, the other for two. We prayed it stayed that way, and that there wasn’t a rush of last minute bookings. We all sat down for coffee half an hour before the diners arrived, and two more people walked in to book another table for the evening. Three tables!!! This couple, Rob and Rita, were on their way back from Cape Arid, and had stopped off in Broomehill at the same time last year, and had dined at the restaurant. More pressure! People with good memories, and we were stand in chefs!

The first table of four arrived, Annabelle dealt with front of house, while Stuart prepared the mains and I did the salads. Stuart must have watched an awful lot of cooking shows at some point in his life, as his attention to detail when it came to presentation was strict. I learnt fast not to shift the chicken on the plate when  putting on the salad. It resulted in an oily smear and we needed a new plate! Once all the starters were served for the table of four we began on the mains, just as the order for the table for two’s starters came in. Crap!!! I think we were less nervous when being questioned by Chinese immigration.

Where's those starters?!

Annabelle and Jim were just divine.  They had  a magical quality about them, like they’d just stepped off the pages of a Peter Carey novel. With every dish we served up and garnished, Annabelle would look at it with delight and exclaim how beautiful it was. Rita and Rob returned for their booking, and we had another two people phone up and place their order as they drove down from Kattaning 20kms north. So all in all it was four tables, and as far as we know, noone complained. After cleaning up we sat down to our own dinners and a glass of wine with Jim, Annabel, Rita and Rob.

Rita and Rob had crossed the Nullarbor a few times, and had only good things to say about it. It was nice to hear it spoken of with enthusiamsn as opposed to a deadly boring stretch of road where we’d die of thirst and then get run over by a truck pulling three trailers. They reminded us to be cautious of all of these things of course, but talked about how much beauty there was to be found there if you took the time to look.

Jim, Annabelle, and their friends Sandy and Neil who we’d met at the wine tasting were all going to the races in Mount Barker the following day. Held in conjunction with local wineries, it’s called Grapes and Gallops. We got up really early the next morning so we could ride the 100kms and meet them at the races. 

They passed us at about midday the next day, stopping to get cold Cokes out of the boot of the car for us. When we got to the races, we found that Neil had bought our entry tickets for us, and organised somewhere for us to leave our bikes.  Thank you again for your kindness.

We had a great day at the races, learning quickly that a dollar each way was probably better for our budgets than going on the nose every time. We unwisely blew our money on horses, burgers and beers and left even more desperate to find work.

That evening we stayed at the local caravan park, run by Shirley and Steve.  They had spent ten years travelling and teaching English around the world before settling down to run the park. We asked them about work in the area and they phoned the owner of a nearby strawberry farm and told him about us. They let us stay for free the following night, saying, that lots of people had helped them out on their travels aswell.

We phoned the manager of the strawberry farm, who was positively delighted to have someone who had cycled half way around the world. I think he imagined me as a strawberry picking juggernaut, huge athletic strides between rows of strawberries, scooping them up in my hands. I was a bitter disappointment, hitting my picking peak on day 3, then plateauing then getting slower and slower until new starts were outpicking me on their second day. This is not usually the way it goes in this business. However, I comfort myself by knowing I picked with integrity, no unripe or rotten berries went in my tray!

Fly Fish Western Australia!

It was always going to be a bit of a culture shock arriving in Perth after spending so long in the developing world. The mayhem and hecticness of India was beginning to feel normal.

The fishing too, (which may seem obvious to anglers) is worlds apart. Mainland India has issues such as pollution and overfishing, and also no regulations. Whereas Australia must only be second to the States with enforced, stringent bag limits and size limits on their seafish.

We were 10 days in Australia before I was able to get a cast in. We were living on a farm near Mount Barker which is about 80kms north of Albany, which also means 80kms from the coast. Christine and Andrew, our friends from Perth, came down to visit us and take us out for the day. They insisted I took the fly rod (Andrew is also a very keen fisher). I did not need much persuading.

Albany is the largest town on the south coast of WA, over looking a scenic natural harbour with some of the clearest water I have seen on the trip. We headed towards Emu Point; a popular spot with restaurant, cafe, and a perfectly calm swimming beach which even had a laned swimming area. Best of all, it also had a narrrow deep channel leading from a large inlet to the open sea, with flats to the side. No tropical fish here unfortunately, but the bread and butter fish that are present around all of Australia’s southern coasts. Brim, flathead, herring, whiting, and salmon during the run. I am always a little disappointed with whoever it was to name these fish, as they have just thought of a fish that looks similar to one in the UK and given that name to them. The only one that has no the name in the UK is the flathead, which I think highlights the lack of imagination of the people that named the fish. It would never happen but even if Aboriginal names for the fish were used at least you would feel you were fishing a foreign land for foreign fish and would give a little credit to the indigenous people of this country.

The fishing was pleasant, wet wading out past bikini clad women in the warm, crystal clear water. This is another thing that is a bit different in the west, you are lucky to even see a women in Pakistan, and even then it would only be their eyes. Also on the topic of differences, it gave a slight queasiness in the stomach to see the wealth that most of us enjoy. Watching jetskis, fishing craft, big cars and 4x4s and most of all, everybody having ‘leisure time’. Unheard of in the countries we have just travelled through.

Anyway, the fishing. Nothing mindblowing fish wise, a couple of herring probably just short of a pound in weight, but incredible fighters for their size. 

Leaving the farm

We picked strawberries for a month, not making our fortune, but saving enough to cycle across. We left the farm on  a Thursday and rode to Albany where Stuart bought new running gear for his bike. We found a really friendly bike shop. The owner had a great story about a man who came in one day, slapped $400 on the counter and told them he wanted to ride to Adelaide.  The owner said the shop made no money off the transaction, selling most things at cost price just because they loved his spirit of adventure. He had a big bottle of water and a big bag of rice. They left the shop to wave him goodbye, took loads of photos, and then watched with horror as the cyclist set off on the wrong side of the road!

After buying the bike parts, we went to look for a campsite. We stopped off at a deli to ask directions for the closest caravan park. The man behind the counter paused before giving us directions, “Do you know that for an unpowered site it’s $65?” he asked us. White knuckles gripped another shop counter. “Do you know how many strawberries that is?” I gasped. Lee then told us we could pitch our tent on his lawn, drew a quick map and told us to ride there when we were ready.

Bike repairs

Not much work was done on the bike that night as Lee and his wife Nadine were far too entertaining. We rode to Emu Point the following morning and fixed the bike in a park, then it was  back to the deli to say goodbye to Lee and Nadine and have quite possibly the best hamburger we’ve ever eaten, called the Jimmy Cadillac. 

Lee's Cadillac

It was late in afternoon by the time we left Albany, but we managed 40kms before it got dark and camped just off the main road beneath a group of trees filled with kookaburras. We woke to one of their raucous ‘conversations’  and were able to see them up close.

Esperance was still 400kms away, but we decided to use it as a Nullarbor training ride and try to get there in three days. We broke our previous record of 155kms twice during the next three days, of heat, hills and headwinds.  On the third day, thoughts of a bottle of red wine, pasta, pesto and a block of feta cheese kept us going . We reached the town after 8pm, supermarkets closed, along with the offices of the caravan parks. We could still have pitched our tent and paid in the morning, but the Scotsman in Stuart won’t allow him to pay full price for a third of a day’s camping. I agreed to an extent, but the wind was howling, ‘No Camping’ signs were posted all along the beach and I was too tired to ride back out of town to find some trees to put the tent up in. So we went to the pub, bought dinner and a glass of wine, then went back into the howling wind at ten pm and put the tent up behind the public toilets.  That ‘s the stuff dreams are made of.

Bugger!

We woke up super early to take down the tent, which was lucky as about ten minutes after we’d done so, a young man and his girlfriend went into the bushes behind the toilets to drink beer. We opted for coffee, so went in search of somewhere that was open. Most of Esperance seemed to be up also, running, walking their dogs or fishing on the pier.  After coffee we found a caravan park close to the water and checked in for the next two days, wanting a bit of a rest before the mighty Nullarbor. We extended our stay a further two days when we saw the forecast of a 41 degree day complete with a strong northerly wind on the day we had intended to ride north to Norseman.

Beautiful Esperance

Esperance was a great place to stay; simply stunning beaches and a laidback feel to the town. We were camped in between some lovely people, Wil and John from NSW, and Kaye and Gil from South Australia. Kaye and Gil were crossing the Nullarbor a few days after us, and asked if there was anything they could carry for us in their car. This was a huge help, as carrying enough food and water presents some challenges to the cyclist.    The only places to buy food or get water are the roadhouses, and these can be as much as 180kms apart.  Some people post food parcels to the road houses, Stuart and I are not as organised as that. So we went to the supermarket and bought more than we would normally be able to carry, and gave half of it to Kaye and Gil. They invited us to their caravan for a beautiful dinner on our last night; chicken kebabs, a gorgeous garden salad, and a huge potato salad.  

We set our alarm for half past four the following morning.  We got up, stuck our fingers in the air to confirm the northerly had swung back around to the south, then hooked our bikes on to the back of the tailwind with the hopes of making it the 200kms to Norseman that day.

Huntsman trying to hitch a lift

The Andamans!

The Andaman Islands, a thousand miles from anywhere. Closer geographically to Thailand than India, we were going to the Andamans with the hope of finding a private boat that would take us to South East Asia. There are no commercial boats that go east, and Myanmar’s land borders can’t be crossed, and we were hoping to get there without flying. It’s one of those things considered ‘not impossible’, though we’ve never met anyone whose done it, or who knows anyone who has. So, like my fantasy of the old Soviet freighter that would take us over the Black Sea to Georgia, on which Sergei would teach me Russian as we chopped mountains of onions, I had already positively visualised the cool French couple, mid forties and impossibly tanned who were going to stow our bikes under a canvas sheet on the deck of their yacht, and teach us to sail as we crossed the Andaman Ocean to Phuket. In return, Stuart and I could look after the twins while they went deep sea diving. My high school French was going to enjoy a renaissance, we’d drink gin at sunset while studying the charts, changing course and heading for Sumatra, Borneo, then Papua New Guinea. Oh! I couldn’t wait to meet them.

Fishermen on the Hooghly River, Kolkata

We boarded the M.V Nicobar in Kolkata at four o’clock on Friday afternoon and went down, down, down to our respective bunkrooms on the First and Second Floors. Most people fly to the Andamans, those with bikes or those on a tight budget, don’t. We fell into both categories. Tell another traveller on the island that you travelled there bunk class, and they pause, look at you a little closer, like you’ve just told them that you climbed Everest without oxygen. “You travelled bunk?” The bunks themselves are not so bad. Very similar to sleeper class on the trains, except that your compartment has 100 people, not seven. I think the main reason for the nervousness is, you guessed it, the toilets. Let’s put it this way, to say that we were travelling in the bowels of the ship would be a wholly appropriate statement.

The bunkrooms were a happy festival of babies, hairbrushing and music. Suitcases were unpacked, colourful fabric was hung between the beds to make wee compartments. It was like a school camp, loud and boisterous until ten, and then instantly quiet. Then instantly noisy again at 5am when all the mobiles would start playing music.

Heather and Rani

We moved about 300m at around ten o’clock that first night, and then laid anchor. Twelve hours later, in a queue of cargo ships, we started again, until mid afternoon when we stopped for another five hours. My post traumatic stress from the toilets on the Baku to Aktau ferry flared up again, my recovery clearly not complete. I began to panic; declining water, tea. I’ve learnt that ship toilets have a finite life span, and I wanted that boat moving, churning white water across the Bay of Bengal.

We woke on Sunday morning, and our landscape was only sky and ocean. A Mark Rothko in blues with occasional white horses. We could see flying fish from the deck, exploding out of the water like frightenened birds, then buzzing off like old war planes.

One of our beautiful ship mates

It was Tuesday afternoon by the time we arrived in Port Blair, the Andaman’s main town. There are 576 islands in the chain, only 36 are inhabited, and tourists are able to visit just a handful of these. Before the British came it was mainly populated by indigenous tribes and during British rule, it served as a penal colony. There are roughly six tribes left, and all but one tribe are decreasing in number. Now, the majority of the population are mainland settlers. The tribes themselves have resisted integration and contact with outsiders, so as a result, tourism is tightly controlled. Tourists require a permit to visit; it lasts 30 days but can be extended for a futher 15. Camping and staying with locals is strictly prohibited and from what we could gather, both are deportable offences.

We checked into a lodge in the busy Aberdeen bazaar, a home fae home for the wee Turra loon! Port Blair was not the island hamlet of our dreams, much imagined as we battled the traffic of mainland India. It was with a grim acceptance that we rode off from Haddo Wharf on Tuesday afternoon and were absorbed into the stream of trucks, buses, rickshaws and motorbikes. Honnnnnnnk! Beeeeeep!

Later that afternoon we visited Darran who runs a fishing charter on the island. He told us that because of the NE monsoon in December and January, it would be almost impossible to find a boat that was going east at this time of year. For different reasons, this was confirmed to us the following day after a visit to the Port Authority. This man’s reasons were different, telling us that independent sailors only radioed in their presence but didn’t actually come ashore. Either way, it was au revoir to Pascal and Veronique, my wiry arms from climbing the mast, and my expanded repertoire of French cuisine.

We decided to visit Diglipur in North Andaman first, and booked a boat that was leaving in two days time. Then we headed south to Wandoor, a tiny village about 26kms out of Port Blair. The first ten kms were full of heavy traffic, but we seemed to cross an invisible border, and suddenly the trucks vanished, and like a balm spread over the eyes, the Andamans revealed themselves in a rosy pink sky edged with coconut trees. We rode through villages busy with volleyball and cricket, chairs used for wickets. Women and children were sitting in sociable groups in their gardens. Occasionally we’d hear what would soon become a regular call “Nice cycle!” or our favourite,“Gears! Gears!”

Wandoor jetty

At the jetty, the fishermen had just brought in their catch for the day. Enormous deep sea fish, bright reds and oranges with eyes popped out from their swift ascent. The sun was going down, the yellow fishing boats were knocking together, villagers were riding their bikes home with that evening’s fish hanging over the handlebars.

Wandoor Sunset

The next day started out with a light drizzle, which increased to a downpour that lasted all day. Once we were soaked, we were soaked, so we took our time in getting back to Port Blair. It’s not like getting drenched in Scotland, or Montenegro for that matter; hypothermia was never going to be an issue on the Andamans. Stuart stopped for a cast. Some locals stopped their car and told us it was a good spot, and that they’d caught a big fish there recently. Another car slowed down to shout out “Crocodiles! Crocodiles!” I’m sure they were both right. This was a great day, the grey moody sky intensifying the jungle greens. We’d stop in chai houses when the rain got too heavy, and think that this was the only way to travel.

Croc bait!

The boat trip to Phoenix Bay in the north took eight hours, and we got off the ferry and spent a nice half hour at a tea stall, drinking chai and eating cakes. I love Indian tea stalls; five rupees, and a pot of milk, tea and sugar is boiled up just for you, and handed over in a small hot glass. Diglipur, the largest town was in one direction, and Kalipor in the other. We had read about a resort in Kalipor which sounded nice, so we headed there. The resort was run by a very cool man named Alex, and just after we arrived, five other people also turned up. Three very cool ladies from England, Maggie, Di and Julie, and Robin and Jans, two positively adorable young Swedes.

Rice drying in the road, Kalipor

On Sunday morning, while Stuart was fishing, I went for a bike ride. Twenty minutes in to my ride, I passed a church, and a young girl sitting on the front step waved to me. While we were talking, the pastor came out and invited me in for the service. I felt horribly underdressed in shorts and t-shirt, but went in and sat at the back, rolled my cycling gloves into a ball and hid them under my seat. There were about eight children in attendance, two men and six beautifully dressed women. They wore loose white trousers, a fitted black tunic dress, and a flowing white scarf draped over their heads and and shoulders. Never again will I go for a bike ride without an emergency frock and pair of bedazzlers to snap onto my shoes.

Shiloh Church, Phoenix Bay

The pastor began the service with a soundcheck, repeathing Hallelujah into the microphone, and then launched into the most rocking love song to Jesus, while Divya, young girl I first met played on the bongos. It was so cool! The music was amazing, everyone was clapping, and the pastor had a fantastic voice. And he knew it! I started to wonder if the church was really a front for a weekly Karoake jam. The service was about 75% music and the rest a short sermon and some rapid fire bible verses. A man from the audience was asked to translate from Tamil to English for me, but he looked to the floor and shook his head. After the service he approached me to apologise, saying he’d never done that before and was too shy.

Three of the children, two sisters and a brother lived a few hundred metres from the church, and I gave the boy a lift home on the back of my bike. His mother and aunty came running out and invited me in for tea. “This is a miracle” his aunty Bindu shouted “He has not been to church in weeks, and as soon as he saw your bike outside, he got changed and ran to church! Come in , you are our special guest!” I spent the rest of the afternoon with this beautiful family. Bina, the children’s mother gave me tea and an omelette, then a full lunch an hour later, with six bowls of different curries and dhals, fish, mutton and even beef.

Heather and Bindu

Saddle Peak is the highest point in the Andamans, and the following day, Maggie, Di, Robin, Jans and myself walked to the top with a guide. Us gals were in leech socks that reached the middle of our thighs and our guide just wore an old pair of jandals. It was an amazing walk, trees with enormous buttress roots, old gnarled vines woven between the trees, outrageously coloured butterflies, and big lumps of coral scattered along the path from the 2004 tsunami.

Jans and an enormous tree!

Leaving Kalipor, we cycled two days through the jungle to Rangat, which was pretty much the furthest we could go on the bikes before reaching the tribal reserve of Middle Andaman. There is a road through the reserve, but only enclosed vehicles are permitted. Never has a colour been so clamourous, so insistent, so urgent as the greens in the Andaman jungle. The noise of the insects was an intense wall of sound, growing in pitch to sound like a helicopter about to take off.

Schoolchildren, North Andaman

There was a Hindu festival on the evening we reached Rangat, the whole village was bedecked with candles. Sweet shops had tiny candles on the lid of every single jar, tiny beedlenut shells filled with oil were lining shop fronts, a candle floating inside each one. Everthing is decorated in India. Cows have garlands of flowers around their necks and wrapped around their horns. Tractors often have a bunch of plastic flowers jammed into a hole in front of the steering wheel. We stopped at a cafe where a tiny baby had just finished her bath and was being rubbed with oil on the kitchen table; she had a sparkling diamante chain around her waist, and her tiny wrists were clacking with polished wooden bangles.

Stuart "helping" the net menders, Rangat

From Rangat, we took a boat to Havelock Island. This is the most touristy of all the islands, many would come to the Andamans just to come here and visit Beach No.7, voted most beautiful beach in Asia. And it is stunning, a long stretch of empty white sand and gorgeous clear water. We stayed there a few days for snorkelling and fishing, then headed back to Port Blair. We wanted to visit Little Andaman next, probably the least touristy of the islands, exactly what we were looking for.  We also booked our tickets back to Chennai on the mainland. The next boat was leaving on the 27th of December, which gave us just over a week to spend on Little Andaman.

Our kind of luggage, food, only food...

Before leaving for Little Andaman, I visited Ross Island, a former British army base,  ten minute boat ride from Port Blair. In its heyday, it was thought of as ‘The Paris of the East’. It had a famous bakery, a printing press, water filtration plant and a church whose stained glass windows came from Italy and the altar was made from Burmese teak. All of these buildings are now in ruins, and nature is slowly dismantling it all. A huge trees bursts out of the church tower. Suffocating vines spread across crumbling brick walls. Heavy, squat palm trees have broken through the floor of the Officers Club. It was easy to imagine a movie scene in which I accidentally slip through some time portal, and watch the jungle slowly recede as a swing band starts up. A debonair young man straightens his bow tie and finishes his drink before crossing the floor to ask a lady to dance. I look down to see I’m in an elegant dress, and that the lady he’s asking to dance is me.

Church Tower, Ross Island

Little Andaman is the most remote of the islands that tourists are able to visit. It was one of the worst affected in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and guesthouses have only just recently reopened. We arrived in Hut Bay at about two in the afternoon. We rode up to 16 (the villages are referred to by the distance they are from Hut Bay) and found a resort opposite the beach, and moved into a little bamboo hut. We were delighted to find Robin and Jans also there, and to meet Carol, a super cool girl from Germany, who was studying for a philosophy exam that she would sit on returning to Berlin (impressed!, I struggle to do the blog on time!). Also there was Corinne, a real darling from Italy, oh, I could have listened to her all day! She had rescued three orphaned kittens, and was always busy boiling eggs and oats and entertaining them with string.

Ranjan the manager was an amazing cook. I asked if he would teach me to make parotha, the latest bread love of my life. It’s like a chappati and a flaky pastry combined. We had a lesson the following evening, his assistant Mulan did the cookng, while Ranjan talked me through it like a chef on a cooking show, even calling for a commercial break when the dough was left to sit. It seemed to be a simple enough dough mixture, except with the addition of egg, sugar and dalda, which I think I will struggle to find a substitute at home, a kind of palm oil. What makes it special is what happens after the dough has been made. Balls are formed, then rolled paper thin. This flattened piece is then cut in half, and these thin, paper halves are stretched and wound around the fingers and tied into a knot, resembling a flower. These are then rolled flat again, painted with oil, then fried. When you have a pile of about six of these, the next stage is to slam your hands into the sides of the stack, spin it, then slam again, spin it, then slam again. The textures made my the flattened flower shape crack and flake; it’s soft yet crispy, oily and chewy. My favourite thing to do was to sandwich an omelette between two parothas, oh my god, and tear bits off, oh my god.

Cooking lessons with Ranjan

The owner of the resort also had a fish farm on the land next door (fancy that!) and were harvesting while we were there. It was a pond in a field, about 25m squared and stocked with carp. A pump had been lowering the level for a couple of days, and when it was low enough, men would get in with throw nets and trap the fish.

Mulan's catch of the day

Because of the exposed stretch of water between Little Andaman and the main Andaman island, people needing to catch flights or ferries back in Port Blair usually leave the island about two days before they need to in case bad weather strands them. We, and others staying at the resort were in the awkward position of not wanting to chance a canecellation and risk missing our boats and planes on the 27th, but also not wanting to spend Christmas Day in Port Blair. We all decided to chance it and booked our ferry back for the 26th. We were enjoying a long stretch of calm, sunny days. What could possibly go wrong?

Mulan's beautiful wife and baby

Surprise, surprise, the weather changed dramatically on the 24th, thus beginning four days of ferry cancellations. Not that we knew that at the time of course; each evening going to bed with fresh hope, but being woken each morning to the sound of coconuts crashing violently onto the rooves of our huts, trees almost horizontal, and hearing the angry crash of wave upon wave upon wave from the beach across the road.

Stuart braves the lagoon, HP on standby

Christmas day started like this, but was brightened up with a gift of colourful bangles from Stuart along with new flowers to decorate my bike. My red roses from Kashgar that I bought to celebrare the Karakoram highway had fallen off one by one over the last couple of months. We rode our bikes down to the usually idyllic lagoon to watch the sea and were followed by a young boy called Sanjit, who loved the bikes. “Never before have bikes like these been seen on these islands!”. He told me that on the day of the tsumani, he saw the waves coming in and remembers running into the mountains. His uncle died, along with his tiny cousin. He asked if he could ride my bike, and I spent the next while filming him on his mobile as he rode backwards and forwards, waving at the camera, loving the gears, bouncing on the suspension. We rode each others bikes back to the village, 50 Cent’s ‘In da club’ playing on his phone. Yeah, I’m still hip! He visited us later in the evening, with a gift of sugarcane that he had picked from his friend’s field.

Yo Shorty, it's ya birthday...

We managed to fit in some Scottish country dancing that evening, Stuart teaching Juval from Israel the Gay Gordons and Ranjan made us a beautiful channa masala. After he’d finished cooking, he came and sat next to me and told me he loved my bangles. Then with a sigh, he said “Oh, I need more love”. His wife had died a few years earlier, and he was raising their two young children on his own. “Sometimes, when I was in the house, and everything was quiet, I would hear her bangles and her anklets as she moved around. Heather, I am not a rich man, but it was moments like these that made me think, oh, I am in paradise”.

Boxing Day arrived, with another ferry cancellation. I took the bus to town to speak to the man at the ticket office about what we should do. The sky was black, and the sea was crashing onto the beach. I loved the buses on the Andamans, deep crimson on the outside, peppermint green on the inside. Tropical jungle greens are framed by the glassless windows, and women dazzle with explosions of beauty, jewellery and colour in every seat. But it was a sad experience to take the bus on the 26th during the storm. The quiet islanders sat so still, so serious, all watching the sea. Each and every resilient one of them would have lost someone on that terrifying day eight years ago.

The man from the ticket office gave me a small scrap of hope when he told me that the Chennai ferry had also been postponed and wouldn’t be sailing on the 27th as planned, but he could not tell me any more than that. He told us to come to the jetty at 6am the following morning, as there was a chance of a weather window and the boat may sail.

We did this, and again on the 28th but still no ferry. A large group of us, including Robin whose 45 days on the Andamans had expired, went for chai and parotha at a cafe next to the wharf. At eight o’clock my phone rang, and it was the ticket man telling me they would sail at 9am. Within ten minutes the road was full of rickshaws piled high with baggage and four days worth of ferry passengers had arrived at the boat. Any readers who have ever queued for anything in India will be able to imagine what happened next.

Paul, an Austrian traveller joked that when they threw the British out, they must have shouted after them “And you can take your queues aswell!” It was like a massive scrum, all converging on the small half metre wide gangway. It got so fraught at one point that the ticket collecter started punching a man as he was boarding, even chasing him up the gangway to give him one last shove. All the foreigners were guaranteed to get on, as each of us either had a flight or boat to catch, or in Robin’s case, were no longer supposed to be on the Andamans. As a group, I think the police just wanted us all on that boat and off the island.

Stuart and I were the lucky ones, our boat for Chennai was waiting patiently for us at Haddo wharf and leaving the day after we arrived back in Port Blair. The others weren’t so lucky; each of them had to cancel flights, and the prices for the next ones had skyrocketed. Luckily though, Robin, Corrine and Carol all managed to get onto the Chennai boat, so on we boarded with our smuggled bottles of rum and whiskey, all set for New Years Eve on board the M.V Nancowry.

On New Year’s Eve,  along with about 300 soldiers from the Indian Army, we all sat on deck and drank whiskeys thinly disguised as 7 Ups and Pepsis. It soon seemed only natural to challenge them to strength competitions. Push ups, pull ups and pole climbing, it was a great atmosphere. Seconds into 2012, people formed groups and a leader would begin a chant, and the groups would repeat the call. A man whispered to me what to say and we joined in with music; it was a great start to the New Year. Not so the 4:30am docking in Chennai, having to get up and pack with the world’s worst headache.

It was pole climbing mum, honest...

Fish Andamans!

One of my pipe dreams of this trip is to discover some new fly fishing destination. In this modern world where flights are inexpensive and western wages are high, the chance of this happening are very, very slim. None the less, nothing is impossible.

The Andamans are a group islands situated in the Bengal sea which are part of India and run close to Thailand’s mainland, a few hundred kms off Phuket. I hoped their tropical location would provide some interesting fishing opportunities that may be relatively unexplored with a set of fly rods.

Unfortunately, there was very little information online for fly fishing in the Andamans, only boat fishing for blue water species, and after our splurge on mahseer fishing on the mainland this was not an option. As soon as we arrived on the island we spent the first two days running around annoying port authorities, bars by marinas and anyone else we thought may have an idea of how we could get off the island. Darren was another guy in the firing line, I got his name off a fishing forum. He ran a charter fishing operation out of Port Blair, and was one of the nicest and most informative folk we met on the island. Explaining that we had arrived during the North East monsoon season, he said it would be highly unlikley we could get a boat over to Thailand. Had we arrived in February, March or April it may have been entirely possible. He also explained how he did not think the Andamans was an ideal fly fishing destination, but gave us some pointers on where to go and wished us the best of luck.

Fly fishing in the tropics required an almost completely new approach to tackle and techniques compared to the fresh water fishing I had been doing in the last six months. Larger fish (hopefully), extreme heat and the corrosive properties of the sea. So, sending the #6 rod and reel along with light leaders and trout flies on to NZ, my parents set about accumulating my salt water gear in Scotland and posting it out. Apart from the small hitch where I recieved a 13 foot spey salmon rod instead of a #10 9 foot rod, I received salt water reels, flies and leaders and eventually the #10 on the Andamans (Thanks for all your efforts Mum and Dad).

On our first week on the islands ,we made our way up to Pristine Beach Resort, at the northern most point, near the town of Diglipur. Our hut was just 100m from the beach, a small swell was running the first day which made fly fishing pretty hard going, so as usual I ended up doing a lot more walking and exploring than fishing, discovering wreckage high up the beach left from the 2004 tsunami. The swell had dropped the following day. Wading the shallow beach for most of the day, the first fish came to hand in the shape of small trevaly and spiky reef fish, which I am always very cautious when unhooking.

First Andaman Fish

Having bought snorkeling gear in Kolkata, I had an afternoon of exploring an island that lay a good 500m off shore with a fellow traveller called Maggie. Maggie was super keen, and diving had been her passion for most of her life (even diving off St Kilda!), until she damaged her ears on her last dive, so she was limited to snorkeling from then on. She was not to keen on going to the island herself (I don’t blame her as it was a decent open water swim with currents) and asked if I would go along with her. Crocodiles and fatigue were also not outwith the realms of possiblity. This turned into some of the best snorkeling either of us had ever done, with great visiblity, an abundance of reef fish and just knowing it was the pair of us on a mini adventure. With Maggie’s diving experiences all over the world, it was great to learn the names of the reef fish present and share sightings of crayfish, colourful parrot fish and even a moray eel. No pelagics, which I am more interested in from a fishing point of view, but I would imagine they would be a lot more skittish.

Happy Fishing!

To end our stay on North Anadaman, Alex organised a trip for us to a beach which to his knowledge, no other tourists had visited. This involved; an hour long jeep ride, a 1km walk and a 45 minute boat ride down a mangrove lined creek which was apparently infested with crocodiles. Arriving at the beach our group had to walk a kilometre or two along the extensive beach. This was heaven for me, a full afternoon of wandering along a beach with a fly rod. Terns were working the shore in the distance, the sea was flat calm and it all looked fishy.

A fish I would love to catch is called a bonefish, only found in the tropics and the Anadamans fall in to the belt around the world where they might be found. I could have high tailed it to where the birds were working, as trevaly and other predatory fish were chasing the sprats on to the beach but I wanted to comb the whole beach to satisfy myself bonefish were not present, as the days conditions were not conducive to sight casting.

After losing a trevaly early on due to operator error, (the fish zooming about so fast after getting hooked it gained some slack line and was off), I was able to land a new species for me which I have never seen before nor could I get an ID from any of the locals. After an initial barramundi like jump it put up a great fight before being landed, photographed and returned. The second half of the beach walk and cast put me in the vicinity of the terns working. I had some great fun with trevaly which do not have to be big to make a bit of a mockery of my #8 fly rod, as these are some of the hardest fighting fish in the sea. They just never give in until they are lying on the beach, the largest one being only about 3lbs but you can put all the weight you dare on the fly rod and I’m sure I can hear them saying ‘is that the best you can do?’. These fish reach over a hunderd pounds in weight and are only really targeted at this size with heavy spinning gear using massive poppers.

Mystery Fish

The last fishing day on North Andaman, I had a morning in front of the resort. It was a shallow part of the beach where there were many locals fishing with a cast net. Although I (selfishly) find net fisherman a little irritating, they can give valuable information on what is possible to catch in the area. Here there were only juvenile fish and sprats, nothing very inspiring. It was a particularly windy day and I blanked that morning, only managing to hook my right ear. This was the first time in over twenty five years I have done this. The hook was in the lobe of my ear, well past the barb. No pain until I tried to pull it out. Hoping noone else saw me doing it, I cut the line and made my way back to the accomodation in the hope someone else could pull it out for me. Luckily Alex the resort owner came to help. Pushing the hook through, he managed to cut it with a pair of wire cutters; painful but anything to save a trip to the doctors.

Havelock Island is the most popular island on the chain, we reached it by cycling down through North Andaman to Rangat and hopping on the ferry. The first day there I high tailed it over to Beach No.7. I heard there was a lagoon and went there in the hope that there was going to be some flats fishing. No such luck. On reaching it, it was just a little jumble of rocks and sand. It took an hour and half to get there so I fished the best I could until being told to leave as there was a crocodile attack just last year on an American tourist. Back to Beach No.5 where we were staying, grabbed a cold beer to go and drink by the beach and have a rethink. Seeing the beach for the first time I was overjoyed to see at low tide there were very extensive flats. Skulled the beer, grabbed the rod and fished all afternoon, which although fruitless was very enjoyable; seeing trevaly, large bumphead parrot fish and losing a trigger fish, once again due to operator error. It ran all my fly line out and a great deal of backing until it cut me off on coral. The drag was way too slack.

Although I found the flats on Beach No.5 unproductive, it was intresting to see bumphead parrot fish on each of the three sessions. These fish grow to around 100lbs, the largest one I saw on the flats was around the 40lb mark. It is possible to catch these fish on the fly, but due to my inexperience it didn’t happen for me. Only after research online back at Port Blair I found out how to approach catching these huge fish. The only other note worth making on what I saw at Havelock were the trevaly hitting bait fish around the pier whilst we were waiting on the ferry. Perhaps worth pursuing on spinning gear, but they would easily take me around the pier supports on a fly rod.

Andaman Trevally

Last fishing spot on the Andamans was Little Andaman Island, this is as far south on the Island chain where foreigners are allowed to visit. Even here there were restrictions due to tribal areas.  The first reckie drew a blank mainly due to the amount of swell running. We were based on the east coast and with the north easterly monsoon season in full swing. I had to search out bays sheltered from the prevailing winds. Butler’s Bay was within a short cycle from our accomodation. This was a steeply shelving sandy beach with a little swell that gave me a bit of a battering whilst fishing but allowed me to cast beyond the sandy wash into the clear water. I got away with using my #8, a floating line and fishing a surf candy style fly. I got bitten off fairly early on using a 15lb leader but persevered and managed to land a nice trevally which would go an easy 6lb. I don’t mean to go on about it, but having caught most of my fish on the fly in fresh water these fish go so hard. Taking me in to the backing on more than one occasion with the drag screwed well up. The fish came back to camp strapped to the back rack on the bike, there was enough for every one to try and a meal for myself and Heather. Fresh sea fish is very hard to beat. The same was repeated the following day with a slightly smaller fish, which also went down well at dinner.

The rack of many uses

The pier was the next port of call (excuse the pun) which provided me with enough shelter and good access to deep water. I walked twice to the end of the break water and fished back, first using a popper then on to the surf candy using the #10, mainly because of the rough ground. Unfortunately the theory was never put into practice. I saw blue fin trevally on several occasins showing a slight interest in the fly but nothing too commital. The break water provide a fantastic artificial reef and seeing all sorts of colourful reef fish using the polaroids provided a great accompaniment.

Have bike will trevally!

Summing up, Darren was right when he thought the Andamans were not really a fly fishing destination. I felt a little restricted on the Islands with the tribal reserves, but understand the reasons they are in place. I felt as though I sampled a good cross section on the islands, with Beach No.5 on Havelock and Butler’s Bay on Little Andaman showing the most promise.

Chennai was in high spirits when we rode off the ferry on New Years Day. Cars routinely slowed down and we were wished a Happy New Year, babies waving with the help of their mothers. One man slowed down and asked through his motorbike helmet “Are you on an adventure?” Another shouted the customary “Which countreeeeeeee?” as his voice got swallowed by the traffic and the speed he was driving at.

Hangover cure, Chennai

We stayed at the beautifully airy and leafy Broadlands Lodge; scores of white rooms with blue shuttered doors and windows circling around courtyards. Almost two hundred  years old, it once housed a nawab, (a muslim ruler) and his servants.  There was a mosque next door, whose call to prayer was the most elaborate and haunting we’ve heard on the trip, sometimes lasting up to ten hypnotising minutes. It would begin at four thirty every morning. One morning, for whatever reason, it wasn’t sung, and we woke up anyway, asking each other if we’d missed it.

The main courtyard was also doubling as a Royal Enfield motorbike club. Paul and Jim from Australia leave their bikes there and come over about once a year for a blast up into the Himalayas. They were assisting Robbert, a drummer from Amsterdam with his newly acquired machine, helping him get ready for the long ride home. Robbert is planning a drumming workshop and recording session with local musicians in every country he rides through, such a beautiful idea.

Jim, Robbert and a Royal Enfield

Not so beautiful though, were our bank accounts. Our funds had almost run out presenting us with a dilemma. We didn’t want to stop cycling, (particularly as we hadn’t actually done any since Kolkata), but couldn’t afford to continue. If we flew to Bangkok, we wouldn’t have enough money to fly out. We thought about flying to Malaysia, then sailing to Sumatra, but realised our money would run out half way across Indonesia. Ending the trip after a tropical island holiday with our days of camping and cycling so long behind just didn’t seem the right way finish off.

And then we noticed that huge, inhospitable land mass known as Australia sitting there just under Indonesia. A land of open roads, huge skies and a conveniently reciprocal agreement with New Zealand which meant that I could just turn up and work. It ticked all the boxes. Work. Cycling. Camping. Wine. Cheese.

We booked our tickets to Perth, and spent the next week in Chennai hanging out with the Royal Enfield Club and getting our bikes ready for flying. We couldn’t find any bike boxes, so made our own from scraps of cardboard we bought from a man in the street. They weren’t pretty, but once roped up they did the job. We posted our warm clothes and down sleeping bags back to New Zealand, trying to make the bikes as light as possible for flying.

Getting our knives sharpened, Chennai

The city was noisy, polluted, hot, chaotic and friendly. We stood at a busy intersection in Chennai on our last night, and watched the cars, buses, motorbikes, bicycles and oxen all converge from all four directions, cross over and avoid each other in poetic near misses. And noone ever gets angry, noone is impatient, there seems to be no such thing as road rage. Women sit elegantly side saddle on the back of motorbikes, ankles crossed, handbags or babies on their laps. Oh, India! We did struggle at the start, but you charmed us, you changed us, and my, how we’re going to miss you,x.

Mother India

Beautiful, tinkling, colourful, glittering glass bangles up to the elbow. Women with shining black hair to their waist. Nose rings, ear rings, toe rings, anklets. A sea of gorgeous fabrics; gold, greens, blues, reds, swirling all around you. Emerging from immigration after another awkward conversation about cricket, “Give ’em a heave Lance Cairns!”, I am instantly entranced by these effortlessly elegant women, floating around us as we weave our bikes through the crowds of people waiting to see the closing of the border.

We entered India at Wagha Border, famous for its closing ceremony where the Indian and Pakistani guards try to outmarch and outshout each other every evening. Recently the guards were instructed to tone things down as so many were injuring themselves by kicking too high as they marched. We planned it all wrong though; in retrospect we should have gone to see it as a day trip from Lahore, as once there, we found there was nowhere safe to leave our bikes while we watched it. The hotels were all full, so we had no choice but to cycle to Amritsar before it got dark. Of course, we could also have done a day trip from Amritsar, as many others do, but Stuart is hard wired to always go forward, so this wasn’t an option.

The Golden Temple

In Armritsar, we stayed at the Golden Temple, the holiest pilgrimage site for the Sikh religion. It’s dome, made to resemble a Lotus Flower which symbolises the Sikh’s desire to live a pure life, is said to contain 750kg of pure gold. Food and accomodation is free, though a donation is appreciated. It was crowded when we arrived, but we were given a mattress on the floor. We ate in the incredible food hall, which runs all day and all night. As you enter you are given a plate, a bowl and a spoon. As you sit in rows on the floor, men walk up and down the aisles filling your plate with dhal, chappati and a sweet rice pudding. When you leave, you pass a chain of people who take your plates and spoon. By the time your plates and cutlery reach the enormous area where they are washed, the place is as noisy as a train station. There is a rhythmic clack, clack, clacking as the plates are banged on sides of huge cauldrons, washed, then stacked noisily onto racks to dry.

Stuart waiting for food, a familiar sight.

 Our first plan was to cycle north to Macleod Ganj to hear the Dalai Lamas teachings, and our friend Gerrite, the Dutch cyclist we met in Lahore was going to Nepal. We were able to find a route which meant we could cycle together for the first few days before needing to part ways. He was such a pleasure to cycle with; a wonderful conversationalist, and an inspiring traveller.

We reached Dharamsala after five days of cycling that had grown steadily hillier. From Dharamsala to Macleod Ganj, there was a choice of two roads. A very steep three kilometres or a gentler nine. Ever up for a challenge, we chose the shorter option. Of the entire trip, this was the steepest climb we’ve done. Adding to the pressure is the fact that the road is lined by guesthouses, restaurants laundromats and internet cafes. This made us so determined not to come off, particularly when people started clapping and cheering us on and waiting at corners to see if we’d make it up the next incline. How do the Tour de France cyclists stay so focussed? Tibetan monks would pass us laughing and smiling, one even gave me a push up a really hard section.

Macleod Ganj

 Macleod Ganj is the home of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government in exile and many of the thousands of brave Tibetans who have escaped China walking over the Himalayas. We arrived two days before the Dalai Lama was to begin his teachings. We registered for our tickets and bought a small FM radio through which we could tune into the English translation. We spent Saturday at the Buddhist Temple and visited the immensely moving Tibet Museum. In the photography display there was a photo of a seven year old girl arriving in India and being treated for frostbitten toes. Another was a lonely photograph of a five year old girl and her father, holding hands in a vast landscape of white, crossing a 5,000m pass on their walk to India. We spent time with two Tibetans one evening, one had been in India for six years. He told us that a year had passed before he was able to make his first phonecall home. He said “I want to go home. Now my mother has white hair and lines on her face. But if I go back, I am worried they will put me in jail”. His friend had arrived in India only six months ago, and could not speak any English. While he was telling his friend things for him to translate to us, his hand made a cup shape, and he kept slamming it down on the table as he spoke about the Chinese in Tibet. He said he never wanted to go back.

Sunday was the first day of the teachings. When the Dalai Lama left his residence and entered the courtyard, the hundreds of people who had been sitting cross legged and suddenly standing made a whoosh sound that you could hear in your stomach; there was a collective intake of breath, then all was silent except for the tiny clickings of prayer beads. Some older Tibetans held their faces in their hands, and their eyes filled with tears. He walked through waving and smiling, drawn towards the young children and reaching out for their hands. It was a rare moment – even from where we were standing, 20 metres away, the goodness of this man was beaming from him and it was overwhelming.

My Buddhist pilgrimage continued after leaving Macleod Ganj, as I had an appointment to meet Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, a western buddhist nun who became reluctantly famous after spending twelve years in a remote cave in the Himalayas. To raise funds to build a nunnery, she now travels the world and gives talks on Buddhism. The fact that she’s from the west, means she can explain things in a way that’s easily absorbed by the western psyche. She’s clever, funny and tough as anything. The night before my meeting we stayed in the nearby monastery of Tashi Jong. We arrived just as the gong was sounding for tea, and were led into a kitchen overlooking the valley and the fields of freshly cut grass. We ate chickpea burgers for ten rupees each down by the river that night, where Stuart was tormented by the sight of about 500 resident mahseer swimming below the bridge. All considered holy, all unable to be caught.

Na na na na na

Meeting Tenzin Palmo was wonderful, I was very nervous, and managed to burst into tears when I first saw her. I had a long list of things I wanted to ask her, but we ended up talking about the bike ride for most of the time I was there. She told me that the bike ride is the perfect opportunity for me to practise mindfulness, which is one of the fundamentals of Buddhism – simply being in your present and practising awareness, as the present is all we really have. That evening we had dinner in a restaurant at the monastery, along with about twenty young monks, all drinking tea in their saffron robes and watching Bad Boys 2 on TV.

Not your usual school, Not your usual students

While I was at the nunnery, Stuart rode off with his fishing rod, trying to find a section of river where the mahseer weren’t considered quite so holy. He was unable to find such a place. If the fish weren’t holy, they also weren’t there. He stopped off for tea at a small village shop, and was soon surrounded by children wanting to ride his bike. He said yes to one of the older boys, who within seconds of riding down the hill, went flying over the handlebars. Stuart was horrified for the boy, but the shop keeper took it the other way and cursed the boy for damaging the bike.

Our route through the back roads of Himachel Pradesh and Uttarakhand over the next ten days gave us a long, slow look at rural India. The steep, mountainous landscape was sculpted like wedding cakes, terraces for rice and vegetables were carved into the hillsides. Unsurprisingly, as we were in the foothills of the Himalayas, the roads were the most challenging on the trip. We met our match on one mountain pass and had to accept a lift. Stuart has lost his first, second and third gears, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen him push his bike up a hill. A dark moment indeed.

The unthinkable happens!

The following day was seven hours of constant climbing. But we were permanently humbled by the women we would cycle past every day; hay bales of perhaps 30kgs balanced on their heads or strapped to their backs with rough rope, walking slowly, slowly up hill. We passed one woman in her seventies carrying a pile of wood the length of a railway sleeper across her back. The hillsides were filled with people with tiny machetes, cutting long grasses for their cattle. Once we stopped for lunch and watched a group of people making concrete. There were two women in the group, wearing gorgeous sky blue saris. It looked as if they’d been on their way for a lunch date but decided to stop and mix cement on the way. Their job was to walk backwards and forwards over a three metre patch; at one end they would have the large basket on their head filled with sand, they would then walk this to the cement mixer and tip the sand in. They did this the whole time we had our break. When we rode past, only one woman was working. As we cycled a bit further, we saw the other woman under a tree, breastfeeding her tiny baby.

Our daily humbling

We kept to the back roads as much as we could, but the times that we had to ride on the main roads were quite simply hell on earth. Let it be said that there is no beast less predictable than an Indian bus, no driver less cognizant of the fact that it would hurt if he hit you than an Indian bus driver. After six months of cycling and almost ten thousand kilometres, India has been the first country where we felt unsafe riding on the same road as other road users. We had many close calls with vehicles overtaking us and even a time when a lorry clipped Stuart’s handle bars causing him to put a foot down. Though it sounds minor, there was only an inch or two between that and causing serious inury.

Some cyclists go to great lengths to make themselves more visible.

Another contributing factor to the challenge of cycling here, is horns. To say, “They beep their horns alot”, though correct, is too benign a statement and makes the mental state I was reduced to seem entirely disproportionate to the offending action. Words like deploying klaxons come a bit closer to conveying the violence inflicted on the eardrums and nerves. Every single scooter, motorcycle, car, lorry and bus (oh, how they especially love it), lets go with a honk at your right ear every time they pass or come towards you, necessary or not.

I fell into a very dark cycling hole on some days, struggling to remember why I enjoyed riding my bike. I would smile bitterly as I remembered I was supposed to be practising mindfulness while cycling. The only thing that kept me sane was imagining a future or remembering a past that did not involve cycling in India. There is a writer called Diane Ackerman, who loves riding her bike, and she has a gorgeous line “When I go biking…I am mentally far from civilization.  The world is breaking someone elses heart” Oh, she had clearly never cycled in India. Throughout all this, Stuart managed to maintain a serious Pollyanna syndrome, playing the glad game all day long. I was the Hyde to his Jekyll.  I was the mad woman escaped from the attic. I’m normally the one who surrounds herself with school children, laughing gaily as I ask their names, not him. I usually call out the greetings in the local tongue, while letting butterflies play in my eyelashes as birds sing to me from my handlebars. Stuart would tell me just to block it out. I would rotate my head 360 degrees before roaring “TELL ME HOW!?!” from a frothy mouthful of green bile. I was devastated. Everyone else seems to come to India and have a spiritual experience; meditating in Ashrams, yoga on the banks of the Ganges, finding gurus. I’d also had a spiritual transformation; I needed an exorcism.

But, when the roads were good, they were truly divine. We had the sweetest of sweet four day stretch in Uttarakhand, where we literally turned off a busy road, (where I had a motorbike on my tail that wouldn’t pass, going beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep), and found ourselves on a thin back road that curved along a river, natural forest on either side, gorgeous Himalayan magpies with their long tails crisscrossing the road in front of us. We thought that maybe we’d been hit by a bus and had gone to heaven.

Our kind of roads.

That evening we stayed in the small town of Mori. The town was packed, people filled the streets, music was coming from the fields. We were told there was a festival that night, and invited to go along at nine o’clock. When we walked into the marquee, an usher saw us and immediately led Stuart and I to the front of the audience to sit with the local dignitaries. A comedian was onstage when we arrived, doing an imaginary commentary on a cricket match between India and Pakistan – it was all in Hindi, but I think that Pakistan were losing.

Soon afterwards, the prizegiving ceremony for the afternoon’s athletics competition began. The man seated next to me whispered into my ear each time a girl went up to receive a prize,telling me which race she had won. Soon, this man’s name was called out and he went up to receive an award. When he returned to his seat I asked him if he’d come first in the 100 metres. No, he told me, I started this festival 23 years ago, and for this they have given me an award. He then asked me to write our names onto a piece of paper; we thought that it must have been a tactic for not forgetting our names. Some more prizes were given, and then suddenly we heard our own names read out. We walked to the stage amidst huge applause, received two trophies, thanked the crowd and returned to our seats with no idea what was going on. The man next to me whispered “We are so delighted that foreigners have come to share our festival. We know you have no idea what we are all saying, but the fact that you are here means the world to us”.

Best Foreigners Award goes to...

The good roads didn’t last much longer after Mori, and soon we found ourselves back on the main roads. The transition from quiet forest road to the crash of auto-rickshaws, honking trucks and swerving buses as we reached Rishikesh was pure trauma. It was a matter of being happy one second, and in hell the next. And this was us on our way to the yoga capital of the world! The place the Beatles found their guru! We’d arrived in town at the same time as an enormous festival in nearby Haridwar, and on this particular day, many of the pilgrims were visiting Rishikesh. The pedestrian bridge across the river to our guesthouse was so full of people that we had to wait three hours before we could cross with the bikes. This gave us time to compare ourselves to the other travellers. Regally they would glide past us, yoga mats peeking cheekily out of their hemp bags, beatific smiles on their faces. We sat at the side of the road, bikes leaning up against an old stand, ears ringing, gloves still on, fists clenched, looking for someone to punch.

Heather was a bit moooooooody by the time we reached the guesthouse.

We took a much needed yoga class the next day in a beautiful room overlooking the Ganges. We were told it was a drop in class, totally suitable for beginners. Needless to say, I had to hold onto hand rails when I descended stairs for the next week. The yoga teacher was very cool, possibly Australian, though we were never quite sure. We saw him often over the next week; usually as he’d just finished his morning class, sitting perfectly upright on his classic Indian bicycle, ringing his bell sprightly as he passed people.

The holy Ganga

It was impossible not to be affected by the Ganges, and the incredible sight of Hindu pilgrims performing their ritual cleansing in the river, which is considered a temple. Seen from the bridge, the women in the water with their saris floating around them, looked like beautiful smudges of colour on a painter’s palette. We went down early one morning for a swim. A friendly woman showed me how to block my nose and ears with my hands and then told me I was to go under five times. Her whole family clapped when I was finished.

The freezing Ganga

Despite our bad luck with receiving post while travelling, we tried again in India, organising for a parcel to be sent to our guesthouse (thanks again and again and again to Muriel and Douglas!). We were tracking it online, but it still hadn’t arrived by the time we needed to leave for Stuart’s fishing trip. As we knew we would have to return to Rishikesh to pick up the post anyway, and with the double incentive of avoiding 6 days of life threatening cycling, we took a bus the 300kms to Ramnagar.

And now for The Fishing News...

The first I ever heard of this fish was when I was ten or eleven, back in 1989, when as a fanatical young angler I watched a documentary called ‘Casting For Gold’. John Bailey and Paul Boote were fishing on the upper reaches of the River Ganges at the end of the monsoon season. It was a superb watch and I think they both ended up with fish over 50lbs.

I’m not going to say that ever since then it has been a dream, but the show for me certainly played a part in our decision to head down through Pakistan and India, rather than across China. Mahseer are inhabitants of submontane Himalayan rivers, found from Pakistan all the way around to Thailand and into part of China. They are said to be related to somewhere between the Carp and the Barbel family of fish. Golden mahseer possess the largest scales of any fresh water species and have been known to grow in excess of 100lb. As far as the angler is concerned, they are incredibly spooky with a highly developed lateral line (this detects vibrations in water). It has been said that the mahseer is the permit(a saltwater fish that is notoriously hard to catch) of freshwater fish.

Scaling up

As Heather may have already alluded, India is pretty hard going on a bicycle. I could have opted for traipsing round the countryside trying to catch a mahseer unassisted, but I think I would be a single guy by now or Heather a widow on the run. So the decision was made to hire a fishing guide for a couple of days. Misty Dillon is the only man to talk to about this, he runs a company called Himalayan Outback and also holds the world record for the largest Mahseer caught on the fly at a stunning 33lbs. He is one of only two qualified fly fishing instructors in the whole of India. I told him my objective of catching a fish on the fly in each country we cycled through, and that having a shot at a mahseer on the fly would be a real highlight as they are not that commonly targeted on fly fishing gear.

Himalayan Outback has access to many rivers across India. Without hesitation, Misty immediately advised that I gave the Ramganga river a try. The beat was situated in the Tiger reserve within the Corbett National Park and the opening days of the beat were available. This beat only sees anglers about five weeks of the year. I jumped at the chance.

That'll be that pool spooked then...

We had three weeks in India between booking the fishing and the actual fishing dates, so lots of time to get excited. We had decided to push the boat out a little and stay a night in the fishing lodge. Guides and 4x4s were also arranged, mainly because we were in the Tiger reserve. I have only used a guide once before and that was a week’s salmon fishing in Iceland. Although I have managed with out one on the trip so far, I felt with a country the size of India along with its population of 1.2 billion, trying to find good Mahseer fishing would be a little like trying finding a needle in two haystacks.

So you can imagine our crushing disappointment when three days before the fishing, we both succumbed to some sort of illness. We don’t know quite what it was, but it left us both feeling uncomfortable and exhausted. An eight hour bus jounrney to Ramnagar added to the misery. I am sure Heather has already vented this fact, but the bus drivers all drive like they have just stolen it. Both of us were completely wiped the day after the bus journey, spending the whole day watching Hollywood block busters in the hotel.

At 0430 the following day we were picked up to go fishing, still feeling pretty grim. Heather had a day at the lodge, blogs to write, books to read and sleep to catch up on, so she would have a relaxing day. I was straight down to the river with Bobby, my guide. Seen from the river, the reserve was a beautiful place, jungle surrounded us, covering the undulating hills. We saw elephants away in the distance down by the water’s edge and had spotted three species of deer before even reaching the river.

The first pool we fished was Bobby’s favourite, so expectations were running high. I was fishing my Hardy Demon 9 foot #8 with a clear intermediate line. A 9 foot leader tapering down to 10lb monofilament with an olive fry pattern designed for mahseer. The flies are tied using a trailing stinger hook. Within three casts I was into a fish that took me in the fast water, a great fight ensued with the result a simply stunning looking bar of gold around 3lbs. Customary snaps taken and the fish was away like a shot. Another smaller fish came to hand on the same pool before we moved on downstream.

Stuart and Bobby the guide

We covered around 10kms of water that day, never fishing the same pool twice. On quieter pools I could see where the mahseer got their reputation for being so spooky; one unseen fish could bolt from under you and set the mood for the rest of the resident mahseer. As you can tell the river is crystal clear, at times you think you can see every fish in the pool. You see the fly being stripped past them, and them totally ignoring it. I thought how similar this fishing was to Atlantic Salmon fishing, where you are covering fish but they are just not up for it. You just have to keep covering water, looking for a taking fish.

A lot of the pools had some very big fish in them, one pool we estimated a fish of over 35lb to be cruising about. In a relatively small river it was quite a sight. For some reason that I still don’t have the answer to, these big fish don’t seem to be taken on the fly in this river. Bobby told me a 10lb fish is the largest he has seen caught on the fly here. Fish in excess of 40lb have been taken on spinning gear though, which I can’t quite work out in this gin clear water. Anyway, it was great to see such a healthy natural population of mahseer.

Catch of the trip!

The largest fish of the trip was caught that day and was estimated around 7lbs and had me down to the backing, I can only imagine what big fish would be like on the larger rivers the outfitters operate in. The day ended with seven fish including an Indian Trout; troutlike in shape but without an adipose fin and possessing a large mouth for its size. Troops of monkeys and a gang of wild boar provided eye candy whilst fishing, with the pug mark of a leopard left in the soft sand on the last pool reminding me whose house I was visiting.

Indian Troot

It was pitch dark by the time we made it to the lodge after a surprisingly long walk from the jeep. Heather was made to feel most at home; the lap top set up on the desk, the keys still smoking. A tiger had been seen the week before from the lodge so as you can picture, Heather’s imagination was on the rampage. The hospitality here was fantastic. Although I was not there for very long we were very well catered for. I was utterly exhausted and still feeling pretty shit, so was sound asleep by about nine o’clock only for us both to be woken at four thirty the following morning to get to the to reserve for six.

Heather joined us the second day to see inside the Tiger reserve for herself. Unfortuately we were both still a little under the weather, so may have not got the most out of it. Always last in the group, she said she felt like the weak antelope that always gets taken in the nature documentaries. However, it was another great days fishing, with five mahseer to the fly up to 6lbs. Heather had a shot with a spinning rod in some of the more suitable pools but with no interest from the fish, which was a shame as I would have loved her to get a hold of one of these lovely looking fish.

The weak antelope crosses the river again

The fish I caught over the two days had a good size range, from 1lb through to 7lb. I was always amazed at each fishes initial take. They were absolutely solid and you could mistake even the smallest fish for being monsters. Pound for pound mahseer are consistently the hardest fighting freshwater fish I have caught, every one fighting out of its scales. Certainly the fast water at the head of the pools where they hang out and their oversized paddle-like fins make them the perfect sport fish.

Best fish of the second day

Thanks to Misty for organising our trip and dealing with the constant phone calls and questions I had before the trip, and to both Bobby our guide and David the camp manager for a great stay.

No tigers were spotted in the reserve but we fluked a lift with a couple of really nice guys back to Rishikesh, where they took a back road. This was so much more enjoyable than an eight hour white knuckle ride in a bus. Even more rewarding though was a leopard that crossed our path about 100 meters in front of us. A fantastic end to our two days away.

Lakshman Jhula, Rishikesh

Back in Rishikesh, our post had arrived and we booked a train to Kolkata. We admitted defeat, Indian roads had broken us. I had so many plans before we got here, I’d pictured us riding to the Taj Mahal, our bikes making a bulky silhouette against the gleaming white marble. But all those things will be left for another trip, without bikes. We’d run out of back roads by this stage and we didn’t do this trip to be putting the bikes on and off buses and trains to avoid busy sections. We love riding our bikes, camping and covering distance under our own steam. India is incredible, but it changed our trip totally. So we thought we’d go to Kolkata, take a boat to the Andaman Islands, and attempt the impossible and see if we could find a boat to take us further east.

There was an hour of subdued but rising panic after arriving at Howrah station, when we couldn’t find our bikes. It’s enormous, seeing a million passengers in and out each day. We were sent to each and every corner by railway workers and policemen until finally finding the bikes sitting by themselves at our train’s second cargo carriage that we didn’t know about. We loaded up, and rode across Howrah Bridge into the city, my newly bent back wheel and slipping gears hinting at a rough time on the train. At some traffic lights, we saw another cycle tourist talking to a policemen across the road. We rode over and met Oonjan, an inspiring 59 year old cycling from Malaysia to the London Olympics, rasing money for the Malaysian Aids Foundation. We went for breakfast, and over coffee and omelettes from a street stall he told us that after stopping smoking at 49 and putting on weight, he decided to get fit.  So he ran the Sahara marathon which is just a mere 7 marathons in 7 days. After breakfast we all rode off to Sudder Street, each of us almost getting taken out by a bus, and found rooms at Hotel Paragon.

We braced ourselves for Kolkata, and were surprised by how much we loved it. It is a place where you definitely tell yourself that you can truly never, ever complain about anything again. But there is also a lot of happiness in this city and the Kolkatans are friendly and laidback.

Patient cow

Stuart woke me on our second day there with the words that every girl wants to hear at 5:30 in the morning. “Do you want to get up now and go to the fish market?” Why of course my dear, what else would I rather do? I replied leaping from my bed, putting on some lipstick and heading for the door.

Howrah Fish Market

The Howrah fish market was well worth the early start. Enormous piles of fish; barracuda, stingrays, trevally, queenfish, barramundi, indo pacific tarpon, jewfish, tuna, pompano, carp, and catfish amongst others.

Eel-ated!

Fantastically strong men would wait by the scales with baskets on their heads, which would get heaped high with fish and they would skilfully walk these out of the market.

Someone else with fish on the brain!

Sometimes the place would erupt in shouts and people would scatter, and you’d turn around in time to see a medieval looking wagon, with the most gruesone wheels crash through. The atmosphere was fun, all the men wanted to have their photos taken with their biggest fish. Selling techniques were direct, we saw one man grabbed by the neck and steered towards the right stall.

Flowers by the tonne

Upon leaving, we found by accident the famous Mullik Ghat flower market. It was on our list of places to visit, but we didn’t actually know how close we were. A sublime arena bursting with every imaginable colour and then some, crammed with small tents with men inside turning their flowers into art.

Fresh flowers

Sitting on the street, having breakfast after the markets, I remembered a story a friend told me about his grandmother. She had lived in India as part of the British raj, and after independence had moved to a suburb in western Sydney. He told me she would stand on the front steps of her new house in the suburbs and look at all the houses, with all of the people living their private lives inside, and she would ask “Where is all the life? Where is all the living being done?”. As we walked around Kolkata that day we saw a woman fold the top of her tent back to let the sun shine onto her things. She places a bright green chair under a tree that has colourful pictures of Shiva and Vishnu nailed onto it and begins drawing pictures into an exercise book. A woman further down props a small mirror on top of a gate and applies her makeup. A mother squats on the footpath next to a plate of flour and starts to make chappati, her babies at her feet. Foamy headed people are washing their hair, their clothes, their bodies under the tap in the street. Small children put on their best dresses and run around inside their tents. A woman stops in the street before a statue of a Hindu God, clasps her hands together and fervently prays. A sadhu stops at a small shop and replaces the dried flowers decorating the shelves with a fresh garland, blessing the shop before he moves on. A baby with no pants on crawls across a filthy pavement wetting itself, her toothless grandmother looks up and asks me for money. A hunchbacked beggar slumped forward face first onto a pillow does not even hear the coins being dropped into his tin. A five year old girl with tough, blackened feet runs out into the traffic, and you wonder how things will turn out for her with such a tough start. A beautiful young woman with burns on her neck and arms walks into a shop and lays her open hand on the counter and waits, and waits. I go and give her ten rupees and she looks at me in thanks and follows me down the street, “Aunty, Aunty…” asking for more. Families sift through reeking, damp rubbish, looking for treasures, something to sell. Tired, coughing rickshaw wallahs look exhausted as they walk their customers; some sleep under their rickshaws, one hand holding onto a wheel. We turn a corner to see a row of men at shiny black typewriters, their customers sitting next to them, earnestly dictating from the letters they hold in their hands. Teenaged boys run past them, playing music from their phones.

Street life

The next morning we went to the Shipping Corporation and bought our tickets for the Andaman Island ferry. A man with a rifle patrolled the queues, smiling as he told us to stand up, no sit down, come through here, no go back there. After this, because no visit to Kolkata is complete without a trip to the fishing shop, we spent two frustrating hours in the midday heat with an increasingly tired scrap of paper upon which was an address that noone could agree upon. We eventually found it after walking across a dark warehouse filled with makeshift houses. Stuart bought some line, then following the daylight, we found ourselves outside on a busy side street. Huge trucks were parked in the middle of the road, enormous baskets of vegetables were on the ground. These took eight men to lift them, and slowly, one by one, three men would leave the circle and stand under it and once confident they had the basket balanced, would walk through a dark doorway. We followed them in, and found the most beautiful fruit and vegetable market in the world! The whole warehouse was mood-lit. Each seller sat under a light bulb that had different colours of cellophane underneath it to catch and change the light.

Red Onion Bordello

Never has fresh produce been so seductive. Piles of tomatoes sparkled like a spill of rubies. Big bellied sellers watched possessively over their tumble of red onions. Who knew onions could be so tempting? It felt like stumbling upon a most fanstastic and sometimes dangerous secret. Shouts would come from all sides and we would turn in time to see a trio of desperate men with a tonne of cabbages on their head charging towards us, yelling at everyone to get out of their way. I was sometimes too late and would fall inelegantly backward into baskets of obscenely plump, well lit aubergines.

Coming through!

Our ferry left the following day, which felt a little too soon. There was so much more we wanted to see in Kolkata, but the M.V Nicobar was ready to take us a thousand miles southeast, to the Andaman Islands.

Photos We Didn’t Take

One of my favourite writers, Truman Capote, had a technique for approaching a short story. Like a photographer makes a frame with the right angles of his thumbs and index fingers to choose what to focus on, Capote would look for the small detail that would tell the bigger story. We were in the complicated country of Pakistan for a very short time. Our visit there was a series of exquisite moments that all hint at longer stories to be told. Insh’allah, one day we can go back to hear them.

I will admit that I was a bit nervous before we went. Of course, with a trip like this, there are no guarantees. A year of travelling without armour. This leaves you open to everything, good and bad. But it just seemed that in Pakistan there was less of a guarantee that everything would be fine. Our media has been very effective in really only letting us hear the bad news. The list on the foreign office website of places you can’t travel is extensive. I would meticulously check this list against our intended route. Stuart could only think about trout fishing, I could think only of the Swiss couple who were kidnapped in July. But as we knew when we set off from Scotland, 99 percent of people in this world are good, and bad things can happen to you anywhere.

Kunjerab Pass 4,700m!!!

View from the bus

Almost the minute that China turned into Pakistan, the road changed from smooth ashpalt to rocks, stones, potholes and long waits to pass the roadworks. This contrast is also evident in the immigration process. In China, there is a yellow line a metre away from the passport control desk, and someone is responsible for ensuring you don’t stand too close, or too far from it while you queue. The Pakistan border post in Sost was like an old and wonderfully disorganised schoolhouse, filled with chainsmoking and wonderfully disorganised headmasters. Before giving me a price for my visa, they had to flick backwards through the arrival book to see how much they’d charged the last New Zealander ($80 US), (!!!). For the visa, we just had to fill in a form and give two passport photos. Organised as ever, I hadn’t had time to cut our photos off our sheet of six. This was easily fixed with a screwdriver that the official found in his top drawer. He hacked away at the sheet, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, one eye screwed up to stop the smoke going in it. “Next time I’ll have scissors!” he said. “Next time I’ll have already cut them up!”, I replied.

We stayed that night in the Four Brothers Hotel in Sost, and had a dinner of yak and rice, and our first taste of spiced Pakistani tea. Maeuil told us that eight years ago, while trekking in Morocco, he’d seen a certain light on the rocks as the sun was starting to set. Since then, he had been searching to find such a light again. On the bus journey to Sost, he had saw it through the window. I thought it so wonderful to search for something so abstract, and decided that I also wanted to find my own certain light somewhere in this world.

There was a powercut as we sat in the cafe, and the tables were all lit by candles. Men would walk past the windows of the cafe, their heads and faces wrapped in shawls from the cold. More than any other moment on the trip, this image gave me the electric thrill of really, now, feeling like we were somewhere different, in completely unfamiliar territory.

At breakfast the next morning, we sat with some of the men that we’d met on the bus. They helped us order eggs and naan, and said “You have friends”. We spoke to a man outside the hotel, who was from the tribal regions, on the border of Afghanistan. He asked us if we thought that meant he was a terrorist. Maeuil touched the man’s backpack and said “No, you look more like a tourist!” Maeuil then went off to catch a bus to Karim Abad, and Stuart, Sebastian and I started riding there. Soon after leaving the hotel, we came across my latest transportation love affair. The Pakistani truck! I loved the Ladas overloaded with watermelons in the Caucausus, and the patient, stoic donkeys in China. And now my heart was completely won by these glorious, slow moving works of art. Every inch covered in beautiful, bright paintings. And they’re not only beautiful to look at, they jingle as they move with hundreds of little chains hung along the bottom.

Pakistani Truck!

This day of riding was absolutely, unbeatably the most spectacular on our trip, oh let’s face it, our lives. The beauty of the landscape was bordering on surreal, and the gracious, friendly greetings we received from everyone we passed was dreamlike. The sky was overwhelmingly blue; walls of rock, or mountains of pure snow were lining the road. Women in bright colours would leap to their feet as we rode past their houses, waving, waving.

View from the road

Stuart on the Highway

We stopped at the small village of Passu. There were two shops, but both were closed, and looked like they had been for some time. Old faded signs, with peeling paint told us to stop and enjoy Coca Cola, or that we could hire trekking equipment. A man was sitting in the garden in front of the hotel, and we asked him if there was anywhere we could buy some drinks. He told us the shops had been closed for months. The owner of the hotel came out and told us that he was open for lunch, and he could offer us tea, curry and rice.

We joined the man at his table as we drank our tea and waited for lunch. He was a trekking guide, and told us how the tourists had stopped coming. “After 9/11 it dropped sharply, but there were still some, then it got quieter and quieter, and now, in the last five years, there has been noone. This hotel, once you would not even be able to get a room, and where we sit now, it would have been crammed full with tents, people from all over the world. But now, noone comes”.

An hour later, we were called inside as lunch was ready. It was the most exquisitely prepared meal, made from scratch. On the bookshelves were old Lonely Planets, trekking maps, books in German and Dutch, and photographs on the walls of trekking parties. The hotel owner was an elegant man in his late sixties, he wore a dark grey salwar kameez with fine embroidery around the collar. He seemed to always hover just on the edge of our conversation. When he overheard that we were hoping to reach Karim Abad that afternoon, he rose from his seat and told us that we were leaving it too late in the day, and should stay in the hotel just before the lake. When we finished our lunch he put a large silver tray on the table with three apples.

Children from Husseini

Attabad Lake is a recent feature on the highway. Last year’s flood caused an enormous landslide which dammed a river, and caused a part of the valley floor to fill; now where there was once a road and several villages, there is a lake 13kms long and in some places over 100m deep. Thousands have been displaced, and 20 lives were lost in the flooding. We arrived in Husseini as the last boats of the day were being loaded. It is a busy and colorful place; lorries were reversing down to the water’s edge, with men climbing up the sides to begin the unloading before the lorries had even stopped. Tea houses have sprung up, catering to the instant workforce that has materialised because of the flood. Stuart spoke to a boatman and negotiated that if he and Sebastian helped them load, they would take us down the lake for free. The boys worked at this for about 45 minutes, whilst I looked after the bikes amidst a steadily growing crowd of men who stood silently and stared at me. One kind man gave me an apple. I told him how much I loved the brightly painted trucks, and he told me that all of these trucks come from Rawalpindi, but were stranded in Husseini after the flood. “Now all they do is drive backward and forward between here and Sost”, he told me. I’m sure there is a children’s story just waiting to be written, The Homesick ‘Pindi Truck. With big, sad headlights for eyes.

Loading the boats at Husseini

Two boats were being loaded at the time, but ours set off first. We heard a commotion behind us shortly after leaving and turned around to see that the other boat had capsized. All the other boats were leaving the bay to try and recover the cargo. We looked at our heavy steel bikes with a surge of relief, mixed with guilt for getting off so lightly.

An apple a day keeps your bike from floating away

All at sea

Unfortunately, as the man from the Passu Inn warned, we did leave too late in the day, and it was pitch black by the time we reached the other side an hour and a half later. A thin plank was thrown onto the edge of the boat from the shore, and boys appeared from the darkness and wheeled all our wordly possessions over the water. We stepped off the plank and sunk immediately into dust that came up past our ankles. We looked up to see a steep,  hill in front of us. It was impossible to push our bikes up by ourselves, and we each needed a helper to get the bikes up the hill leading away from the bay. Once at the top, Stuart and Sebastian started to ride down, still in the fine dust. I had to push as my eyes could not make out any contours, and I couldn’t tell the difference between road or rock and kept falling off. Even at this late hour, and in the darkness, a stream of tractors were still motoring past to go and collect the newly arrived cargo. They were all so good natured, they would pass me waiting patiently at the side, and call out Good Evening M’am!

Lake Attabad

When our track became a road again, we found ourselves in a similar place to the other end of the lake; a busy hub of trucks, jeeps, tractors and teashops. It was too dark to ride to Karim Abad, which was still 15kms away, so our options were to find a jeep to take us there, or share a tent with some workers as it was too crowded to put our own tents up. We decided to look for a lift. This worked out easily, and the bikes were taken apart and slotted in the back of a jeep, and we all crammed in, and on the truck. A boy of about 16 spent the 45 minute journey holding onto the front grill and singing.

No arguments over the front seat here

Sometimes I love arriving at new places during the night, as it is a total surprise to see where you are when you wake up. Karim Abad is a miraculous place to find yourself in after an evening wrestling with bikes in a sandpit. We opened the door of our room in the morning to see mountains of over 7,000m surrounding the village, which is perched high up on a hillside. The main street was an interesting mix of carpet shops, second hand bookstalls, cafes and grocery stores. And behind this rose a complicated network of stone lanes and walls leading to the houses.

The world's most picturesque clothesline

I explored the carpet shops with Maeuil that morning, sitting on the floor as new rug after new rug was laid out in front of us. I was reminded of a quote from a French artist that I saw in a carpet shop in Istanbul, which I unfortunately I can’t quite remember, but it was something about how the history of the world could be found in one finely woven carpet. It was wonderful to learn about the process of making a carpet, and how many knots per square inch (hundreds!). In one shop, as we sat on the floor feeling the knots with our hands, Maeiul whispered, “Oh, I love textiles, I am just crazy about them!”

The next day, we walked to the Ulter Meadow with some friends we had met the day before, Barbara, Nazeem and Raphael. On the way out there, we passed two men, one of them was a friend of Nazeems. He was a man in his 60s, and he paused on his walk to tell us a short history of the area we were in. As we walked away, Nazeem said “That man told you all about where we are standing, but his modesty prevented him from also telling you that he has climbed all of the peaks we’re about to see, aswell as K2, Broad Peak and Gasherbrum 1”.

Ulter Meadow

Yakkity Yak

We had lunch in the meadow, underneath Ladyfinger, Hunza Peak and Ulter 1 and 2. Avalanches would often roll down the glacier, sounding like jet airplanes flying above us. We made tea in a shepherd’s hut before returning to town where we stopped off at some of Nazeem’s relations. They had the most incredible view of Rakaposhi from their lounge window. I spoke about this to Nazeem’s 13 year old cousin. “Yes” she said “We never get bored, we only need to look out the window, and sometimes I sit here and build castles on clouds”.

I spoke to the owner of the Hunza Inn about how much had changed in the last few years. He said that last year he only had 80 guests for the whole season, usually he would have 800. He told me I must come back to the Hunza Valley, perhaps in June when the trees are full of cherries, or July when the apricots are ripe. It would be difficult to choose the best month; we loved October as the days were still warm, but the summer haze had gone so the views of the mountains were incredible.

Noisy glacier seen from Ulter Meadow

We left Karim Abad reluctantly, but as the trout season was officially closing at the end of the week, we had to leave for the city of Gilgit, where the fishing could be organised. Gilgit was 100kms away, and we knew the road would be bad, so we had an early start and expected it to be a big day. This was a good days riding; half the road was still broken up, but the latter half of the day gave us a section of completely smooth and finished road. We rode past some schoolchildren coming out of school, and a group of four young girls in blue tunics and white shawls over their heads waved to me. As I climbed the hill, I heard giggling behind me, and turned to see the girls running behind me, shadowing the bike, their shawls fluttering behind them. When I turned they would stop, and when I started again, they would also start again, running and giggling. It was a gorgeous sight and sound; they ran with me all the way to the top, their laughter making making my bike feel as jingly and jangly as a Pakistani truck.

We’d been warned that the Hunza was unique in it’s peacefulness, and we would feel things change as we went further south. We saw anti-American graffiti spray painted on walls, and posters advertising a rally, with burning US and Israeli flags marking out the locations. It was a shock for us when we reached Gilgit to see the heavily armed police presence. Dotted regularly down every street was a policeman with a rifle, and once a police ute drove past us with four men sitting casually in the back with guns, one was a machine gun with a long belt of bullets looping out of the gun and coiling onto the floor. This level of police presence was a normal part of life in Gilgit, but it was the first time I had been in a place like that, and it was unnerving, lending the whole place an unpredictability and feeling of tension (we just don’t get that kind of thing in Fort William!). When we looked around, we couldn’t see anybody smiling or laughing, it seemed a town of hard edges.

We stayed at the Madina Guesthouse, its big flower garden in the courtyard made it feel like a peaceful oasis. As we wheeled our bikes in, I heard someone call out my name, “Who knows us here?” we wondered. We looked over to see Nico, a friend last seen in Azerbaijan. Another three cyclists were also staying there; Jeremy from Canada who was in his 15^th month and 23^rd thousand kilometre of touring, and Leigh and Steven, from New Zealand. They had started their trip in Kazakhstan, and had also experienced that sweetest of pleasures, travelling that country by rail with their bikes.

The following day Stuart and I went to find out about the fishing at the Government Fisheries Department. He recommended that Stuart fish the river in Gupis, 80kms to the west and gave him the contact details for the fisheries department there.

Gilgit was a kinder city that day, and I realised it was the comparison between it and Karim Abad that had unsettled me.  There is possibly no place more peaceful in this world than Karim Abad.  There was definitely a mix in attitudes, but nothing too intimidating, just something we had to get used to. Stuart went for a shave, and the barber was the most charming man, all smiles, absolutely delighted that a tourist was in his shop. When looking for somewhere to have lunch, a man came up to us and asked if we needed help. He recommended a place to eat and then asked us what we thought of Pakistan. We began by telling him that we thought it was beautiful. He stopped us short and said “No, please speak openly. What does it actually feel like for you to be here? What do you really think about this place? I know that we are all represented as terrorists in your media, and it makes me so angry that this minority has given all of us this reputation. But let me assure you that nothing bad will happen to you in Gilgit”. He then went on to almost plead with us not to go the frontier provinces.

Heather on the highway

I decided to stay in Gilgit while Stuart went fishing. We didn’t know much about Gupis, and while Stuart would be out fishing with a guide, there was a chance that I would just be left at the hotel, uncomfortable about wandering about on my own as a single, foreign female. I walked Stuart to the busstop, and a kind policeman invited us to tea. As I walked back to the guesthouse, Gilgit kept becoming an easier place to be, and I began to really like it there. A busy bazaar of silks and bangles, fruits and vegetables, and shops full of live chickens that get given the chop as you buy them, fresh as you like.

A boy came up to me on the street one day, and started to walk with me, “Hello, where are you from, what is your name? What do you think of Pakistan? Do you think we are terrorists? All I want is to be a good person. I am going to study Electrical Engineering in Lahore. All my father wants for me is to study Electrical Engineering and to move to England”.

With one or two exceptions, all the women in Gilgit covered their heads, many of them wearing the full niqab. One day a woman met my eye, and we smiled at each other. Though I could only see her eyes, it was such a wonderful feeling, like a shared secret with someone I would never know, and whose life I could never get close to. We both began to laugh, as if struck simultaneously by our differences and our similarities. I was crossing the street later that day, and a group of young girls were sitting in the back of a taxi truck. They all started waving, and one of them reached out and grabbed my hand, and held onto it until the truck moved off. Other eyes were looking out from through the slats in the side of the truck, through the gap in their veils, smiling. There was so much warmth, through so, so many layers.

Back to the wonderful world of trout fishing, in Northern Pakistan this time. Gilgit city would be the hub, with most of the rivers in the surrounding area falling in a geographic location where conditions are a premium habitat for salmo trutta. Further up the KKH was too high, with freezing glacial rivers flowing the colour of a cafe latte, and the lowlands of the country were far too hot to support a trout population.

Tickets and information could be obtained from the Minister of Fisheries, based in Gilgit. He was most helpful, and sent me west, about a two and a half hour bus journey up towards the town of Gupis. I had already heard about this area and although I could not get as far as the Huderab Valley where some big trout were known to frequent, it still put me amongst some amazing scenery with beautifully clear rivers.

Every country so far seems to have a vehicle that dominates (apart from Europe). The Balkans had Yugos and Golfs, the Cacausus had the Ladas, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan old Audi 100s. Pakistan seems to run on Honda Hero motorbikes and Toyota Hiace buses. I’m sure the drivers of the buses have competitions to see how many people you can squeeze on. Fifteen people seated would be normal back west. My bus had 30 inside, some were kids, granted, but this does not include the five guys hanging on the back. Another bus passed with between ten and twelve guys on the roof and hanging off the side and rear. With local music blaring from the front, superb hills around us, it certainly set a feeling of adventure. Even more so knowing the Taliban were just over the pass at the head of the glen.

On arrival at Gupis, I found the fisheries office to arrange a ticket, and to look into hiring a guide for the first time this trip. Yosef oversaw staff of around twenty. He informed me that most of these were watchers, a term I had not come across since living in the Western Isles. This term had obviously stuck around since colonial times when the fish were introduced to the area from Kashmir, (though originally they came from England). The fish came here in 1908 but unfortunately before this region could celebrate a centenary of trout fishing tourism, 9/11 happened. From here on tourism has been in decline; this year I was the first tourist to register for a fishing permit, four days before the season ended on the ninth of October.

Chai was produced on arrival and I was introduced to five other guys working in the fisheries department. All were fishermen and really keen to see what fishing gear I had. We talked at length about the fishing. Much further up the system were where some really big fish were, photos of trout in the double figure range were shown. I was going to be fishing more locally, although this still required transport. 4X4s were available for hire, but with so many Honda 125 motorbikes around I felt this would be a cheaper option. I put the idea forward, and they asked if I could ride a bike. With a way to save money in sight, without thinking, I confidently said ‘No problem’. In actual fact, I had no idea. The group of guys showed me outside where a Honda was sitting and invited me to take it for a spin. This was all a little embarassing as I sat on the bike, being carefully watched. The furthest I got was kick starting the bike, then just sat there looking a little lost. Busted!

Stuart takes the back seat

Graciously I was told ‘You’re having a laugh’. It was decided that Rakib Zeman would drive the bike with me on the back and accompany me fishing along with Abrar Husain. We charged up river to some beautiful water. Down to some fishing at last, only a few hours of daylight remained and the temperature was beginning to plumett. Few fish were showing, so I went for the boring option of the #8 to fish a lure. Spin fishermen were fishing the opposite bank with success. A well known local angler was also fishing with me, he was a successful fly fisherman. Fantastic I thought, haven’t seen one for months. He seemed a little bemused though at the equipment I was using, which I thought was fairly standard. It was not until I saw him fishing that I realised why the funny looks. This guy was up stream nymph fishing using a team of lightly dressed flies (one hackle wrapped round the hook). The main difference, he was using a spinning rod and reel casting only monofilament line. No distance achieved but exactly the same technique as Czech nymphing with a short line. Very effective, four fish to my two. No one had ever seen fly fishing equipment which I found very strange, as I was sure the trout were introduced for the English fly fisher. A century is a long time and angling has obviously metamorphosed over the years.

And relax, first fish in Pakistan caught

I was looking forward to a full days fishing the following day as there were a couple of rising trout the previous night. The day turned out to be a bit of a non starter unfortunately. Slightly frustating but between one thing and another I never got fishing until around 4pm and it gets dark at six. Perhaps fishing for between 8-16 hours is not a common practice here? Anyway, I got to fish the lighter rod and had five fish coming to an Adams and a small spider pattern fished off the back of it. The largest fish was around 11 or 12 inches and not too disimilar in colouration to some Scottish trout. I have not had a huge amount of dry fly action on this trip, so to get it at the end of the season, (and probably the last trout fishing before reaching the shores of NZ), was a boost.

Pakistani Trout

The third day in Gupus, I had to myself (a full days fishing; bliss). I planned on crossing the river and following the goat track contouring the steep banks. Sheer rock faces that met the river meant there was a lot of hiking up hill, and up hill. This meant climbing to two or three hundred meters above the river to reach a nice spot I had seen from the opposite bank the day before. After two hours walking without wetting a line I had to about turn and head back down. More frustration.

On eventually meeting the river on the opposite bank it was incredible how the frustration immediately evaporated, as on the first cast I had a nice fish swim up from four feet of crystal clear water to sip the dry fly, a great sight. The fishing for the rest of the day was consistent and all on dries, even sight casting to some.

Once fishing, this was some of the most enjoyable of the trip; not the biggest trout but just catching plate sized fish in a swift, clear river and on dry flies is hard to beat.

Catching up with an old friend

We’d had enough warnings from friends, policemen and locals for us to decide to take a bus from Gilgit to Rawalpindi. I still wonder if we played it too safe.  People are regularly riding the whole way from Sost, and are fine, (even if there is the occasional section of stone throwing), but we decided that we wanted only good memories of Pakistan, and opted for the bus.

When Apsley Cherry-Gerard named his classic tale about collecting the eggs of the Emperor Penguin during an Antarctic winter, The Worst Journey in the World, he had clearly never sat above the back wheel of a bus from Gilgit to Rawalpindi. After six years of manhandling 25kg bags of fish feed, we’ve been quite proud of leaving those jobs with healthy backs. This was in danger from the minute we got on the bus. The road conditions (bad), combined with the speed (fast), and what we later realised was broken rear suspension, left us in total agony; spines compressed brutally with every bump, jump and lump. Nine back breaking hours into the journey, the ticket collector came and told us there was a problem, and that we should move to the front of the bus. Once seated, we realised that unlike we had assumed, not everybody on the bus was in the same hell that we had been, in fact noone was. We spent the remaining nine hours of the journey in relative comfort; enjoying the Hindi film music blasting from the speakers, and watching village life by night through the windscreen. Trucks would roll past, all lit up like carnivals by our headlights.  I told Stuart that travel in foreign countrys can’t possibly be considered complete without a long journey on public transport. He laughed at my obvious attempt to justify not cycling.

All lit up

We arrived in Rawalpindi at seven in the morning. An English speaker came over to help us when he saw us unsuccessfully asking people for directions to the Lahore bus stand. He took us to the stand, and when he found out that tickets would not be available for another hour, asked us to go and have breakfast with him in a cafe across the street.

He was from Quetta, a city in Balochistan, a place foreigners are advised to avoid. He had just finished his microbiology degree at a university in Rawalpindi. He was a big cricket fan, his favourite all time player being Stephen Fleming, who he considered very calm. He was wearing a traditional salwaar kameez, but tugged on Stuart’s t-shirt, saying “I wear clothes like this too, when I’m here”, he then opened his briefcase to show us his folded jeans and t-shirt. He told us that when we travel in Pakistan, to only go to the well known places “Do not go here and there, please, do not go here and there”, he said, poking his finger at vague spots in the air. “If you came to Quetta, something bad could happen to you”.

When the time came to get on the bus, he jumped into the small compartment underneath the bus in his perfectly clean clothes, insisting on packing all our bags tightly in, and postioning the bikes and wheels. He got out all dusty, and when he noticed one of the flowers had fallen off my bike, he handed it back to me, saying eloquently,“It is with regret that I must show you this”.

After cycling in Lahore, Istanbul seems like a well ordered memory. (But as I write this from India, cycling in Lahore seems a mere introduction to what chaos truly means…) We left the bus station and joined the fast running current of cars, trucks, buses, motor rickshaws, motorbikes, scooters, bicycles, horses and carts. But our flexibility to deal with this has increased as we’ve travelled. My technique is to only look forward, brake or swerve when someone cuts you off or pulls in front of you, and nurture a deep sense of trust that the drivers behind you will be doing the same with the vagaries of your own particular path.

In true Heather and Stuart style, we realised early on that we had no idea where we were going. Armed only with the name of the hostel, and with the address being buried deep on our computer, deep in our panniers, we began by asking people if they had heard of the backpackers. A 15 year old boy said he knew, so we followed him down an increasingly confusing warren of streets and back alleys. Once he stopped and bought us both a glass of sugarcane juice. It soon became clear that he didn’t know where he was going, he just really wanted to hang out. As a last cringemaking resort, I had to pull out our laptop on the crowded street. “Hey Stuart, just pull over, I need to check my emails, yes, here!” Two boys of about 12 had been following our entourage on their bike, and they then took over and told us to follow them to the hostel. They glided effortlessly across busy intersections, barely even looking. The boy on the back carrier kept looking around worried that we would lose them, and would hurry us along whenever he saw a gap in the traffic that we could fill.

Follow that bike!

Half an hour later we arrived at Lahore Backpackers. Arriving at the same time as us was the wonderful Gerrit, a Dutch cyclist who had cycled from Quetta, up the KKH and then back to Islamabad and onto Lahore. We felt so lame saying we’d taken the bus from Gilgit.

We were soon greeted by Sajjad, the manager of the backpackers. Within a couple of days Stuart and I had fallen totally in love with this man. He loved Lahore, and spoke about his city with wide eyes, and eveything he told us had the air of salacious gossip, “Oh sister, it is un-be-LIEV-able!” I told Sajjad that I was dying to see some qawwali while in Lahore, and asked if he’d be able to help us. Qawwali is the devotional music of Sufism, which is the mystical aspect of Islam. Thursdays in Lahore are known as ‘Sufi Thursdays’, as qawwali musicians perform in the Dada shrine in the afternoon, and there is usually drumming to be seen later in the evening. We had arrived on Tuesday, and were delighted to hear that we were also in time for another Sufi festival taking place on Wednesday night.

Lahore was in the middle of a dengue fever outbreak when we arrived, but we didn’t see a mosquito the entire time we were there. Our rooms were ruthlessly sprayed every evening, and to avoid any population building puddles of water, they had stopped watering their outdoor plants. Mosquito coils decorated every surface. We’d had strong warnings to avoid Lahore because of this, my favourite being “If you had to choose between visiting Peshawar and Lahore, I’d say that Peshawar was safer just now. In Peshawar, you may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and a bomb may go off, but in Lahore, those mosquitos are everywhere!”

We spent Wednesday looking around mad, colourful, chaotic, noisy and exciting Lahore, taking a motor rickshaw for some of the day. This was the way to travel. It was fun to be part of the bullying traffic, and see the near misses up close without being one of the nearly missed. We visited the Badshahi mosque, capable of holding 100,000 worshippers. It has magical acoustics inside the prayer hall; Stuart and I were told to stand in opposite corners inside the building, and when Stuart spoke into his corner, his voice travelled into mine and it was like we were speaking on a telephone.

Badshahi Mosque

At 9pm, we hopped into a rickshaw with Sajjad, and drove for half an hour across town and then through an intricate maze of back streets. Sajjad casually told us of an American diplomat who had recently shot two Pakistani men in this area, “So now, some people like foreigners, and some don’t”. I managed to keep my smile pasted onto my face but my heart flew up in my chest like a frightened bird.

It is hard to describe what happened next. We got out of the rickshaw and walked towards a doorway in a stone wall which was decorated with colorful fairy lights. Inside, the trees were decorated with more lights and flowers. The courtyard was packed with men and children, and a qawwali band was dancing through the crowd, singing and clapping. Like pied pipers, they had a crowd of excited people following them as they wove trails around the courtyard. As soon as we were seen, the crowd abruptly left the singers, and began to follow us, clapping and trying to grab our hands. Sajjad steered us to a quiet corner, and Stuart, Gerrit, myself and a friend of Sajjads who was the singer of the main qawwali party were seated on a bed. Within a minute, the crowd grew to be about six deep all around the bed, and everyone started pushing, hands forced through to be shaken, all trying to get a closer look at us. “When do you start playing” Stuart asked the singer with urgency. “Good question, Stuart!” responded Gerritt. Plates of rice, savoury and sweet were bought to us, along with glasses of water. Sajjad immediately asked if it was tap water, and when he found it was, he sent it away and bottled water was bought to us. “They cannot drink tap water!”. We were like a rare plant species, to be handled with kid gloves and gazed at with wonder.

We were then taken to a partitioned area and given a sweet, pink tea with chopped almonds floating on top. The crowd followed us, and were soon pressed upon the fences, throwing us flowers, waving, and pushing their hands through the trellis. An older man dispersed the crowd by throwing buckets of water on them. We are used to being stared at and appearing different, as any traveller here is, but this was definitely on the next level, and gave us a small taste of what it would feel like to be famous. Absolutely Fantastic! I have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever. Now… I just need to find something to be famous for.

When the music was due to start, we were taken through to another area and seated near the stage. After getting comfortable, we looked up to see about 20 mobile phones and cameras trained on us; filming and photographing us just sitting there. Then the music started. Qawwali always begins with all the men joining their voices into a beautiful, tonal aaaaaah, which the leader will then elaborate on, as the harmonium, the tabla and the handclaps begin. For myself anyway, the feeling is electric, it goes straight to the stomach. I wasn’t expecting what happened next, so found the next moments frightening. A man was carried in by four men and laid onto the ground in front of the singers. He seemed asleep, but then began twitching and bucking his back. This continued for some minutes until some men appeared with coils of rope and what looked like a long, thick bandage. They bound the mans legs together and then carried him to a tree behind the crowd. He was hung upside down to a branch about ten metres high and for the next ten minutes he violently threw his body around, flicking himself up and down from the waist, eyes still closed. The music continued, building in wonderful intensity as this music does. By this stage, another man had been carried in who was in the same state, and his legs were also prepared for him to be hung from the tree. Not all men were hung up; some would go into other states of bliss, but their dancing would be so physical that each would need a heavy sash wrapped around their waists which was held onto by another man, to keep them and other onlookers safe from their movements. Their eyes would be closed, their faces thrown back, their expression one of rapture.

The qawwali singers played for about three hours, and the busyness at the front never stopped. Men would suddenly succumb to the music, dropping to the floor from where they had been standing, going into violent spasms amongst the audience, sometimes only moments after they had been assisting someone else. After the men had been bought down from the tree, they would sit quietly at the front, their arms around each other. They looked completely drained and exhausted, but seemed also to be shining, as if a fever had broken.

For us, this was unlike anything we had ever seen. But for some of the others, we were still the main attraction. Stuart watched a boy behind me slowly sneak his camera up beside my head, and unnoticed by me, he quietly filmed the side of my face.

At half past twelve, Sajjad told us it was time to go, but invited us to look at the shrine before we left. Seated inside, were all the wives, mothers and daughters of all the men outside. I had not seen another woman before then. In between bites of his banana, Sajjad told us the history of the sufi saint buried there. A man came up to Gerritt and asked “So how is your visit? I hope you leave Pakistan with positive thoughts and see that we are not all terrorists”. With comic timing, a fight then began outside. A surging crowd grew around the fighting pair, and it pushed and shoved and rolled itself all over the previously serene courtyard. Gerritt was giving the man a beautiful response, and Stuart and I were thinking, don’t look outside just now!

The next day we queued outside the Dada shrine for another afternoon of qawwali. Singers perform here every Thursday, playing in five minute segments. This shrine is very famous and it is considered a great honour to sing here. There were long queues to get in when we arrived, everyone was lining up to go through the metal detector. Militia and policemen with guns patrolled the crowd. I was seen queueing with the men, and a policeman told Sajjad I wasn’t allowed to enter. Sajjad went and spoke to a senior officer who overruled this. By this stage I was feeling really uncomfortable. The first policeman reluctantly walked me over to the women’s queue where I was frisked, taken through the metal detector, and he then escorted me into the shrine. I was so grateful to see the singer from the night before; he came over, greeted me warmly and asked if I’d enjoyed the previous night.

Once again the music was beautiful. A sufi with a long white beard, in a suit of the most dazzling green, with long golden earrings danced and whirled about to the music. He came over to meet us and touched our heads. Throughout the afternoon a man wandered around with a backpack sprayer, misting rose oil above our heads. In the middle of the performance Sajjad leaned over and whispered “There never used to be so much security here, but a year ago there was a bomb blast that killed over 40 people and left almost 200 injured”. He then smiled and went back to watching the music.

After the concert, Sajjad gave us the alternative tour of Lahore. He took us to the Diamond Market, which does not sell precious stones. For some reason I was not expecting there to be a red light district here, Pakistan being as strict as it is. But we were taken through the streets of Heera Mandi, and wandered through little lanes with lots of doors, occasionally seeing a woman looking out, or waiting in the doorways. This visit to these women, known as nautch girls, was given extra poignancy when we were able to meet Iqbal Hussein, a famous artist who grew up in Heera Mandi, and lives there still. This area is his home, his mother and grandmother were both nautch girls. His paintings depict the reality of Heera Mandi, and through these he has given the nautch girls a dignity, a story and a voice. Because of this, he is considered a maverick and rarely able to exhibit his work in Pakistan. He was painting a portrait of a local businessman when we stopped off at his restaurant, and he let us sit and watch for a while. The businessman asked us what we thought of Pakistan, and he also spoke of his despair at the minority that represented his country. He asked “What does it matter which religion we are? Don’t they all say the same thing? And at the end of the day, isn’t the whole point to simply leave the world a better place than it was when we arrived?”

Sajjad wanted us to see the view of Lahore from the top of the restaurant. It was a beautiful sight; all was quiet from up there and the mosque was lit to a dusky pink in the setting sun. We could see into the courtyard, and watch the last of the days visitors wander slowly around it.

Mosque at sunset

Our magical, mystery tour of Sufi Lahore continued that evening when we were lucky enough to go and see the un-be-LIEV-ably talented Gonga and Mithu Saien. Once again, after a complicated rickshaw journey through another spiders web of narrow lanes, we arrived at a glittering sufi shrine that looked like it had just been visited by spring. The atmosphere was different once again; women were able to watch the music and dancing in the same room (though still in a section of their own at the back), and there were more children running around. In an unforgettable moment, in a city of 10 million, the two boys who rode us to the backpackers three days before, ran up and hugged us when we walked in.

Gonga and Mithu play the dhol, which is a large barrel drum that sits at waist height, hung by a strap around the neck. They wore long black shirts that came down to their ankles, and heavy chains and pendants hung around their necks. They looked like two Islamic kings. They were unbelievably cool. Gonga let me hold his six month old baby, which of course immediately started screaming. This is an excellent way for a foreigner to draw even more attention to herself.

Naimat, Stuart and dhol

They began playing at ten o’clock that night, and continued until one in the morning. To say they drummed with an other worldly precision and rhythm that was machinelike would be true, yet that doesn’t capture the soul of this music – it is mesmerising, grabbing your insides and drawing you out. It was astonishing how synchronised these brothers were, made all the more remarkable as Gonga has been deaf since childhood. Sufi dancers began to dance, in all their spinning and headshaking beauty. This was simply incredible to see; the men would spin so fast, then faster, then faster, in a perfectly controlled line as they moved across the floor, arms out at their sides, eyes closed, sweat dripping from their hair. When the music stopped, so would they, instantly. The head shaking was so fast that it was like seeing one of Picasso’s cubist paintings on a human head in front of you. The blurry head would remain whole, yet it was moving so quickly it was possible to see all the features on the same side of the head, unable to keep up with the other side of the face as it spun away. At one stage during the performance, Gonga took centre stage and started spinning, his drum rising higher and higher in the air as he spun. By the end, his drum and arms were at a 90 degree angle ,to his body, he was spinning round and round and round, and his drumming did not slow down once,

It was a sublime celebration of music and dancing. There was one notable exception to the sufi dancing halfway through the evening. A dancer cleared the floor and performed a most divine Michael Jackson breakdancing routine, and then, my favourite, he swallowed his cigarette and began dancing like a steam train, letting the smoke out of his mouth for the choo choos. The crowd loved this boy in his skin tight jeans and t-shirt, and he would throw his head back and laugh and keep dancing. He was positively life affirming. A ladyboy (as diligently pointed out by Sajjad) jumped up to dance with him and they performed a gorgeous dance with dark, flamenco flourishes. And one of the beauties of all this, was that all anyone was drinking was tea (okay, some massive blunts were being smoked in a room out the back with an old sufi, but the majority were just sipping sweet, milky tea). It was marvelous to watch the tea boy weaving through the sufi dancers with a tray full of tea cups, his own movements a dance as he avoided their spins and twirls without spilling a drop.

At the end of the night, we went to meet the brothers and thank them for such an incredible night. Cool on stage, they were even cooler in person, (we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!). Mithu said “So what do you think of our Pakistan? You see that tonight is all about love. When you go home, write a book, and tell the world what you saw in Pakistan ”.

We all walked outside together, Sajjad nudged me in the side to look at some ladyboys sitting in a doorway “Look, ladyboys! And they are smoking hasheeeeeeeeesh!” Un-be-LIEV-able. Mithu then jumped on his motorcycle, and a Sufi dancer jumped on the back. His rock star status was now complete, and like star struck fans we waved as he sped away down the alley, on our knees, worshipping his tyre tracks.

Gerritt and I went to the zoo the following day. We called ourselves the zoo within a zoo, as we were photograped as much as the animals. I spent the rest of the afternoon in a bookshop that Stuart and I had visited the night before, as the manager had invited us back for tea the following day. He was a young man who loved talking to foreigners, and valued good behaviour in people above all else. He gave me tea and grapes, and enjoyed talking about cricket (these moments usually strike fear into mine and Stuart’s hearts, sport is a good ice breaker, but we usually fail miserably at these converstions). I did my best, harking back to the days of Richard Hadlee and Lance Cairns, and made a reasonable attempt at the conversation. I was able to do all of this without launching into ‘Give ’em a heave Lance Cairns’ to fill in any silences, thus was able to keep my good behaviour record intact.

Leaving Lahore and our darling Sajjad

Oh, Pakistan! We feel we only scratched the surface of a place that asks so many more questions than it answers.  It is an incredibly beautiful, but challenging country, full of contradictions. It is true that the men we met had some of the most elegant spirits that we have encountered, yet in my time there I spoke to only eight women. Without speaking to the women, how can we come away with a full sense of the people, and know what life is really like there?   The way the men greet each other, right hand pressed to their friends heart as they lean in to embrace, is a beautiful thing to see. It demonstrates perfectly the heartfelt goodwill that we have found consistent with all the Muslim countries we have visited. Yet they are also capable of great violence towards each other. Possibly the most dangerous thing we did in Pakistan was visiting the Sufi shrines. They are regularly targets of militant activity, as fundamentalists think it un-Islamic to revere the body of a dead saint and to show devotion to God through music and dance.  People thank you genuinely for visiting their country to see that they are not all terrorists, but will warn you in the same conversation not to visit the border regions. It is a country with a strict moral code, yet we spent an evening in a shrine where ladyboys danced gorgeously and provocatively. And happily, this was more than just tolerated, it was celebrated.

I adored the country, but it is a place where you can’t take anything for granted. With my vivid imagination I could always feel a hand pressed down on my shoulder, reminding me that everything could change in an instant. But this became one of those things that just has to exist alongside everything else. Particularly when you look around you, and realise that for us, it’s just a few weeks, but the Pakistanis themselves live with this unpredictability everyday. Assalam Aleikum Pakistan, Insh’allah.

Hello India!

Many thanks to our wonderful friend Gerrit for letting us use his photos of the sufi night.  Happy cycling,x.

Rock the Kashgar!

As the Chinese border official was checking our passports, he was confused about what the R in GBR stood for on Stuart’s passport. I explained that it didn’t stand for anything, just the second letter in Britain, similar to the floating L in my NZL. Then, somehow the DE on German numberplates came up, to which I explained the word Deutschland. The guard then remarked that I was a very knowledgeable lady. I immediately closed my mouth, deciding to quit while I was ahead. But he was all fired up by this stage, demanding to know where Old Zealand was. Knowledgeable turned to vague in a matter of seconds.

Our first few days in China did not feel very Chinese at all, except for all the Chinese men driving past us on motorbikes, shouting Nihau instead of Salaam. Instead, it felt like we had just crossed the border into the world’s largest building site, and it took three days to cross it. From the Chinese checkpoint, the road, in all its muddy, rocky, gravelly entirety, has been ripped up for resurfacing, or in some cases it is being recreated a short distance to the side. The road will be magnificent when it is completed of course, but why, we wondered, did they have to rip such a large chunk of it up at once. Why not do it in sections?

It was three days of stones, mud, gravel, puddles, cement mixers and dump trucks. We made a grave error as soon as we arrived by not changing money at the town just past the border. We’d been waiting so long on both sides, due to the three hour lunch break, that we just wanted to get going, sure that, 1) we’d reach the next town before night, and 2) sure that this next town would have a money changer. We were wrong on both counts. We cycled until after dark, sure the town was just around every corner, until I decided it was too dark to continue (another stellar I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here performance on my part, unfortunately). There was nowhere to put up a tent that didn’t look like it would receive a visit from a ten tonne truck during the night, so we found the only option, which happened to be in the middle of the road, but just behind a highly visible road block (we hoped).

Drive through camp site!

 We woke to find that we were 500m from the town. If we had been runover by a truck during the night, our campsite and it’s proximity to salvation would have had a real air of poignancy. “They were so close!” our friends and family would have despaired. As it was, it only had an air of transparency, as we packed up and breakfasted under the bemused gaze of passing truck drivers. We had no water, and all we had in our panniers was noodles, so we were keen to get our money changed and buy some breakfast. A kind policeman at the checkpoint told us that the nearest bank was in Kashgar, 200kms away. I made a small joke about how we would be starving by the time we reached there. This lovely policeman said “When did you last eat? I will help you.” We told him that we weren’t starving, and would be fine, but he made us follow him to the shop, and bought us orange juice, pepsi, and bread rolls. His colleague appeared with muffins and apples about ten minutes later. This man was then sent away to fill up our water bottles. He waved away our thanks with the simple reply of “It is nothing. We must help each other.” We told him that we were going to Kashgar, and then onto Pakistan. He told us that the Kunjerab Pass was cold, and that our noses would run.

It was a hard day of cycling. There were two passes on the map, but they didn’t come with the usual bonus of a downhill in between, they just seemed to join together in 70 kms of uphill. It was a day of constant climbing along with our first rain in months.We reminded ourselves regularly of how we’d longed for this in Kazakhstan. We reached the town of Ulugchat, and as what now appears to be the usual for us, it was dark. We found a hotel, and though it looked a little bit more expensive than we would have liked, we had no choice but to wander into the lobby in our waterproofs, feeling elegant and sophisticated. The girl didn’t speak English, but indicated that there were rooms, but there weren’t rooms for us, but could we please sit down and make ourselves comfortable. Half an hour later, a policeman entered carrying a stack of papers. “Irkeshtam pass?” he asked us. It was interesting to see the whole process of foreigner registration in action. He told us to go with him, and we followed him a couple of kilometres to another hotel. There he searched through the papers, to find our names on the list of all foreigners who had entered China over the last couple of days. He ticked us off, officially registered us, and organised a room for us in the hotel.

The road from Ulugchat was amazing, no more roadworks, and we flew along for the first 40kms, making great time. Then screeched to a halt when we realised that we were passing a stocked pond of carp. Similar to Azerbaijan, this would be Stuart’s only hope of catching a fish in a landscape of brown, muddy rivers. Stuart fished for an hour or so. This was enough time for me to realise that I had left my wallet, with all our cards and US dollars in the hotel. As this has happened within a month of my losing our phone in Kyrgyzstan, I have officially resigned from all my high ranking positions on this trip. I am grateful if I am even left in charge of small change.

I had done no research on China for fly fishing. Up until vey recently we were planning on spending three months crossing it, now we would be lucky to spend two weeks there. From looking at our map and the route we planned, there were rivers gracing us as we traveled. What the map didn’t indicate was the river level, water clarity and industrial scale gravel removal. Heather already mentioned that China was like entering the world’s biggest building site. It was the total lack of environmental controls that got me seriously worried that there was no way I was going to get a fish in this short stay here.

Howkin' about in the river

Three full days on the road until a possibility presented itself in the form of a put and take carp fishery. Saved! A series of earth ponds 2-3 acres in size with loads of grass carp bathing on the surface. A couple of fishers were already there with their bait rods set up. The only difference being that half of them were women in skirts and high heels.

After the aforementioned meltdown that we possibly could be left high and dry with no cash in rural China, I got into a meditative fishing state, setting up the rod as Heather jumped into a taxi. On the water with the 6# and the same set up I used in Azerbaijan, I made cast after cast to these sun worshipping fish, thinking this will be a breeze. A full hour passed, tearing through every fly in the box, casting to uninterested fish. Eventually a fish switched on and homed in on an epoxy buzzer fished almost static. Result. A fish of around 2.5lbs.

China, tick!

Certainly harder than the fish in Azerbajan to entice and that was the only fish on the fly. A couple of guys working there could clearly see that I was struggling. They looked a little bemused at the tackle I used and even more complexed at the hook, all dressed up. They produced some bait which looked like fishmeal, formed a paste with it then molded it round the hook and then threw a load of ground bait in. I was not even going to begin to explain that I was a fly fisherman with principles. Tossing the bait out it was a matter of seconds before a fish inhaled it and another fish was landed. If they seemed a little bemused at the tackle I was using, they were utterly perplexed as I unhooked the fish and released it back to the pond. I thanked them very much and continued to try and get another on the fly, but nae luck.

Heather returned with the goods, we had lunch there and as we settled the bill we tried to pay for the fishing. There was no catch and release ticket believe it or not, so no charge. The rest of our route in China was also a complete fishless desert, so I felt very lucky to have come across this spot. I also thought it very apt that the Chinese fish was a Carp. Close call.

It was 4pm Beijing time by the time we left the fishpond, with 60kms to go to reach Kashgar. It was a gentle downhill the whole way, and we arrived in the city less than three hours later. And oh, how we wish we’d had set our camera up on the handlebars! Like a Critical Mass biking event, as we got closer to the city centre we found ourselves being woven seamlessly into an ever growing battery of bicycles and electric motorscooters. Being pulled along with this two wheeled crowd was such fun; we’d all amass in a blob in front of the cars at the traffic lights, and all burn off together when the lights went green. Of course, ours being a slower burn off than theirs, usually starting off in the wrong gear, being left behind with the cars, hey guys, wait up! When you first arrive in the city centre, it feels like a slick modern city, fast roads, big shops. But you only need to turn a corner into the old town, and suddenly modern China has vanished, and you find yourself in a teeming marketplace of Central Asia; a crash of donkey carts, stalls stacked high with watermelons, eggs, spices and dried fruit, sacks of nuts, curls of dried snakes strung like bangles across the door of a medicine man’s shop, shashlyk being turned over on the barbecues (shashlyk was runner up in the Name that Sheep competition), fresh hot naan being arranged onto waiting tables, children in ornately embroidered hats darting amongst the traffic, and the beautiful Uighur women in their rainbow of glorious headscarves, thick stockings, and high heeled shoes.

The marketplace

Kashgar is a legendary Silk Road hub, where the routes from Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the north and south routes of the fearsome Taklakaman desert converge. It is the home of the Uighur, a small Muslim minority, now struggling to keep their culture alive under the very heavy hand of the Chinese government. On the one hand, as a traveller, it is easy to be intoxicated and spun around until dizzy by the exotic other worldliness of the Uighur Old Town. It’s a place where even a short walk to buy an intricately patterned circle of salty Kashgar naan feels like you’ve just been led through a mysterious jewelled cave of marvelousness. But as you walk, you witness the old town literally being pulled down before your eyes. We met a traveller in Bishkek who had just come from China, and when we spoke of our interest in the old town of Kashgar, he told us to get there fast. This seemed an exaggeration, until you see it for yourself. Huge chunks of the sky are visible between shops and houses, revealing a new apartment block in the background.

Piles of bricks and rubble are heaped on the footpaths. The sound of power tools and hammers is constant, and goes on well into the night. The reason for this is due to stricter building regulations since the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. But the timing of this along with the mass immigration of Han Chinese to the area has left the Uighur feeling as though their culture is being stripped from them. Their have been riots and deaths in Kashgar and Urumchi as recently as July.

We stayed in the Old Town Hostel; a glorious place. It’s huge, with a big grapevine in the courtyard that has been hung with the old inner tubes and bald tyres of a thousand cycle tourists.

Spare tyres

It’s a sprawling complex of rooms, and run by the loveliest group of people. When I checked in, I said we may stay for two or three nights, I wasn’t sure. “You can stay as long as you like, You can stay forever, You could become a Muslim!” was the gorgeous, sing-song response I got from the two staff members behind the counter. As we were unpacking we met a cycle tourist from Germany who had flown to Islamabad, cycled the Karakoram Highway to Kashgar, and was setting off the next day to cycle back to Islamabad. He told us the scenery was amazing, but we would be given a police escort in Kohistan, and that stones would be thrown at us by hostile children.

The old town would become even more surreal at 9’oclock every morning. The primary school across the road would have morning exercises for the children; always beginning with the same rousing national song played incredibly loud. This would then be followed by Fur Elise and Jingle Bells. Every morning.

There were a lot of conflicting reports about cycling the KKH at that time. The one thing which we knew for a fact was that the Chinese authorities would not let you ride all the way to the Pakistan border. They insisted instead that you put your bike on a bus from the town of Tashkorgan to Sost, the official Pakistan immigration point. The difficulty lay in whether you were allowed to cycle the first 300kms from Kashgar to Tashkorgan; some cyclists had been turned back within the previous couple of weeks and made to return to Kashgar to take a bus. Sebastian, another German cycle tourist left for Tashkorgan the day after we arrived, so we joked with him that if we didn’t see him in Kashgar again, we’d know it was possible to ride.

Garlic, anyone?

While wandering the streets of Kashgar, we met a most wonderful couple, Neil and Ann from Cumbria. They were also keen cycle tourists, though they weren’t cycling on this trip. Neil was a lover of Silk Road history, and had the most incredible travel stories. Like this one, “The last time I was on the Karakoram was back in the 80’s, and the mujaheddin were having their RandR in some tents at Sost”. We also shared a love for Ella Maillart. For those who don’t know who she is, she was a Swiss woman who travelled independently in Asia in the early 1900s, brave and intrepid by any standards, but incredibly so as a solo woman. I read in one of her books that whenever she is in doubt as to whether she should take a journey, she asks herself two things: Is it positive and does it lead to more life. If she answers yes to both of these questions, she goes.

We stayed for four days in Kashgar; roaming the streets of the Old Town, the hammering of coppersmiths and silversmiths providing our soundtrack. Occasionally we would visit the big supermarket in the city to stare in shock at the tanks of (barely) live fish and turtles that were waiting to be chosen for someone’s dinner (yes, turtles!). Pass us an oxygen meter somebody! We need a crashcart, stat!

Failed audit

We visited the famous animal market; but probably because we didn’t get drunk and purchase livestock with two beautiful and charismatic Frenchmen, it lacked the boisterous charm of the Karakol market in Kyrgyzstan.

I ain't carrying this one!

On Monday morning we packed up our bikes, and at the advice of a tour agent, we rode to the PSB to find out if we needed a permit to ride to Tashkorgan. When the policeman found we didn’t have visas for Pakistan (he would not accept the fact that visas are obtainable on arrival), he said it would be impossible to ride our bikes in any way shape or form to Tashkorgan. I thanked him kindly for his advice, which we then completely ignored.

It was 1pm by the time we left Kashgar, but we still managed 108kms before dark as the road was so flat. We stopped at a shop at around 5pm, just as school was being let out. A group of young boys surrounded us, fascinated, clicking through every gear on our stationary bikes; an act which always makes the smile on one’s face transpose into more of a grimace Sometimes groups of girls would walk past, waving shyly and giggling. Once, a girl of about seven broke away from her group to come and talk, but lost her nerve once she was near us. She ran back to her friends with her face in her hands. An incredibly beautiful Uighur woman was sitting outside the shop, probably about 25. She had the most disarmingly green eyes, I was mesmerised by her. She would smile confidently back at me, while spitting out husks of sunflower seeds. She then stood up, lifted a 25kg bag of flour, and walked down the road, with her back bent in half.

Alive but not kicking

We reached the checkpoint at Gaz early the next morning. It was quite intimidating, with a heavily armed soldier standing on the roof of the office. The official just looked at our passports, did not ask where we were going, then waved us through with a bored look on his face. Yes!

After another hour or so of riding, we turned a corner and came face to face with the biggest mountains we had ever seen. As if the Gods of Olympus had decided overnight to come down and arrange the heavy white folds of their garments into valleys and glaciers at their feet, the mountains were there, and my god, they were beautiful. What is amazing about the KKH, is that the mountains are RIGHT BY THE ROAD. We felt starstruck, like being invited to the after party of the Oscars, we couldn’t believe how close these aloof, regal superstars were. And what a place to run into Neil and Ann again, on their way back to Kashgar after a night in Tahskorgan. They were so excited for us, Ann hugged me and gave me two wonderful pieces of advice, “Enjoy” she said, “And don’t forget to look behind you”. Neil said to Stuart “You know, lately I’ve been saying I’m don’t have the time for another long bike trip, but now I think, bollocks to that!”

Never mind the mountains, check out the flowers!

Kashgar naan

Mid afternoon, we realised we had only gone 48kms, after six hours of cycling. This wasn’t great as we needed to reach Tashkorgan by Wednesday night so we could cross the border on Thursday. Saturday was a Chinese National Day, and we wanted to give it a wide berth, as we had been warned that the Fridays and Mondays surrounding these days can sometimes be the victims of random border closures. Luckly though, after another 10kms the road levelled out, and we were able to do another 40 before it got dark. This left us 100kms for the next day, though this did involve a 4,000m pass, the second highest point on the highway.

The splendour of the Karakoram became almost ridiculous the following day. We did what Ann said and kept looking behind us, watching Kongur Shan grow and grow and grow. We sat and had our lunch in front of the 7,546m high Muztagata while eyeing up the pass. From where we sat, it looked easy; just a lazily sketched zigzag up the side of a mountain. We took bets as to how long it would take to reach the top. It was 12pm. Stuart estimated a 1pm finish, I was a bit more conservative and said 1:12. At 3:30 we reached the top, unable to believe that from our lunch spot 1km from the beginning of the climb, it would be another 18kms to the top. Where did they hide all that extra road?

Karakol Lake

Stuart and Muztagata

It was a good downhill all the way to Tashkorgan, though this particular town took its time in revealing itself. We reached the outskirts of the village at 6, and it was about 7 by the time we got to the centre. Show yourself Tashkorgan! we silently screamed. On the way into town, school had just finished, and we had the most wonderful welcome as every child on the 2km stretch of road greeted us and waved to us. My obsession with Princess Diana as a child came in handy at this point; hours of fake walkabouts in my back yard, receiving bunches of flowers and exchanging greetings with invisible strangers meant I was able to talk and wave and smile until the very last child had passed. Mum now realises where all her flowers went!

Wearing everything I've got!

We stayed at the Traffic Hotel, with the charming backwards R in the big rooftop sign. I was thrown into a spiral of panic when shown the bathrooms though; the girls bathroom was just a shower, actually going to the toilet required going into the mens which was just a row of squat toilets, separated by metre high partitions and no doors. How fast I moved across those floors!

At 10 the next morning we went to the Customs House on the edge of town, which is where you get your exit stamps, and from where the bus to Pakistan leaves. It’s a one stop shop. We were very surprised to see Sebastian, the cyclist who had left a week ago, also waiting for the bus. Dear Sebastian, hadn’t known about the final details of the exit procedure. He had cycled all the way to the Pakistan border, right up to the 4,700m Kunjerab Pass, only to be turned back at the Chinese point as he didn’t have an exit stamp. But how lucky is he? He’s done more of the highway than most cyclists have been able to do in recent years. Not having all the details sometimes means you get a lot more of the adventure.

Approaching Tashkorgan

Also waiting for the bus was Maeuil, another friend we had made in Kashgar. He is a potter, and has the beautiful theme for his travels of looking for potters that he can learn from. At the start of the morning, there were so many people waiting for what we had told would be only one bus going to Sost, and my god, there was so much luggage! There didn’t seem to be any way that we would all get to go that day. We shoved our passports into the hands of the first offical we saw, and patiently waited as one by one they let people into the building. Maeuil, travelling light without a bike, went through early on. Then after an hour, Stuart, Sebastian and I were finally allowed in. There were two buses that day, so everyone, and all the boxes, bikes and bags found a space, and by one o’clock, we were reclining on our beds, and on our way to Pakistan!

Beats cycling!

The stars are our chandeliers…*

Kyrgystan – 23rd August 2011 to 20th September 2011

On this trip, Stuart and I began with clearly defined roles. Stuart is Chief Navigator and Chief Mechanic. I am in charge of visas, border crossings and organising the vaccinations. Obviously, the vaccinations were all completed before we left, so I filled this gap by assigning myself the role of Chief Budgeter and Shopper. The times that we have decided to challenge this order have usually ended badly, like the time in Belluno that Stuart told me that he’d let me follow the map to lead us to our hostel. This idea ended with me at the wrong end of a carpark, staring at a wall, insistent I was right, as Stuart walked off in the opposite, and correct direction, shaking his head. When Stuart goes shopping for dinner and lunches, he usually comes back with a sixpack and a sachet of something that needs to be baked in an oven.

As chief controller of purse strings, the heat of Kazakhstan presented a problem for me. Though we wild camped for the majority of  our time, we totally blew our budgets on iced tea. I kept thinking, are other people spending all their savings on Maxi Chai, or is it just us? Will we be cutting our trip short because of this temporary addiction? Could we survive without it?

Stuart and Heather go cold turkey

I found out that indeed we could not have survived without it. Our last two days in Kazakhstan camping beside the lake where Stuart caught the Zander, drinking only warm water that we had filtered whilst being knee deep in mud, left us almost crazed. Our first few hours in Bishkek were filled trying to find a bankomat that would accept our card, so we could quiet the beast within that demanded more iced tea.

We liked Bishkek instantly; a laidback city, that doesn’t seem overly concerned about tourists. We felt ignored, and it was wonderful. We arrived from Kazkhstan at about five o’clock, and went and found somewhere to stay. We checked into the super friendly Sakura Guesthouse, which boasts the best hostel sign we’ve seen so far; inside the toilet is a small sheet of paper instructing: “No good stomach? Sit straight please.” I’ve already sent a copy to the Baku to Aktau ferry.

Our first plan in Bishkek was to apply for our Chinese Visas, but we learnt from other travellers that evening that the embassy had put a hold on issuing visas until the 10^th of September. So we decided to spend the two weeks before this date cycling around Lake Issy Kol, the second largest alpine lake in the world. The first is…….okay Angus Macaulay, I’ll put the answer at the bottom, to give you time to rack your brains.

Issy Kol is about 200kms from Bishkek, two days of riding. On our second day, after stopping for a gorgeous morning tea of pancakes, honey and milky tea at a roadside chaikhana, we rejoined the road and also two other cycle tourists on their way to Issy Kol. Stefan and Nikola were from Grenoble in France, and were en route to Beijing. They’d left France around the same time we left Scotland. Now I’m not suggesting that Stuart and I get sick of each other, not at all, but it’s great to ride with someone else for a while. And this pair were instantly likeable, and we found we had alot in common within minutes of meeting each other. For example, Nikola is also carrying a fishing rod, though he hasn’t imposed such a rigorous policy to his bike ride. He can leave a country without catching a fish!

We camped in an apple orchard by the lake that night. Stuart and I made a big pasta, and Stefan and Nikola made an apple and honey compote. The next day was a Saturday. We rode for a couple of hours the following morning to the village of Kizil Tuu. Stefan and Nikola said they were going to leave their bikes in the village, and take a taxi to the town of Karakol at the far end of the lake, so they could go to the Sunday animal market. They were such good company, that we decided to join them.

We rode down a small road into the village, looking for a house that seemed a good place to say “Hello, can we leave our bikes with you for a day while we go to market?” We saw some people in their yard washing their car, and they gave us a friendly wave. We went over, and with some sign language and a few key words, such as moo, we arranged to leave the bikes there for the night. We were then led into the lounge and seated around a long, low dining table. Soon the table was filled with glass bowls of chocolates, sweets, biscuits and pastries. Tea was poured, and the wonderful, effervescent Rosa sat with us and asked Nikola about famous French actors, (Mel Gibson also got a few mentions), and made us feel so welcome. She then drove us to the main road, where we found a taxi to take us the 160kms to Karakol.

Karakol Market

The market starts at 5am, and is said to be almost over by 10. We opted for some middle ground, and went to the market at 7. It was wondeful. A big muddy field, of sheep, cattle and horses, with a magnificent backdrop of jagged, snowy peaks. Men on horseback would gallop through, big trucks loaded with sheep would lumber in, and within seconds they would be totally submerged by leaping, climbing men; scrambling up the sides of the truck and jumping in to feel the fatty rumps of sheep. It was hectic, colorful and exciting.

All aboard!

Stefan suggested a vodka, to celebrate the market. They sell them in small, plastic shot glasses. One seemed like a fun idea. The decision to buy a sheep as a gift for the family in Kizil Tuu was made after the third vodka. I must say here, that as a partaker of only the first shot, I did play devil’s advocate and suggest that transporting this animal by taxi to the other side of the lake may prove problematic. This was ignored, as Stuart and Nikola became absolute experts in what sheep were worth, what a good, fat rump felt like, who was trying to rip us off and who was giving us a good deal.

Bonus Booty!

After three hours of haggling, and as the market slowly wound down, they finally decided upon a sheep and parted with 2,800 som, roughly 30 pounds.

We named the sheep Dolly, even though it was a he, and tied him up outside the cafe while we went in and had one last celebratory vodka. Hell, we’d only known each other two days, and now we all owned a sheep. The market was practically deserted by the time we left, making our slow way across the empty cattle yard with a recalcitrant Dolly. Unfortunately, in his affected state, Stuart had too slack a grip on the rope, and it wasn’t long before Dolly had made a run for it. Stefan perfectly described what happened next as saying it was like watching an old silent movie; Stuart and Nikola weaving crazy zigzag patterns across the field, Dolly in his final bid for freedom proving too nimble to be caught. The Benny Hill theme music was all that was missing. Soon Stuart and Nikola had disappeared into the maze of alleys, and Stefan and I gave up trying to follow them. Half an hour later, they reappeared. Dolly was draped peacefully over an exhausted and muddy Nikola, with Stuart at his side nursing a bleeding arm after a dramatic lunge to grab Dolly’s legs, (Jeanna, think Uig Sands!).

Stuart and Dolly

By this stage it was after one o’clock, and ever pragmatic, I was starting to worry about over extending our check out time at the hostel. (On this trip, I am also Chief Worrier) When the three boys decided to take a rest in the shade, I said I’d go ahead to clear our bags out of the rooms, and explain to the hostel that we would be returning drunk, and with a sheep. Yak Tours Hostel has to be the most laid back accomodation in the world. When I told Sergei that due to excessive vodka at the market, and the purchasing of an escape artist sheep, we had overstayed, he just laughed and said no problem, no problem. Stefan returned an hour later, and went straight to bed, saying that Stuart and Nikola were having a sleep under a tree, and that they would follow shortly. I waited and I waited; then I started to think that perhaps they should have returned by now, and as the most sober member of the party, should do something about these two foreigners passed out in the street.

I had only been on the main street for two minutes when a man came up to me saying “Tourist?” I thought he must be selling something, so I told him that I was fine, just going for a walk. Then he said “Schotlandia!” and began stabbing the air in the direction of a taxi. A chill of realisaton crept over me. He led me by the arm to his car, from where I could see the back of two sorry heads, and then he opened his boot to reveal Dolly. Nikola leapt from the car, “Stuart, we are saved, we are saved!”

They had spent the last hour in this taxi, crawling the streets, trying to remember where the hostel was, and failed. They had no money left, so were held hostage until something happened to save the situation. I was a hero for about two hours – if they were in any state to, I’m sure they would have held me aloft on their arms.

We phoned the man who had driven us to Karakol the day before and asked if he was available for a return trip, with an extra passenger. My enduring image of Dolly is of him tied up to a pole in the busstop in Karakol, waiting patiently as the taxi driver searched in local shops for a large sheet of plastic and sheets of cardboard to lay in the boot of his brand new van.

As we got closer to Kizil Tuu, and as the boys got closer to sobriety, we began to feel apprehensive about how the sheep would be recieved. Like being handed a bag of freshly caught fish that you don’t feel like gutting, perhaps the last thing this family felt like was slaughtering a sheep.

Rosa recieved the sheep as if it was the most natural thing on earth and led Dolly to a small hutch out the back. I had grown enormously attached to Dolly by this stage, and felt a surge of relief, thinking that perhaps he would be allowed a few more weeks of living before the family decided to eat him.

Not so. Within about an hour, Dolly had been led unresistingly into the kitchen and killed on the floor in the Halal way. My nerve failed me just before his throat was slit, and I left the room. I’m not a vegetarian, so after leaving, I felt hyprocritical. I decided to return and be brave enough to watch the whole process. But when I reentered the kitchen, it was over, and Dolly was being bled into a bucket.

Dolly was intended as a gift for this family, so we did not expect to be eating him that evening, and certainly not still be eating him after midnight. The feast begain with barbecued balls and kidney, which were given to the four of us as a special treat. Flashbacks of the busstop scene alternated with every uncomfortable bite. Then we began on big portions of meat, eaten straight off the bone. All the uneaten meat was torn into tiny pieces, and returned to the pan and mixed with spaghetti, and we were served huge plates of this. Never have we eaten so much mutton in one sitting. This kind of meal is called Beshbarmak, which literally means, five fingers. No cutlery is used, we just ate with our hands. By the time we went to bed, all that was left of Dolly was a folded up sheepskin under the kitchen cupboards.

We all left the next day, and camped by a reservoir that Stuart and Nikola were planning to fish. Nothing was caught, but some fishermen gave them two fish for our dinner; so we made a big fire, and cooked the fish on a flat stone. The explosion of stars that night was magnificent.

Campsite by night

Campsite by day

The next morning, though we were all going to Son Kol, we parted ways as Stefan and Nikola needed to return to Bishkek to organise visas. Son Kol is a lake in Central Kyrgyzstan, where Kygyz families live in yurts over the summer, while their animals graze in the high pastures.

We began the 3,400m pass to Son Kol on a beautiful, blue sky day. The climbing was sustained, but not hard, and the ever unfolding views of mountains made it a joyful experience. Cars loaded with Kyrgyz families would erupt into claps and thumbs ups as they drove past us, providing an injection of energy as we rode. I watched a horseman leave his yurt, and canter across the slope of an enormous mountain, his wife standing in the doorway watching him become a dot on the overwhelming landscape.

On the way to Son Kol

At the top of the pass to Son Kol

Both of us felt strangely exhausted after we arrived. It had been a long day, but this was a different kind of tiredness, and for the first time, went to bed while it was still light, and without having anything to eat. We couldn’t be bothered cooking, and weren’t even hungry. In the morning we felt worse. We got out of the tent, and lay on the grass in the sun, unable to move. We had no energy, and our bodies ached.

Girlfriend in a coma

A man rode past us on his horse, and invited us to come and stay the night in his yurt. We were kicking ourselves, but had to decline the invitation, as we didn’t even have enough energy to take the tent down and pack our bikes. It was strange. I began flicking through the health section in the Lonely Planet, and found a section listing all the symptoms we had. It seemed that we were dehydrated at altitude, and were possibly also lacking in salt. We launched ourselves into preparing a very salty, and subsequently almost inedible bowl of pasta. As we were finishing, Jumarbek returned on his horse, with his second invitation to come and stay for two nights this time, in his yurt. We were feeling better, so this time we accepted his invitation and told him we would pack up and come by in about an hour.

At the yurt was his wife Sultanet, and their two daughters Moonara and Sumara, who were four and three. We sat up and drank tea until about nine o’clock, and also had our first taste of Kymyz, which is fermented mare’s milk. This sits in the yurt in a big barrel, occasionally being churned up throughout the day with a ‘bishkek’. It’s hard to describe what this tastes like. Maybe the knowledge of what it is affected my judgement, but as you drink it, it smells horsey, with just a hint of a baking sodaish fizz. The Kyrgyz absolutely love it. We could only manage a few sips. I told them I had a New Zealand stomach, and had to go a bit easy. Jumarbek acted out my stomach exploding, and me being shot up through the roof of the yurt. Then it was time for bed. He told us we would get up at six the next morning, that Stuart would help him with the sheep, and I would help Sultanet for the day. We all slept in the yurt next door, and before bed, Jumarbek prepared his shotgun by pushing gunpowder into cartridges, in case wolves came during the night. We fell into the nicest sleep, nestled in next to this family. There was a smell of raw mutton in the air, and the coldness of the night kept threatening to sneak in under the felt walls.

Moonara and Sumara

Stuart left with Jumarbek in the morning, and I spent the day sharing Sultanet’s workload. She got ready for milking first thing in the morning and called out some instructions to little Moonara who wandered off behind the yurt. Ten minutes later, Moonara reappeared; shouting, her little cow whip in hand, herding the cows for her mother.

Cowgirl!!!

After milking, I got comfortable behind a small machine and separated the mornings milk from the cream, which they call kaimak. Then, Sultanet and I began the meditative task of making balls of kurut. These are yoghurt balls, made by leaving milk to sit for five days, then adding salt. This mixture is then rolled into tiny balls and laid onto a mat and left to dry in the sun for two days. They are a popular snack in Kyrgyzstan; we find them a bit strong to eat plain, but love them as a substitute for parmesan cheese when crumbled over our pasta!

The kurut was taken in as the sun went down, we peeled potatoes, and then I had a bread making lesson from Sultanet. We had a mutton stew that night, and an extra visitor, Jumarbek’s father over from Naryn. It was amazing to watch Moonara and Sumara eat; after a full day of helping their mother outside, they had such appetites and tore violently into their mutton. They would throw back their bowls of tea in two gulps before pushing them back to their mother, breathlessly demanding more chai before lauching headfirst back into their bowl of stew. As soon as they had finished eating, they lay down on their blankets and fell into an instant sleep.

Jumarbek gave us a fashion show after dinner, parading his selection of Kyrgyz hats. He would disappear from the yurt for a moment, then burst through the door with a new example of headwear, shouting “Salaam!” We braved the kymyz again that evening, managing more than a few sips this time, feeling quite proud of ourselves for acquiring the taste.

In the middle of the night, the dogs started barking, and in the darkness, I saw the grandfather get up, pick up the shotgun and go outside. He started calling out to the dogs that were tied up on the hill, then he started howling like a wolf. They communicated like this for a while, then the dogs stopped barking, and he returned to the yurt to sleep.

We left the following morning, after laying the balls of kurut out for another day in the sun. Jumarbek and Sultanet had one more month in Son Kol, before the yurt would be packed up and they would go back to Naryn for the winter. Sultanet and the girls would travel back by truck, and Jumarbek would walk the sheep, cows and horses back over the hills, with his dogs and his shotgun.

Our family from Son Kol

Son Kol must be one of the most peaceful places on earth. The occasional car will drive past, but apart from that, there is no other sound. The landscape is one of skies, mountains, water, horses and silence. As you sit, it seems impossible that elsewhere, far below, the world carries on the way we know it does. As I write this, I’m already part of that world again; but I am so glad to have been part of the rhythms of Son Kol for even a short time. Next spring, I will know when Sultanet is getting up, when she will be milking her cows and her horses, and I know how she makes the kurut.

Son Kol

As we left the lake, we asked at a yurt if we were leaving on the pass that led to Chaek. The family invited us in for some kymyz, and by that stage our confidence was such that we both drank an entire bowl each. We stayed for half an hour, gave some dried fish as a return gift, and carried on towards the pass. It was at this point, that Stuart realised he had gone one bowl of kymyz too far. I was 500m behind him, stuck at an impasse with an angry dog that I was too afraid to pass. I should also mention that I had the toilet paper. Stuart was further up the hill, dealing with an explosion of South Park proportions. By the time I reached him, it was all over, as was our map of Kazakhstan.

We camped at 3600m, the closest to the stars we’ve been. I think it may have been a little bit too high though, as I woke with the most excruciating headache imagineable. After three hours of almost unbearable riding, we rode past a house and a woman waved us over and invited us in for tea. She had just baked bread, and we sat with her and had bread and jam, endless cups of tea, along with a pill for my headache. We weren’t sure if it was a cafe, so awkwardly needed to check if we had to pay. She said no, she just found tourists interesting and would always invite them in for tea if they passed her house.

When we first started planning this trip, our intention had always been to cycle across China and into South East Asia. But while in Kyrgyzstan, we became more interested in riding the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan, and then onto India. The lure of famous mountains, the world’s highest highway, the avoidance of the Taklakaman Desert in China and mahseer fishing in India all played a part in this change of plan. So we left our bikes in Chaek, and took a bus to Bishkek to enquire about Pakistan visas. Soon after arriving, we found out that there was no longer a Pakistan embassy in Kyrgyzstan, and for a few disappointed moments we sat on a park bench . Then we looked up to see a French traveller that we’d met two weeks earlier. He told us that we could obtain visas on arrival at the Pakistan border. He also told us that he’d found an agent that could get Chinese Visas in one day, and this was still one week before the 10^th of September. It was a great chance meeting, so we decided to stay the night in Bishkek and apply for our Chinese visas in the morning.

This was unbelievably easy with the help of the Liu, the busiest woman in the world. We filled out our forms in the morning, accompanied her to the embassy, then she told us to meet her at 5pm that evening. We met her on the street, and she rummaged around in her enormous handbag for what seemed ages, before triumphantly emerging from this bag with a bundle of about 15 passports tied up with an old rubberband. And that was that, we had our Chinese Visas. We stayed one more night in Bishkek, and applied for visas at the Indian Embassy the following morning.

While waiting the week for our Indian visas to come through, we spent a gorgeous few days in the Suusamyr valley, for a spot of trout fishing……..

Kyrgyzstan was one of the countrys on the trip where I was very much looking forward to wetting a line. I had heard there are trout there, but there is no informaton to be found on fly fishing for them. This added to the anticipaton, as on this trip I would love to find somewhere relatively unexplored by western anglers. Staying at the Sakura Guest House in Bishkek helped get a little more information, as the guy running the place was a mad keen spin fisher from Japan. He showed me some photos of the trout he had caught. Fish around the two pound mark with a stunning array of spots, which I have never come across in trout in the west before. There was also a picture of a fish around 5-6lb caught by a Russian guy. This was what I had been looking for.

As you may see from Heather’s accounts, there was quite a bit of cycling with only a little fishing before we reached the Suusamyr valley where I had been recommended to go. As soon as we reached the Suusamyr river it was just screaming trout! A fast flowing clear river unmanipulated by man. We were around the 2500m mark where we made camp, right beside an immensely powerful pool; very deep, with the river slackening slightly on the near bank. I always seem to reach for the heavier rod on these occasions, with a Teeny 250 line and a Zonker style lure. I feel this covers the water most effectively when searching a new pool of this size. First run through the pool drew a blank with one possible offer, but hard to tell. The second run down, scaling down the fly size produced my first Kyrgyz trout. A fish about 1.5lb easly landed on the 8# but showing those superb spots that I saw in the photos back in Bishkek.

The first beautiful Kyrgyz fish

I was ecstatic, the first fish always means I can now relax and enjoy the fishing. It was a perfect size for eating and since not too much effort was put in to catch it, I felt a healthy population existed in the river. On cleaning the fish, I found the flesh to be a beautiful orange colour; this colour is mainly present in salmonids when eating crustacea. Turned out at this point in the fishes life, it was not too fussy, and had been gorging itself on Stone fly nymphs to terestrials to gamourous shrimps. Clearly partial to the odd Zonker aswell.

A quick flick the next morning on the same pool produced a nil result, so we cycled further up stream towards the town of Suusamyr. Covering a massive 10km, we set camp up again. This is my kind of cycle trip. The river here was a lot more boisterous with white water everywhere. I have grown to love this type of fishing, ever since my introduction to it in Italy. 90% of the river couldn’t hold a trout, but just trying to figure out where they would be adds another dimension to the fly fishing, rather than just blindly fishing a large pool. A brisk15 minute walk upstream before I found a nice pocket of water behind a large boulder.

Managed to winkle one out from this side of the big rock

The third cast with my favourite dry fly the ‘Stimualtor’, stimulated a response in an aggressive trout around the pound and a quarter mark. This was on the 6# which was a little more suited to the size of the fish which fought well in the strong current. This also went down well at dinner. I somehow feel justified killing fish when camping; it adds a little sense of occasion and a welcome break from the usual pasta and sauce. I think I have a healthy balance between catch and release, and killing fish. Overall, I reckon I might only keep around 10% of the fish I catch. I enjoy catch and release and only kill fish if I feel there is a healthy population of that size present. Plus, I think one of the great perks of being a fisherman is eating fresh fish. I lost one other fish within this short session, but there was a lot more walking than fishing going on.

The following day after cycling another short distance, I could tell a river crossed the path ahead of us. I thought if we follow this downstream to the main river, the junction pool is bound to be a hot spot. This turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Turning onto a track from the rough road we were already on, we found ourselves fording streams, negotiatng a rough braided river bed and fighting our way through scrub. All this is unpleasant enough, never mind with a pair of touring bikes. We spent a good hour pushing on, trying to stick with this tributary, but still no main river. I thought that before Heather starts hurling rocks at me, we should find a camp spot and I could push on solo with only the fly rod. Camp set, I carried on down stream casting into any fishy looking water in the braided channels. It took a further hour to reach the elusive junction pool. It looked fantastic with the setting sun in the background. I fished the long pool four times with a team of heavy weighted nymphs, all to no avail. Even a local spin fisher told me he was getting exasperated in ‘anglage’ (sic).

The following day, after a 12km round cycle for supplies, we came across a bridge with a deep swirling pool below it. With the customary look over the bridge, staring hard into the water, I eventually made out the outline of a fish in the three pound range. Unfortunately it wasn’t feeding. This never stop me trying, and trying and trying. The end result was always going to be fishless, and it was, even with Heather being fish spotter from the bridge.

Camping further upstream, there was very fishy looking water above and below us. I had a good few hours of daylight to explore this area. Wet wading in the freezing water made me wish I hadn’t thrown out my holy waders in Georgia. At least they would have acted like a wetsuit; any water that was let in would soon warm up. At this stage of the trip we have fished in 16 different countries and my fly box is starting to show large areas of white foam where flies used to furnish it. Being a keen fly tyer I have never experienced such fear of voidophobia. So, fly fishermen might appreciate how I felt when casting to a likely lie on the far overgrown bank with a team of prized nymphs, only to get them caught on a submerged branch. Under normal circumstances I take this as part of fishing and make the break without thinking. Here, I still had no choice but to make the break, but the fish pimp indicator tantalisingly told me where the flies were caught up. Nothing for it but to ditch the rod, wander downstream until I found somewhere to ford the river, bush whack my way through the far banks undergrowth until I found the indicator in about four feet of freezing stream. There is nothing worse than wandering about in soggy boxers, so stripping off, holding on to a willow branch for support I finally managed to retrieve the cast of flies. What a palava for three flies. This was a fishless day even with fishing some amazing looking water.

We were planning on getting on our bikes the next day to make our way further south towards the Chinese border. I had a quick foray first thing, managing to winkle one out on a lure. This fish was safely returned.

Still loving the spots

Same fish, just like the shot.

All bikes packed, ready for the road, we struck forth ready for a big day cycling. The only thing between us and the open road was the bridge where I spotted the fish two days ago. One quick peer over I thought, just incase. ‘Oh look’ I casually said to Heather, ‘Here is another fish in a different place, feeding away’ as she walked with resignation to get her book out of her pannier.

This fish was only just visible, in very deep water. It was going to be a nightmare to fish for with a back eddie on the surface, but the fish still facing upstream (fishers will understand). The only way to cover the fish was to wet wade out onto a load of twiggy debris barefooted to cast from knee deep water with an ounce of split shot on the line. I know I have been cursed with this dreadful affliction of fishing and this was highlighted over the next hour tryng for this one fish. I know nothing about meditation or walking over hot coals, but I was completely transfixed with this trout. Heather was waiting, we still had 100kms to travel, time was getting on and the water was absolutely baltic. Nothing could distract me from tryng to catch this damn fish though. Things only hit home when Heather finished her novel for the second time, got fed up and came down to break my trance. I conceded to the fish and tried to leave the water, only to find I could hardly walk and the soles of my feet were in agony from standing on the sticks. I guess I’m lucky in a way that its possible to completely clear my brain, (which shouldn’t really be that hard) and think of nothing but catching a fish. Strange as that sounds.

This was the last fishing in Kyrgyzstan. Enjoyable fishing with the main highlight just seeing the big, black, beautiful spots on these brown trout. I’d love to know where they originated from, as all of the trout in Asia are introduced, I think, from colonial times.

After leaving the Suusamyr road, we joined the Bishkek to Osh road. This was beautiful riding, following a mountain range down the country. Picture perfect scenes were constantly presenting themselves as we rode past; three children crammed into the door of a bright blue railway carriage, waving frantically; a young boy racing over a hill on his donkey, herding his family’s horses, asking if we want to stay the night. We had our longest downhill on this road, after climbing the Ala-Bel pass. 65km that required barely any pedalling; this would have been pure bliss, except for the dogs. There are two ways to approach a dog giving chase whilst cycling down a hill. There is Stuart’s approach, which is to think that at 40kms an hour you’ll be past before they know you’re there, or my approach, which is to jam on the brakes every time you see a yurt, honey seller, or any other residence as you know there will be dogs, and the last thing you want is to get a fright at that speed. Actually, this is the only option if you are behind someone who has just ridden past at 40kms an hour; sleeping dogs have suddenly stopped lying, and they are up, angry, and ready for the second cyclist.

We stayed in Toktogul that night, and met another couple who had cycled from Thailand, across China and were en route to Dubai. The next day we shared a taxi with them for our final visit to Bishkek to collect our Indian visas. It was a successful trip for all of us; our visas were ready, and Gerry and Vicki picked up their Uzbek visas. We also had a surprise reunion with Stefan and Nikola while walking down the street; they were leaving the next day to return to Kazakhstan before crossing into China.

We took a shared taxi back to Toktogul, and luckily didn’t have to wait long for enough passengers to turn up and make it a worthwhile trip for the driver. There was a teenaged boy on board, who took his English homework out of his bag, and read it to me, carefully lingering over every word. Halfway to Toktogul, we stopped at a market, and Stuart was busting for the toilet. He crossed the road, found a dark corner, and that was as far as he got before two policemen came up and told him that he was going to jail. They didn’t speak any English, and refused to entertain Stuart’s graphic re-enactment of the act of not actually urinating. For about 15 uncomfortable minutes, it really did seem that we would have to spend the night in the cells. Fed up with waiting, the teenage boy’s mother came over to see what the hold up was. When she found out what was happening, she shouted at the two policemen as if they were naughty children, grabbed Stuart by the arm and walked him back to the taxi.

The next morning at breakfast, we counted up the days left on our Kyrgyz visa, and realised with a shock that we had alot less time than we thought; leaving us with 3 days to travel the 700kms to the Chinese border. Impossible. So we pedalled off that morning, hoping that we’d find some more kind truck drivers to help us out as far as Sary Tash. After 35kms, we met Mikhail in his trusty Kamaz, who drove us as far as Massi, about 200kms from Osh.

Cruising in the Kamaz.

Soon after that, Sashka picked us up, stowing our bikes in two big metal containers under his artic Mercedes. Charmingly, we weren’t the only ones in the cab; two budgies were cheeping away in a cage on Sashka’s bed. It was on Sashka’s lorry that Stuart’s worst nightmare came true. He has recovered sufficiently to write about it…

We got dropped off just before Osh, scrambled our bags and bikes together, said our farewells, only for the lorry to set off with my two rods still on it. Disaster!!! Jumping into the middle of the road to stop any cars to give chase, miraculously, a taxi pulled up. No English of course. It took about five minutes of him telling us that the bikes wouldn’t fit, before I got the message across. Now, any other taxi we have taken on the trip has always travelled at warp speed, which I love, Heather hates. This one, knowing the task, sees a way of making more money by tootling along as scooters over take him. I never knew you could have a white knuckle ride at 40kms per hour. We only caught the lorry because he had been pulled over by the cops about 10 kms up the road.

A third lift the following day got us all the way to Sary Tash. Our bikes emerged from the back of the truck looking all Jackson Pollock as a tin of paint had spilled over them in the back of the lorry. We had something to eat in a cafe, and were just getting into warm clothes to start riding, when a man popped his head through the door. He was also cycling, and wanted to introduce himself. And how funny it was to hear those familiar vowels, and find out he was from Wellington. Of all places for two kiwis to meet. Adam had just ridden over three snowy 4,000m+ mountain passes in Tajikistan, and was now leaving his bike in Sary Tash to take a bus to Bishkek. He was going to find a sports bar and watch some rugby.

There was still two hours of daylight left, so we thought we’d head off to get a bit closer to the border for the next day’s ride. The border is only open until half past four, with a three hour break in the middle of the day. It snowed lightly that night, and when we woke up the tent was covered in ice. To the south of us were also the biggest and most beautiful mountains we’d ever seen, only lightly wreathed in clouds. It was so exciting.

From the Irkeshtam Pass

This was the most exquisitely beautiful day’s riding. The clarity was amazing. As the sun rose, it burnt the clouds off, and soon we could see the whole Trans Alay range, including 7,134m Pik Lenin. This road feels fantastically remote; there are no villages, just mountains and wide open spaces. Occasionally a house will appear, usually with a shepherd outside, waving, telling you it is cold on the pass, and letting you know that you can stay the night if you wish.

''I'm on the hiiiighway to China"

The ride to the border was painless, as all the height leading to the pass had been gained in a lorry (oh, how we cringed the day before when we passed some other cyclists doing it the hard way, willing our comfortable seats to swallow us whole). There were a couple of uphills, more downhills than we were expecting, and we had soon reached the first border post. This was manned by two men of about 20. One of them spoke good English, and was keen to talk for a bit. As we left, he called out to us that he loved us. We have never been so charmed by a man holding a gun.

There were three more official posts we had to pass through before the Chinese checkpoint. The last Kyrgyz guard to check our passports also told us laughingly that he loved us. It was a beautiful end to a beautiful month in a very, very beautiful country.

* Thank you to Dave Dondero, who doesn’t know us, but this blog title is borrowed from one of his songs. I just thought I’d better mention that. While I’m at it, Up the Reisling and Down the Rhine was borrowed from Richard Hopewell, who does know us. Thanks Ricardo!

**Lake Titicaca, on the border between Peru and Bolivia

Stuart and Heather get their just deserts (sic!)

Stuart and Micha managed to stay awake long enough to see the sun rise over the Caspian. I faded about an hour before it came up. As I walked to our room, I passed the Moldovan woman whose husband wasn’t allowed to board. Her whole body was given over to silent sobbing, her wet handkerchief was pressed hard onto her eyes.

We all slept until about ten the next morning, and woke to find ourselves in the middle of the Caspian Sea, with no land in sight. Stuart got up and went for a walk, and came back with the cheery news that the bathroom sink was now filled with vomit and the toilet had stopped flushing. I think myself and sister Penny are the only two people reading this who have seen one of Jim Carrey’s less well known serious film roles, Doing time on Maple Drive. It’s a tough love story in which Jim’s character, the college dropout, comes home to clean up after getting into hard drugs. I reenacted a harrowing scene from this film, in full Hollywood victim pose, crouching outside the bathroom, howling “I’ve got nowhere else to go!”

This boat was like a ghost ship; enormous, but when you were on deck, there was not a soul about. We chugged along all that day, and woke up at 4am the following morning to hear the anchor being dropped, then all fell silent. We woke to see that we were moored in Aktau harbour, but it wasn’t until midday that we were able to disembark.

Micha, Stuart and I rode into Aktau and found a shop near the sea and treated ourselves to a cold beer. “Let’s go get something fresh!” said Micha. A young man, Sascha, came over to talk to us for a few minutes, then returned a minute later to take pictures of us on his mobile. We then decided to ride to the train station, as Micha wanted to book a train to Astana, and Stuart and I had decided to take a train to Aralsk. Micha is a photographer, interested in broken things and industrial scenes. He rides with a toolbelt around his waist, cameras slotted in where the tape measures and hammers should go. Whenever he saw something interesting, he would effortlessly reach for his camera, and photograph or film while cycling.

As we rode off, I noticed that Sascha was following me, about two metres behind my back wheel. Traffic was backing up behind him, and beeping occasionally, but he wasn’t bothered. We rode out of town for about half an hour, Sascha shadowing us the whole way. He decided to blow his cover when it became obvious that we were lost. He parked his car and came over and told us to follow him to the train station. This was lucky, as it wasn’t easy to find, and once we were there, he acted as translator while we bought our tickets. We saw the Moldovan family at the train station, it was like seeing old friends.  Sascha then  invited us to stay at this house, so we all packed our bikes on top of his Lada, and he drove us back to town.

Living the Lada Loca

One of the bedrooms in his house was filled with rabbits, with just a wire screen on the door to keep them in; vegetables and straw were scattered all over the floor. We cooked up a big dinner of pasta, and made a fire in the back garden. Sascha didn’t speak much English, but was dying to learn new words. He was always be running up to me and asking what something meant, like what was the difference between cool like cold, and coool with thumbs up. He disappeared in the middle of the night. We woke up, did the dishes and left the house while being eyed suspiciously by one of his neighbours who thought we had broken in. She shouted after us, saying that she would call the police.

The Camel Cup

We were all booked on the same train, which left at nine that night. We went swimming during the day, then spent a few very boring hours registering ourselves with the migration police, then went into town to find an internet cafe. Sascha found us again on the main street, and sat with us in the cafe and read his two Russian/English dictionaries that he’d just borrowed from the library. I really liked him, he was a bit of a lost soul, but his wish for our friendship was direct and in his own way, honest, even if it did begin with a stalk through the streets of Aktau.

Boarding the train with our three bikes was exhausting. We didn’t have much time before the train left, so all the bags were taken off and jammed in a doorway, and the bikes were jammed in another compartment. Then people needed to get past all the bags. It was chaotic, but after about an hour we were shown our sleeping compartment, all bags were taken there, bike wheels were taken off, bikes were stowed out of the way, and we could then relax into part one of our two day train journey.

The first couple of hours was very funny. Norbuk, a slightly inebriated passenger, sat in our cabin and photographed us until his battery ran out, occasionally making us say “Kazakhstaaaaaaan” while doing the thumbs up. Stuart woke me up the next morning in time to see the sun rising over the desert. It looked beautiful, just a bright orange disc appearing over the sand. The desert was eternal; we travelled for a whole day on that train, and the landscape remained the same – intense blue skies, yellow sand, and just the occasional cemetary or small dusty village disrupting the endlessness of it all.

We parted ways with Micha at Kandyagash. He was able to stay on the same train all the way to Astana, while we had to change trains and begin another nightmare of getting our bikes on the train to Aralsk. Now, to all parents of young children who are reading this: next time your child misbehaves, don’t waste your time threatening them with the naughty step. Tell them if they don’t do what they’re told, you will give them a touring bike, and have them travel by rail across Kazakhstan, changing trains at least three times.

We were greeted to mocking laughter by the next train attendant when we went to board, even though we had booked our bikes on when buying our tickets. She told us to board anyway, and even put one of the bikes in her cabin. We were told to put the other bike in the entrance way, and to pile the bags where we could. Soon another guard came down, made a huge fuss about the bags, and ordered us to carry them down to the other end of the carraige. We did this, along with the bikes, then two other guards came through from the other direction and told us we couldn’t leave our bags there. We told them that once we knew where our cabin was, we could store the bags properly. Stuart was shown four cabins, but we weren’t told which one we coud go into. I was then pulled into the first woman’s room, along with a young girl who spoke a bit of English. She was told to tell me that all of the guards were now in trouble with their boss for allowing us onto the train with our bikes, and could we please pay 4,000 tenge to her in order to stay on board with our bikes. I felt sorry for the young girl, caught in the middle like that, mainly using Google translate on her phone. I went and told Stuart, and we tidied up our things, (by this stage we had been given a bed each in two separate cabins), and then we went and hid in the dining car. The guards took no notice of us after that. We went to bed at about 10, and were told that the train would reach Aralsk at 5pm the following afternoon. Stuart was woken at 2am to change rooms for no reason, then we were woken again at 4 as the train was approaching Aralsk. The joys of train travel!

Room with a view

We had read that the North Aral Sea was in the beginning stages of recovery, and that a fishing industry was beginning again. We wanted to see the area, and thought it may be a good place for Stuart to try for his Kazakhstan fish. The office in town where you could make enquiries about visiting the the sea wasn’t open until 9, so we had four hours to wait. There was a coffee shop open at the train station, and we spent a couple of hours there. We bought the policeman a coffee, before he inexplicably told us to move on and go into town. So we sat dejected and tired in the main street, watching stray dogs mate, waiting for the shops to open.

Bed of the old fishing harbour

Unfortunately, it turned out to be too expensive for us to make the trip to the sea, so we treated Aralsk as a good place to recover from two days on a train, before beginnng our journey south. We stayed at a really nice homestay, run by two cousins, stocked up on food for the next few days riding, and grew ever so slightly nervous as we sensed tomorrow’s headwind building up.

At eight o’clock the next morning we left Aralsk. I had been reading an interview in the Lonely Planet with an Australian adventurer called Tim Cope. He had done a three year horse trek across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia. He said the steppe was a feeling, not a destination.

Miss Desert Eyelash 2011

We left Aralsk, and my mind was filled with lofty thoughts. Like the river for Siddhartha, so the desert would be for me. It’s blank nothingness would reflect on my Western mind, which would become a mirror. My mind would become spacious, open, serene. I would realise the nature of being, and emerge from the desert changed. I delighted in the details of the desert for the first couple of hours; camels with their beautiful eyelashes, grey birds with the most gorgeous flash of blue feathers under their wings, horses grazing on the edge of the horizon. About 40km into the ride, a truck stopped and the driver jumped out and told us to put our bikes in the back. Did we do it? Hell yes.

In the split second it took us to accept his offer, I remembered a joke that seemed like it could be potentially appropriate, though I wouldn’t realise how much so for a couple of hours. A river floods in a town, and a man goes and stands out the front of his house. A motorbike races past, stops and the rider shouts, get on, we’ve got to leave town. The man declines and says, No thank you, god will save me. The waters rise. The man has to stand on his roof to keep clear of the water. A man in a boat comes by to offer a lift. No thanks, god will save me. Soon the man is balancing on his chimney. He declines rescue from a helicopter, still waiting for god to save him. The man drowns and when he meets god in heaven, he immediately demands to know why he wasn’t saved. For goodness sake, says god, I sent you a motorbike, a boat and a helicopter, what more did you want?

The truck driver was travelling with his wife and their four year old son Mirat. We all had a quick shot of fresh, cold camel’s milk, and then set off. Mirat had just woken up, and didn’t seem too impressed at first with these two strangers invading his dad’s truck. Within about two hours though, I’d taught him some cool dance moves and we spent a big chunk of the journey doing Grease type moves, torso only of course. We drove for about 150kms in the truck, and watched the wind start building up. Sandstorms were blowing across the road, and in what would have been at least two days of riding for us, we didn’t see anywhere in that section where we could have refilled our water bottles.

Mirat

After about three hours, the truck stopped and we were told that he was heading off in another direction, and he kept mentioning Vodka, hotels and pointing to his watch. We thanked them, said our goodbyes and rode a couple of kilometres down the road, before deciding that the sand being thrown up by the wind was too much to cycle in, and stopped off at a cafe to sit it out. We spent an hour there, then went over the road to a bus stop and made sandwiches. Another hour there as we waited for the conditions to become bearable. Eventually we decided to give it a shot. It was a 35mph headwind, and we were travelling at the speed of 6kmph. Our eyes were becoming bloodshot with the amount of sand in the air. Grim would be an understatement. After an hour of cycling and breathing sand, we gave up again and found refuge in another bus shelter. By this stage it was 7pm, and we had to think about finding somewhere to put our tent. So we put our heads down and cycled back into the exfoliator. Ten minutes later we heard a loud horn honking, and then a truck pulled in front of us. Such a wonderful moment of recognition followed as we saw our desert saviour from earlier leap out of the cab and run around to throw open the back doors of the truck. The trailer was now filled with empty vodka bottles, and we realised that he was picking up bottles for recycling, (not off to drink in a hotel, phew!).

Jumping into the cab to see Mirat and his lovely mum was so nice. Stuart and I wondered what they must have thought of us. Jesus, they say they’ve cycled from Scotland, but we’ve been gone four hours and they’ve only gone 5kms! We drove for about ten minutes before the truck pulled over to the side of the road. The father reached behind his seat and pulled out four cold beers and handed them out to us and his wife. My Russian phrasebook has a fantastic array of phrases, from telling a hairdresser that they’re a genius, to asking an incompetent lover “is that why you’re still single?”, I flicked to the socialising section and said to them in Russian, “Eta kak ras!” (That hits the spot!) They burst out laughing in surprise, and the mother grabbed the phrasebook off me to see what else was there. “I feel fantastic!” she shouted, which set us off even more.

It was wonderful driving through the desert with this family. As the sun went down, the sky became pink, and the sand seemed to vibrate with these changes in colour. The moon was full and to see a moon in this setting of two blocks of sand, sky and nothing else was incredible. The truck stopped again, and we were invited to follow the family into the dunes. We walked to a memorial stone, with a woman’s face etched into it. The mother started singing, and indicated that this woman was a famous Kazakh singer, who had died there in a car accident. We knelt down and the father sung a slow and moving Muslim prayer. Mirat started tapping my knee, and I opened my eyes to see that he was showing me that I should perform the azin like his father and mother were doing. This is a movement of cupping your hands over your face, and moving your hands down in a gesture of washing. It is performed when passing a grave, or to give thanks after a meal. It is truly beautiful.

Soon it was dark, and we moved across the desert, with the brilliant moon dominating the windscreen. We passed the Beykonur Cosmodrome, from where Yuri Gagarin went into space. It was lit up like New York. At about 11pm, we pulled into a restaurant, and had tea with milk (first time in months), and a gorgeous meal of chicken and rice. The father had a cup of coffee and only picked at his wifes plate. The table next to us was filled with a group of fantastically boisterous woman, burping loudly and spitting out chicken bones.

We tried to pay, but they wouldn’t let us. The father, lying on his back, head on a cushion, put his legs in the air and started cycling. He said to us, “Aaaargh, me, Schotlandia”. We laughed, and let ourselves for a small moment enjoy the fantasy that we could one day repay him in kind.

At 2am, we stopped at another teahouse, but this time it was for sleeping. Stuart and the father went into the restaurant to sleep, and I stayed in the cab with Mirat and his mother. I was given a blanket, and fell into the easiest sleep over the front three seats. An hour later, Stuart and he came back though, and we were off again. I asked Stuart if they’d had a meal, but he said they’d just walked into the restaurant and slept.

Desert Road Truckers

I don’t know if any of our readers have tried to sleep upright in a Kamaz truck, but I will tell you now that it is almost impossible. I did try, with the classic head nod followed by the regular head jerk back before waking up, and almost broke my neck. At 7am we reached the city of Qizilorda, which was where they lived. We drove to their house, which was in a broken apartment block. The area in front was filled with overflowing skips, with stray dogs and donkeys eating the rubbish. Stuart helped carry all the melons that we had bought on route into the building. The walls in the close were crumbling with electrical wires exposed. We were to continue with the father, and the mother and Mirat were going home. We felt so much love for this family, even though we had spent such a short time together. We hugged her hard goodbye, and she told us to make sure we gave our addresses to her husband.

The three of us drove for another 10kms, before we had to get out as the truck needed to go another direction to drop off the vodka bottles. We were told to go to a cafe about 1km down the road, and wait, as the truck would be rejoining our road again later.

We rode for a kilometre, but didn’t see a cafe. We carried on for another and saw a cafe with a lot of trucks out the front. We went in and ordered coffee and samsa. It was 8am. We then ordered another coffee and another round of samsa. I got out my diary, Stuart flicked through the Lonely Planets. Midday came and went. We had only slept an hour since leaving Aralsk, a day and a half ago, and were starting to feel deranged. We kept looking outside to make sure our bikes weren’t obscured from view by trucks. Stuart then fell asleep on the pile of books. The owner of the cafe came up, knocked on the table, and indicated that we should eat something. Fair enough we thought, we have been sitting here for four hours. Stuart went to the counter and came back confident that he had ordered sorpa, which is a strong stock with whole potatoes and chunks of mutton. Spoons were brought to our table. Half an hour later, still only spoons were decorating our table. So then we started on the beers. Four beers later, I thought, I really should check on this food order. Of course, it was non-existent, but we’d already figured that out. We reordered, and this time it came. It was half past two.

By 3pm, I was crawling the walls. Never have I sat in a cafe for this long. It was equivalent to a days work, with nothing accomplished. Quiet in the Lochy seats! I ventured outside for fresh air, against Stuart’s advice. I returned completely yellow with sand, eyes bloodshot, even more unbalanced from the combination of wind and sand. The truck drivers falling through the door were equally mad; harrassed, caked in sand, they would stumble to the bathroom and drench themselves in water, emerging soaking wet and gasping.

By four o’clock, we had to face the horrible fact that we may never see our wonderful truck driver again. We didn’t want to leave as we hadn’t given him our address, or been able to get his, and we didn’t want to leave the area without being able to properly thank him.

I don’t know if we had the wrong cafe, or what, but he never came. We had to go though, and it was still impossible to cycle. The wind was so strong, and all it blew was sand. We decided to pack up and leave the cafe, and try our luck hitching. We wrote Turkistan on the back of our map, and lay it on the ground in front of the cafe. Within ten minutes, ourselves and bikes were in Morat’s Kamaz, and on our way to Turkistan, 300kms away. He was about 29, and his friends were in another truck. We spent the next four hours overtaking each other, with one stop for a swim in the river.

We arrived in Turkistan at half past ten at night. I made a small note to self that we really must stop doing this; arriving in new cities in the dark, looking for somewhere to sleep. We were looking for Hotel Sabina, but the unknown and unlit street in which we were dropped off didn’t make it easy to figure out where we were. A teenage boy on a bike rode up to us and asked us where we were going. He didn’t know the hotel, but the nearest landmark was the Yasui Masoleum, and he told us he would take us there. He took us through dark streets, to the mausoleun, and then found some of his friends who made phonecalls and were able to show us exactly where the hotel was.

I wasn’t even sure if we’d find a receptionist at that time of night, but a lovely elderly man was sitting in the office drinking tea. I asked if he had a room, and he seemed to be saying No, there were none available, but pointing to his watch at the same time. He then found his dictionary, and pointed to the phrase, “to free oneself, to liberate oneself”. I immediately took this as a sign. I went outside to tell Stuart that there were no rooms, but like Lucy Jordan, I needed to find myself, and ride through Paris in a sportscar with the warm wind in my hair.

Slightly more practical than me, Stuart made further enquiries, and found out that a room would be available in one hour. The man told us to go and have something to eat, and when we came back our room would be ready.

Turkistan

We really enjoyed Turkistan. We visited the Yasui Masoleum the following day, which was beautiful. Yasui was a Sufi poet who translated the Koran into the local vernacular, so it could be read by everyone. We visited in the afternoon, and then returned as the sun was setting. The tiles were lit up in the most brilliant golds and blues.

The Yasui Mausoleum, Turkistan

There was no more cheating after Turkistan, as we decided we would actually ride the rest of our time in Kazakhstan- we were halfway across the country, the bulk of the desert was behind us and we had loads of time to cover the distance to Kyrgyzstan before our visa ran out. It would have been so easy to reverse this decision on our first day riding. We didn’t have food poisoning, but I would times our last two days cycling in Azerbaijan by about ten, and that would approximate the hell of our cycle from Turkistan to Bogum.

When we were in Kazakhstan, the entire country, it seemed, was alive with roadworks. This meant huge sections of gravel road, wide enough for two trucks to pass each other, but not quite wide enough for a bike at the same time, and no shoulder because this was filled with piles of gravel. On our first day we had a vicious side wind. It was sweeping across the desert, with no trees to weaken it, and it is no exaggeration to say that we were blown into the gravel and off our bikes with most of the gusts.

Gorgeous Kazakh angels were sent to us though, in the form of four boys of about ten years old, coming back from the market on their donkey cart. They had about four watermelons left, and when they saw us, they stopped the cart and came running over. The obvious leader of their group, smashed a watermelon on the ground, opening it up as a gift for us. We fell on it like wolves, and they kept opening up new watermelons for us. They were high spirited, generous and so much fun. When they’d given us all the watermelon we could eat and also pack onto our bikes, the piled back into the cart, and with a clatter of wheels and laughter they were off, stopping every 20 metres to stand up and wave and see if we were still watching.

The Watermelon Boys

We peeled of this awful road after about 70kms, because of a lake that Stuart wanted to fish. Oh, I’ve never been so grateful of his obsession for fishing before this moment. We were given a tailwind, and a quiet road with only the occasional tractor. Heaven on a stick!

Bogum was a very welcoming village; people got out of their cars to greet us, and gave us directions to the lake to go fishing. We thought we deserved a nice cold beer after the hell of the cycle, and soon found ourselves joined by three locals at the only table, and invited or rather forced to share their vodka and dried fish. “Pass me my diary Stuart, I need to make an appointment with the toilet from 5am till 9am tomorrow morning!”

Chut Chut means little in Russian, but when you ask for a Chut Chut Vodka, it is not what you get. We emerged smashed from the cafe half an hour later, and rode to the lake. By that stage it was too dark to fish (yes, I’m sure that’s the only reason). Damn those locals and their vodka drinking ways! We made dinner and decided it was such a mild night that we wouldn’t bother with the tent, (yes, I’m sure that’s the only reason!) but would sleep out. Shortly after that, the police arrived, and told us that we couldn’t camp there, but could do so in their compound. It was very dark by that stage, but we put up our tent where we were told. We woke to find ourselves in a kind of security area for the dam. The guard on duty was very friendly and before we left the next morning he asked to have his photo taken while wearing Stuart’s bike helmet.

We were only about 5kms out of town when a car sped past us, and then skidded to a halt. Four men jumped out, one of them holding a movie camera. Within about ten seconds, we realised we were being interviewed for a feature on a Kazakh news channel. The men didn’t speak any English, and of course, we speak Chut Chut Russian, and even Chut Chuter Kazakh, but we did our best and threw in answers hoping they’d stick. They filmed our passports, opened my bar bag and filmed the contents, shee-pee on full display! At one stage the interviewer seemed to be asking if we’d had any health problems. He did this by lifting Stuart’s shirt and pressing his ear to Stuart’s heart. They also asked us if we were carrying a gun (????!?) Should we be? For days after this event we waited for our celebrity status to kick in, balloons and banners slung over street lights, people calling out our names. Nothing as yet. Perhaps it’s still to air.

Stylist!!!!!!

We rode for 124kms the next day, in searing heat, for far too long. We were aiming for a lake, that seemed to recede in front of our eyes. Every person we asked told us it was another two, five or ten kilometres away. This was mainly due to the fact that it had actually receded, but after 124kms in the baking Kazakhstan heat, you start taking it personally. We reached a town where we thought we should actually meet the water, but were told by a man on horseback that we would have to ride yet another 15kms, on a side road to reach it. It was too late in the day, so we left the village and started to put up our tent a couple of kms out of town.

Soon after the tent was up, the same man came up to us and told us that it was too dangerous to camp there as wolves would come to our campsite in the night. He also asked us if we had a gun. We don’t. He told us it wasn’t safe, and said he’d show us somewhere in the village where we could put our tent. We rode back to the village with him and two young boys who had followed him.

We put our tent up just outside the last houses of the village. It seems there were enough dogs and human activity about to make it off limits to wolves. Soon after putting the tent up, one of the young boys from earlier came back to our site with a bag of tomatoes as a gift.

At half past twelve, I woke to see shadows cast over the tent, beer bottles in hands. We stayed quiet, hoping it would come to nothing. It didn’t. Heda, Heda. Rattle, Rattle, Rattle on the tent. We unzipped the tent and told them we were sleeping. Half an hour later, more people arrived. Lots of giggles. Heda, Heda. Another, even more drunken visit at 1:30 made us long for the swift resolution of death by wolves. Heda, Heda, I am sorry, pyat minute, vilasapyet to magazin? (rough translation, can I ride your bike to the shops for five minutes?) At 3am, three dump trucks drove next to the tent and unloaded three trailor loads of rocks. We are no longer afraid of wolves.

A policeman called us over early the next day and gave us a bottle of iced water. Later that morning, a shopkeeper graciously added a box of dates to our groceries as a gift, placing his hand over his heart and bowing as he did so. Another customer in the shop bought us a chocolate bar. The day continued to improve. We finally encountered a long stretch of road where the roadworks were almost complete, resulting in perfectly smooth sections of asphalt. Occasionally we were cheeky and snuck our bikes onto sections that were so new that cars weren’t even allowed on them; we just wove our bikes through the orange cones, and enjoyed a few kilometres of unbroken freedom. We also had our first tailwind in about two months, and more important, we also saw the sun go behind a cloud for the first time since Georgia. For all the Scottish who are reading this, never complain about Scottish weather again! If you only knew the hell of waking up every morning to unzip your house, to see yet another blue sky, bleached white around the edges by the mocking sun! Embrace your cloudy skies, run laughing into those sharp northerlies, pull your cardigans closer to your shivering frames; love it, please!

Stuart and his eagle eyes spotted a ‘shower’ in a field that evening, a kind of truckers secret. It was an underground spring which someone had attached an upright spout to. We had just broken our record of bathless days, which in the heat of Kazakhstan, and with all the sand, was making us horrific. In other climes, I celebrate these moments of freedom and think of it as releasing my inner Huckleberry Finn, but this was different. We had become monsters. Finding this spring was a gift, and we left the next morning feeling a little more human.

The next day, we found ourselves getting closer to the border of Kyrgyzstan. The jolt that the sight of those high mountains gave us was incredible, whispering to us like a gorgeous promise. But, we still had a fish to catch, and our last chance to do so was a little further north of the Kyrgyzstan border. So we said goodbye to our tailwind, and introduced ourselves to another evil crosswind to go fishing.

Reel low muddy water,my favourite...

As you may have gathered by Heathers description, there is a lot of nothingness in Kazakhstan bar acres of sand. The only way that we were going to locate fish was by looking for any large water bodies on the map. After speaking to the guy heading the recovery of the Aral Sea I got excited when he mentioned there were Russian spin fishers regularly travelling to a satellite lake catching Zander. I think he may have mentioned pike, but most exciting was the fact there were Snake Head present; this is a true Asian freshwater sport fish that I have only read about online. Unfortunately though, conditions were too severe, with high winds, blistering heat and so much sand in the air it made your eyes go bloodshot after only a few hours of being exposed to it, and we passed this lake after a couple of hours in the lorry.

A further two attempts were made in Kazakhstan in reservoirs that must have only been running at 20 to 30% capacity; potentially massive lakes reduced to large, muddy ponds. One angler I talked to was trying to let me know how it was such an ecological disaster for the fish and that the fishing was suffering. Sounded like a perfect excuse I thought, as I bit the fly off and headed back to the tent. I also have a confidence crisis when fishing muddy water with the fly.

Again I have to mention how Heather has been so patient with these fishing detours sometime going hundreds of kms out of our way for me just to go and blank. (Heather tries to speak urgently with her eyes, mouth covered in duct tape).

I had one last chance before we crossed into Kyrgyzstan; another reservoir perhaps running at 50% capacity, but still massive. A little out of the road and with nothing on the shores bar a couple of houses. It was roasting hot with very little in the way of shade, and to top it off, dirty water. On the kind of plus side we met a fisher coming in with his catch, which covered the floor of his small rubber dinghy which he used to retrieve his gill nets. I recognised Crusion Carp and Zander amongst other coarse fish. This gave us a good idea of what could be possible.

With no shops around and no fish during the first day, the water filter came into its own for the first time. It felt weird wading through knee deep mud to get to the pea soup coloured water for something to drink. Hats off to the Katadyn though, for keeping us going with no ill effects.

Have rods will travel

That evening I went for a walk with the fly rod to see if I could find some inspiration as things were starting to look a little bleak during the day. Around a corner I saw a few anglers bait fishing from the shore. On getting there I found a couple of guys pulling out small silver fish on long coarse fishing poles. I was thinking, please don’t let these wee silver fish be my Kazakhstan catch. Although they have saved the challenge on two occasions now, I don’t want a reputation as a fisher of tiddlers. I had to catch something though, as were running out of food and Heather was running out of patience. Fishing a team of weighted nymphs, the tiddlers started to take. The Kazakhstan challenge was saved but without much satisfaction.

One guy was fishing a little further out and was starting to catch Zander, some fish up to 3 and 4 lbs. He caught more fish as the evening progressed.  This meant a change of technique for me, to a large tandemned bait fish fly. Still nothing. All the guys were very friendly, even the guy catching all the zander offered me the next bite on his set up. I felt like I was a kid again fishing with my uncle. I accepted his offer as I have never caught a Zander before and I thought it would look a little more interesting on the blog even though it wasn’t on the fly. Conversing in the international language of fishing talk, let’s call it ‘anglage’, we waited for the bite that should have been imminent, and waited and waited. This became a little embarrassing as they were coming in thick and fast before I was offered the next fish. After forty five fishless minutes I called my self a ‘Jonah’ and carried on fly fishing. What would you know, I start fishing, then he catches one.

Being shown the possibilities

It was now starting to get dark and time was running out, Unbelievably I hooked a fish but immediately lost it just as my excitement kicked in. A good sign I guessed, thinking positively. Half an hour later a Zander took and was swiftly landed, not the biggest specimen but again a new species and one I had put in a reasonable amount of effort for. So claiming this as a success plucked from the eyes of defeat, I said my goodbyes and headed back to the tent to give Heather the good news that we could head off in the morning. I think she was more delighted than me, or did I misread it for relief?

Last cast success

No sleep till Baku

In this modern world of Nintendo Wii, and interactive gaming, we thought that perhaps our readers may be becoming a bit bored of our usual narrative style, and would welcome the chance of cycling some of the way with us. For those that are interested, we’ve come up with a few easy to follow steps:

1. Find yourself an exercise bike.

2. For your outfit, select a pair of fleecy tracksuit pants, a thermal vest, and a woolen jumper.

3. Place a bottle of hand hot water within easy reach.

4. Find a broom, and with cable ties or duct tape, secure a hair dryer to the pole at mouth height, and roughly two inches away from your face. Adjust the heat setting to hot, and the velocity to medium.

5. Now start cycling.

Now you know what it feels like to ride your bike in Azerbaijan in July. If you feel like going to the next level, ask someone to pop down to the local spare parts shop to see if they can find the horn of a Lada. When they get back with said horn, ask them to stand next to you and honk it in your left ear for four to eight seconds, every one and a half minutes, for eight hours. Now you really know what cycling in Azerbaijan feels like. Okay, one more thing. You could ask some of the neighbourhood kids to help with this; spend a couple of hours having them run in front of the bike and hold a watermelon in front of your face. Your experience is now complete.

Happily though, we found the people of Azerbaijan to be unfailingly cheerful, friendly and welcoming. The heat made the cyling the hardest on the trip so far, but the people made it incredibly fun. We arrived in Balakan quite late in the evening, and checked into a hotel that was part of a petrol station. This had all the charm of a truck stop, which was actually a good thing as we managed to spill red wine all over the floor within about ten minutes of our arrival. These spots blended in easily with the already stained carpet, but I still felt compelled to cover all the spots with salt to soak up the mess. This seemed a good idea right up to the next morning, when I realised that the other key ingredient which makes this handy household tip work, is a vaccuum cleaner. We have managed to pack a lot onto our bikes, but a hoover is not one of them. Stuart was right, I should have left well enough alone. Needless to say, we beat a very hasty retreat the following morning.

Our first full day of cycling was characterised by intense heat and generosity . We refer to it fondly as The Day of the Chaihouse. We didn’t do it on purpose, but we found that whenever we stopped to check our map, or fill our waterbottles at a spring, it would happen to be outside a chaihouse. At the first one we were invited in for tea, and then treated to lunch. At the second one we were invited in and given cold drinks which were subtly paid for by a policeman. The men at this chaihouse thought Stuart looked like David Beckham. When I heard this I immediately positioned myself elegantly and waited for the inevitable remark that perhaps with another three days of cycling in this sauna I could pass for Victoria. Alas, no such compliment was forthcoming. At the third chaihouse, a man ran out and also asked us in for tea, and then played Russian music to us from his mobile phone.

This was our first full day of cycling in extreme heat. Bulgaria was hot, Turkey was hotter. Georgia was hot though this was tempered a bit with our times at altitude, but my god, Azerbaijan was absolutely roasting. The sun would rise, merciless, at half past six. There was no grace period where it would slowly gather its strength; it would go straight to the boil and stay like that until about eight o’clock at night. By the end of our first day, the heat and the busy road filled with watermelon sellers in their hundreds had left our nerves a bit shredded. We stopped at a spring for water as it was beginning to get dark, and within about a minute, our bikes were surrounded by about ten truck drivers; gold teeth flashing at us in the half light, pressing the buttons on the bike computer, trying to read the map. It all felt a bit much after 100 kilometres in 40 degree heat. We made our goodbyes and slipped away, and found a bridge to camp under about three kms from the main road.

We got up early the next morning to try and get a good few hours of riding done before the super fiery section in the afternoon, but about two hours into the ride, Stuart was able to find a fishing spot…

After Georgia and three other countries that I felt I did not do justice to, I was feeling the pressure mounting to catch a fish that I could be happy with. As we cycled through Azerbaijan’s baking countryside, my heart was beginning to sink deeper and deeper, as bridge after bridge that I would so look forward to peering over, only presented dry river bed after dry river bed. It seemed that it would be hard enough to find water, never mind fish. After thinking that the only option would be to fish in the Caspian sea at Baku (one of the most polluted water bodies on earth) things were starting to feel a little hopeless.

Fa's the fish?

But, miraculously, we came across a ground water spring feeding a trout farm. These springs run at a constant 10 degrees throughout the year, making them an ideal place to farm Rainbow Trout. I never wanted it to come to this – catching a fish farm fish!, but the way things were looking I was very, very desperate. From the road we could see an algae filled pond of around three acres with fish moving on the surface; a sight for my sore eyes, even if I thought they were stockies (easy trout to catch). On entering the farm we were greated cheerfully by the staff and shown the trout in the race ways, work seeming a very distant memory. The farm also operated as a kind of alfresco restaurant. No English was spoken, but I felt this was the perfect fishing location as I could fish and Heather could relax drinking coffee and reading her book.

After seeing the farmed trout, I was looking forward to putting myself out of my misery and catching a stockie to save me from blanking in Azerbaijan. Heather seated, I eagerly set the six weight up with a Hugh mungus thinking this will be a singe. Wrong. Cast after accurate cast to rising fish and nothing was happening. Only on closer inspection did I see that the only fish in the pond were Grass Carp, fish that mainly filter feed on algae. Not often found in Scotland, and never have I heard of them being caught on the fly. Anyway there was water and there were fish and at this stage I adopted the phrase ‘never surrender’. Two frustrating hours passed with me throwing every small dry in the box at these pernickity creatures, to no avail. Cup of tea and beer, that will sort it out I thought, as I poured out my frustrations to Heather who was loving life till that point.

What fish could refuse a blood worm? I thought as I tied on a small red beaded fly with a fine marabou tail. Unbelievable first cast to a sighted fish and it took. I don’t think I have felt under as much fishing pressure as I have on this trip.

Grassed a Carp

I ended up catching three grass carp in the 3-4lb mark; superb fighters and sight fishing to them made it all the more interesting. Plus, it was a new species for me and a bit of a challenge.

A face only an angler could love

Back into the furnace we went, but both delighted with the beautiful grass carp that Stuart had caught. We had more kindnesses from the Azeris that afternoon also. We stopped at a shop for cold drinks, then I went over the road to a fruit and vegetable stall to buy some potatoes and an onion. The owner came out, and added extra potatoes to my bag, along with tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. He would not take any payment, he just folded my hands over the bag and put his hand over his heart and bowed. The barber from the shop next door then ran and grabbed a table, put it in the shade and covered it with brown paper, and found some chairs for us to sit on as we drank the drinks we’d bought earlier. He even turned the music down that was blaring from the shop. It was so gracious and kind. There is a gorgeous sense of them feeling a visit to their country is a deep compliment, and they make you feel so welcome whenever they can.

Despite the heat, we still managed long days and big distances, the reason being that we were planning on taking a boat from Baku to Aktau in Kazakhstan. This is a cargo boat, that allows passengers on it, but is notorious for how difficult it is to actually become one of those passengers. The boat has no timetable, no ticket office, and can leave within hours of arriving in port, or wait two weeks before its ready to go. We wanted to get to Baku as quick as we could so we had time to get our Kazakh and Kyrgyz visas, and be ready for the whims of the boat.

The scenery of the first few days of cycling was nice; we weren’t on main roads, rather following a road that linked the towns and villages that sat along the foot of the Caucausus. We had those magnificent mountains to our left as we cycled, and the road had lots of trees. Our favourite stretch was just after the town of Ismayilli, when a thick canopy of trees covered the road for about four kilometres of sweet, shady relief. Not long after this though, the scenery began to change as we saw the Caucasus slowly ending, and something more akin to a desert beginning.

There was a huge hill cycling up to the town of Saraxi, which came as a shock after three days of mild undulations on mainly flat roads. Combine this with the heat, and you have quite a hellish climb. I created quite a fracas by innocently stopping halfway up to drink some water. A slow moving truck stopped in the middle of the lane, and the kind driver got out and asked if I wanted a lift up. The back of the truck was quite high off the ground, and I showed him it would be impossible for us to lift the bike up onto the back. But by this stage, a queue of traffic had built up behind us. One impatient truck driver drove onto the rough gravel offroad to undertake, another truck who tried to overtake also slowed down to ask if I needed help and then promptly stalled. Another car pulled up, and the driver said in english, do you need some help. I explained to the driver that I was in fact fine, and I could carry on no problem. I realised that my fast English response probably would have gone misunderstood when he followed this up with the marvelously inappropriate invitation to “Please, sit down”. They all left soon after that, and I continued my slow slog to the top, made all the more depressing as the sun was behind me, casting my shadow forward, giving me a good couple of hours to contemplate the silhouette of my hair which is in the much dreaded ‘growing out stage’ and the combination of this and my bike helmet made me look like Ronald Macdonald.

The last thing one wants when finally getting to the top of a long, hot hill, is a 300metre stretch of enthusiastic teenage boys selling hazelnuts. I had lost the power of speech, looked like Ronald Macdonald, and all I wanted was water and shade in which to hide in. Some of the boys took it upon themselves to push me the final few metres, which is very nice of course, but in reality quite scary as they took a side each, and were running so fast, making the bike feel almost impossible to control as each boy swung it to their side as they ran. Nyet horosho, Nyet horosho! I screamed to no avail.

I found Stuart waiting at the top, and of course, he had hitched another ride up holding onto the back the truck that had initially stopped and offer me a lift.

Not long after the hill, we saw a lake off to the side of the road, and headed straight for it and dove straight in. It seemed a good place to camp aswell, with just a couple of fisherman on the other side, and a goat herder criss crossing the hill and occasionally bringing his flock down for a drink. This all changed within about five minutes of our arrival, when three carloads of guys turned up to swim, blasting Cassius from the car stereo, and insisting we take photographs of each and every somersault that they did off the pier. It was wondefully chaotic; we had already started cooking, and soon our campsite was filled with posing Azeris in their swimming shorts, and goats streaming through the legs of people running into the water. It all ended as soon as it began though, the sun began to go down and they all jumped into their cars and roared off. We were left with just the fishermen and their neon floats, and the frogs that were exiting the lake in their hundreds and hopping to the fields about ten metres away. It was such a strange thing to watch, the entire perimeter of the lake was moving with migrating frogs.

Quiet campsite

The desert became a very unavoidable fact very early on the next day. The comfortingly bulk of the Caucasus had given way to a landscape of dry, yellow hills and a cloudless sky. It was a Saturday, and we were about 125kms from Baku. We planned to cycle to the outskirts, camp and leave ourselves with just a short ride into the city on a Sunday morning, when traffic would hopefully be at it’s quietest. All very well in theory. For those of you that are still on the exercise bikes, I suggest you get off now. The next 36 hours are not pretty. For those diehards who insist on riding the whole way into Baku with us, find yourself a plate of dubious fish, and let it sit in the sun for a few hours.

Saturday’s cycle descended rapidly into hell. It was incredibly hilly, and we were met with a gruesome cross wind that was strong enough to regularly gust us off the road. It was a long, full day of this, through a burning, unchanging landscape, just long hard climbs, quick downhills, and then straight back up into more climbs. We reached the outskirts of Baku at about 7pm, and realised we had cycled too far into the urban sprawl to be able to put the tent up. We stopped outside a garage and asked the mechanic if there were any hotels nearby. He directed us next door, where we found a kind of hotel, but the rooms had about seven beds in each, and the door was just a flimsy curtain. It was cheap, but we wanted something that would at least be mosquito proof, so we went to leave. By that stage, the mechanic had come over with a set of keys, and seemed to be saying there was a room above his garage where we could sleep. Stuart went and checked it out, and it seemed to be a half finished flat, complete with a bathroom. We were delighted and relieved by this kindness, and soon were sitting down for chai outside the garage as we unpacked the bikes. The usual crowd gathered around quite quickly, making Stuart panic a bit as one man took Stuart’s rod case off his bike and started unpacking his precious Hardys. My bags were also rummaged through, books taken out and flicked through, bike computer given its usual once over. Soon the owner of the garage arrived and told us he would take us out to dinner. Kind as it was, all we really wanted was to hide in our little room above the garage, but we quickly went for a shower that didn’t work, so resorted to the bottles of water over the head trick and changed and jumped into his waiting Lada.

This was definitely the strangest dining experience of the trip so far. We were taken to a large, elaborate restaurant with outdoor seating, but were shown into a small windowless room, waking up two of the staff who were asleep on the sofa. They quickly disappeared and we were seated at one side of the table, while the restaurant owner and his friends, along with the owner of the garage all sat opposite us. Chai was bought to the table, then salads and bread. Soon a plate of fish arrived. We ate, they watched and smoked, noone else was eating. When we were finished, we were taken back to the garage, and told to call the mechanic in the morning when we were ready to leave, as the bikes were locked in the office.

As soon as we were back in the room, Stuart started to feel sick. Within about half an hour, he was giving it some welly in the vomiting department. The room then filled itself with mosquitos. It was too hot to close the window, so we had to leave it open, and swelter inside our sleeping bag liners to try to avoid being bitten. Outside, a pack of stray dogs began fighting. I went to the window to see what the fight was about, but there was nothing, they just rolled around the area behind the shop like angry storm clouds, barking and scrapping in one corner, before drifting to the next to start again. It wasn’t long before I also succcumbed to what Stuart had, but my symptoms displayed themselves in a more embarrasing way. It would be impossible to overstate the romance of this situation. We joked that it was lucky that we weren’t at the beginning of our relationship and had chosen a weeks cycle tour in Azerbaijan as a romantic mini-break.

As my brother Brendan said when I told him this story, “That sounds like the seventh circle of hell”. Indeed it was, we slept not a bit, just taking turns in the loo, swatting mosquitos, and watching the dogs fight. Morning came though, along with an invitation for tea at the cafe next door and lots of photos.

I don't know who's having the worst day.

We had only about 25kms to go until Baku, but it was the hardest 25kms of the trip. Oppressive heat and still sick, we stopped off at a shop to buy lemonade. A sheep had just been butchered on the footpath out the front, it’s intestines like oily balloons in the gutter. We sat next to it and drank our lemonade, feeling totally wretched and trying not to pass out.

 We were guided into the city centre by a ten year old boy in a bright green t-shirt. He saw us cycling in, and told us to follow him. It was busy traffic, involving the usual six lane roads and fast offramps that we have to speed past to avoid exiting traffic. This boy sailed over these without even looking behind him, sometimes riding with no hands, just waving his arms in the air, slowly backwards and forwards. He took us almost into the centre, but peeled off a bit before, indicating with a wave that we were to continue straight ahead.

The flame shaped building, Baku

Baku is a beautiful city, with large, leafy trees, and a lot of parks and fountains. Once we had left the traffic behind, the Old Town was such a relaxing place to arrive at. Unfortunately though, Stuart fell off his bike soon after reaching the city walls, landing directly on his head. This was the ultimate straw to break the camel’s back, my god. Wretchedness transmuted to despair, and all we wanted to do was find the hostel and crawl into a hole.

It took us about an hour to find the hostel. We shared a room with two Austrian motorcyclists who just arrived from Iran, riding in 50 degree heat. They were really nice and entertained us with stories about how hard it is to even cross the road walking in Iran, while we lay like ghosts on the bed.

Monday morning came and we were back to normal, thank god. We took a taxi to the Kazakh embassy, to find it was closed. The next thing on our list was to try and get ourselves on the near mythical passenger list for the Baku to Aktau ferry. Our taxi driver was super cool though, and he drove down to the port, and started rattling doors and banging on windows, and found out exactly where to go. He then drove us to the other port, rattled a few more doors, and found the very woman who knows when the boats come and go. She said there was no boat in port just now, but gave me her number, and told us to call her at ten the next morning.

The Kazakh and Kyrgyz visas took three days to come through. Baku was a very easy city to wait in though. We occasionally forced ourselves out into the 52 degree heat of Baku to see some sights, the rest of our time we hung out at the hostel with our new friend Michael, and the newly arrived Jakob, who we had met on that bizarre night in Georgia. Funnily enough, he had actually ran into a very unhappy Mr G the following day, and Jakob was wondering what on earth we had done to him to make him so upset at the mention of our names.

 Michael was a wonderful person to meet on your travels. He was a professional rattler of cages; voluntarily homeless so he could better act as an advocate for the rights of the homeless in the city he lived in. He had just finished his adventure of visiting the lowest point on every continent, and the Caspian Sea was his last stop. As he told us, sure, lots of people spend a lot of money going to the highest points, but how easy is it to get depressed! He took the most beautiful delight in the ordinary; from getting your washing done and handed to you all nicely folded, to simply waking up in the morning, having your french toast and wondering what would happen that day. He reminded us to always look at the world with fresh eyes, and that everything truly was, delightful!

Every morning in Baku started with my phonecall to Viktoria, when I would hear her say “We have no boat. Maybe tomorrow.” Mischa, part of the family who ran the hostel, was worried about us spending all our money as we waited for the boat (so were we). After every phone call, he would say “Oh, no boat, Caspian Hostel, money, money, food, food. Maybe tomorrow boat, Insha’allah”.

One afternoon, while sitting at the hostel, a man popped his head in to say hello as he’d seen our bikes in the courtyard. His name was also Micha, and he had just flown into Baku from France. He was also intending to take the boat, and then ride onto Afghanistan. Except for the small problem of his bike not arriving at the airport. He left me his email address so I could let him know if I heard anything about the boat.

Caspian Shores, Baku

On Saturday afternoon, my phone rang, and it was Viktoria. I leapt up like an excited teenager. She called! “We have boat” said the now familiar monotone. “Go to port and buy your ticket, I will not be there, there will be a boy, we don’t know when the boat will leave, Good bye”.

Mad dash to a taxi, only to forget where the second port was. Long, slow kerb crawl for four kilometres, with the taxi driver thinking we were mad. Stop here, no keep going, Stop here, no keep going. When we finally found it, we were happy to also see Micha there with his bike, buying his tickets. He told us the boat was docking at 11pm, and that he was going to go to the port then as he wasn’t going to take any chances. I was also of this mindset, but Stuart was positive that the boat wouldn’t leave until the following morning, as it would have to unload its cargo and then reload. It could take a whole day, he assured me. So we booked another night at the hostel, and I made a big chilli for everyone. Micha visited the hostel again and took my phone number and told us he’d call us when the boat was ready.

My phone rang at 2am, with Micha telling us that people were starting to queue up. Trying to be as quiet as possible, we got all our bags ready, loaded up the bikes while dear Jakob went to the shops and bought us a bag of food to take on board (Oh! I hope we see you again!). We pedalled off at 3 in the morning, Michael crept out of bed and whispered “Goodbye, my adventurers!” and we made it to port half an hour later. Stuart then realised he had left his boots at the hostel, and a kind Polish man who was waiting for the Turkmenistan ferry raced him back to town in his car.

Micha and I had already been through the scanner by the time Stuart got back, and it was funny to watch them inspecting his passport as he came through, them speaking in Azeri, with just the occasional ‘Mel Gibson’ peppering their conversation.

Queueing ahead of us was a family from Moldova, and they were having an emotional argument with one of the custom’s officials. One of the woman was crying, and another was slamming her hands onto the bench. Soon afterwards, one of the men in the family slowly bent down to pick up his bag, and walked back through customs, unable to board the boat. The women clutched each other, and slowly moved towards the boat, in a tight, grieving mass.

As I waited for Stuart to come through, a port official came up to me and told me to keep my money and my valuables with me at all times, and to be on permanent look out for the ‘people with no country’ who would try to steal our things.

We carried our bikes up the ramp to board the boat, and set sail at about 4am. Baku was all lit up, and so were we. The three of us were so excited; the boat did exist and we were on it. Though by that stage, because of the fact that it came and went within five hours in the middle of the night, I was entirely convinced that we weren’t on a boat at all, but a spaceship.

Beam us up!