Posted by Krista
Kashgar, Xinjiang

Greetings from the road!

As we freewheeled down to the city of Kashgar, sun and dust in our eyes, haze in the air, second-largest sand shifting desert to our east, we felt elated to have made it this far. To me, reaching China symbolises having ridden halfway around the world – HOORAY for pedal power!

From Osh, Kyrgyzstan, we were joined by two cyclists, Ben and Sylvie, who’ve ridden all the way from France on recumbents.

The first 60kms of road was smooth as a runway. But then, as predicted, the roadworks began.

Smiling faces greeted us and we learnt our first few words of Chinese, yelling, “Nee-ha” (hello) to all the Chinese road builders as we bumped and clunked along. My forearms and hands ached from the vibrations and corrugations, my lungs stung from the dust of the trucks, but my heart sang with the mountains that surrounded us.

At the end of our second day, we were waved down by a young lad, Timur, who invited us to camp in his back garden. We stayed there for 3 days, swam in the mountain meltwater and visited the jailoos – the summer pastures – riding a donkey!

The families living in the yurts invited us in…

…and plied us with yoghurt, hard balls of cheese, green tea, fresh cream, nan bread and… fermented mare’s milk, a Kyrgyz specialty, known as kummuz.

Crossing the 3615m Taldyk Pass wasn’t half as difficult as I had imagined (I’d been creating a nightmare road based on what all the cyclists in Osh had described). As we climbed higher and higher, a cold flutter of snow greeted us.

Dan sped ahead, strong and sure, I was slower, having to stay in Granny Gear. This was not because of a steep incline, but because my gears were becoming more and more jammed. Ben and Sylvie had a near collision with a speeding truck, which hadn’t judged the angle of the hairpin bend.

The air was thin at the top, and I was breathless but happy.

And when I looked back at where we had come from, I was quite impressed.

The village of Sary Tash was horrible and we fought with the local kids who were throwing stones at us and trying to catch hold of our bikes. But to counterbalance this was the stunning view. And we followed this mountain range all the way to China…

The road deteriorated quite a lot more, but we didn’t care, we just loved being amongst all these beautiful mountains …

And 250kms later, we were in China, where the stinking floppy-humped camels, the wind-sculpted rocks and the mud-brick Uighur settlements kept us constantly surprised.

Posted by Krista
Osh, Kyrgyzstan

China has seemed so elusive, so far away for so long, and yet now its snow-capped peaks are beckoning us, inviting us, challenging us. These grand mountains bring tears to my eyes – their presence and strength remind me of my own eternal nature.

From Osh, a road winds its way into the Alay Mountain range. We’re gonna follow it for some 250 kilometres, crossing three high passes, to reach Irkeshtam, the border with China.

I’m a bit nervous cos we’ve met a stack of other cyclists here who’ve reported that this particular road is the worst they’ve ever ridden. Its whole length is currently under construction, and by all accounts, apart from the first smooth and tarmacked 60kms, it’s rubble, mud, diggers, sand and gravel all the way to China.

I hope my bike will last until we reach Kashgar. It’s creaking and groaning from within the front hub and the gears have some unsolved problems that elude even Dan. And neither of us know how we’ll deal with the altitude yet – the Taldyk Pass is at 3615 metres – and is the highest we’ve been on bikes.

But, one pedal at a time, and I’m sure we’ll get there.

Posted by Krista

Our trip is to raise funds for Rainforest Rescue, an environmental organisation working to protect rainforests of the world. Here is an update on their progress…

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Good news! Since January of this year Rainforest Rescue has planted 10,000 trees on previously cleared land inside the Daintree National Park in far-north Queensland.

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Also, on 13 May 2009, Rainforest Rescue purchased Lot 29 Cape Tribulation Road in the Daintree! This is the 11th property in Rainforest Rescue’s Daintree Buy Back and Protect Forever Project – identifying and purchasing precious rainforest at risk of development and establishing Nature Refuge status, which protects it forever under covenants ratified by the Queensland Parliament in Australia.

Owning this 11th property not only means that the unique rainforest flora here, including the impressive fan palms are safe, but rare and endangered species like the Bennett’s tree kangaroo and cassowaries now have a vital corridor through the rural residential subdivision from the Daintree National Park on its northern side to two declared Nature Reserves in the south. This is particularly important in this area, as residential development fragments essential cassowary habitat through clearing and the introduction of weeds and dogs.

Unlike the properties to the south of the adjoining road, which are in wet lowland areas, Lot 29 runs up the side of the foothills of the Daintree National Park, offering a significantly different ecosystem especially worthy of conservation.

The vegetation type here is described as notophyll to mesophyll vine forest with significant numbers of fan palms on the slopes with the main emergent being the swamp mahogany — host to the rare redeye butterfly and bottlebrush orchids. The biodiversity values of this ecosystem type are described as being ‘very species rich’.

As a dedicated Nature Refuge, no development is possible at all now on this property; no dogs, no traffic, no clearing, nothing. Just nature doing what it does best (under the watchful eye of biologist and Conservation Manager David Cook). You can visit this and other properties we have secured on a self guided tour, Rainforest Rescue can give you directions any time.

Your continued support is vital in keeping up the momentum on this project. Please help secure even more of the Daintree by making a donation to Rainforest Rescue.

Click here to donate, thank you! xxx

Posted by Krista
Osh, Kyrgyzstan

Osh is situated at a major travellers crossroads – if you go south-east you reach China via the Irkesham Pass, south will take you to the Pamir Highway in Tajikistan, go north and you will reach Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek and just a few kms away to the north-west is the border with Uzbekistan. All very nice cycling territory! And it’s here that we’ve met NINE other cyclists! Yee ha!

Together with our new two-wheeled friends, we’ve been discussing routes and plans and ideas for the way ahead. It’s becoming more and more apparent to us that the original route we wanted to take – along the high altitude Tibetan Highway to Lhasa – is virtually impossible this year.

Travellers and cyclists reaching Osh from China have reported that the Chinese authorities have clamped down EVEN more strongly on independent travel through this region since the Olympics. And for the past couple of months, travellers have been forbidden to enter Lhasa without an official guide.

So we’re reconsidering our route and here are the possibilities.

Posted by Dan
Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Donkey and horse carts greeted us when we were dropped off on the outskirts of Tashkent at 11 o’clock at night. Gutted, exhausted and disorientated we struggled to drag eleven heavy pannier bags, a delicate broken bicycle and my bike onto the curb.

We asked one of the horse and cart drivers if he’d take us the last 10km into the city to a guesthouse, but the silhouetted man refused, claiming it was too far. Any car, any vehicle can act as a taxi in this part of the world – all you have to do is flag one down and name your price and destination. An hour and a half later, after continuous failed attempts, I managed to convince a driver of a small van to take us in.

Reaching the guesthouse, we were pleased to find two bikes exactly the same as ours sat in the courtyard. Under the cover of night our spare parts problem could dissolve should we dare to tinker with these carbon copy velos while their lovely Belgium owners slept upstairs!

The following morning we met Sandrine and Gerard, whose bikes we had admired on arrival. Over breakfast they told us about their journey – great cycling stories from their recent time in South East Asia. They also filled us in on where we might find spare tubes and a new tyre as they’d had a few bike problems of their own and so had already worked out where the best Tashkent bike shops were.

Then, in the shade of the open courtyard, I leant over Krista’s damaged wheel and took a file to the rim, sweating with apprehension for a whole morning as I gently, tentatively, sanded and filed away the jagged edges until I’d made a smooth surface for the bead of the tyre to seat against.

And in the afternoon, following Sandrine and Gerard’s directions, we took the Metro to the street full of bike shops. Apparently, this was the best and most likely place to find the right size spares in Tashkent – though we were pretty sure that they would be of dubious quality.

The man running the shop want ed a highly inflated price for the worst quality inner tube ever, and refused to negotiate! Although there were rows and rows of other bike shops on that street, no other shop had the Presta valves we needed. Frustrated, disappointed and unwilling to pay so much for a bad quality inner tube, we walked away, not quite knowing where to turn next.

Trudging back along Rustaveli Street, I spotted Gerard whizzing by on the other side of the road. I waved frantically, hoping he would stop and help us negotiate a fair price for the tube, as he told us he’d made friends with the shop owner that morning.

As the cyclist came to a skidding halt, Krista looked at me and said, “Who the hell’s that?” When I looked closer, I noticed the bike had a basket on the back – and the rider suddenly didn’t look like Gerard anymore… But the guy had stopped and was waving back at us as if he was our best friend!

Apprehensively, we crossed over toward him – and we were greeted by an over-excited lad, speaking quickly at us in Russian – still as if we’d known him all our lives. His one English sentence was “I love you bicycle”. Krista thought he was crazy, and rolling her eyes, she said to me, “You’ve picked a right one here”.

The guy, who introduced himself as Said, was ridiculously hyper, and seemingly passionate about bicycles – motioning and gesturing the acts of riding and repairing bikes – so I thought, “what have we got to lose?” and tried to explain our story (complete with loud explosion imitation and deflated “PSST!”, injecting the Russian words we just learnt for tyre and inner tube).

So, with wheel in hand, we followed Said for the next 4 hours, slowing coming to realise – with awe and deep respect – that he knew far more about bikes than we did. With a quick glance he knew the materials that made up the different parts of the wheel and where they’d been manufactured, and as he walked through the bazaar, we also came to see that he knew every person in Tashkent who had anything to do with bicycles.

Said was so pleased to have met us that on the way to Chorsu Bazaar, he went in search of a street photographer who could take a picture of us all standing in front of the Circus.

When Said’s friends from the different stalls at Chorsu Bazaar couldn’t provide the spare parts we needed, he urged me to meet him at 5am the next morning to cycle 20km to a different bazaar. It all seemed so random, but I agreed anyway as we had no other options left.

Reluctantly I got up at 4:30 the next morning to meet Said, unsure of where I was going or why I was going there.

Yangi Bazaar was just how I imagined a market during the Soviet times to have looked – full of dusty old shoes, oily car spares and electrical parts salvaged from every Russian machine ever invented – loving collected up as if they were valuable antiques and then spread out on tables through the crumbling graffitied concrete walls of what looked like an old aircraft hanger.

Following Said through the labyrinth of dark corridors, I began to get the picture – not only did he know all of the 100 odd guys setting up their stalls selling tyres, mud guards, wheels, spokes, gears, bells saddles you name it they had it, all of which was from China of course, but he too ran a stall selling second-hand imported bikes – Russian, German, French and Italian steel frames from the 70’s and 80’s.

At 6:30am the penny dropped. I was holding 4 spare Presta value inner tubes and the best quality tyre available (in Uzbekistan!)

I had accidentally flagged down the most perfect person to help us find bike parts, the best case of mistaken identity ever made!

NB: Having said all this 3 of the 4 spare inner tubes broke the following day as I was fitting them! One exploded while only half inflated and the valves of the two others fell clean off! Thanks to Steve, a WarmShowers host living in Tashkent, who donated 3 of his precious and rare tubes to us.

Posted by Krista
Tashkent, Uzbekistan

500kms to Tashkent – the capital of Uzbekistan – was our next challenge.

I worried that the temperature would reach 50 degrees on that long and flat road. Desert temperatures had already given us heatstroke and nausea and riding just wasn’t fun anymore. So we made a plan to ride from 5am until 12 noon, then rest in the shade for a few hours and cycle again in the cooler evening temperatures.

We found some roadside trees that were full of apricots and collected a bundle – one for me, one for later, one for me, one for later…

All was going well until we heard that dreaded “PSSST”sound. Dan had a puncture… but when we took the tyre off and looked at the inner tube, we found it was completely ruined, a jagged split of 30cm that no amount of patches could repair.

We’d already used up one spare tube a couple of days back in Bukhara. The young boy running our guesthouse had rapped at our door motioning to us that we had a flat. When we took the inner tube out to patch it up, we were shocked and confused to find a split in it that was half a metre long!

Now, sitting dejectedly on the side of the road, we fitted our LAST spare inner tube, looking at each other, nervously. If anything happens to this… spares would be hard to find out here.

As midday approached, we began looking for a canal or a river to sit by, rest, eat lunch and wait out the intense heat of the day, when an almighty =BANG=! blasted out from my rear wheel.

From 25km/hr, I skidded and came to an abrupt halt, my heart sinking. I knew this time that my inner tube had exploded and we had no other spares. With my head in my hands, I looked round to see the bare aluminium of my wheel exposed to the rough road surface. I winced as I saw that my tyre had peeled off the rim and a torn and shredded inner tube was hanging limp.

Dan ran over and, in silence, we inspected the damage. It was worse than we could imagine. The bare rim had scraped along the ground, and had been grated, leaving sharp, spiky edges.

My wheel, my precious wheel! Even if we would have had spare inner tubes left, with the damage to this wheel, we wouldn’t have been able to have fitted them anyway.

With the help of a local family who had heard the canon exploding, we flagged down transport all the way to Tashkent. It was the only choice we had – there, we could work on the wheel and hunt down the right size inner tubes. In this little town, the local bazaar only sold parts for huge 28 inch wheeled Russian bicycles.

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Posted by Dan
Bukhara, Uzbekistan

As we watched the full moon rise high above the mud walls of Khiva, we wondered whether it would bring a change to the weather. We’d had tailwinds for the last few days, which had helped us cycle far and fast. Would they continue to blow in the same direction and push us the 450 kilometres onwards through the Kyzylkum Desert to Bukhara?

Sure enough, the weather had changed – the wind swirling between our legs slowed us, making every kilometre a fight.

Towards the end of our first day, we passed though the last villages of the fertile river basin and over the Amu Darya river, clipping the border of Turkmenistan before reaching the long desert road. Just as Krista spotted strange opaque yellow clouds on the horizon, the wind picked up to such force it felt like the sky was collapsing on top of us.

We took a break and waited in a shop to see what the wind would bring next : people scurrying home to avoid the dust, spinning by locals on bicycles just as fast as the rubbish that it was scattering.

After an ice cream and a Snickers, we went back out to fight against the wind. We were trying to find a teahouse where we could sleep for the night. But when we turned a corner, we saw another set of yellow clouds heading straight for us. The sky and desert had merged to form a moving mass of biting sand. Krista quickly warned me to cover my eyes, ears and mouth, knowing full well it was a sandstorm having faced them while cycling across Pakistan.

Though squinting eyes I saw a small building – a police check point about a kilometre up the road. I put my head down and raced towards it, pumping my legs hard and feeling the sand grating in my front teeth.

Reaching the building, I turned to see that Krista had been forced off her bike and was walking, pushing into the wind. It was the first time I had looked up and could see the ferocious strength of the sandstorm – the first time I had even seen one – its power is definitely to be admired. And as the sand whipped and danced across the road, I ran back to Krista to help her push her bike.

We were invited inside the checkpoint by the policeman and his assistant, who put us behind a curtained room to rest, poured us bowls of tea and offered fruits and biscuits. They and treated us so well, and it was heart-warming to be on the end of such kind and gentle treatment from a checkpoint policeman when all the other police so far in Uzbekistan had been so arrogant.

The wind calmed and the sand settled after half an hour. Although the policeman had said we could stay there for the night, we decided we’d go on further. We pedalled til we reached a teahouse at Miskin – the last small settlement before the desert road started out across the vast Kyzlkum Desert.

We slept, free of charge, in one of the teahouse cabins, just as we had done all across Kazakhstan. They are basic rooms set aside from the café where you can eat in peace or move the low table aside and roll out one of the colourful mattresses to sleep on.

At 4:30 the next morning, just as the light was beginning to fill the sky and wake the birds, we pumped water from the well outside the teahouse and filled our empty bottles. We’d been told the water was really good and from 30meters below the ground. A day or two later we’d come to regret the glowing recommendation of Miskin Su-water!

The desert hotted up quickly. By 9am, it had reached 45 degrees and the tarmac had begun to melt, squelching under our tyres as if we were riding through sticky glue.

When we needed a rest, we tied the tarp between our bikes to make a shade to hide from the sun.

Photo: shelter

Psychologically and physically the road got really tough in the afternoon. The wind was still against us, and the undulating road was full of potholes, corrugation and sand. Tour buses, trucks and long distance taxis belted by without stopping and the bland featureless horizon went on and on.

It was hard to focus and find a motivating force when we knew all too well that the road and landscape would continue like this until we reached Bukhara. Our approach was to try and cover as much distance as possible each day to get out of the searing heat of this oppressive desert.

After three days of slogging it out across the desert for12 hours a day, either the heat , bad food from the greasy teahouse kitchens, a dubious hard boiled egg, or, as we prefer to blame it on, Misken Su-well-water ,got the better of us! While my Dad and our whole family were joined together celebrating his 50th birthday, I was doubled over a bowl throwing up, pained and uncomfortable in a sweaty sleeping room of a teahouse.

The following morning, 50km down the road, Krista was overcome by a severe case of dysentery, and I was really scared that she was loosing too much salt and sugars as she was becoming very weak.

We reached a teahouse and decided it a safe place to rest, but as I watched Krista dragging herself to the pit toilet 100 metres away across the hot sand, I saw her pause, then sit down, and then fall spread-eagle in the desert. I ran across the sand and without my hat on it felt like the sun could set fire to my hair. Krista had fainted and was a shade somewhere between ghost white and pale green. Her eyes were rolling around her head and sweat was beading out of her pores like a squeezed sponge.

Dragging her to her feet we stumbled into the toilet – a stinky wooden box infested with flies. Krista was too weak to stand, and fell once again, her eyes rolling into the back of her head, her face opaque. I got her back to the teahouse where the staff were shocked at the state their two new customers were in. Luckily enough, a man who was in charge of a telecommunications tower on the other side of the road said he had an air-conditioned room where Krista could cool down. Her temperature was rocketing and she needed a dark quiet place.

Over the next 20 hours we stayed in that room with the antique air con noisily blasting and I kept an eye on Krista’s temperature and bullied her to drink salt and sugar solutions to re-hydrate and replace the fluids she was continually losing.

The following morning, Krista had some strength back and we decided we needed to hitch the last 100km out of the desert to Bukhara – a big town where we could have a few rest days and access to a doctor if needed.

Photo: hitching into Bukhara with bad belly - Kamaz truck

Staggering into Bukhara, we were greeted by cyclist Mark from Ireland, who’d just crossed the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan! He told us of the other cyclists that were in town – Maxime and Beatrice from France. It was great hanging out and sharing stories with other cyclists.

Four days of rest, great company, more mosques and medressas, we were right as rain and back on the road.

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Posted by Krista
Khiva, Uzbekistan

With the alarm clock still ringing in my ears, we dragged ourselves out of bed. It was 5am, yet light had already crept into the sky. Looking outside, I noticed immediately that the wind had already begun to blow dust up around the streets and swept courtyards of Nukus. The bowing branches and bending grasses indicated the wind was from the north-west. Yes! The perfect direction for a tailwind!

As soon as we left the ordered, wide and straight Soviet streets of town, the desert was upon us. Orangey-brown sand dunes rose either side of the road, held together by scrubby bushes, dry and prickly. Comical desert rodents scratched around in the sand and when they heard the whirr of our wheels, stood upright, alert, then ran quickly back to their burrows.

The desert was so hot that, even after swigging mouthfuls of water, my mouth soon became completely dry again. My lips cracked and bled and it was hard to swallow without my throat sticking together. But the tailwind was still with us, making the pedalling almost effortless, and a young boy named Rustam made my day when he proffered a litre of cold, fizzy mineral water to drink when we passed his home.

We were moving so quickly that by 9am, we had already covered 50kms. It was at that point that Dan suggested we try and make it all the way to Khiva that day – we weren’t quite sure how far it was, and didn’t think it would beat my personal record of 180 km in a day that I set in Vietnam 11 years ago – but it would definitely beat the distance record of 110 km for this trip.

The desert petered out when we entered Khorezm , the region fed by the Amu Darya which flows from the fast-shrinking Aral Sea all the way to Afghanistan. Village life and greenery surrounded us once more. Ordered canals criss-crossed the patchwork land, and groups of children, wound up in scarves and gloves, worked all day in the fields.

Some people waved and called for us to stop, but we kept on going, determined to achieve this physical and mental goal. A man on a motorbike invited us to stay at his house, explaining that he’d hosted a cyclist a couple of years ago. We declined his offer, he sped off, but came racing back 15 minutes later with a letter, written in English, from the Bristolian cyclist, thanking him for his hospitality. He hoped that this proof would persuade us to take up his kind offer and stay for the night with him and his family, but we still held the ancient city of Khiva in mind.

Evening arrived and we began to feel weary, our bums sore, our faces sunburned and squinting. When we stopped to ask for directions, a man assured us that Khiva was only 30 kms further. We’d already ridden 140 kms – it would mean a total of 170 for the day. I would be just 10 kms shy of my personal best.

Unable to continue without food, we stopped briefly to eat fish, which was caught in the river just behind the small teahouse. 10 kms further on, we sat at the side of the road, eating ice cream, needing all the energy we could get. When we asked the ice cream seller how far to go now, she scratched 13 in the sand, and we were relieved.

Darkness arrived and the nearly full moon rose in the sky. We were knackered, but Khiva still eluded us. On and on we went, 13kms, 14, 15,20…30…40… on a long, straight road directly south – realising that the all estimations of distance we’d been given had been wrong and that Khiva was still much further on.

We’d passed some camping spots a few kms back where we could have hidden amongst trees for the night and slept, but now it was dark and these places were much harder to see. We thought maybe we’d ask to sleep in a teahouse, but even they were difficult to see.

I shone my headtorch onto the odometer and watched the kilometres pass… as we clocked180 km we cheered that we’d beaten my previous record for the longest day in the saddle. And upon reaching 195km, we finally arrived in Khiva, the old city rising before us, its city wall, crafted in mud, towering above us in the moonlight, like a strange and bulbous sleeping animal.

We were elated.

And here are some of the sights that greeted us in the morning…

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Posted by Krista
Beyneu, Kazakhstan

There is the sound of a roaring camel in my ears. Her growls and moans are more ancient and strange than any I have heard before – and Dan likens them to the noise of dinosaurs. I wonder if she’s shouting to welcome the rain that has finally arrived in this dry and dusty desert village, or, like the scuttling people running for cover, she’s lamenting the howling wind and the storm that’s soaking her.

I think back to the last bout of rain that hit us in Kazakhstan, just two days and two hundred kilometres ago. The camels were roaring persistently then too, whilst Dan and I were forced to take refuge in a chaykhana (teahouse) because the pitted track we were taking had turned into thick clay that completely clagged our wheels and stopped us moving.

At first we were upset that we wouldn’t be able to cover the 85 kilometres we’d planned to do that day. But in the end, after a pot of sweet, milky tea drunk from bowls, a plate of plov, some eggs and a bowl of cabbage soup, we were thankful for the rest – knackered from battling the headwinds and gruesome track.

Then, the next day, when the rain stopped, and the fierce wind and sun had dried our track so we could cycle again, the camels were quiet once more, seemingly content to munch on the newly watered, fresh smelling desert bushes – suddenly resplendent with desert flowers of delicate purples, pinks and whites, and bright yellows – turning their heads to stare intently at us as we laboured slowly along.

The Turkish truckies aboard the cargo ship from Azerbaijan had warned us that this road from Aktau to Beyneu would be difficult. In the ship’s mess, while we anchored for a day waiting for the Swine flu quarantine to be lifted, we mused over maps, trying to glean as much as we could from the drivers the conditions of our proposed route. Bulent even offered us a lift all the way to Beyneu, the last village before the Uzbekistan border. But we shook our heads and instead enlisted him to help us learn some Russian words that we thought would be useful for the way ahead …

But nothing could’ve prepared us for this road… Day by day we toiled, never able to reach more than 10km/hr, eating five meals a day to make up for the amount of energy we were expending pushing against the fiercest headwinds we’ve known, the dust and sand storms, the rough track and the lack of habitation.

We sought refuge in chaykhanas, which lay sporadically along the deserted wasteland, and when those couldn’t be found, we hid from the dust and wind in drains to eat nuts and sultanas and swig on fast-emptying bottles of water.

And I noticed that it was only when we stopped hoping the headwinds would turn into tailwinds and accepted our pace that the desert’s vastness, its harshness and its unending horizon became beautiful in our eyes.

And then we sang to the rocky outcrops, the windswept canyons, the giant boulders sculpted into spheres by the wind, the ancient burial grounds perched on hilltops, the huddling herds of horses and, of course, to those ancient wandering camels that roared in the rain.

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Posted by Dan
Aktau, Kazakhstan

The smoke, thick and black from the ship’s diesel engine blows away from us to the south-east and we are finally sailing north-west. Relaxing, reading, we hear the sound of a helicopter leaving an oil rig and fly above us. We jump to the window of our cabin, which is wide open, only a gentle breeze flutters the curtain now. Yesterday afternoon, the wind was apparently too strong to sail, or there was a storm out at sea which the captain wanted to hide from. So he dropped anchor, having turned around and motored back to the coast of Baku, after only 3 hours of leaving port. The boat sat and bobbed there all night, whilst we made friends with the Turkish truckies on board and swapped maps and notes with the other overlanders travelling this way.

This morning, when the wind had dropped and the anchor pulled in, we snoozed as crew pumped out excess ballast or leak water. In a soft daze, I hadn’t realised we were actually moving again, the sound of the water pumping out had merged with the splash of the still water under the speeding hull. It was only when I saw the reflection in the Perspex cover of the cabin light above my head of the sea moving away from us, I realised we were on our way again.

Relief allows us rest, and the strain of the 15 day wait for the boat is being slept off. Probably too by the 8 European friends we have made in the last 2 days. Despite having waited the longest and joined the French, German, Spanish, Ukrainian and English travellers camped outside the Kassa (ticket booth) all day, 2 days ago now, we ended up being the last ones to be sold a ticket. When we’d arrived at 7am, the day of departure, we’d been singled out and pressurised, told that the last ticket had been sold to our German friends and that there was no space for us. This deceit and the ugly, arrogant behaviour by the staff of the Kassa had us running back and forth between the Kassa and customs, where our friends all waited with their tickets in hand.

We had already sensed the staff at the Kassa were dishonest people, but thought it incredulous that after 15 days of telling us, “Tomorrow, tomorrow” they would now refuse to sell two cyclists a ticket. A huge ship, with more cabins than passengers, was being described to us as full. With aggressive fists, the Kassa staff crossed their arms to make an X, to mean closed.

Close to tears, with dates of our visas running through our heads, and maps of alternative routes confusing and flashing through our minds, our journey, for a moment, seemed in the hands of these despicable people. It was hard to hide our anger, we raised our voices, losing our grip of calm and reason. Ireyna, the Ukranian woman, ran with us back to the Kassa, to ask again, speaking fluently in their common language of the ex-Soviet states, Russian.

She was calm, she was bright, she smiled, she was friendly, she didn’t show surprise and she was patient. Then she spotted the chief outside the Kassa, whom we’d not seen before, and spoke briefly and precisely to him. When the chief entered the Kassa, me and Krista understood clearly this part of the conversation. He spoke in stern Azeri, “What’s the problem? It is nothing. There is no problem. Sell them a ticket.” Ireyna, she is a star.

With ticket in hand, we three ran back to the boat to have our passports stamped, in fear that the boat would now leave without us. The customs guards were pleased for us and were all smiles, though the day before and the hour previously, they had been quiet and unreactionary. Our new friends punched the air as we joined the gang readying to board, although after the challenge of patience, nobody showed too much excitement, all agreeing that we’re not there until we’re there… When wheels roll away from customs to the open road, we’ll know we’ve made it: away from Azerbaijan and into Kazakhstan.

Our desperation to take this boat was so great, since we’d waited for such a long time, told every day that we should come back tomorrow. It had only taken 8 days to cycle the whole length of the country, yet we’d been in Baku for over 2 weeks. We’d been expecting to take a boat in a matter of 4 or 5 days, but because we’d waited so long, any other option for an alternative way out of Azerbaijan should we not board this boat was now nearly impossible.

One of the aims of our journey is not to fly. Our ongoing visas to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are paid for and planned out with set dates of entry and exit. To apply for replacements would be a costly option and a race against time, since we only had 6 days left on our Azeri visa. Our visa to remain in the country could expire before being granted one for a neighbouring country. We didn’t have time to exit the country by cycling. And we had chosen this route to avoid Iran, since, interesting as it may be, Krista didn’t want to return there as she’d been put in prison there 12 years ago. Even so, this would still leave us with the problem of a Turkmenistan transit visa, and crossing 800kms of desert in just 5 days in searing heat. AARGH!

The three men and one woman of the Kassa were simply scaring us into offering them a bribe, knowing how long they had kept us waiting, being aware that we must take a boat any day now.

We drew these conclusions when we got on board and saw that indeed this huge boat had more cabins than passengers. And when we heard from the captain that there had been other boats that had come and gone that we could’ve travelled on, our suspicions were confirmed.

For the first time on this journey, we had both forgotten that time is the only thing that can change a situation. It is only a moment of drama, and if you wait it out, it will be a different outcome. Patience will put an end to a tight spot, if you stay calm! So we toasted a drink on the bow of the ship with our new group of friends in celebration of our departure and progress towards Kazakhstan.

Smiles and laughter and friendship grew aboard and we made plans to look out for each other along the road, although our overlander friends would move much faster than us, travelling with motorbikes and cars.

The important words to remember come to mind on the voice of our friend Gizem: “Now the adventure really begins”.

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