We woke up our last morning in Hohhot and feasted briefly on the Internet before strapping all our things down onto our cycles and heading to our in search of noodles.

We ended up going back to the same Uyghur noodle place that we’d found our first morning here, and ordered a couple more bowls of lamb noodles, this time accompanied by a few Uighur kebabs, and what the Chinese call “Chuar.”

The symbol for Chuar is 串, which can be found throughout all over most mainland Chinese cities. It’s an easy one to spot, the Chuar character, since it looks like a kebab. Another character which I noticed it also looks a lot like 中, which is the first character of the Chinese word for China, 中国, literally translated “Middle Kingdom” or “Central Country”. That made us think. What if there was a chuar guo (串国)? Would that place be anything like our beloved Xiniang Uighur semi-autonomous region? And so with it we’d like to announce a new t-shirt: Chuarguo, in hope of promoting it as a pro-Xinjiang underground movement in favor of increased chuar consumption and support of Uighur entrepreneurship in the world at large.

And with that we hopped in the bus.

Even before the bus had left, the drivers’ started playing ridiculous kung fu movies, each of which seemed to be better than the last, and which continued to play throughout the entire ride to Beijing.

The highlight of the bunch and the final film was John Woo’s classic Once a Thief.

The ride ended up being pretty long.  For part way through, we hit some truly horrendous traffic, which had us waiting for hours in frustrating gridlock, making me wonder whether wheeling would not have been faster.   People hopped off and on the bus to relieve themselves and smoke cigarettes.  Looking out the window at our fellow stuck travelers, I began to realize that with the exception of busses, almost all of it was commercial drivers: mostly giant trucks transporting industrial and agricultural goods. China was moving so much stuff, that they could have a full stop and go gridlock traffic jam on a 6 lane highway in the middle of nowhere the most depopulated Provence of the country.   Most of it was product which was paid for by point B to be moved from point A.  This country never ceases to impress. Eventually, thanks be to Jah, we hit the open road again, and made it into Beijing only a few hours late.

It was by then well after nightfall. Gone were the days of blessed far north summer nights when the sunlight extended on until 10 or 11, and we were not quite sure where we’d been dropped off. What we were sure of was that it was surprisingly warm out. We had been able to wear the leather Jackets still in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, but it seemed that here we would need to put them into storage deep in the bags, hoping for a reappearance in Korea.
It had not been this warm at night since perhaps somewhere in Turkey, or even before that. And I marveled at how quickly I became soaked in sweat just wheeling away from the bus station and out to the main road. Our only real goal was to find an affordable hotel, and knowing China, we figured that would not be too difficult. We’d wheel into the city center the next day.  So off we went, wheeling along and keeping an eye out for the ubiquitous Chinese business hotel. But, strangely, we couldn’t find any. Perhaps we were in the wrong neighborhood, we thought. Heading on further, and keeping our eyes peeled.
Still no hotels presented themselves. We did spot a delicious smelling cluster of restaurants, though, and decided that eating could only help our situation. So one giant sizzling plate full of fish and few plates of greens later, we climbed back on the cycles with not only full stomachs, but armed with directions from the waitress towards a hotel.

We found the place no problem, but it turned out they were not authorized to accept foreigners. This was something we’d never encountered in China before… and we were puzzled. The owner of the hotel apologized and sent us on up the street to another hotel, but that place was way too expensive. And I’ll be darned if this trend didn’t continue on well into the night. We would wheel up to a perfectly respectable and affordable looking Chinese business hotel and attempt to check in, they would have vacancy and be very friendly, but sad to inform us that we as foreigners were not allowed to stay there, and then send us on to a nearby fantastically expensive place. How is a man to choose freedom in such conditions?
It was thus that, at nearly two AM, exhausted, sweaty, and discouraged, we rolled up to a certain hotel whose name shall remain for now a secret. The owner of the place was just leaving after a long night of balancing the books, and walked by Scott just as his front desk manager was being sorry to inform him they not authorized to accept foreigners. Something touched the man about us. Perhaps it was seeing our haggard state, or being somewhat of a cyclist himself. Maybe it was Scott’s Chinese, which we must have sounded not unlike Scorat: Cultural Lessons for Choosing Freedom in Chinese Cities and Betterment of Glorious Partners of AsiaWheeling Global Enterprises. Whatever it was, he decided to cut us a break and do a little under the table deal making.
He let us into a room where we would be able to sleep, showed us how to use the bathroom, and how to flush the toilet by diverting the water from the sink to the shower via a large metal handle, and then spraying water into the keyhole.  But he never even gave us the key. Presumably we were never to do anything more than sleep, get up, and leave, so there would be no need.
The room was interesting. Not Chinese business, but it was nice, like sleeping on the futon in your unemployed friend’s basement apartment. It had two huge beds, which took up almost all the floor space, the rest of which was taken up by a low table on which was a complementary Windows XP PC. Having our own notebooks, we had no interest in the PC, but we were able to use its Ethernet connection to sync our email. Then we just crashed hard and woke up the next morning to leave. The owner wished us good luck finding a more legitimate place to stay and then we were back on the road, wheeling fully loaded again.

This time we pushed on towards Tiananmen square, scanning all the way for a noodle shop. There were plenty of people wheeling as well, and a very intense police presence in this city, really unlike anything we’d seen in China. There was going to be none of the usual white crimes of AsiaWheeling, like running red lights or dashing across an intersection in between signals. Here the cops were on the job and tuned in to bikers, shouting at you if you crossed too far over the yellow line which marked where cyclists should wait when crossing the street.
We continued to wheel, keeping eyes peeled for noodles, but to my great indignation, they continued to be a scarce commodity. When we passed our third McDonalds I turned to Scott “Three McDonalds and no noodles? Are we still in China?”
And it was true, Beijing felt different than any other Chinese city we’d been to in this great country, and different then it had felt in 2008 when we first visited. It was so… shiny and clean. People we so orderly, toeing the line. Where was the raw? Where was the yelling? And where were all the damned noodles?
Finally, after much searching, countless McDonalds, KFCs, and Pizza Huts, we found a restaurant that was not a noodle house, but was at least a down home Chinese restaurant.

We ordered a large plate of pork with cumin, a cucumber salad, some white rice, and drank many pots of their tea, so much in fact that the tea in the pot became so exhausted by repeated soakings that we were no longer able to detect the actual tea flavor by the end of our time there.
Now, with some food in our stomachs, we continued to wheel on, past Tienanmen Square.

Even Tienanmen felt significantly different than the last time I’d visited, which had been on a cool and misty day. Today the sun was blinding and there was not a cloud in the sky. I realized then, also, that I had not ever seen Beijing with so little pollution. It was really quite amazing.

When we spotted a China Mobile office, we called a waypoint to buy a SIM card. We were able to do this no problem, but were quite surprised to find that here in Beijing SIM cards cost about 100% more than had we bought them in, say, Hekou.

A phone would be important, so we decided to purchase one SIM card to share between the two of us.  Scott ran in and executed the mission while I sat outside and just played the ukulele. Most of the well dressed Beijing pedestrians had no idea what to do with me. I must have looked like a filthy homeless vagrant (which is what I was) and Beijing is not a city with street performers. So most pedestrians, as they passed, would just glance at me uncomfortably and then avert  their eyes while walking onwards stiffly. Doing our best to push peoples limits here on AsiaWheeling, on rendition of BlackWater at a time.
Scott came out triumphant with the SIM card and ran over to buy a peach from a man and his wife who were roaming the streets with a peach selling cart.
Just then, our man MCK called, and as luck would have it, he knew of a hotel not one block from where we stood just there and then. It was a place by the name of Hai Na Binguan, and we strolled in to find that they even had a vacancy for us. So we headed up to the room, pleased to see an Ethernet cable hanging out of the wall, and that the bathroom was on a raised platform, covered in deafeningly screechy sliding smoked glass doors and headed out for a quick sunset wheel.

We began by heading down a large street near our hotel, lined with block after block of restaurants, making our way down the bike lane which ran, strangely enough, through the middle of the sidewalk. As we wheeled along, people called out to us, sometimes even in English asking us to come investigate their restaurant or their wares.

When was the last time that I had been yelled at on the street to advertise a restaurant… I can’t even remember… what was Beijing becoming? Bangkok?

We wheeled on, through shockingly manageable, well organized, and mostly brand new streets, able to get almost anywhere, without ever having to ride on a road with no bike lane, and spending an unprecedented amount of time waiting, under the watchful eyes of multiple traffic police, at stoplights.  A new Beijing sprawled before us.

After taking a huge loop, circumnavigating and eventually plunging back into Dongzhimen, we headed across the street from our hotel to try out the Uyghur restaurant there. We ordered a cucumber salad, a variety of Chuar, a big bowl of spicy Lakman, and some of that wonderful Uyghur bread called nung. The food was very good, but the nung was truly incredible, cooked in a large coal burning oven outside the restaurant, and brushed with oil and spices and browned on the char grill before being served.
As we were leaving, we stopped by the register to pay, and thanked in owner in his own central Asian tongue. “Rakhmet.” We were admiring a large calendar on his wall, featuring a large gold accented photograph of the K’aba. He came over to us, and seeing the mustaches (which are a symbol of being muslem in China) asked us if we’d been on the Haj?
“No,” Scott replied in Chinese “But hopefully one day, Insha’Allah.”

We woke up the next morning to find it still raining in Hohhot. Either it did not rain much here, which would make the flooding and torrents of muck filling the streets much more forgivable, it was that whenever it rained in this city everything just became a shockingly filthy mess. The streets turn to mud pits and each puddle seems a lurking disease vector. Just our kind of place.

Meanwhile, we’d been hard at work in our hotel room, churning away on correspondence for you, dear reader. When we spotted a break in the rain, we headed out with the goal of catching something easy and quick near the hotel, but as happens so often in China, we became fascinated with our surroundings and started strolling, which was worth it if for nothing else than to get to see a little girl wheeling around on an amazing device, something like a cross between a bicycle and a rollerblade.

We also found lunch, in a very crowded restaurant a few blocks over from our hotel.

We ordered a savage feast of boiled dumplings, fried eggplant, and Inner Mongolian meat and potatoes.

While we were eating, it began pouring outside, so we ran back to the hotel to wait out the rain.

When it looked like it might have let up for a bit we headed out again on the bicycles. As soon as we started wheeling, though, the skies open up once again. There was only one choice here: rain gear. And so we called a waypoint at a corner shop and purchased two large cyclist’s ponchos.

The Chinese have really mastered the cyclist’s poncho by designing a product which can be worn not just by the human being, but also by the cycle itself. You see, the front and back flaps of the Chinese cyclists poncho are enlarged so as to allow the user to place the front part over the handlebars of his cycle, turning he or she into a kind of waterproof bullet train on two wheels with a head sticking out the top.

Now armed with rain gear, we commenced some really serious wheeling, which sent us all over the city, getting completely lost, in the back alleys and muck filled streets of Hohhot.

The rain did let up by the time we were finishing the wheel, though, and allowed us to get out the camera once again here in a giant park dedicated to Chengis Khan, who unsurprisingly is also quite popular here.

From there, we wheeled on into the night, taking advantage of our new Chinese headlights, which were startlingly bright. We realized that we were hungry right outside of a very popular looking hot pot restaurant. Inner Mongolia is rumored to be the original home of hot pot, so we decided to give it a try.

The restaurant turned out to be absolutely jaw dropping, Each order hot pot was brought out with a variety of dipping sauces including chili pastes and thick sesame butter based condiments. After that the hot pot proceeds more or less as normal. Here however, the hot pot itself was particularly old school. It was a kind of all in one hot pot vessel, consisting of a round, hammered copper, exterior bowl, and a large cylindrical interior chamber which was filled with hot coals. The coals then boiled the water, and also heated up the edges of the chimney which could be taken advantage of by power users to fry little bits of meat.

As good as the hot pot were the people with whom we shared the restaurant. We were surrounded by some serious Hohhot ballers, most of whom seemed to be out to dinner on the company’s dime and determined to go for the wall.

And then it was suddenly 4 in the morning and we were hustling to get all our things together, take down the laundry line, pack up our lives and go to Mongolia.

Our time in Siberia felt like it had gone by in a flash, and I would be lying if I told you we didn’t find it difficult to place our excitement about Mongolia ahead of our fondness for Siberia.

It was gently raining on us as we wheeled through the still darkened streets of Ulan Ude towards the main train station. If this had been Krasnoyarsk, of course, it would have already been light, so far north is that city. When we got to the train station, we discovered that we had made an error in assessing the time of the train, miscalculating the change in time zones between here and Moscow (we’d been warned against this by that fine e-ticket lady in Novosibirsk). Luckily, we had made the error in our favor, so we had only to wait around for an extra hour so, letting time catch up to us.

It didn’t even take a full hour, though, for the train arrived 40 minutes before its schedule departure time, which gave us plenty of buffer to spend climbing aboard with all our stuff and smashing our way into our cabin. Inside we found two very friendly and patient Dutch ladies who were sleeping. They were very forgiving when we not only woke them up, but executed a very boisterous reshuffling of all the luggage in the entire compartment (including theirs) in order to make our cycles fit.

There are a few reasons why fitting the cycles on this train was difficult. The first is that this was a trans-Mongolian car, rather than a trans-Siberian car. The main difference between the two sets of rolling stock are that the trans-Mongolian cars are all Chinese made… This means less luggage space, and smaller bunks. On top of that, the train to Ulaanbaatar has no Platzcart class, so we had to deal with the more expensive and less luxurious “Kupe” class.

Regardless, we managed to get all our things into the train car, Storing my bike under one of our bunks, and Scott’s underneath the bunk of a nearby friendly gentleman.

Meanwhile Buryatya slowly transitioned into steppe outside the windows, opening up into wide and endless grassy fields, flanked by kind looking mountains. Not long into the ride, the train stopped at the Russian border town nestled up to Mongolia. It was a sleepy little Siberian village, and we were quite shocked to learn that the train had every intention of spending the next five hours here. We assumed that meant we needed to go file through some kind of customs processing, but after walking around for some time we found that too was not until after the 5 hours of waiting. It seemed we were doomed to wait here so that the train could be reconsolidated from cars arriving from all over Russia, bound for Ulaanbaatar, many of which, I believe were full of not people, but freight.

We had learned a few interesting things about this train already, apart from the fact that it featured Chinese rolling stock. It was also populated almost completely with foreigners.  We could barely remember how to socialize in English. Were the Russians not interested in visiting Mongolia? Or do they take a different train? I can’t be sure, though we invite speculation in the comments. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that the Mongolian railways symbol is fantastic.

The wait in the railroad station in Zamin Ud turned out to be even longer than expected, so we had plenty of time to wander around looking at the train loads of tanks that were heading down into Mongolia,

and to speculate as to what was in all the rusting chemical cars, especially the leaky ones.

Just like the other cars we’d ridden in Russia, ours on the Trans-Mongolian had a fantastic wood burning samovar, which provided the people with hot water, even throughout the entirety of the wait to consolidate the train.

And then it was finally time to go. We were all ordered to go back to our bunks, and the first wave of Russian officials bordered the train with more of those adorable drug-sniffing Dachshunds that we’d seen in the Novosibirsk airport, followed by wave two: a woman who’s only job seemed to be to wander through the car shouting at everyone to get out of their rooms, while new inspectors, with bigger and meaner looking dogs headed in to investigate, then to shout at everyone to get back in to the next “kupe” could be assessed.  She would approach each kupe, announcing “Please leave your room.”  As European the european tourists simultaneously paused in releif of her politeness and the directness of the request, she quickly followed it up with a curt, “Leave now.”  And so they left.

Next came the actual border police, who demanded our passports and immigration cards, taking them one by one, and determining whether or not our faces matched the documents and placing them into a very fetching double headed eagle emblazoned leather satchel that I would love to one day own, and disappearing with the documents. We then waited on the train for an hour and a half, unable to leave, while the passports were inspected, detected, and stamped.

Our documents arrived back in good shape though, and the train rumbled on towards Mongolia.

Once in Mongolia, we experienced essentially a parallel operation. It was slightly less heavily staffed, and there was only one, rather beat up looking dog, but they same basic algorithm.

It was time, after long last, to switch back to our “sun” passports, the one’s we’d last used way back when we left the UAE. We needed to enter Mongolia on these, since they contained our Chinese visas. At first the woman was skeptical.  “Where is your Russian Visa!” she demanded “Show it to me!” the librarian style silver chains that connected her glassed to her head jangling audibly.

I sheepishly produced the “moon” passport, not knowing if I was somehow breaking the law, and showed her the visa. She scrutinized it for a while as I blabbered on trying to explain that we needed to enter Mongolia on the passport that she had, and why we might legitimately have two passports to begin with. Finally with a snort and a whinny, she gave the “moon” book back to me and headed on down the car.

Great Success!

From there we continued to roll on towards Ulaanbaatar, through a Mongolia which I found to be much greener than I had ever suspected. Mongolia was downright lush in some parts.

While the train rumbled on, the Dutch women were teaching Scott some words in their mother tongue, in between rounds of insane Dutch scrabble (J’s are worth very few points). Meanwhile, I wandered off to the end of the train and played the ukulele, longing for a little more Siberia.

That morning I woke up somewhat groggily and late at the Hotel Buryatya, feeling disoriented and wondering for a moment where I was. I had been dreaming about Indonesia and black magic, and was very perplexed initially to find myself staring up at this soviet light fixture.

It all came back to me then… Buryatiya, Siberia, Beeline, Megafon, Plov, the Ladies of Shymkent, Turklaunch, Samer in Latakia, Hosam in Damascus, Sid in Dubai, Jackson Fu, Haba Xue Shan, Sri Lankan Koththu, Bangkok… AsiaWheeling was immense and it all flooded over me as though it were pouring out of that light fixture in a deluge of memory.

The crisp morning air and the bright sun of Buryatya brought me back into the present, as we climbed on the bikes and wheeled downhill in search of breakfast. We found it not far into the wheel, at this little people’s cafeteria, located conveniently in between a Russian orthodox church and a giant pile of dirt.

The piles of dirt had something to do with some really aggressive construction which was going on in downtown Ulan Ude. They seemed to be putting in a giant new promenade, terminating at a certain giant sickle and hammer topped obelisk in the city’s central round about.

The restaurant was filled with plenty of Russian people eating and drinking, and we scrutinized the menu, quite thrilled to find a few of our favorite Central Asian dishes available.

We ordered some Lakman and some Manty, but ended up getting a small plastic Tupperware container filled with instant chicken noodle soup mix, combined in equal parts with corn oil and some old leathery Pelmini. Things were very cheap, though, so I guess in Buryatiya you get what you pay for.

We continued from there, wheeling up and out of the city past the Hotel Cagaan Morin. We called a waypoint only an hour later, however, feeling that before we execute a savage Buryat wheel, we needed to eat something real.

So we stopped into a pizza place which was themed after old Soviet architecture magazines and home goods (remember, concept first!).

The pizzas took forever to arrive, which gave us plenty of time to look through ancient soviet magazines (which were quite honestly riveting).

When the pizzas finally did arrive, though, they were absolutely scrumptious, laden heavily with meat and cheese, and very light on the sauce.

Now, having actually eaten, we headed out for some more serious wheeling, pedaling towards the outskirts of town, and soon finding ourselves in the midst of a giant grassy freight yard.

And the shot…

On our way out of the freight yard, we also spotted this amazing announcement, warning against the dangers of crossing the rails while trains were passing.

We did our best to follow its instructions, dashing across a few rails just as a train was coming, and heading over to a new road that ran alongside the river.

Now here was some real Siberia! It was overgrown, and full of abandoned houses.

Stray dogs wandered everywhere, and picked through giant piles of garbage, we continued to wheel on, past this long inoperable pipeline suspension bridge, and past a giant power plant belching smoke into the sky.

Eventually, we were siphoned into a road that dead ended at a large swath of pounded sand, where men slept in the back of their Marshriutkas, cigarettes burning in their lips, and waited for passengers to arrive.

We turned around at the packed sand, and headed back to the old pipeline suspension bridge, where we found a pedestrian crossing that we used to get across the river and into a new and somewhat wealthier neighborhood.

Now we were back amidst the gigantic Soviet housing blocks, and courtyard gardens.

We suddenly realized that we were frighteningly, terribly, thirsty. And just as suddenly, the ever ubiquitous Russian water selling kiosks all disappeared or closed for a smoke break simultaneously, and we were sent on a maddening goose chase across the outskirts of Ulan Ude in search of water.

We ran into stationary shops, restaurants that only had beer or soda, and even into an English School. Eventually, in parched desperation, we rode on into the next neighborhood, where we finally found an open kiosk next to a bus stop.

Drinking the whole liter and a half in nearly one barbaric gulp, we headed back onto the road, which siphoned us towards the city center. We spotted an interesting riverside byway made entirely of sand, and decided to give it shot. It turned out to be an exceedingly technical wheel, so thick and mushy was the sand. Who would ever build a rode like this?  So tough was it, in fact, that we eventually gave up and headed back up onto the main road to take a large bridge back into the city.

As we crossed over the bridge, we spotted an under construction set of new residential roads, and decided that since the construction was not taking place that day, we would make like the locals, and just start using them. So we headed into a new part of town, marked by some very interestingly ornate wooden buildings. At the edge of the wooden buildings neighborhood, we spotted a large paved path that ran along a central canal.

We hoisted the Speed TRs up and onto that path and began wheeling it.  The pavement was uneven, cracked and covered with broken glass, but the sights and scenery was fascinatingly degraded and industrial, and our Big Apples seemed up to the task, so we wheeled on.

When the path on which we were riding petered out into a wasteland of twisted rusting hunks of metal, asbestos siding, and broken glass, we moved off the path, cutting across a large construction site.

We wheeled on through more gnarled buildings, half way between being built or falling to pieces. In the midst of it all, we met this young Buryat boy, also on a folding bicycle.

He joined us to wheel for a bit, and we chatted in bits of English and Russian. He did not seem to speak either of the two languages very well, but what we lacked in ability to communicate, we easily made up for in the comradery of the road.

It was not long after we’d made it out of that construction/junk-yard area of Ulan Ude that we realized Scott’s bike had shed some important screws that held the rear rack on. We headed to a market street to look for some replacements. I approached an old Buryat man in a giant cowboy hat and asked him where he thought we might find some screws, showing him an example of what we were looking for. He thought for a moment, and then very clearly and confidently told me that there were no screws of that size in all of Buryatya. Apologizing, he then walked away.

We, of course found plenty of them at bargain basement prices in a hardware store two shops down, and screwed his rack back together using the key from our long lost Indian bike lock.

We then headed up to investigate a giant Soviet-Buryat theatre, with carvings of traditional peoples on the front of it, before wheeling back to the old Hotel Buryatya to do a little Laundry.

We woke up that next morning at the Zvezda Hotel in Irkustsk just reeking of fish. I felt like my body was off gassing all kinds musk that would no doubt endear me to the feline population of this Siberian town, but also probably also made me smell like an the corpse of a fish monger.

We headed downstairs to sample the Zvezda’s complimentary breakfast in the big game hunting themed restaurant downstairs. We found ourselves tempted to pause in the stairway, the walls of which were filled with pictures of Russian men all over the world killing giant animals, posed now with the dead body, crouched proud and smileless next to it. The restaurant proved to be quite the place as well, with an decoration scheme somewhere in between a hunting lodge and upscale hair salon. The walls were covered with ridiculous wallpaper, and glass cases that held things like obsidian knives and pistols that folded up into your sleeve.

They also had a whole bunch of downright offensive art hanging on the walls, all the impressions of Russian artists as to what African or Indonesian art might look like, but having never actually seen a real example.

The breakfast was strange, and the English on the menu very cryptic. We both ordered a couple of egg dishes, which turned out to be sunny side up eggs on top of French toast and covered with ketchup. Once we’d finished them, the waiter came back over “And what about desert?”

Dessert at breakfast? Well, when in Irkutsk… So we both ordered some sticky sweet yoghurt surprises, which were so sweet and lackluster as to be barely edible and headed back upstairs.

We feasted on some last bits of internet before checking out. When we approached the front desk, however, unlike anywhere else in the entire trip, they actually attempted to charge us for the storage of our bags, and no small amount either. In fact they were asking us to pay nearly a night in a Chinese business hotel for each bag! In the end we struck a deal… We would put all out bags into one of the Dahon folding bicycle carryon bags, and thus consulate them all into only one night at a Chinese business hotel. It was still highway robbery, but at least we could pay for it with what was in our wallets and there would be no need to go out and find an ATM.

Then we hit the road. We had a very important mission that morning, and that was collecting our tickets from Ulan Ude on to Mongolia. The trans-Mongolian trains were not technically e-tickets, so they had to be issued by a different entity. Our goal was to pick them up from the Real Russia office in Irkutsk before our train left that evening.

Sounds simple enough, but the office was hidden in a maze of soviet apartment blocks, in an unmarked building on a street whose name no one knew.

To illustrate the navigational obstacle that we were tackling, take this example: We were no more than 30 meters from the front door of the place that we would eventually find to contain the offices, in the northern outskirts of Irkutsk. However, when we stopped a man who was loading hundred of water melons into the back of his Volkswagen station wagon, we proceeded to draw us an elaborate map, wiping lines into the dust on the window of his car with his finger, directing us back into the city and out into a totally new and opposite outskirt of town.

So we were battling a serious signal to noise problem as we attempted to find this place, and what should have been an hour long wheel, turned into three. We fought against a number of conflicting directions, riding back and forth over the same area many times, before we finally found our building and the offices of Real Russia’s partner in Irkutsk, “Baikal Mystery Travel Company”

Getting the tickets was no problem, and since one of the workers at the place began laughing when we heard we’d locked out bikes outside the building (“they’re already gone,” he giggled), we cut the small talk short and headed back down to find the bikes, of course, exactly as we’d left them.

We noticed some spray painted signs on the street, indicating the way to beer and Kvas, so we decided to follow them to a large super market, where we purchased another Siberian picnic that couldn’t be beat and wandered over to the edges of the lake to eat it. We had some piping hot stuffed peppers, filled with potatoes and Grechka, a block of stinky blue cheese, some black bread, and a tub of pickled mushrooms. It was delightful.

Then, checking our watches to confirm we still had plenty of time before our train, we wheeled on out of town into the countryside, on some very Midwestern-US-style roads.

We called a waypoint to investigate a gas station, which had managed to reduce costs by selling gasoline directly from the semi trailer. The man seemed to be doing great business, and, though we were not in the market for gas, we were sure to express our solidarity before departing.

We continued to wheel on from there, into the Siberian farm land. When we spotted this sign indicating a very interestingly shaped memorial, we headed off the main road and onto a smaller gravel one. We were now heading through prairie and when we spotted what looked like an old abandoned Doppler radar station in the distance, we decided to head in for a closer look.

The station was most certainly abandoned, but showed plenty of recent signs of occupation by local vagrants.

Having gotten our fill of that creepy place, we headed back to the main gravel road, and continued to wheel on towards the memorial. At some point, however, we took a wrong turn and ended up at Irkutsk’s military air strip. We wheeled up to the place, which was guarded by machine gun toting fellows perched in metal towers, lazing against piles of sand bags, and asked a military man who was just unloading his huge green duffel from the trunk of his Volga about how to get to the memorial.

He seemed most pleased that some strange foreigners of folding bicycles were interested in the memorial, and was more than happy to point us in the right direction. So off we went, seeing exactly where we’d made our mistake, and skirting along the side of the airstrip back out towards a thick chunk of forest, where we assumed the memorial was located.

We wheeled past a cop car full of sleeping officers, and parked out bikes outside the memorial, being careful to keep our distance from a particularly savage looking Siberian husky that was chained to a Lada parked in front of the place.

The memorial turned out to be more of a memorial complex. The reasons for its construction are still foggy to us, though we believe that the sinking of a ship might have been involved. We walked past a broken stone tablet structure covered with artificial flowers, the meaning of which we would be more than thrilled to hear in the comments, and headed back into the more overgrown rear section of the memorial. There we found a giant wall of names, with “for what?” in Russian scrawled in blood red above it.

From there we headed back out, and decided to see if we could not loop around the airstrip and make our way back into town.  There was a strange plate (maybe radar related?) at the end of the runway. And when we saw that it was protected by no wall we ran up to take a timed exposure.

It was just seconds after we’d done that that the police car pulled up to us. Two cops climbed out and gave us a rigid solute. “Hello. He said in English. Do you speak Russian?”

“Yes, but badly,” I told him. And he began to spout off in Russian:

“I am officer so-and-so, of such-and-such unit of the Irkutsk Malitsiya. I would like to formally request your documentation.” We were both carrying our passports, so often were they required in daily activities here in the post soviet world, and we happily turned them over.

“Thank you, your papers are in order.” He said, handing our papers back. “Please do not take any pictures, here. That is against the law.” Scott fingered his camera nervously. “And thank you for visiting our memorial.” They began to pile back into the cop car.

“Can we get back to Irkutsk taking this road?” I asked pointing to the large arching packed dirt road we were hoping to us.”

“Of course.” They said.

And with another solute, they god back in their car and drove off in the opposite direction. Well, in the grand scheme of things we could not really have asked for a more pleasant police interaction.

So we hopped on the cycles and headed down to the road.

I almost felt back home in Iowa, hammering down this low traffic level, shoulder-less road. We wheeled hard now, past farms and small villages, back towards the main city of Irkutsk.

Back at the Zvezda, we collected our things and nested in their business center, where they have an African grey parrot that swears in Russian.

We attempted to ignore its taunting and work on correspondence for you, dear reader.

We had just enough time to collect a few snacks for the train, and to spend some time chatting with an old pensioner, who used to work for the ржд  as a locomotive engineer before we needed to hop our train for Ulan Ude.

We woke up the next morning at the Sivir Hotel, none too eager to leave Krasnoyarsk, and headed back to the good old Travelers Coffee for a last bit of internet before striking out to pick up provisions for our next train ride. We were feeling fine, as we walked along eating ice creams on the sunny streets of Krasnoyarsk, and looking even better in our new leather jackets.

It took us a surprising amount of time to find a large grocery store, but when we did, we were able to load up on all our favorite supplies: a couple loaves of black bread, 3 dollar jars of caviar, nutty Siberian cheese, thinly sliced sausages, thick aged pork fat, bags of bacon and scallion flavored chips, and a few cans of Kvas.

I was so excited about our purchases, I accidentally stole the key to the locker that they asked you to place your backpack in while shopping. I laid it on the pavement outside the Hotel Sibir, hoping some good samaritan might return it for me, for we were getting very close to missing our train to Irkutsk.

We did not miss the train, though, and after stowing our cycles, relaxed into our seats to let more of the beautiful Siberian countryside just slide right on by.

We shared our bunk cluster in patzcart with a couple of fantastic people. One of them was a 30-50 year old man who spend the entire train ride slowly drinking giant 2 liter bottles of warm beer, and reading thick Russian history books. The other was a perhaps 50 year old woman from Chita, who had been on the train for three days already and was more than happy to share her vast supply of tomatoes and huge canister of mayonnaise to dowse them with.

After about 5 hours, the train stopped at a particularly busy station and we climbed off to see what was for sale.

The answer was everything.

We wandered around investigating all the options for a while, and ended up buying a bag of salty home made pickles, a few hard boiled eggs, some meat cutlets, and a fried river fish.

We were tempted by this gold mine brand beer, but decided it was probably terrible.

Back in the cabin, we layed into snacking. I found the pickles to be especially out of this world. Scott was a huge fan of the 3 dollar caviar. Oh, heck, I was too. Eating on Russian trains is great.

Soon night fell and we were whipping along through the darkness, blasting through tiny clusters of township and then vast swaths of pitch black forest.

We woke up the next morning in Krasnoyarsk, wondering if we should have gone to Koloradski Papa’s the night before, and climbed on the cycles to wheel out in search of breakfast.

This morning we ended up finding it not far from the market where we had purchased our jackets, at very cheap people’s cafeteria-type restaurant.

I loaded up my tray with a few salads and some stuffed meat pies, Scott loaded his with a giant flaky Somsa, a plate of Gretchka and a cheese covered pork chop, and we headed to the register.

A few rubles later we were digging in to some real down home Siberian fare, eating hungrily under the watchful eye of none of other than Lenin himself.

Finished with our meal, we headed out, and it was only about a block away that I realized I’d left my backpack in the restaurant. I sprinted back to grab it, considering it contained my computer, camera and the like, and finding that, once again, my enchanted backpack refused to disappear. The owner of the restaurant was waiting with it in his arms, smiling at me. “I thought you would return soon,” he said handing the thing to me and grinning.

I hustled to catch up with Scott who was busy photographing more fantastic Russian graffiti, this one no doubt talking about the massive privatization of previously public assets that took place during Glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union.

We headed back to the 31B-Baker-street-style traveler’s coffee, and worked furiously on correspondence for the next few hours before the call of the open road started calling our names and we returned to street level.

Our plan, if we could harness enough daylight still, was to ride all the way out to the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Station.  It was a particularly famous power station in Russia, playing a starring role on the 10 Ruble note.

So we headed back onto that river-side path, figuring that if we followed it far enough up river, we would undoubtedly eventually reach the dam. And so we rode on, past some magnificent railway bridges, eventually rejoining traffic on a smaller side road, which seemed to be leading us into a heavy industrial sector of town.

Try as we might, we couldn’t seem to keep near the river. The road just kept turning away and heading up hill. If we took the road which kept us closest to the water, we continually ended up in this rotting wooden village filled with barking dogs and very hard to traverse steep gravel roads. We tried once to find a passage through that village, and giving up when the road that we were on petered out into garden plots and guard dogs, we headed back down, teeth rattling in our skulls as we went over giant stones and potholes.

We tried another road which led us into a giant freight rail yard. This seemed promising, but soon that road too petered out. We spotted a group of pedestrians heading up a set of rusting metal stairs and decided to follow suit.

The view from the stairs was magnificent, showing that Krasnoyask was no small rail hub itself, but unfortunately, the path that lead from the top of the stairs, through the children’s playground and a small hospital, dumped us back out into that rotting village.

So we tried again to make it through the village, with similarly rotten results. Just as we were turning back, we spotted a local gentleman walking up the other way, and we took out a 10 ruble note to use as an illustration in our request for directions.

He laughed. He knew exactly what we were looking for. “but it’s too far!” he said. We’d heard that before, and laughed it off, pushing him for the directions.

So he shrugged and explained to us how to get there. Turns out we needed to go back into the city, and catch a bridge across the river, then proceed along the other side in search of the dam. It’s a 30 or 40 km ride there, he said in a far away and skeptical tone. Fair enough, we thought, and with it already being nearly, four PM, set off at a new fierce pace.

You may think us mad, dear reader, but you must remember that up here in Siberia, during the summer the sun does not set until 10:30 or so, so despite the fact that it was nearly 4pm, we could count on another 6 hours of good light. This just might be doable, if his estimates were a bit high, and if we hustled.

So off we went, pounding back down the hill, across the access road to the village and back onto the riverside bike path. We were flying.

We pulled off the bike path when we spotted the first bridge that was not for rail only, and tore across it too.

Not far into the communities on the other side of the river, we realized we were starving and pulled over at a small Produkti to purchase a couple of creamy pastries, and some very salty smoked string cheese.

We then we laid back into it and wheeled on hard, sticking to the riverside. This was our mistake again… not the wheeling hard, but the sticking to the riverside. We should have stuck to the big roads. For once again, we found our journey petering out into a dead end. I headed over to a kiosk to consult the women who were standing and sitting around it, discussing matters to complex for me to effectively evesdrop on.

They explained that we needed to go back, almost all the way to the bridge and get on the main highway. Shucks.

So we did, taking a few shortcuts through Siberian villages, and sprinting across a set of train tracks, holding the Speed TRs over our shoulders.

Then we were on the road, and everything felt right.  Unfortunately, the road was quite busy and had absolutely no shoulder. We tried riding on the sidewalk, but the sidewalk was so degraded that it was hard to ride fast.

So we eventually just got onto the highway and stated riding as fast as we could.

We rode hard and fast, but it was harrowing. Cars and trucks would whip by way too close to us, and all the while the sun was falling and the temperature was dropping.  After riding for an hour or so more, when we reached the top of a hill, we decided to question an Azerbaijani watermelon merchant there as to how much farther it would be to get to the dam. At first he told us it was hundreds of kilometers, which was obviously hogwash, but when we were not buying it, he took out his mobile phone and called his wife.

“15 kilometers more.” He said, apologizing for his misrepresentation. We looked at our watches, and up at the sun, and, perhaps in a moment of weakness, decided to head back empty handed.

As so we did, continuing to pound through the Taiga on our Speed TRs, doing our best to keep from eating bugs, and now free of our time constraints, calling waypoints whenever we spotted something amazing.

Take this Giant hidden Krasnoyarsk sign, so overgrown it was almost invisible from the road.

From there we wheeled back into the city, and being rich with time, we decided to wheel past the bridge we’d taken across to explore this side of the river more fully.

The sun was getting closer to setting, it being about 9pm as we passed by this hydrofoil boat turned restaurant.

Not long after the hydrofoil, we found the road coming to an abrupt end at a tattered wire fence. The fence was mostly broken and people seemed to obviously be using the space behind it as a thoroughfare, so we headed in, wandering up a large concrete slab to find ourselves on a new path, leading out onto a peninsula which jutted into a lake surrounded by new and futuristic apartment buildings.

As we rode along this path, we stumbled upon an outdoor fashion photo shoot, where a young model was posing in a very short black dress, next to a tree, with these amazing orange buildings in the background.

And then we were back at the Hotel Sibir. What a wheel it had been. Dam or no Dam.

We decided to celebrate that night by heading to our Siberian Bureau’s favorite restaurant in Krasnoyarsk, a Ukrainian in the center of town.

The waitress of the place spoke a bit of English, brought us some free sticky sweet medicinal liquor as gift from the house, and even told us what night club she was planning on visiting after work, inviting us to join her there. These ladies in Kransoyarsk…

The specialty of the place was cold porkfat. And it was delicious. We had ordered a large plate which came out with mustard and horseradish.  The pig fat was eaten with slices of tangy deep black bread, and often played the roll as a chaser for a shot of vodka.

In addition to the pork fat, we got a large beef salad, which contained the first lettuce we’d had in some time.

Our final dish was a kind of puff pasty soup: a savory beef stew with essentially a pie crust baked over the top of the stone pot it was served in.

All the food was delicious… AsiaWheeling 3.0 will have to include the Ukraine.

We pulled ourselves out of the starchy comfort of our ржд sheets, stuffed our things back into our packs, grabbed the Speed TRs from the overhead rack where they had been stored, and headed out into Krasoyarsk.

Our first thought, after noticing the lovely imperial Russian style of the trainstation was: Holy Cow! It was cold, here!

We needed those leather Jackets pronto. Huffing and puffing huge clouds of condensation and wearing most of our clothes, we rode hard towards the center of town, and the Hotel Sevir (which means the Hotel North). We found the place in short order and checked in, throwing down our things and taking a moment to appreciate those little touches that separate one cheap Russian flophouse from the next.

There would be no use in lounging around the internet-less hotel room not wheeling, so we climbed on the Speed TRs, and headed out into the city.

Breakfast and coffee seemed like an obvious first move, so we made them our primary goal. It took some time, though, before we settled on a place. This was mostly due to the fact that the majority of restaurants in Russia, you see, are closed in the mornings, presumably since one is expected to have a mother or wife that is making that meal for you. So we wheeled on past tons of closed places, huge Soviet and imperial buildings, all the way down to the shores of the Yenisei River.

We did eventually find a place to eat, though. It was another hotel, in fact, and we were essentially buying into their included breakfast program.

We chose the English breakfast, which ended up being a rather nutty bowl of porridge and a couple of peppered eggs. Lovely.

We moved on from there, heading downstream, pedaling along with the river on a system of dedicated paved trails.

Perhaps our assumptions that Siberia would not be a place were wheeling was popular were misguided.  We couldn’t help, as we pedaled down recently repaved roads closed to cars, that this road might just be a pro-wheeling Krasnoyarsk initiative.

About the time that we were passing this fantastic no parking sign,

we spotted a bridge leading across into a gigantic park that nestled up alongside the city, on the opposite side of the Yenesei. The park proved to be even more of a wheeling destination, with kilometers and kilometers of paved bikeways.

Well, we couldn’t resist, so we just kept going, on out of the city and deep onto the park.  But all good things must end, and in a spectacular pile of gravel that could only say “well the budget ran dry” the paved path ended. So we turned around and wheeled back into the city.

Not long after we’d re-entered the fray, Scott spotted some Chinese characters on the side of a nearby building. With all intentions to investigate further, we headed over to what turned out to be a Chinese imports market. The market was full of, surprisingly enough, Chinese people. And suddenly, after we locked our bikes to a Uyghur snack cart (big ups Uyghur’s!), for the only time on the entire trip so far, the locals were speaking both Scott’s and my foreign languages.

With both Russian and Chinese on our side, we felt had immense bargaining power. So we headed in and immediately began trying on leather jackets, or perhaps I must more accurately describe them as imitation leather jackets.

Realizing we’d digested all the “English Breakfast,” we headed to the back of the market where there was a very pleasant lady serving up Russian-Chinese food from large blue plastic tubs.

We ordered two bowls, which came with a pile of white rice and a little of each kind of Chinese food, topped with a serving of Russian cabbage salad. While not particularly Chinese in flavor, they were quite tasty and the bill for both of us was less than 1 USD.

That market was great, but we were unable to find exactly the right leather Jackets. We were getting close, though, and we headed from there towards Krasnoyarsk’s central market.

When we got there, we realized we’d definitely come to the right place. The market was more than 60% coats, and the vast majority of those were at least in the style of leather or fur. So we locked the bikes to the railing of a nearby canal and headed in.

Some of the lady’s coats in this market were truly something to write home about, with wild colors, multiple types of fur, huge colors and sashes, and giant gold clasps, this place was all about load winter ware.

Not far into our investigations, we found Scott the perfect jacket, a black leather job that fit his torso like a glove. We haggled for a while with the lady, and eventually pulled the trigger. As we were leaving, we were investigating the similarly gigantic selection of fur and leather hats, when one of the hat salespeople came over to us. They were not interested in selling us a fur hat, though, they just wanted us to try some of the more ridiculous ones on and take a few pictures. Listen up viral web marketing teams, this is the way to do it.

Not long after that we found the perfect jacket for me as well, and called the entire mission a success.

Feeling more savage and raw than ever before, we climbed back on the cycles for a little new leather jackets wheeling.

We wheeled on into a residential neighborhood where we lingered for a bit scrutinizing a South East Asian elephant topiary and fake palm tree exhibit thing that had been erected in the middle of a divided highway, and then wheeled on back towards the center of the city, sweating hard in the leather jackets, but refusing to take them off.

We stopped next when we spotted a large honey market. We were of course seduced by the “black living honey” and could not resist buying a small tub to take back with us. It ended up being a very delicious, though clotted with pollen and wax. I am assuming here that the pollen and wax were features and not bugs.

From the honey market, we wheeled on, past this most interesting bright red obelisk in the center of town (more information about this is welcomed in the comments), and on home to eat a little more honey.

Strolling in search of a restaurant, we found that the people of Krasnoyarsk organize themselves for some latin dancing on the street every once in a while.  The spectacle attracted many an onlooker.

We went that evening to a Pelmyni restaurant, and ordered who huge bowls of boiled Russian dumplings to dip in sour cream.

With stomachs full of Pelmini, we headed over to a café which we knew to have wifi. It was a coffee place by the name of “Traveler’s.” Being travelers ourselves, we thought it might fit.

So we sat down and began working. That was when we were introduced to one of the lesser know features of Siberia: the forward women. Not only had we been noticing that the women here were absolutely gorgeous, but they were coming up to us and asking to talk. Such behavior was completely unprecedented, and frankly we did not know what to do.

Scott had a call with a mentor of his, and I was working on correspondence for you dear reader when two gorgeous girls came over and began feigning a need to use my computers to check something “really quick,” which rolled into a conversation. The conversation went on for an hour or so at the end of which they asked us if we’d like to go with them to a night club called “Coloradsky Papa.” The night club had been actually recommended to us by the Siberian Bureau, but for one reason or another, we decided to decline the offer, perhaps idiotically.

Meanwhile, while I was turning down two beautiful women who wanted to go out dancing on a Thursday night, Scott was receiving unsolicited messages from other women complimenting his mustache.

As we walked home that night from the café, we looked at each other…

“Krasnoyarsk, eh?”

“Agreed, brother. Who knew?”

We woke up our last morning in Novosibirsk feeling we had spent way too little time there, headed down for another huge breakfast that couldn’t be beat, feasted on the internet for a good 4 hours, and then decided to head out for a bit of wheeling.

Part way through the wheel, we decided to stop in to a little cafeteria style restaurant to get some plates of meat, salad and Grechka. Grechka is a very Russian and particularly tasty buckwheat pilaf, which you can imagine playing a role similar to rice in many meals.

We then headed to the grocery store to load up on supplies for the trans-Siberian ride over to Krasnoyarsk. The grocery store ended up being full of fantastic products, like this apple juice, or these cream filled candies.

There had been some trepidations, mostly among my half of the team, as to whether we’d be able to find somewhere on the Trans-Siberian trains to store the bikes. Now AsiaWheeling is pleased to officially report that there is plenty of room for folding bicycles and the Trans Siberian Railway.

We were also, at the advice of our Siberian Bureau, riding Platzcart, which is the lowest sleeper class on the train. AsiaWheeling is also pleased to officially report its strong support for travel in Platzcart. One is given more room for one’s luggage, placed in an environment where one is more likely to make friends, and in our opinion given more security for one’s belongings. Due to the cheaper nature of the tickets, thieves are less likely to snoop around. Also, they are forced in platzcart to do so in the open, in plain sight of all the fellow passengers who you’ve just made friends with, and who are now offering you bites of home grown tomatoes and shots of cognac.

Some of platzcart characters include:

(More Here)

So with the bikes stored, we had nothing to do but sit back and watch Siberia roll by. And my goodness was Siberia lush and green as it rolled by. We understand that we came to visit during the few months when it is not brutally cold, but ladies and gentleman, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due.

As we rode along, the train would stop from time to time in cities along the way. When it did so, many of the locals would run out to sell things to passengers on the platform. We always made sure to run out and look for interesting food and drink, or savage bargains.

That evening, we retired to the dining car where we watched soviet cinema on the monitor there, and chatted with some of our other travelers.

One of them spoke English in fact, having traveled in America as part of the work and travel program. Which we were soon to find was extremely popular among Siberian youth interested in America. And as far as we can tell, most Siberian youth are interested in America.

After chatting with him about the best things to see and do in Krasnoyarsk, we returned back to our platzcart and drifted off to sleep.