We had made reservations, while on the train at a wild game themed hunting hotel in Irkutsk, a place by the name of the hotel Zvezda.

We climbed off the train and began wheeling into town. The train station in Irkutsk is actually on the other side of the river Yenesei from the city, so we had first to climb over the the rail yard and then the Yenesei, using a giant bridge. It was a glorious ride, and the morning light in Irkutsk was intoxicating. The bridge we rode over actually reminded me in no small part of the Troisky Brigde in Petersburg that I used to take each day to get to School.

We managed without too much trouble to find the city center, but try as we could, it seemed impossible to find anyone in this city who knew where the Hotel Zvesda was.  Finally, we just called the hotel, and Scott spoke with them while I chatted with a nearby kiosk owner, resisting strong temptations to buy a copy of “Snob” magazine.

And so it was armed with a better, though still an impererfect idea of where this place was that we headed back onto the road, climbing uphill now, following one of the city’s many tramways.

Three more inquisitions of the locals, and one more call to the hotel later, we finally arrived, thoroughly  awake now and plenty ready to eat breakfast.

The Zvesda turned out to be quite the place, with plenty of taxidermy and bizarre cartoons of game animals, prancing and dancing.

We quickly unpacked all our things and began to make the room our own. It had our favorite feature for any hotel room: in room Ethernet. Now many of you readers out there might be wondering why we would not prefer wifi. And I can see why you might say this, but when you’ve been rambling for this long you start to learn that wifi networks are never as trustworthy. They kick you off, the signal drops out, the data speeds are variable, sometimes they refuse to issue IP addresses, sometimes everything breaks and one needs to go restart the router… Nowadays, I see wireless at a hotel and get a little worried.

Ethernet, on the other hand, is almost always guaranteed to give you a connection, and it’s often quite fast. Chinese business hotels realize this across Asia and provide the people with good old Cat-5 jacks.  Plus, asia AsiaWheeling can use internet sharing tools to spit the connection between the two of us too, no problem.  So that’s exactly what we did.

But the day was still young, and there was plenty of Irkutsk out there to wheel. So we tore ourselves away from the inter-tron, hopped on the bikes and headed out. The wikireader had run out of batteries again, and we would be loath to wheel Irkutsk without it, so finding more batteries was the first order of business. It seemed these post soviet batteries were really not up to snuff, so we stopped at a “Rosneft” station to buy a few more, selecting the name brand this time.

From there, we pedaled not too far to a large central dam that had been built on the Yenesei river right in the middle of town. There as a little broken glass riddled trail that heads out along the dam, parallel to the road used by semis and dump trucks, so we decided to take it. Here we are about half way across.

A little farther down, we found a section of the dam had been built up to act as some kind of loading and unloading operation. It looked not unlike the devices that we had seen used to move containers around in container ports, though this one seemed to be outfitted with the kind of claw we’d seen used to dredge stones and muck out of rivers and ports more than anything else. So speculation as to what exactly they do with this device is more than welcome in the comments.

On the other side of the dam, we found ourselves in a nice park, which like any Russian park, would be not quite be complete without a giant statue of Lenin.

We continued through the park, which turned out to include some really inviting trails, which began as paved and fenced off, but soon dissolved into rougher-riding gravel roads.

We continued on, into the forest on this trail, marveling at how quickly we could move from an urban center into what felt like the middle of nowhere.

As we followed this forest path further and further, it wound its way back towards the lake, and we found ourselves stumbling upon little family lakeside picnics and tanning sessions along the way. Now we were wheeling right along the shore, along a packed dirt trail. Eventually the packed dirt began to feature giant roots and elevation changes that were just too savage for even our trusty Speed TRs, so we locked them to a birch tree and headed off on foot.

The trail quite suddenly dumped us into an opening where we the foundations of a very large building were rusting and bleaching in the sun. A young Russian couple, male member overweight, pale and greasy, female member devastatingly attractive in multi-zippered one-piece hyper short dress, sat on the river banks feeding each other grapes and eyeing us as though to say “Excuse me? Can I help you?”

In case they were curious to witness something extreme, Scott did some emergency mustache trimming.

We did our best to get out of their line of sight with all haste, continuing on along the lakeside for a bit and, when the trail seemed to have petered out there, heading back to the Speed TRs, which were waiting patiently for us back in the forest.

We wheeled our way out of the forest, using a new route which dumped us out onto a large, New Englandy road, lined with orange and red leafed trees. It was already the beginning of fall here in Siberia, and we were just thrilled to be experiencing seasons, for we had not in quite some time.

Rather than get back on the dam, we decided to take a left into the automobile repair part of town. We followed along the other side of the river, probably getting almost all the way back to the train station before taking a large modern bridge back into town.

The sun, the beautiful clear river, all made even more attractive by the polarized lenses of our Maui Jims… Siberia was just too delightful.

We called a waypoint to buy some Kvas from a Produkti on the other side of the river, and lounged around in the shade, chatting about how much we’d like to import Kvas to the US and market it as “Mustache Kiss” brand soda.

We stopped at a small microbrewery on the way back to eat a bizarre hot dog salad, before returning to the Zvezda to lean head-on into the backlog of correspondence for you, dear reader.

That evening we dined on things from a nearby grocery, more exactly fishy things from a nearby grocery. There was black caviar, tiny stinky fish, medium size stinky fish, and one giant smoked chunk of stinky Baikal fish, all accompanied by the mildly stinky, salty smoked string cheese that we were becoming so fond of and a loaf of rye bread.

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.

We woke up that next morning in Novosibirsk, and headed downstairs to see what the breakfast was like at the hotel Novosibirsk.

And we are pleased to announce, dear reader, that it was a breakfast buffet unprecedented since the Hotel Puri in Malacca Malaysia. There were many kinds of meat, hot and cold, eggs to order, porridge of all kinds, fruit, many selections of breads and pastry, a large station just dedicated to a kind of mashed up cottage cheese called Tvorok, a made to order Blin station, and last but not least plenty of good strong coffee.

On top of that, there was some more of that blazingly fast wifi right there in the breakfast nook, in case we wanted to download copies of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan at 500 k/s. As you can imagine, we spent quite some time lounging around computing before heading out to do a little more serious Novosibirsk wheeling. And so we ran back up to the room to grab our Dawn Patrols, checked in once with the front desk to confirm that our registration had gone through without a hitch, and to ask the best place to buy leather jackets in town before then hit the road. Our first stop was the train station. We had purchased our train tickets online (way to go PЖД!) and so we had only to head over to the local e-ticket window to pick them up .Unfortunately, the e-ticket pickup window had a most complex schedule imaginable, and we had managed to come during one of the many 45 minute long hour e-ticket window closures which are randomly dispersed throughout the day. Rather than wait around, we decided to do a little wheeling and stop back later.

So we wheeled on, away from the train station, past a “Fennimore Cooper” branded wild west themed restaurant, and on towards the main drag, known as Krasny Prospekt, or red street.

The women at the front desk at the hotel Novosibirsk had directed us to a rather giant mal. Not long after wandering into the place, we began to become pretty sure it would not be the place to buy the AsiaWeeling leather jackets. It was very posh, in a way that only stores in Russia can be. There were, of course, your international name brands here and there, but what made it so startling was that all around us there were totally unheard of and completely wild domestic Russian brands selling for truly absurd amounts of money.

Just for fun we wandered into a leather jacket shop and tried on some truly intimidating specimens, double breasted, and covered in zippers and studs. The prices were in the thousands of dollars, through, despite stange and un-known brands emblazoned all over them. Eventually, we lost interest and headed back out for some more wheeling.

From there we headed down the road further in search of a more manageable market for leather goods. The sun came out as we rode, and soon we were bathed in that most uncommon and glorious thing, I beautiful warm day in Siberia. When we rode by this amazing umbrella concept doorway, we had no choice but to stop and appreciate it for a moment.

But a moment only, for there was much more wheeling to do, and the streets of this city were too inviting and  sparsely trafficked to resist. We rode on, then, by a giant central park, where old men played chess on concrete outdoor tables, and onwards past crumbling imperial style housing blocks.

We took a right onto a forested street the skirted the back edge of the park, and followed it until it brought us to a large church. It had been quite some time since we’d seen one of these… in Lebanon, perhaps? This one was of course a little different than any Lebanese church, with huge metallic onion domes and double perpendicular bars on the crosses.

We continued to wheel on past the church and into a more industrial neighborhood. We took a right turn once again onto a muddier and more crumbling drive, which took us through a neighborhood of sagging wooden houses and untamed prairie-like yards. We stopped at a kiosk in this neighborhood to purchase some water, but finding that it was well over a dollar for a medium sized bottled, we decided to wheel on.

I apologized to the woman, saying it was a bit too expensive for us, and just as we were about to go, she asked me to stop. “What do you want to do with the water?” she asked.

“Well, drink it.” I replied. She then told me to wait a second and went into the back of her Kiosk to dip a plastic container full of water from a large vessel she had in the back.

“Here have some of this. It’s free.” We thanked her and drank deeply.

The water tasted good. We have no idea if it was tap water or not, but it certainly did not make us sick. I thought then back to the Russian cyclist, Elya, which we’d met in Cambodia. She had said the water was safe to drink all around Russia… I hadn’t believed her, but maybe she was right all along.

We then ordered a couple of cups of coffee from the lady, which where were priced at a much more reasonable 12 cents per cup, and along with the coffees came two complimentary sausage rolls. “Please take these. For your health, she said.” We tried to refuse, Arab style, for a bit and then accepted them, for they smelled amazing. They were something like a cross between a croissant and a corn dog.

We munched down on those, and I did my best to make small talk with the lady in between customers. She was a new entrepreneur here. Recently having parted ways with her husband, she had bought this kiosk and erected it here. She explained that she did not have to pay for the land, here, since it was on the roadside, but that she did need to pay quite a lot to get a certificate of health approval from the powers that be. She pointed up proudly to here certificate.

“How often do you need to get a new one?” I asked.

“Only if a cop comes by and makes trouble with you.” She said smiling and winking. Quite a place, this one.

We hopped back on the bikes then, and headed back towards the heart of the city. Notice here, how differently Beeline advertizes in Russia as compared to the Uze and the Kaz, or even Vietnam and Cambodia.

We continued wheeling, past more giant cookie cutter housing blocks, and eventually noticed we were thirsty, so we wandered into a giant grocery store, bought waters there and investigated the giant selection of frozen Russian dumplings, called Pelmini. We drank deeply and talked about how every culture seems to have its dumpling. The Turkic cultures have their Manty, the Chinese their Jaotse and their Baozi, the Russians their Pelmini, England and America, their dumplings to name a few.

We headed back out to the street, unlocked the bikes, and spent a while staring at an amazing copper colored classic soviet car before climbing back on the cycles.

From there, we wheeled on to a more central market district where we continued the search for leather jackets. The jackets still proved difficult, but we were confident we’d find the right ones eventually. We did find this fantastic mathematically based advertisement for… we’re not sure… reading in the city?

Anyone that can unpack this in the comments is more than welcome to. Here’s their website… still confusing…

We dodged in and out of malls and shops, finding some fantastic huge Russian women’s boots, but still no Jackets.

We headed from there back towards the train station, timing our wheel to shoot the window when the e-ticket kiosk would open back up. In doing so, we found ourselves on the wrong side of the station, which gave us the opportunity to take a giant overpass above the tracks of this cities huge Trans-Siberian station.

We spent quite some time lingering above the tracks, taking in the operations.

The ticket office was indeed open when we arrived, and the woman who worked there was very patient and methodical as she prepared our tickets for us, showing us exactly how the schedule would work, and underlining that all the train times would be in Moscow time, and not to let that confuse us. Fair enough ma’am.

Tickets for the trains all the way to Ulan Ude in hand, we wheeled from there to a large park, where it seemed it had become city wide cocktail hour. Cocktail is also not quite the right word… It was more like city-wide I’m-off-work-it’s-time-to-Gulyat-with-a-beer-in-hand-hour.

We passed by this very loud and interesting statue.

Your guess is as good as ours as to what components of this are intended by the artist and what are graffiti. From there we headed out of the park, past an interesting geodesic dome and a large wavelike seashell opera house.

For dinner that night, we decided to sample the fare at one of Novosibirsk’s many Traktirs.

The Traktir is a kind of Russian Institution. It’s a theme restaurant that is privately duplicated thousands of times in nearly every Russian city. The algorithm goes like this: Decorate the interior of the place with tons of wood, or fake wood if you can afford it. Make it look as much like the inside of a log cabin as you can. Then fill the walls and ceiling with as much rural schlock as they can hold up; I’m talking hoes, buckets, ropes, saddles, chains, quilts, whatever you can get your hands on. Windows should be minimized, and the staff should be hired only if very attractive, blonde, and female, and placed in a truly ridiculous costume, bright red britches will do, excessive bits of lace and shiny clasps are preferred. Then after all of that is done, you can start thinking about the food.

This is the Russian way, in restaurants at least: concept first, then everything else.

The food should be homey, though, nothing too spicy, nothing too loud. Plenty of meat, plenty of potatoes, a few soups would be good. Black bread is a must, and above all else plenty of booze, for that Russian stereotype is not so far from the truth.

We ordered Borsch and Solyanka (both came with plenty of sour cream and fresh dill), and a large plate of meats which was from the “to beer” section of the menu, which featured dishes paired with beer. We got our giant plate, which turned out to be filled with 4 kinds of meat (sausage, chicken wings, lamb Shashlik, and roast chicken skin), fresh cukes, onions and tomatoes, and plenty of deep fried potato wedges. Petty darn American if you ask me. And it came included with a couple of large glasses of Siberian Crown Lager, a sudsy local cheapo.

We landed in Novosibirsk to find it cloudy and threatening rain. We filed off the Air Astana propeller plane and walked down the stairs and onto the runway. The first thing we noticed was that this was a new climate. It was cool and fall-like, new Englandy even. We climbed onto a bus with our fellow travelers, and a ever so slightly grinning fellow wearing a bright white captain’s hat and white gloves piloted the thing across the jet way and over to the terminal.

We had made friends with a fellow on the airplane, another Mongol Rallier, who had suffered a tough accident, in which the entire drive train of their Ford Transit had completely disintegrated somewhere in Western Kazakhstan. He was headed now to Novosibirsk to meet up with some other Mongol Rally participants in hopes of Still making it to Ulaanbaatar.

He spoke no Russian and had never been to the country before, so we accompanied him over to the entry card filling out booth, to tackle the issue of filling out the forms as a team. They were, of course, only in Russian, and I was struggling to figure mine out when a starchy and immaculately uniformed woman came over, demanded to see my Russian visa, and then low and behold, filled out the entire form for me in a few minutes flat, all in beautiful cursive Cyrillic. How’s that for service!

The entry process was completely painless, and performed by a strikingly beautiful woman, who welcomed me to Siberia in Russian before stamping my papers and handing them back to me.

On the other side of passport control, our luggage was already waiting for us. A few men with adorable trained drug sniffing dachshunds were wandering around the place. As I headed over to pick up my bag, one of them came over to me with his dog and gave me a quick solute. “May I?” he asked in Russian. “Of course,” I replied. The little chocolate covered guy then proceeded to stick his nose up under the lip of my pack, tail just whipping around like mad. “Ok. Thank you.” The man said, and flagged me on towards customs, which was also a walk in the park. I put all my luggage through a old Russian-made X-ray scanner with plenty of Dr. Who-esque lights and readouts on it, and then walked directly out the large electric sliding doors, which had been jammed by a piece of triangular wood to be always open.

Outside it was brisk, and overcast. I looked out on a small parking lot, a military base, and some big stretches of pine forest. The air was clean and crisp. My goodness it felt great to be in Siberia. Cab drivers began coming up to me and asking if I needed to get into Novosibirsk. “I’ve got a bicycle, so no need.” I replied.

“And where are you hiding a bicycle?” they asked. I patted the bag slung over my shoulder.

“Just watch this.”

Scott soon exited the facility in similarly high spirits “I feel like I’m in Germany!” he exclaimed and we began to unfold and reassemble the cycles. As we did so, we began to collect a crowd around us of interested cab drivers. My Russian was getting better, and now that we’d spent that day in the Mountains outside of Tashkent with Shoney’s friends, I knew enough Russian swear words to understand what they were saying, and most of it was pretty flattering.

As I worked, I joked around with them and talked about the cycles, where we’d ridden them so far, how the gears and internal hub transmission worked, and about our plans in Siberia. They seemed to be generally not only approving, but dare I say… respectful?

I realized, as I chatted with these guys that it was the first time we had collected a crowd of interested people around us in some time. It was the first time people had showed interest in the cycles since Shymkent, or even back in Uzbekistan. And it felt great. I found myself remembering why I love AsiaWheleing, why I love traveling and why cycling new cities is such an amazing way to see them.

I had been worried for a moment that Siberia would be as grumpy as the northern Kazakh cities had been, but thanks be to Jah this was proving not the case.

And so it was with a chorus of “good lucks” from the gallery of cab drivers that we hopped onto the cycles and headed down the road. We got another small salute from the guard at the gates to the airport. I asked him the way to Novosibirsk city center as we rolled by, and he directed us onwards, calling out “Maladietz,” which means more or less “way to go, man!” or “Good show, old boys!”

And then we were wheeling. And it felt great. It was a totally new climate and a new landscape. After being in either steaming Jungles or dry deserts for the past 8 months, it felt great to be in a temperate zone, like coming home for the holidays.

The roads were decent, but there was no shoulder, and certainly no bike lane. In fact, during the entire 20 km ride into Novosibirsk, we saw perhaps one other fellow on a bike. Wheeling, it seemed, would not be popular pastime here in Russia. Luckily, traffic was not too dense, and the drivers on the road were so surprised to see two fellows in Vietnamese motor cycle helmets riding fully loaded down with packs that they gave us plenty of room.

We stated to hit the outskirts of Novosibirsk and stopped to confirm our trajectory again, this time at a bus stop in one of the more far-flung suburbs. I had an interaction with a local that was far from the Indonesian smile or the cheerful vibes of Laos, but it was not openly hostile and combative the way my interactions had been in Kazakhstan. And it felt great. There is certainly a sheen of grouchiness to the Russians, I wouldn’t dare deny that, but it’s really just superficial, almost a cultural or stylistic choice, and easily broken through with just a few words of conversation.

It began to mist on us, ever so slightly as we made our way into the more gnarly and built up city center. Little droplets of water were clinging to my mustache and wool sweater as we pedaled across a large trestle bridge over the river, Ob. We passed by a couple of young men on the bridge, who’s fantastic leather jackets and completely wild vertical mullets convinced us that we needed to adopt a little Russian style before we left Siberia. They were like the perfect cross between Jack White and David Bowie.

We had, in the depths of our time in Astana, riddled with bed bug bites, and computing in the lobby of the Radisson, decided to just go ahead and splash out a little here in Novosibirsk. We had been advised by Ms. Helen Stuhrrommereim, that our first registration here in Russia was the most important, and that in the future we would only need register in a city that we would be staying in for more than three days. More than a three day stay in a city is rare on AsiaWheeling, and we had read that there was only one Hotel in Novosibirsk that would be guaranteed to both be open to foreigner guests, and be sure to register you, and that was the Hotel Novosibirsk. It was by no means a cheap hotel, not by anyone’s standards, and certainly not by AsiaWheeling’s. But we had booked it. And over the internet no less. We could not even remember the last time we stayed at a hotel that could be booked over the internet (ok… yes we can… it was probably the intercontinental in Muscat with the Illustrious Mr. fu).

We stopped by an ATM on the way to the hotel. It was a Russky Standart ATM. I had, living in Petersburg become familiar with their world famous Russkiy Standart Vodka…

…but I had not yet learned that the vodka company had made a foray into the world of banking!

The rain stopped just as quickly as it had started, and we found ourselves at a large central intersection. We stopped there on the quickly drying streets to ask a pedestrian who was so startled to see us, that he responded to our question of “Do you know where the Hotel Novosibirsk is?” with a simple “yes,” and them some dumbfounded glassy eyed staring at us and our cycles.

“Could you tell me where?”

“Ah yes of course…”

And two blocks later we were looking at one of the ugliest, blockiest concrete hotels we had ever seen, dropped down like a giant alien tombstone, right there in front of us.

The misting rain was started back up again as we wheeled our bikes into the lobby. It was certainly a much more impressive hotel on the inside than the out. We headed up to the gleaming mahogany front desk, and were immediately assigned a few beautiful women, one of whom showed us where to park the bikes, the other of whom pulled up my registration online and took the payment.

They ran a tight ship here. They took our passports from us and registered us right there and then, scanning all the relative paperwork and sending off the completed forms via email, giving our passports back in a matter of minutes.

Feeling just great about this place, we headed up to our room, which was not Chinese business quality, but is was plenty clean. The hot water seemed to be inactive, and the wireless internet network up there didn’t seem to be giving up any data, but our view of the train station across the street was magnificent.

We changed out of our sandals, threw on our pointy Uzbek shoes and sweaters and split to go stroll a little in Russia. Strolling is of course not quite the right term, though. What we really wanted to do was Gulyat. The russians have many words for walk, just as Inuits have many words for snow, and Gulyat is the Russian term for entertaining one’s self by wandering around, chatting and pointing their heads into various shops parks, cafés and the like. Gulyat is about as close to a national sport as Russia has. I mean they like hockey, some of them, but they all love to Gulyat. You could even say that the Gulyat is not unlike wheeling without the bike.

And so Gulyat we did, stopping first at a Blin place, so that Scott could try his first Russian crepe. We chose to get them with smoked salmon and fresh dill and eat them as they walked. They were splendid.

And so we strolled on, through the gentle mist, into a large outdoor market, where they were selling everything from fruit to fish.

From there, we strolled on into one of the large soviet built housing blocks, all of which have a giant interior courtyard, usually sporting a children’s playground and a few small gardening plots.

In Soviet times, the Russians had very few options when it came to brands and types of consumer products. And, though the Soviet Union has been long gone now, there is still a reactionary increase in the selection of products. This cigarette kiosk for instance, has only a typically Russian selection of brands and sub-brands.

We were not interested in cigarettes, so we headed on, past another one of those Kvas tanks that we’d seen so much in Kazakhstan. Here in Novosibirsk they seemed to go with the more subtle blue and white patterning over the louder yellow they’d preferred in Astana.  Continuing to stroll, we inspected the offering of restaurants and pubs in which we might be able to feast.

The sun was just setting as we arrived back at the hotel Novosibirsk. It felt great to be in here. Our hotel made us feel like princes and the city had a fresh and invigorating vibe to it. So we decided to go out and celebrate by purchasing the first glass of ale that we’d been able to find since Hong Kong. It came accompanied by the classic beer Russian beer snacks, a kind of black crouton snack called Grenki.

As we walked back to the Hotel Novosibirsk, we stopped at a Ukrainian Peasant Branded baked potato stand, and got a couple of baked potatoes with cheese and mayonnaisey salads on top. They were heavy and greasy, but also quite satisfying.

Back at the hotel, we continued to strike out on the hot water and the in-room wifi, but all was forgiven when we went downstairs to the second floor lobby to connect. Not only could we easily get on the network, but we were seeing unprecedented speeds. I’m taking four or five hundred kilobytes per second downloads. We were in Russia now, and it was time for AsiaWheeling to get back to being seriously on the Internet.

The sun was still far from risen when we awoke our last morning in Kazakhstan. I wandered into the kitchen and began making coffee, calling to Scott to make sure he was rousing himself as well. It was a little before four in the morning, and I headed into Scott’s room to take down the laundry line that we had put up in there.

I chewed on a small bowl of cereal, and Scott nibbled the last of yesterdays raisin and nut bread, but neither of us were very hungry. Coffee would, of course, be key, so we focused mostly on getting some of that in our system.

We headed out into the chill of the streets. It was downright cold our here, and I took out my sweater to wear on the ride.

As we pedaled on through these familiar streets, past cops setting up traps to extract bribes from early morning drunk drivers, and workers lined up at fluorescently lit bus stops, the sun began to shed the first purple glimmers of light across the sky.

We headed over the large central bridge, past the good old Radisson Hotel (may your ping times grow ever shorter), and on pas the Khan Shatyr and into the Kazakh country side. We nearly scared a fellow to death, when we rolled up to him at a stoplight in the outskirts of Astana and he rolled down his foggy window to find two fellows wheeling. He confirmed that we were indeed on the correct road to get to the airport, breathing out the words in a huge cloud of condensation and cigarette smoke.

It was really downright cold out here. I should have put on my Uzbek shoes, for my toes were absolutely freezing as we wheeled. Soon we were just hammering through the Kazakh step. The area was flat as a pancake and we had a mild tailwind, so we were making magnificent time. As more light spread across the sky, my spirits began to lift. We were doing this. We were choosing freedom. There was to be no haggling with a cab driver, no messing with the bus system, we were just wheeling the 35 kilometers out to the airport, and it felt good.

We passed by the prestigious “Harvard of the Steppes,” Nazarbayev University and marveled at what time of learnings may be happening within.

As light poured over the steppe, we took a right turn onto a giant and savage highway. I called out to a cop who was deep in the process of extracting a bribe from a driver he’d just pulled over, “This way to the airport?”

“Da.” he said, scowling.

Excellent.

We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to pack up the cycles properly and to check in before departing. The airport itself was quite impressive, designed by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa,and drawing from Uzbek and other central Asian architectural traditions, combined with that certain metal and glass je ne sais quoi that all airports share.

The interior was, quite thankfully, well heated, and we rolled the bikes in without attracting any attention from security. We proceeded straight to the elevators, and rode them up the the second floor, where we packed the bikes up right outside of check-in.

The packing went very well, and we even paid some enterprising young fellows to wrap both of our bikes in that protective film which had so terrified us when we were in Kolkata on the pilot study.

Our hearts fell through when we walked up to the Air Astana counter to check in. Not only was the woman grumpy but…

“You want to charge us WHAT to bring the cycles on the plane?”

We tried all our maneuvers: spitting business cards, explaining that they were not full sized bikes, weighing them and showing that they were not in excess of the luggage limit, encouraging them to be reconsidered as a simple “fragile bag,” but all failed. And in the end I headed over to a little glass kiosk and paid a grumpy woman in a ridiculous looking Astana airlines beret more money than I care to mention, even to you, dear reader. It was like a final blow, a final stab at the soul of AsiaWheeling before we left Kazakhstan.

But the universe is a mysterious and twisted place, full of both fantastic and terrible things. And as we wandered away from the check in desk grumbling, we thought: at least the airport was heated.

And then we opened up our laptops to work a little on correspondence for you, dear reader. And low and behold, free wifi was broadcasting through the airport. Very nice touch, Astana. You’re well on your way to redeeming yourself.

Plus there was a fantastic Beeline branded complementary charging station. More points for the Astana airport!

“This is great!” I said to Scott, uploading things to the intertron and typing away, “We just should have flown Aeroflot.”

“Yep.” Scott replied, “But to be honest, if the food is good on this flight, I might even be willing to forgive them.”

As the flight hurdled through the clouds into Russian airspace, we passed the time by reading Kazakhstan’s twice monthly English newspaper supplement Focus, which carried articles with names like “International Banks Growing Like Weeds in Kazakhstan.”

The paper also carried a number of articles focusing on an upcoming OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operating in Europe) summit which Nazarbayev very much wants Obama to attend.  Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai was scheduled to appear, and we spent some time discussing what the political press would be printing about the AsiaWheeling Holiday party.

The inflight magazine, Tengri, proved an unending source of entertainment as well.  Trumpeting a recent success, the airlines CEO wrote in his letter to passengers “Air Astana is pleased to announce that it has been ranked  third amongst carriers for the “Best Airline: Eastern Europe” award by SkyTrax.  The first two positions were held by European Union flag carriers, making Air Astana the best airline in Central Asia.”

Ouch, we thought.  Talk about damning with faint praise.  We imagined Uzbekistan Airways to be a magical non-stop in-air festival of plov, filled with smiles and free folding bicycle transportion and an in-flight catalog of pointy black shoes priced in sum.  We could only hope, dear reader, that our arrival in Russia would be joyous.

We woke up the next mooring in our grimy hovel of a soviet apartment in Astana, Kazakhstan, city of wonder and newness, to some violent knocking on the thick steel door of our apartment, I threw on a pair of pants and stumbled my bed bug bit ridden body over to the door, shirtless, just stinking of Ultrathon, and still working to get my eyes to focus.

It was our Babushka, the woman who rented us the apartment. Knowing that my Russian was bad, she was very careful to speak slowly and use easy to understand words. As far as I could tell, she had just come over at 8:00 in the morning to chat. So chat we did. She bustled around the apartment, noting approvingly that we had been “cooking” in the place (if boiling water for coffee and pouring bowls of cereal counts, then yes ma’am). After we had reached the full extent of my vocabulary and thoroughly chatted all the topics which I knew how to chat, she finally got down to business and we began brainstorming together places for me to hide the key when we left the next day at 5am to wheel to the airport. Finally we decided on a grubby little hole in the wall in the stairwell. And with that, she leaned over and kissed both of my cheeks. “You are such a good boy! Such a fine ‘sportsmen’” (which is the Russian term for a male or female athlete) “So brave you are! Can I call you my son?”

Oh, shucks. Sure you can call me your son, lady. And with that, she kissed both of my cheeks and gave me a big gelatinous hug, and disappeared through the door. “Be careful! Good luck, my son!” she called out as she locked the deadbolts one by one. The conversation had been a gleamingly positive interaction amidst the sea of Kazakh grumpiness. Why, showered as they are with money from the heavens, giant booming growth, and not that many people to spread the wealth among, can so many of the people we meet in this country get away with being so darned grumpy? Thank goodness for people like Nurbek (our RFID engineering friend for the bus)and our dear Babushka.

I then headed into the kitchen to burn the last bits of a lavender scented candle which we knew would do nothing to combat the mildew stench of the place. Scott rolled out of bed, no doubt awoken by our conversations, and we tried not to scratch our bed bug bites as we crunched mouthfuls of Imported Russian cereals.

From there we headed directly back to the ornate confines of the Radisson hotel, where we spent quite a few hours lapping up their wireless internet, which at nearly 20 k/s was the fastest we’d experienced in months.

When we began to get hungry again, we headed out in search of food. When we tried to do so, of course, the usual problem presented itself, namely that Astana has not too many restaurants, and what it does have is mostly hyper expensive. So we ended going to a grocery store where we purchased food for a picnic: dark bread, grapes, kefir, tiny oily fish, a couple larger smoked fish, some salty smoked string cheese,  loaf of raisin and nut bread, and a package of locally produced prosciutto type stuff.

It was all quite delicious and we talked about what a wild wheel we had had the day before as we dug into the food.

The rest of that day was spent bouncing from location to location in Astana, searching for internet, but always coming crawling back to the Radisson, which as far as we can tell, after trying multiple internet cafes, and even the supposedly wifi enabled mall, the only place in Astana where a fellow can actually connect his own computer to the interwebs. City of the future indeed…

The search for internet was reminiscent of our search for train tickets in Almaty. We would come into businesses, with the intention of paying them for use of the internet, and they would greet us with hostility and grumpiness. There were a few marked exceptions, but this was proving an incredibly tiring place to travel, not so much because of the logistical hassles, of which there were many, but mostly because of the constant drain of negative interactions with the locals. Kazakhstan had been a very important place to visit, but I was excited to get on a plane the next day and head back to Mother Russia. It had been some time for me, and I was excited to see which parts of my bright eyed and bushy tailed youthful experience of the place still held true now that I was becoming a gnarled and cynical traveler.

That evening, we were rolling by the giant medieval beer hall, “Line Brew,” that we had seen on our first wheel of Astana when we were called over by a couple of characters standing outside the restaurant smoking very thin cigarettes. They turned out to be sunglasses distributers for some of the larger malls in Astana and Almaty. And when we told them that we were sponsored by Maui Jim, taking out our Dawn Patrols as proof, they became very interested in what we were doing and invited us into the interior of the restaurant for a drink and some sausages.

They only drank Leffe beer, they explained, which here in Kazakhstan is frighteningly expensive, but they assured us that they were footing the bill, and proceeded to order a few sizzling plates of sausages. We talked with them into the night, over 12 dollar glasses of Leffe beer, about the sunglasses industry. One of them was a Slovenian chap, who had moved to Italy to play professional Soccer at the fall of the Soviet Union, and now had built a business for himself importing Italian luxury goods into the post-soviet world. The other was an Slavic Astana local, from back in the times when the city was a Soviet backwater full of caucasians. He spoke with gusto about the tumultuous changes that were happening in the city now, and summed it up quite nicely in Russian, which I will do my best to translate:

“For you it may be these bicycles and the Maui Jim. For us Kazakhs, it must to the Hummer and the Gucci.”

On our way back to the hotel, we ran into some rather inebriated Kazakh teenagers. There were four of them, who called out to us in Russian flagging us down to chat. We probably should have just ignored them as the old woman had said, but one of the lessons of AsiaWheeling has been that most people are friendly, so we decided not to, pulling our bikes over. Unfortunately, we immediately began to get a bad vibe from these guys. They were drunk and emotional, envious of us, and looking for opportunities to assert themselves. And not long after this group photo was taken, we began to feel downright hostility coming from them, even with the possibility of violence.  As we slowly made our way away from, they grabbed us by the shoulder and insist that we continue talking.

And so it was that we executed the first red alarm escape of AsiaWheeling. The fellows of course spoke only Russian, and as I was doing my best to dissolve the situation in my broken Russky, and Scott was doing his best to be endearing with the smattering of words that he had picked up since we’d landed in Uzbekistan. We were discussing in English our plan to, once we had found an opening, just hop on our cycles and disappear. We began to wheel the bikes away from the guys, which made them irate, and they began to close the gap.  Then it seemed our last chance before they would have encircled us. So we hopped on the cycles and began pedaling.

The guys did not give chase, thank goodness, for they looked fast, and with there being no handicapped access ramps in Astana, our escape route would have been easy to intercept for a man on foot, so robbed as we were of the ability to wheel up onto the sidewalk. All said, it was a hair raising experience, and we were quite happy to lock the door behind us, retreating into the rotting, stinking, and insect infested apartment that we were calling home. We hustled to pack up our things, slather on the bug repellant and go to sleep, for we had to get up in a few hours to wheel to the airport in time to catch our Air Astana flight to Novosibirsk.

We woke up that next morning in our rather filthy apartment in Astana, Kazakhstan and wandered into the kitchen to begin boiling water for breakfast.

As I fiddled with the single electric hot plate style burner that had been placed on the no longer operational and rather rusty soviet stove, I found myself scratching all over my stomach and sides.

A strolled into the bathroom and picked up my shirt to see my body dotted with bites… bed bugs. Well, I guess they would come sooner or later. Tonight I would need to figure out some kind of new strategy, but for the meantime, it would serve me better to focus on making this coffee.

That I was able to do, and soon I was joined by Scott, who also seemed to be rather covered in bites. We both grumbled a bit and sat down to a crunch audibly on mouthfuls of cereal and some of that delicious 3.2% milkfat Kazakh milk.  I have the not-so-enviable habit of salting my cereal, so we had purchased as well, a large 10 cent bag of salt, which I was happily utilizing.

The entire apartment had a dank mildew smell to it, so the evening before, we had also purchased some lavender scented candles, which we figured would be helpful in mitigating the smell. They turned out to do very little, however, other than provide a bit of flickering cheer to this otherwise soulless place. What we really needed was some heavy duty Sri Lankian or South Indian incense, but we were a very long ways (north) from that part of the world.

With stomachs full of coffee and cereal, we then went at the long overdue task of washing our clothes, which were positively filthy. The Uzbek and Kazakh washing detergents are some of the best in the world, we’ve found. They have a way of getting your clothes really, deeply, unprecedentedly, clean. The reason for this, we’ve heard, is because the regulations here in the post Soviet world allow for the use of certain chemicals which in America, Europe, and even China are illegal due to their terrible impact on the environment. Whatever the reason, we found ourselves the proud recipients of a batch of really, truly, clean clothes, and this was something to be proud of.

We strung them up in a system of clotheslines that we erected in Scott’s room.

With that task done, we set to wheeling. We began by heading out to the edges of the old Soviet part of town. You see, dear reader, Astana was originally a small soviet city, mostly populated by ethnically Slavic peoples. But when the new republic of Kazakhstan was formed, the new government felt that it needed to create a new identity and a new capitol city for itself. So, fueled by millions of oil dollars, it began construction of a concept capital in Astana, flooding the city with ethnically Kazakh peoples, and building a new city center across the river form the old soviet center (which is where the train station and our apartment were).

The soviet part of town was pretty hard scrabble, with crumbling single story homes, no sidewalks, and large plots of dirt playing the role of yards.

We wheeled on through the rougher parts of the Soviet section of Astana and on towards the river. The general quality of the buildings and the expensiveness of the cars on the street increased steadily as we approached the river. We rode past a giant stadium, with these magnificent air intake valves,

and the giant housing development of “Highville Kazakhstan.”

But it was when we crossed the river on the main central bridge that we began to see some truly gigantic and startling buildings. The first of which was probably this monstrous Wayne Manner style gothic behemoth.

We rode on from there onto a street lined with ridiculous themed restaurants, all of which were separated from the highway by a row of small trees. As we looked closer, we could see that the row of small trees was also filled with the bodies of napping construction workers.

We took a right to head into the strange themed restaurant development, and wheeled it thoroughly, gawking at the startling, over-the-top presentation of Greek, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, and Traditional Russian architectural styles. About half of the restaurants were completed, and the other half were still under construction. All of those that were finished were staffed by magnificently costumed workers, who scowled at us distractingly as we rode past.

From there we headed into a giant mall, where we ate lunch. The mall was uncomfortable, eerily quite, mostly devoid of people, and full of unused shop fronts.

We ate at a shockingly branded Russian style restaurant, where we ordered a meat cutlet, a piece of chicken, some beat salad, three thick pancakes with sour cream, a pickled herring and mayonnaise salad and two manty. The food was not bad, but not amazing either, and the plates on which it was served were some of the flimsiest and most untrustworthy pieces of dinnerware ever to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting diner.

From there we rode on to the Khan Shatyr, a huge shopping center, built under a giant translucent ger-style tent structure that was carefully designed to capture the sun’s radiation to aid it in staying warm during the brutally cold Kazakh winters. The ger, as I am sure you already know, dear reader, is the preferred nomad-friendly collapsible home popular among the Kazakhs and other Central Asian nomadic cultures. It looks like this:

Which is only vaguely like the khan shatir, which looks like this.

The closer we got to the Khan Shatir, the more gigantic we realized it was. We began by circumnavigating the thing, riding our speed TRs all the way through the huge oval of parking lot that surrounds the structure. Then, though we had already been in a mall that day, we decided we needed to go in.

It was really something inside there, bathed in light, and full of white paint and potted trees.

Like the mall in which we’d eaten lunch, it was full of tons and tons of unused retail space, but unlike the mall in which we’d eaten lunch, it was also full to the brim with Kazakh families out to enjoy the afternoon.

The first thing we did inside was stop into the architecture museum, where we could pour over the plans for the new giant indoor city that the Kazakhs are planning to build.

With oil money showing no signs of stopping, the government of Kazakhstan is planning to build an entire Khan Shatir style indoor city, complete with Venice style canals and a 3/4s size golf course!

The blueprint was really impressive, and reminded me of some of the none federation spaceships in Star Trek: the Next Generation.

From there we continued on, up to the next level, from which things were no less impressive. This level too was full of unused retail space, and also a new joint venture between KFC and a local company, which they were calling “Rostik’s.”

Nice one KFC.

Soon we found ourselves in a totally overwhelming video arcade/them park section of the mall, which made me feel like I was on some kind of none too enjoyable hallucinogenic drug.

We looked up at the sky and could see the sun beaming through the strange translucent roof above us.This place was too weird for words.

We needed to get out.

And so we did, but if we were thinking that would make this strange trip end, we were most certainly wrong. We headed next across the street towards the center of the new urban development in Astana. We stopped part way there when we noticed the locals were lining up to have their pictures taken in front of this giant statue of Luke Skywalker and a naked lady.

We couldn’t resist joining in as well.

From there, we headed on, under the giant overarching office-building-gateway of a  government building and onto the main drag, the Sheik Zayed Road of Kazakhstan, if you will.

Then the buildings became truly bizarre. For one reason or another, this place put us into a strange dreamlike state, and we rode through it as through in a trance, only half believing the things that we saw.

Part way through, we realized the physical part of us was thirsty and we wandered into a completely empty grocery store, where we wandered down unreal isles filled with all thousands of bottle of the same brand of water. So we bought some with the Technicolor currency of this strange land, and headed back out.

We continued further into the madness, past giant blocky structures, and slender towers, towards the central monument, a golden orb, suspended in the points of a giant crown, which is the symbol of this bizarre city.

We continued on from there, towards the large parliamentary building at the other side of this futuristic drive.  The government building is framed on either side by two truly unsettling golden rook shaped buildings.

Barely able to believe our eyes, we wheeled on. The parliamentary building was giant, and very impressive, seeming always close by, but proving always to be larger and further away than first estimate.

As we approached the gigantic government building, our fellow pedestrians thinned out and eventually disappeared, and eventually they were replaced by a very heavily armed and dense military presence.

With all the solders eying us as we wheeled, we decided it might be prudent to make a right turn and head over to investigate a huge turquoise curled up behemoth that turned out to be an opera house.

From there, we wheeled on, past the huge blocky center for measurements and standards, and the most monstrous Chinese business hotel of the entire trip. I imagined it being like a Mecca for Chinese business hotel connoisseurs, with the finest disposable slippers, the most delicious complementary toothpaste, the fastest in-room Ethernet jack this side of Seoul, and plenty of branded towels. I am speaking, of course, about the Petro-China Hotel. A place, no doubt, built for all the PetroChina executives that came to do business in Astana and couldn’t, until the establishment of this place, find a decent Chinese business hotel.

From the Petro-China hotel, we wheeled on over a newly laid and still quite sticky tarred gravel road.

When we saw a giant white mosque, we decided to turn onto their sprawling grounds to give them a look. They were quite beautiful, mostly gardens, with manicured and sporting raised cobblestoned paths for wheelers and strollers to utilize.

It had been a wheel for the record books and we were, I must say, a little burned out from all the wild things we’d seen. Astana was proving to be like nowhere else on Earth.

And so we wheeled back, stammering to each other, and attempting to find some previously constructed schemas with which to process what we’d just experienced, back down the giant newly paved main street of Astana and eventually back through the forest carnival area that we’d explored the day before. As I mounted the bridge back across the river to the Soviet side of town, I felt a wave of relief washing over me. Finally we were going back to a hard scrabble raw place, where things made sense.

We got back to our squalid apartment, and spent a few minutes just drinking water and attempting to relax. What a wheel that had been!

That evening we wheeled around hungrily for quite some time trying to find a restaurant that was less than 20 dollars for a plate of food. We finally settled on a pizza place, which made us this kielbasa and hot dog supreme pizza, with a side of corn and tongue salad.  It was none too tasty, but got the job done.

Once we’d filled our stomachs with matter, we headed over to the Radisson hotel, where we were able to, after a little sweet talking with the ladies at the front desk, manifest for ourselves two free 24 hour passes on the lobby wifi (Great Success!).

When midnight rolled around, we hopped on the bikes to wheel back to our apartment. As we rode, I realized that for the first time on the trip, the air was cold. I could have used a sweater, or a leather jacket even. The smiles of Indonesia certainly felt very far away as I covered my body in Ultrathon brand high intensity bug repellant and climbed onto the bed bug ridden couch on which I’d be sleeping for the next couple of days.