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.

The Sim City 2000 theme rang out loud and clear, bright and early. We were somewhere outside of Ulaanbaatar, on a train bound from Ulan Ude into Mongolian capital. The Dutch women that we’d been sharing the compartment with had already woken up and had enough time to brew their first cup of coffee. They drank a strange space age kind of Nescafe that foamed and bubbled, whipping itself right before your eyes as you mixed it with hot water.

We had just time enough to mix a couple cups of our own ho hum run of the mill instant coffee which we mixed with a little Siberian 7.5% high octane coffee mixing milk. We barely had enough time to pour two of those cups back before the train was hissing and squeaking it’s arrival at the station.

The Ulaanbaatar station was very impressive, blocky and imposing. It was a cool morning outside and still felt kind of like Siberia. As we were strapping things down, Buryat looking women who spoke perfect English were coming up to us and offering us guesthouses for 4 dollars a night per person. It wasn’t Siberia, but seemed at least that hotels would be cheap here. What a strange phenomenon, this pining for Siberia. We pulled on the leather jackets and hopped on the bikes.

Scott had lost his lock again. This one had been a really great one too, purchased in Turkey right before we left, but regardless we were in the market for a replacement, so we scanned the streets for bike shops as we rode. This did not look like a city that purchased many bikes, however… at least not bikes for the people.

It was touristy. The most touristy place we’d been in months, I’d say, since perhaps Istanbul. The city was full of Irish pubs, night clubs, tour agencies, and all the other less savory businesses that cater to vagrant backpacker riff raff. Many of the signs included English as well.  How did we all of a sudden arrive from Siberia into Phuket?

The Mongolians use the Cyrillic alphabet (more or less) so I was stuck in a loop of trying to access the Russian sector of my memory banks as we rode by signs and advertisements, but continually coming up empty handed, the words being all in Mongolian. In fact, there was a shockingly small amount of Russian or Chinese on the signs here. For a country wedged between two great powers, both of which spoke not much English, it seemed interesting to me that Mongolia was choosing English as its second language of choice.

It was early, and the streets of Ulaanbaatar were empty, giving us the very incorrect indication that this was a reasonably relaxed city to wheel in. Feeling none to pressed for time, we began to meander through heart of the city, looking for hotels, guest houses, places to eat breakfast, and the like.

We rode by some Australian people, who I feel I can now safely say were Mongol Ralliers, having recently achieved their goal of driving from Europe to Ulaanbaatar. They looked like they’d been out all night, and yelled out to us as we drove by “So you think you can cycle in this city, eh? Have you seen the traffic?”

“What traffic?” we called back gesturing to the empty road around us.

We’d find out soon enough, though, exactly what they were talking about. Just give the maniacs time to wake up…

Speaking of maniacs and breakfast time, it was still having not found a hotel that we pulled into a little local eatery to eat a little breakfast and drink a little more coffee. All they had in the way of coffee, however, was this “American Flavour CoffeeKing” The stuff was really bad, like an old a melted coffee-flavored lozenge blended with Elmer’s glue.

The mug that came with it on the other hand…

We could not read the menu at all, though my mind kept trying to interpret it as Russian, so we just ordered at random. The food was interesting, like a cross between Chinese food and Russian food, without quite the stylistic refinement of either.

We got a very mayonnaisey carrot salad, a large pickled cabbage salad; and a hamburger patty with a fried egg on top, doused in what might have been termed Pace brand mild enchilada sauce, accompanied by two squat gers of rice each sporting a little areola of ketchup.

The women who ran they place were very friendly, though, and while they spoke no English, Russian, or Chinese, they were very kind to us in allowing us to plug our laptops in and to investigate the maps in the Lonely Planet.

So it was with a slightly better idea of where we were that we headed back out on the cycles. This by no means meant that we were out of the woods yet, however, for finding the hotel that we’d selected turned out to be another Irkutsk style venture into the confusing depths of a huge soviet housing block.

Inside the block, we were able to find first an old man who spoke Russian and was able to help get us to the right sub-sector of the gargantuan apartment block complex, then a young boy who was more than happy to lead us right to the door of the French youth hostel that we’d been interested in. They were unfortunately, however, booked solid for that night.

So we followed a Mongolian girl who spoke French but no English across that particular section of the soviet housing block over to the Sunny Motel, which turned out to be quite affordable and very cheap. The husband and wife who ran the place were also stellar folks, learning English, Chinese and Russian, and running a spick and span little operation.

We dropped off our things there, and climbed back on the cycles to head out to the train station. We needed to get from Ulaanbaatar over to Inner Mongolian China sometime in the next week and a half, but we had no idea exactly how often, and where or when the trains ran.

Now free of our packs, wheeling felt good, so nimble and speedy were we. We made short work of the trip to the giant yellow MTZ station.

Inside we found a bewildering number of options, including international trains to Beijing and cities in Inner Mongolia on a bi-weekly basis, and domestic trains much more often which take a traveler to just a few kilometers shy of the Chinese border.

Still not knowing exactly what our plans here in Mongolia would be, but happy to find that we had many options, we headed back out to unlock the cycles, stopping as we did so first at a SIM card kiosk and then at a very cheap Korean powdered coffee machine, which had been retrofitted to take Mongolian Tugrug.  The problem with the retrofitting operation was that the machine was unable to give change, and so cheap was the coffee that our smallest bill was enough for 6 cups. So we made friends and just bought them coffee with the excess change.

Then it was time to do a little wheeling. The traffic was getting very thick as we pulled back onto the roads, and we began to learn that the drivers here are none too perceptive. Ulaanbaatar is filled with giant and expensive SUVs, in part because they are useful during the long and savage Mongolian winters, and in part because of the recent boom in foreign direct investment and development centered on the exploitation of Mongolian mineral resources.

Regardless of petty excuses, this was a highly technical wheeling city. A rider in Ulaanbaatar must be vigilant against maniac drivers, assuming always that the people around you will be breaking the rules, never signaling their intent, and generally ignoring not just lanes, but the border between road and sidewalk as well.

Ulaanbaatar is also full of gers too, the traditional Mongolian nomadic dwelling. Gers are a pretty ingenious structure, resilient against the weather, and adjustable to increase ventilation, store heat, and the like. It might come as no surprise, then, that amidst the blocky soviet structures and new shiny metal and glass buildings of Ulaanbaatar, there are also plenty of gers just set up on open bits of pavement. As far as we could tell, there were no rules about parking, and I would assume this extends to parking of houses as well.

Suddenly, as it always seems to go, we realized we were starving. And so we dropped into a very high concept 1960s plastic shape themed restaurant, which turned out to serve traditional Mongolian food.

We ordered blind again, being unable to interpret the menu, but more or less struck gold with a large plate of red cabbage salad, and a sizzling meat and egg scramble. We also got a dumpling soup which came with a certain kind of white milky looking pork broth, which I’d only up until that point found at Korean restaurants.

We headed north then, past Freedom Night Club (American Soft Power get’s er done), and by a very intriguing Chinese business hotel. We decided to pull an uber lichht and send Scott in to shuo a little and see what he could see. He came out looking very excited. “The place is great. It’s definitely a Chinese business hotel, it’s about 20 bucks a night, it has in-room Ethernet, and there’s a dank looking restaurant downstairs.”

“Excellent.” I replied.

“They’re booked solid right now, but I’ve made some friends in there, and they’ll call us tomorrow.”

Feeling great about that option, we hit the road again, wheeling northwards and taking a right turn, veering slightly down hill now and out into the countryside. We spotted a large grocery store, and locked the bikes outside to go in and buy water and generally gawk at the products.

Here we saw the return of the Kickapoo joy juice that had been such a smash hit with David Miller in Borneo. Meat was moving quickly here, and the shoppers were invited to pick and choose from unpackaged piles of it that just sat in the bottom of the cooling unit.

Anything thing which we could not help but notice inside this and all the other Mongolian grocery stores that were to follow was that absolutely everything here that could be was branded with the name of Chengis Khan. There was Chengis Khan Vodka, energy drinks, crackers, sodas, beer snacks, chewing gum, cigarettes and lord knows what else.

From the grocery store, we headed on further into the countryside, and taking a left to wheel towards the Ger district, the part of town where there are many more gers than permanent structures, and where a family might move for anywhere from 2 months to 5 years to spend some time participating in the largest and only truly developed Urban Economy in Mongolia.

The air in Ulaanbaatar is some of the worst in the world, especially in winter. This happens for two reasons: one is that the local wind paterns and the proximity of certain elevation changes encourage air to local air to hang around the city. The other is that during the winter the poor in the ger district burn lots of coal and dung to heat their homes, while the impoverished burn garbage (we’re talking plastic bags to batteries). All that smoke gets trapped in the same cycle of bad air caused by reason number one, and makes for a truly heinous lungful.

Homes in the ger district are separated out by wooden fences and cordoned off into treeless yards. We rode along by the central giant trench, which seemed to act as a collecting spot for all the refuse of the community, and took it up into the hills, the heart of the ger district.

The people we encountered were generally smiling and seemed happy to see us visiting their neighborhood, which I am sure is not on the normal tourist’s itinerary for Ulaanbaatar. We were riding over the loose gravel roads, cresting the top of the hill when all of a sudden three new riders joined out pack.

They were boys, locals of the ger distric, and out wheeling presumably after school. They stuck with us for the rest our wheel through ger district, constantly challenging us to ride harder, or take turns faster. I was beginning to understand that the wild driving of the people in this city might stem from a more basic biological need for speed…

Back on the main road, we pushed it hard back into town. We were fighting a terrible headwind, and so the going was tough, with cars whipping by us, and the subsequent clouds of dry dirt they threw up ending up cought in the teeth. I would hold my breath as I went threw a cloud of dust, pedaling hard and thinking the heavens for the Maui Jims.

That evening, as we attempted to write, lying in our beds at the hotel, a savage domestic depute broke out. Two people, man and woman, in the room next to us were really having an intense argument. The walls were very thin, so we were the sorry recipients of the entire ordeal. Soon the argument escalated to screaming. Then we began to hear stomping and slamming of doors, then bashing noises and more screaming. Soon, what was almost certainly now a physical fight burst out into the hallway, and we heard a human body smash against the wall.

All the while, Scott and I were in the room, listening to Tom Waits’ album “Alice” wondering what we should do.

Throughout the next few hours, the battle nextdoor would simmer down then heat up again, with more banging, screaming, slamming and similarly violent noises. The Sunny Hotel was nice and all, but we needed to get a new place first thing the next morning.

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.

It was even colder in Ulan Ude than it had been in the other Siberian cities that we visited. It was also the crack of dawn and the coldest part of the day, when our train hissed into the station. We climbed off, put on the leather jackets, and began the gray early morning wheel into town.

We reached the city center in no time, but finding a hotel was more difficult. We had heard that Ulan Ude was a cheaper and more backpacker-filled Siberian town. It was cheaper, but we saw no signs of tourists, and most of the hotels were still the usual Siberian business traveler-fueled, inflated price. We did get a chance to wheel by the largest bust of Lenin in the world, though, which helped to fuel us on in the search for lodging.

We spent quite some time wheeling around town that morning, as the sun grew ever higher in the sky, poking our heads in and out of many different hotels.

It was not till our fifth or sixth try that we found one less than $100 a night. And when we finally did, we decided immediately to stay there.

It was a place called the Hotel Buryatiya, a giant and degraded Soviet behemoth, with hundreds if not thousands of rooms, and which still used the old Soviet system of having a woman staffing each floor, as a kind of grouchy secretary, manager, and general concierge for the everyone staying on the floor.

We left our bikes in the lobby and headed up to the room, showing the floor woman a slip of orange carbon copied paper, which she exchanged for the key to our room. Our room was delightful, with some really unique wall fixtures, an old Soviet radio, and a great view of the city.

It felt great to do work at the desk in that room, and though there was no Internet in the hotel, we found ourselves spending time typing away, so pleased were we with the space.

We spent a little time that morning working on correspondence and asking our floor lady to bring us some hot water to make coffee with, but soon the call of the open road and our grumbling stomachs pulled us out into the city.  We could see already we were in a very different place. To begin with, the people here were Asian, looking more like Kazakhs or Koreans than Slavs. Second, it was definitely poorer, not a lot so, but enough to make it much easier to find real grubby down-home joints.

We ended up eating at this place:

This green shack slapped together with corrugated metal was a cheap eating hall specializing in small portions of greasy, salty food. With stomachs full once again, we headed back out into Ulan Ude to do a little more exploring. We found ourselves in a pedestrian mall, which was flooded with people in large furry suits, and families out for a stroll. It was then that we noticed neither of us had service on our cell phones, so we headed into a Beeline Shop that we spotted as we rode by.

Beeline explained to us that here in Buryatya, they were only supporting 3G (welcome to the future) and our old GSM phones would not work here. We had two choices, then: we could either buy a new 3G phone and continue to use Beeline with a new SIM, or just get a SIM card from one of their competitors.

We were in no way interested in buying an overpriced fancy pants Russian phone, so it was with much sadness in our hearts that we headed out into 3G-only Buryatya to find a MegaFon shop.

Buryatya… what was this place? It was the name of our hotel of course, but what else? We really didn’t know, so we took out the wikireader. It was the name of the semi-autonomous region of Russia where we were right now. In fact, the people here did not even identify themselves so much as Russians as they do Buryats. Of course ,they all spoke Russian, but most of them also spoke Buryat, a Mongolian dialect. They were Buddhists here, too, and had been for a long time. Buryatya also sports one of the fastest growing populations of all of Siberia, and is nestled up around the world famous lake Baikal. Well that was something to begin contextualizing our experiences.

Meanwhile in Ulan Ude, we were trying to get SIM cards, but waylaid by our fascination with these modern stainless steel urinals that were so popular in the city. I applaud your taste, Buryatiya.

We did find a MegaFon shop, but being still not fully registered in the city, we would need to wait ’til the next day to get phones. So, with some time left, we headed off on a very long and frustrating search for Internet.

We could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if only we had taken the time to look back on the lessons we learned in Kazakhstan: When Internet is scarce and expensive, just go to the fanciest hotel in town and vagabond your way onto their network.

Eventually, this is what we did, wandering all sweaty and disheveled into the upscale café at the giant and expensive Hotel Cagaan Morin.

We ended up working there for hours and hours, with all intentions of only spending a couple bucks each, but something about the place began to endear us, and soon we were drinking multiple  cups of americano coffee and ordering sour cream blini.

The place was nice, tastefully lit with a cluster of soft white glowing orbs. The tables were comfortable and we were becoming very good friends with all the staff. The Internet was also blazingly fast. We decided this place would need to become a staple of our time here.

That night we dined at the Ulan Ude’s answer to the question of “to Traktir or not to Traktir?”

There, we enjoyed black bread, a very mayonnaisey tomato salad, a tomato-filled local borscht variant, and a couple of handmade pottery steins filled with home brewed “live” beer.

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 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 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.