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 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 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 on the bus just as it was landing at the Astana bus terminal, which unlike in many cities, is conveniently located right next to the train station.

From there, our friend offered to walk us over to find a hotel. It had not been a good night of sleep for him, and he was eager to get to sleep, so we were extra grateful for his assistance.

The first hotel we wandered into was none too fancy, offered no internet, and was nearly 80 dollars per night, so we moved on. “This is one of the cheapest hotels in town,” our friend advised, “maybe you two should look into getting an apartment.” This sounded like a decent idea, so we headed back to the train station where crowds of old women in headscarves were calling out “apartment for rent” and wandering around.

We selected an especially sweet lady, who took us back to her grubby but very spacious soviet style 3^rd floor walk up. It was sort of a gross place, even by asiawheeling standards, but we decided we could do it, and the price was less a third of the cheap hotel, so we pulled the trigger.

We locked the bikes in the apartment and headed out with the old woman to make a copy of the key and to visit and ATM so that we could pay her.

Scott headed off to find money, and I wandered into a bustling and very Russian feeling market with the woman. She made a copy of the key and came back grinning. “I can tell already. You two boys will be like my own two sons.” I thanked her for the compliment. She then began to tell me about all the dangers of Astana. “Astana is not safe like in the soviet times”, she cautioned. “Kazakhs like to fight and some like to steal. Be careful. If anyone comes up to you, don’t let them know you speak Russian. Don’t speak to them. Don’t look at anyone. Don’t do drugs here, the police will find you and beat you. Lock the door to the apartment when you sleep, or else homeless people will come in at night.”

Fair Enough and duly noted, ma’am.

We met back up with Scott, paid the woman, and headed back to grab the cycles. It was high time now for a little Astana wheeling.

Our first stop was another one of those Kvas wagons, where we had got another frosty glass of the good stuff, served up for the people by a yellow aproned lady.

We headed from there in search of some breakfast, which was perhaps even harder in this new town than it had been in Almaty. We did eventually find a place, though, and it was a weird one, something like a cross between a traditional Russian Traktir, a Bob Marley themed joint, and a luau. We ordered some small and somewhat tasty Russian salads, a plate of four very tasty Manty, and a very oily and bizarre cup of turkey soup.

So with a little food in our stomachs at least, we headed further into the city. We noticed a heavily decaled Ford Fiesta, and stopped to investigate it. From what we could tell, it looked like it belonged to some Scottish guys, doing the Mongol Rally, a race from London to Ulaanbaatar for Charity. Good on ya, mates.

We stopped into a medieval themed restaurant, where we confirmed that they did indeed have wifi, but that we would need to buy both food or drinks from them, and a 3 dollar per hour internet access card to use it. So the place ws noted and we wheeled on.

We pedaled from there to a large river that bisects the city of Astana, and rode along it until we spotted a pedestrian bridge. We wheeled up and over that bridge and into the park on the other side. The park was full of people and rides, all hidden amidst a sea of trees. It was a very mysterious place to wheel through, feeling simultaneously like a forest and a twisted carnival.

We paused in the middle of the forest carnival area to buy a couple of cups of sticky black Nescafe from a kiosk. The woman inside seemed put off that we had arrived to do business with her. But we fought threw the negative energy and bout a couple rounds of joe.

A little more caffeinated, we wheeled on, finding ourselves soon at the foot of a large shopping complex called Mega.

So we locked the bikes outside and headed in, figuring we had an apartment now, we might as well grocery shop. We spent quite some time in the grocery store, looking at all the brands, choosing the appropriate canned coffee and buying things to make cereal in the morning.

On our way back to the room, we rolled by this giant gaudy Radisson, which also advertized wifi. We filed that place as well as another possible means of connectivity while in this city.

As we wheeled back by the Mongol Rally Ford Fiasta, we caught the owners just as they were climbing in the car. They turned out to be one Scot and one Pole, and the two asked us to leave our mark on their many times autographed vehicle.

They were leaving that day to head up to Russia. You see, they had run into similar registration problems in Kazakhstan, and were thinking that rather than deal with the massively corrupt officials and the mind numbing bureaucracy of this place, they would just nip back up to Russia where things were sane. Fair Enough.

As a parting gift, they gave us this bottle of Polish Ketchup. They also shared some of their tools with us, which allowed us to tighten Scott’s handle bar post back up, which had been rattling around like mad as of late.

That evening, we utilized a particularly interesting kind of business that we have hitherto only seen in the post soviet world. It is a made to order beer bottling operation. One enters, looks at the giant list of kegs that are on tap, and then the attendant will fill, pressurize, and seal, a plastic bottle for you, from a half liter to two full liters.

It’s a great way to try weird local brews, so we chose one of the brands at random and purchased a liter to bring back with us.