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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the giant housing development of “Highville Kazakhstan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice one KFC.

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

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

We needed to get out.

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

We couldn’t resist joining in as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We began the day by attempting to head out to that mojito branded coffee shop that we’d indulged in the day before, but we were sorely disappointed to find it closed. Now we were in a bewildering Kazakh pedestrian mall, and before we knew it we’d been seduced by a Starbucks copycat joint, where we proceeded to spend an unearthly amount of money on cups of coffee and wifi.

Little did we know upon entering that in order to be issued wifi passwords, we needed to spend a certain amount of money, we found this fact out after already ordering our cups, so we just decided to go whole hog and began ordering soups, salads, baskets of bread, Doner Kababs and the like, in order to reach the expenditure required to achieve wifi access.

It was good to be on the internet. Just that brief session left us with a much more positive general outlook on life. We bounded back to our cycles and headed from there up to Transavia where we picked up our passports, paying them another unearthly amount of money.

We then headed off to find train tickets on the next day’s train to Astana, the brand new, Dubai-esque capital of Kazakhstan. We began first at what would seem the logical place to buy tickets: the train station. But we should have learned our lesson from our trials in Shymkent. The train station was a desperate madhouse full of people cutting in line, screaming at each other and ticket selling windows that would close at a moment’s notice sending their lines to disperse out into the room, frantic, frustrated, and ready to cut anyone without the means or the chutzpa to defend themselves.

On top of that, the people in line with us all seemed to be headed to Astana as well. “Oh, you won’t get tickets,” they said “No more tickets here. We’re going to take the train to a nearby town and from there take a bus.”

This was disheartening but also information that was none too trustworthy. People tell us things all the time on AsiaWheeling and half of it is lies. The art is deciding which to listen to and which to disregard. We profess by no means to be masters of this art…

Regardless, eventually we gave up on ever getting service at the train station and, after calling Mr. Berghoff for advice, headed out to find a private train booking office. Luckily these, were on every street corner. Unluckily, it seemed that there was indeed some truth to the communications that he had gotten from our fellows waiting in line at the train station. Tickets seemed few and far between.

Right off the bat, we had the opportunity to buy two first class tickets, for about 80 dollars each, but that seemed monumental (we later found it was, by Kazakh standards at least, not), so we continued on. We would wheel for a bit, spot a ticket selling office, and then I’d go running in to ask the same questions in Russian. Do you have tickets to Astana for the day after tomorrow? No eh? How about bus tickets? Sorry for asking. Do you have any idea who might be able to help us? No? Well sorry for wasting your time.

Each interaction was exhausting. For one reason or another, the people of this city were unreasonably grumpy. I thought I’d known grumpy, living in Russia, but this was a new level. Each interaction felt like an open conflict, wrought with distrustful looks and judgmental comments about my not planning ahead. I was trying to do business with these people, trying to give them money! Why were they angry at me?!?

And so it went for another couple of hours, negative interaction after negative interaction, all of them explaining in one way or another that we could not get to Astana. We’re booked this whole month. Only one ticket available, for 100 dollars. There are two of you! Scoff! Good luck getting to Astana! Why did you not plan your trip in advance? Astana is a popular destination, how can you expect me to accommodate you at the last minute? Buses?! Can’t you read!?

Honestly I could only read as many words as I knew, which was not that many. I was becoming increasingly sapped of energy by the negative interactions, and soon I confessed to Scott that I could not do this much longer. So we decided to just ride to the bus station.

And off we went. It was no short journey and required a fair bit of asking for directions. When we stopped to ask a very old man with a long white beard who looked like he could have walked right out of a 1980s Hong Kong Kung Fu flick, I realized that it was the first positive interaction I’d had in eons. It felt good, giving me some more energy to pour into the ride.

Also, stopping at a roadside milk stand to buy a little Kefir helped as well. The Kefir here in Kazakhstan was really outstanding, rejuvenating in fact, hell I’ll call it magical. The packaging was also incredible.

We found the bus station to be plenty crowded with people trying to get to Astana as well, and we rushed through the jungle of loading busses to dash inside. I was even able to wait in line without being cut.

There was a good feeling to this bus ticket thing, even if it was, assuming I understood the woman correctly, going to be at least 16 hours of riding through the empty Kazakh steppe.

But the tickets were cheap and available, and armed with assurance that we would eventually get to Astana in time to catch our flight to Novosibirsk, we hopped back on the bikes, feeling like a great weight had been lifted from our shoulders. We pulled over to the side of the road on our way back to taste a little bit of the Kvas being served up by one of the many giant steel tanks, operated by yellow aproned ladies that lined the road to the bus station. To dispose of the cups, one would skewer them with a long vertical rod.  This puncturing would signal that the cups were “spent” and prevent patrons from thinking they may be reused.  There may also be a small part of everyone at needs to puncture a plastic cup at 3:30pm in Almaty to sustain sanity.

It was a long hard wheel back to our neighborhood, and we realized we were plenty starving by the time we got there, so we headed into a little Russian bakery to have a snack.

We spent the rest of that day working on correspondence for you, dear reader, and woke up the next morning bright and early to wheel to the bus station. We felt we needed to get there early, in order to ensure a spot for our cycles on the bus. And we were lucky we did, for a few wrong turns added a fair bit to our time wheeling to the station.

Once we got there, it was not obvious at all where we would find our bus. The station was packed and chaotic, and signs and markers were few and far between. Eventually after talking to a number of people, we found our way to a deserted back section of the station, where I wandered over to ask once again of a fellow sitting there on a bench next to his duffel bag where we might find out bus.

He turned out to be going to Astana as well. He was actually a Kazakh PhD student fresh back from America, and heading to the new capital to give a report on what he had learned on his visit (Nice!).  He was more than happy to show us the proper way to purchase luggage permits for our cycles and bags and how to snag the front spot in line to load them into the belly of the bus. While Scott was chatting with him and a group of fellow travelers who were forming around us, I snuck off to buy us some of the larg triangular shaped Kazakh Somsas. They were full of meat and cabbage and very tasty.

Then we were on the bus. It was going to be a very long ride, and with no bathroom on board, I was careful not to drink very much water. I tried to write as we drove but so bad were the roads, and so violent the resulting bouncing around of the bus as it went over them, that I found computing a complete waste of time. I chose instead to stare out into infinite of the steppe which just rolled mesmerizingly by.

A few hours into the ride, the crew started playing highlight reels from Kazakh dog fights. Dog fighting is a very popular spectator sport here. It’s also savagely violent. We could not tell whether to be amused or slightly sickened by the footage, so we settled for a combination of both.  This popular music video should illustrate the theater of brutality in Kazakh popular culture.

Perhaps 5 hours in, we stopped at a little melon selling operation in the middle of the steppe. The people there were really going for it, producing melons here in the middle of nowhere, so we decided we should support them by purchasing a few.

Our new friend helped us to choose the best ones.

One of the melons had been painted silver. This was, I believe a marketing gimmick, though it might also have had some mystical significance.

About 8 hours in, we stopped at a roadside restaurant called “Café Tranzit.”

Here finally we were able to have some Kazakh food, which was very interesting.

We ordered a few dishes, one of them consisted of large pieces of stewed mutton and a great many raw onions, another was a borsch like soup, featuring a heavy dollop of mayonnaise instead of the traditional sour cream. They also had their own variation on Lakman. I would say Kazakh food is a little like Uzbek food, only less approachable.

It was Ramadan at the time, so our friend was unable to join us in eating. However, most courteously, our bus driver waited until the sun had ducked down behind the outhouses before he left, giving the more observant Muslims on the bus a chance to eat quickly before we left.

We drove on into the night, bouncing over the terrible roads, dodging potholes, and slowing down to drive through sections where the road just dissolved into gravely steppe, until suddenly there was a large noise and the bus pulled over.

Everyone got out and the driver and his team began to go to town working so solve some issue that had cropped up with the suspension of the bus. Fixing it required taking the wheel on and off a few times, and inflating and deflating the cylinder that controlled that wheel’s pneumatic suspension repeatedly as well.

I was unable to tell exactly what they were doing, but in an hour or so’s time, and a bunch of hissing valves, clanging metal, and Kazakh swear words later, all was more or less well again, and we hit the road. Now Scott and I were able to drift off to sleep, and were even able to rest a few hours longer into the morning than expected, with our bus arriving 3 hours late in Astana, getting us in, instead of at 4am, at the much more civilized hour of 7.

I rolled around as the sun worked its way into out room at the Hotel Turkistan in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Scott was still sleeping. I could not remember what time he’d come in from his adventures with our new and rather tiresom fabulous friend last night. I hoped the adventures had gone well. I was more than happy to be able to sleep through them. Scott woke up as I was typing away on my computer on correspoindance for you, dear reader.

“I had a hell of a night last night.” He said, looking groggy, and scratching at his stubble, I’ll tell you over breakfast.

And so we headed downstairs and climbed on the Speed TRs, rolling out in search of breakfast. As was becoming the rule for Kazakhstan, it was not easy to find a restaurant, but eventually we road by a little down home café that looked decent, nearby another branch of the Silkway City.

We sat down and ordered some coffee, a basket of black bread, and a couple bowls of Солянка (Solyanka), my favorite Russian soup. They arrived quickly, and Scott told me the tale of the previous night as we ate. It sounded like a pretty raw experience. I gave him my condolences and poured a little of my coffee out onto the pavement in mourning of our lost warbucks. I hope you buy yourself something really nice, officer.  Like a new gold tooth.

From there, we strolled into the Silkway City, looking to investigate the opportunities for internet to be had inside. We did find a ridiculously priced branch of a St. Petersburg internet café that I’d used once called CafeMax, and an interestingly branded tea shop, but little more that was of interest.

We were not quite ready to hop on the cycles and begin wheeling again, so we headed out on foot, trusting that the phone booth where we’d locked the Speed TRs would keep them safe.

So we began strolling, past some truly amazing looking structures. And some really bold Kazakh jeans advertisements.

We continued on, enjoying the closer look that strolling gave us as compared to wheeling, past a pink and blue wall covered with tattered advertisements, and on through an underpass where an fantastic fellow was playing Ukrainian tunes on the accordion.

He was so good that I decided to throw a few Tenge in his shoebox and listen to him play for a bit.  His artistry and imagination served as a breath of fresh air.

We strolled from there into a large pedestrian mall-type area, where we were able to purchase a few more cups of coffee at very reasonable prices from a street vendor who’s sole advertisement just said “mojitos” in large pink letters.  Large scale advertisements continued to flank the pedmall, giving up pause to dissect each one in critical investigation.

With that coffee in us, we bagan to perk back up, remembering Hosam and the Syrain BBQ we’d had, and that life was good. And so climbed back on the cycles, and completed the long wheel back up to Transavia. We had burned a bridge you might say, with our fabulous friend, and we felt it was important to express to Katya that no one was to be authorized to pick up our registered passports except for us.

When I wandered into the office, I was pleased to find it still there, thinking for a moment before I opened the door of all the movies about long cons in which the conned individual runs back to the office only to find it a vacant rental…

We wandered around for a while outside of Transavia, in that office/residential park, looking at the kids playing. This entry into Kazakhstan had been quite the trial by fire. We were changing, and we could feel it. Or maybe that was just hunger. Regardless it was time to eat again.

So we headed into the nearest grocery store, which turned out to have plenty of ready to eat foods, which we purchased with abandon.

We ate a picnic lunch of the things we’d bought at the store in the shade of a giant green awning. We were joined there by plenty of Kazakh business men and women on their lunch breaks, also mothers who were picnicking with their friends while the kids played in the park. Particularly delicious was this “grandma” brand kefir, which was a very mellow an approachable version of the more tart and mildly carbonated classic Russian drinkable yogurt.

So with that we climbed back on the cycles and attempted to wheel on. But somehow through a mismanaged series of field commands, we ended up siphoned into a Kazakh military training area, where were decided to dismount and walk our bikes through the field where all the concrete barracks were, so as to most politely arrive at the other side where we could see a promising looking highway.

The barracks were stange buildings, covered with ads to joint the army or the Militsiya (as the police here are called). Each window also had a large concrete chuck sticking out next to it, presumably to keep the occupant from sticking his head out the window and Bro-ing out to hard with his neighbors.

Past the barracks, we got in the highway. And we followed that highway on towards a district of giant glass office buildings, which we were only able to access by means of a half build and very creepy pedestrian underpass. Once we finally got close, though, we found the structures to be quite impressive.

From there, we took a right, and continued to head towards the outskirts of town.

It was easy not to get lost, since the whole city is on a slant that always indicates which way is north (down). The street signs were even marginally helpful.

And so we wheeled on, out of the commercial district and into a kind of suburban area. Here the roads got more narrow, and navigation became more difficult. We had spotted a large and very bizarre structure in the distance, and were interested in more closely investigating it, but we found it extremely hard to get to, being again and again siphoned down roads that lead the wrong way.

Eventually, we found our way back onto a more major road, and wheeled along the sandy sidewalk-esque trail that ran along it for a bit, which lead us to a huge hydrologic engineering project, along which a road ran that looked like it just might lead to our strange structure.

And here it is. Speculation as to what this thing is is more than welcome in the comments.

On our way back, we managed to myander our way onto this much more manicured path, which lead us through a bizarre manicured forest of miniature trees, right back to the giant glass office building district. From there, we began wheeling north (downhill) past a huge university, with this devastatingly attractive observatory complex

and on down into the large park that separated our hotel from the southern more affluent and businessy part of the city.  We wheeled into through park and not long into our explorations stumbled upon this startlingly brightly colored church, which also might have been a palace.

I am sure the truth lies in-between.

We were riding through what for all intents and purposes seemed a sunny and pigeon filled park

When it all of a sudden starting to downpour, in broad daylight, forcing us to seek shelter.

The rain disappeared as quickly as it had manifested, and soon we were off wheeling again, now through puddles on wet pavement. The rain was quickly evaporating, though, leaving a most dramatic mist hovering above the ground. The next thing we stumbled across was the famous Almaty WWII memorial. It really is a very impressive structure, with a certain angular brutal feel to it that one usually only gets in two-dimensional art. Bravo communism for making this one.

It’s true Kazakhstan is no longer a communist country, but man oh man am I glad they kept some of this soviet stuff around. Take the crest on this building for instance.

Like something from a video game, or an action figure set, or even star wars. It’s just too good.

That evening, we met up David Berghoff, head of Stantours. Stantours had played an invaluable role in our planning of central asia, and is a fantastic resource for readers out there interested in visiting the region.

We met with David at a beer hall called Stad, where he to our great surprise and excitement, ordered us all glases of Shymkent brand beer.  Following that was a “stinky fish” from a river that flowed into the black sea, transported quite far to this restaurant in Almaty.  We began telling him the story of our registration and the fabulous fellow, which he found neither surprising nor profound, until we mentioned where we’d dropped our passports off.

“Transavia!” he exclaimed. “They’re the Russian visa mafia, you know that?”

Fair Enough, Mr. Berghoff. Fair Enough.

We woke up that next morning at the Ordabasy Hotel, feeling great about being in Kazakhstan. The sun was shining, our air conditioning unit was purring along, and we were just about to head down for a little complimentary breakfast.

Despite the fact that we had slept in until almost noon, the hotel restaurant was more than happy to serve us, nervously placing a modest breakfast of deep fried dough, covered in sour cream, in front of us. I can’t go as far as to say it was delicious, but it got the job done, sticking in our stomachs for hours and hours after we ate it. Thankfully, there was plenty of coffee.

We left the restaurant and grabbed the Speed TRs from where we’d locked them near the stairs. From there we poured out onto the streets of Shymkent, taking in the majesty of the Ordabassy Hotel in the sunlight. We were positioned perfectly, right in the center of town where there was a giant roundabout and a huge pyramid tower piercing the sky.

We spent a little while investigating the tower and the associated fountains.

And from there, just practiced the usual algorithm of choosing a direction and wheeling hard.

We crossed over the Shymkent rail station and proceeded on into the unknown. They say that Shymkent is really more of an Uzbek town, misplaced into Kazakhstan when the original lines had been drawn by Stalin’s ethnographers. That hypothesis was supported by the presence of the giant, Uzbek style melon and vegetables market that we stumbled upon.

The smell of Dynia was so strong as we rode past, that we had to stop. We lingered, inhaling the sweet mellow Dynia smell and chatting with some of the sellers, like this young man.

From there we wheeled way out to the edge of the farmland that surrounds Shymkent, and then back to the city. After we arrived in the city, we headed to the train station, where we went to purchase tickets. The lines were insane, and at the rate I was getting cut by hurried old women, I would have been better off traveling backward in time trying to get service.

So we headed outside and paid an extra $2.00 per ticket to have them booked through a private agency. With tickets in hand, we headed back into town and began bouncing between malls and coffee shops looking for working wifi. It was not easy thing to find by any means. Many businesses advertised it, but few of them had networks that actually worked. It was always the same excuses too. Come back tomorrow, it will be working. Our network admin is away this week. Internet is out in the whole city, it’s not our fault.

Eventually, we found a Turkish restaurant that had a network with the actual Internet behind it, and connected. It felt good to feast on the Internet at reasonable speeds. It was still nothing fast, maybe 10 kbps, but to anyone who’s ever gone from 2 kbps to 10kbps, feel free to chime in with what a pleasure it is.  The place also had probably the most ornate ice of the entire trip, formed into rosebuds.

We headed from there back to the Ordabassy, put on our pointy Uzbek shoes, and left just in time to meet the Ladies of Shymkent. Unfortunately, half way to the restaurant, we realized we’d forgotten our dictionaries and had to run back. Thus, we were 15 minutes late.  When we got there, the ladies were playing cards, already a few beers deep, and scolded us for being late. I guess this was not a culture where being “fashionably late” was encouraged.

Soon the whole crew arrived, though, and all was forgotten. We ordered a feast of Shashlik, vinegared onions, and bread. Then these ladies proceeded to take us on a fascinating journey through the grizzly underbelly of a Saturday night in Shymkent. Most interesting, apart from a plethora of very insightful questions about America and the west that they asked, was the ever-present danger of being killed by a Kazakh man. A drunk Kazakh, we have been told by many people (Americans, Uzbeks, and these women as well) is nothing to run afoul of… a drunk and jealous Kazakh was doubly bad. And ways to run afoul include: dancing alone, not talking to them, talking to them, cutting in line for the bathroom, not cutting in line for the bathroom, being incognito, being clandestine, and being obtrusive.  Accidentally bumping into someone was akin to signing one’s own own death warrant.

For instance, we would be dancing to insane Russian techno-rap-opera music, and when the ladies of Shymkent would need to visit the toilet, we would be told to sit at the table and wait for them, since dancing alone would surely bring violence.  In our visits to the men’s room, Scott and I would suddenly be surprised by a shouting match breaking out in front of us.  Our strategy was to press our backs up against the wall and look toward the moldy ceiling, lest one of the aggressors grab us by the shirt and scream at his opponent, “Is this guy with you?”

Wild Stuff.

The next morning, we had agreed to all meet once again so that they could send us off on our train to Almaty. And when we got back to our hotel to set our alarms, it hit us. We had strolled into a new time zone. Though it had been almost all northward travel, Kazakh time was an hour different than Uzbek time! We had been an hour and 15 minutes late, not just 15.

We were lucky they had put up with that kind of behavior.

Regardless, the next morning we met up with the Ladies of Shymkent, and bid them farewell.

A few even hung around to walk us to the train station.

We looked at our watches and it seemed we had just enough time to make it on foot, so we strolled back to the station with them, and folded up our bikes on the platform.

As we were trying to get onto the train, there was some issue with our ticket and our status as foreigners, but our two beautiful friends managed to talk the conductor down and we climbed on the train.

We waved goodbye one last time and relaxed into our bunks. I soon struck up a conversation with the young men traveling in the section next to us. They were all sergeants in the Kazakh army’s new sergeants program, and they were very interested in our trip and in telling me about how important the new sergeants program is. They were patient with my terrible Russian, but I am pained to report that despite much lecturing, all I can honestly say about the Kazakh new sergeants program is that it is very important, possibly the only thing that can save the broken Kazakh military system.

Anyone with more knowledge is heartily encouraged to share in the comments.

While Scott headed over to investigate the on-train samovar, I was called by the conductor into his private office.

In there, he pointed out to me the problem what had caused the mild uproar outside on the platform. It seems that through some fat fingering on the part of the bookers of our tickets, we had actually purchased tickets leaving from the station after Shymkent to Almaty instead of tickets originating in Shymkent proper.

He explained that while there was no ticketing conflict, this was a big problem, and that I could solve it by paying him about $5.00 right there and then. Sensing foul play and not wanting to pay an unnecessary bribe, I began my first triumphant weaseling out of a bribe in Russian, hopefully the first of many. I agreed to pay him the difference in ticket price, but demanded that he produce some evidence as to the price of the two tickets. We continued to go back and forth, he saying that there was no up-to-date price list on the train, and me suggesting that we compare the difference between our ticket price and that of one of the sergeants. Eventually, in desperation, he just asked “are you going to pay me money or not.”

I said, “Maybe not.” And he told me to get out of his office.

Feeling excellent, I returned to find Scott to have also bonded with the sergeants. They had given him a gift of some bread, and later took him out on a mission to buy chickens  and horse meat sausages from people selling them on the station platforms of the various cities we rolled through.

The chicken was great. The bed was comfortable. The people of Kazakhstan were proving to be monumentally welcoming. This country was on the fast track to an AsiaWheeling seal of approval.

We had only gotten two hours of sleep the day before, albeit on some very comfortable beds, on the floor of a generous Uzbek denim merchant’s dining room floor. But it was still quite difficult getting up early the next morning. But get up we did, collecting our things and heading out to the street to catch a cab for the outskirts of Tashkent, where we were to meet Shoney.

We would be heading up into the mountains outside Tashkent with him and a few of his friends. The friends were all members of a certain Uzbek heavy metal group, knows as Tortoise Minja. We were the first to arrive at the meeting spot, five minutes late, and soon the rest of the team rolled in. Much like at band rehearsal, there was one guy who just didn’t show up. So we called his house and spoke with his mother, who assured us he was already on his way, meanwhile screaming at him to get up in the background.

So we bided our time, munching some Korean steamed buns that were being sold by some members of the large  Korean community in Tashkent. Finally everyone arrive, which gave me an opportunity to introduce the cast of characters.

Shoney : Your fearless Uzbek Bureau Chief and general Uzbek rainmaker/Boston Bro mashup.

Jesus/Noise : Call him what you like, this rail thin fellow played the base in Tortoise Minja, spoke in the most hilarious rudimentary English, had the beginnings of a thick beard. He was obsessed with Texas, and told us repeatedly of his love for the place, and wish to travel there, but dressed more like a fellow I once knew from Arkansas.

Timur : Lead singer, and generally pretty boy of the group, his flowing locks and operatic voice made me very curious to hear how he fit into the heavy metal sound.

Vladimir: The drummer, a cool and calculating character, interested in cooking and maximizing the speed with which he could deliver (double) bass drum hits.

Igor: Lead guitarist – rumored to be a savage kickboxer, a wirey and unwashed but otherwise peaceful character.

Scott: Your basic adventure capitalist, torn bicycle grease-stained Carhearts, William Cheng and Son’s tailored buttondown, large mustache, camera, chest hair, and a pair of Dawn Patrols to keep it klassnaya.

Combine those characters with your humble, ukulele-bearing, correspondent, and you have just enough people to fill a Marshriutka, Mienbaoche, or however you’d like to refer to those small vans that are the glue that holds transportation together all over this planet. The Marshriutka we climbed into made short work of the drive up into the mountains, playing bizarre Russian club music the whole way. We climbed out and paid the guy, setting a time at which he would come back to pick us up, and headed out onto the trail, laden down with Soviet military style canned meats, potatoes, onions, water, and a few bottles of “Pulsar” brand beer.

Soon the trail disappeared and we were just walking up into the Uzbek Himalayan mountains. It had been cloudy that morning, but just about the time the trail petered out, the sun burst forth, and all the clouds burned out of the sky. Sunscreen would have been a good thing to have remembered.

Jesus in particular, son of an auto mechanic, and somewhat the black swan in this group of otherwise very academic Uzbek rockers, swore like a sailor. I found myself learning all kinds of new and terribly offensive things to say in Russian, just hiking uphill with the guy.

The sun was viciously bright, and the scenery magnificent as we climbed up into the hills. We stopped for a moment to rest and scream down at the stragglers. Despite the fact that most of these guys chain smoked cheap Uzbek cigarettes, they could hike very quickly, and I found myself positively drenched in sweat just trying to keep up.

On top of that, they were singing! I wanted to join in, but I was so out of breath that I could barely get out the words to Black Sabath’s “War Pigs.”

To make matters worse, the soil was sandy and the rocks that made up the hillside were barely secured in place by the roots of the scrubby foliage and grasses that clung there. This made it no easy task climbing up the mountain, and I didn’t even want to think how it would be trying to come down, heaven forbid in the dark.

We spent a while trying to find the perfect location to set up shop. It seemed that as soon as we had found one that was decent, Timur would scream down from above us at the top of his lungs, proclaiming he’d found the true best spot, just another 100 meters ahead. This pattern of setting up and moving, setting up and moving, went on for some time, until we finally just put our feet down and stopped moving.

Scott immediately took his shirt off and began looking fabulous.

The guitar player and I grabbed our instruments and began singing and playing together. He was a much better instrumentalist than I, even on the uke, which was something I am sure he’d never even played before. The only thing I could do to hold my own was continually rely on that old favorite, “House of the Rising Sun,” which never fails to be a cross cultural crowd pleaser.

Soon we had settled into the place, and we began peeling potatoes, undressing, eating some of the home-make pickles that Timur’s mother had made, and generally getting sunburned.  Jesus began to wail.

One party was sent out to search for firewood, which was none too easy to find on the scraggly hillside;  another party was sent to find out whether one might be able to purchase a bit of oil from some shepherds across the valley from us. Both missions would be long and time intensive. I ended up on the firewood side of the table.

The oil searching team came back about an hour later, with harrowing stories of the mission downhill, including tales of Timur falling head over tail (evidenced by a constellation of scratches on his arms and legs), and Shoney surfing down a minor avalanche standing on top of a large boulder. They had gotten the oil, though. It was cottonseed oil, the cheapest kind available in this cotton producing country. They had also brought with them a most well thought out and serious argument for moving our operations to a new place that they’d found.

We’d been up on that particular cliffside, collecting firewood and peeling potatoes for some time, and, knowing we’d need to go down the hill sooner or later, illogic and laziness prevailed, and the group voted to stay on the top of the hill.

And so general chilling continued, escalated even. Soon a bottle of vodka was produced from someone’s backpack. Now we were in the bright sun, becoming burned to a crisp and dehydrated, and loving every minute of it, up on a cliffside in the Uzbek Himalayas, eating pickles, drinking vodka, playing music, screaming at the sky, and the like.

It was sometime around when Timur started singing Russian anthems out into the mountains…

…that we realized there was another good reason to go down and cook our lunch at the lower area that Shoney and Timur had found on their mission to the local shepherds for cottonseed oil. Some of the people in our little squadron were becoming drunk, and the mission down that loosely graveled hill would be none too easy if we were to allow the inebriation to continue unabated.

And so down we went, scrambling and taking our time. Jesus, being the drunkest of the crew, chose to simply slide down the sandy mountainside on his rear end.

This was successful in that it transported him down the mountain with relatively little harm to his body, and in being a very rapid means of traversing that bit of land, but unsuccessful in that it totally destroyed his shorts. So down we went, toting musical instruments and bags of peeled potatoes, picking our way across the uneven ground and doing our best not to lose our footing. Meanwhile, Jesus was down at the bottom of the hill screaming obscenities up at us.

From time to time, though the going was rough and I was forced to keep my head down to plan my next step, I found myself tempted to look up into the mountains. They were like none other, impossibly dramatic and beautiful. Ah, Uzbekistan, Ya Habbibi.

We set up shop again at the new site. This one had the added benefit that not only was it near some more plentiful sources of firewood, but it was in the shade of a large tree as well. We were all glad to get out of the sun, which had been beating on us and sapping our energy for hours now.

Vladimir went to work, pouring a long slog of cottonseed oil into the bottom of a cast iron pot that he’d brought, and beginning to fry the potatoes. Meanwhile, Shoney opened up his computer and plugged in a pair of speakers, so that we could listen to some of Tortoise Minja’s favorite music, a group called “Children of Bodom” It was some pretty raw stuff. Listen to this.

Vlad continued to fry potatoes while I cut more fries, and Scott DJ’d. We stirred the fries with an old stick, dumping them out as they got brown into a cracked plastic bowl that the shepherds had lent us along with the oil.

Then Shoney got out his hookah and began the arduous process of unpacking, assembling, and operating it. It was the first time that most of his cigarette loving friends had smoked hookah, and they found it to be quite the fascinating new drug.

We then set to chopping onions, which we fried with the last of the oil and some salt, and once the onions were caramelized, we poured in the two cans of Soviet military style canned beef, stirring it all together and mixing it with the French fries into one giant matted pile.

It may not look appetizing, dear reader, but I’ll tell you, after that climb up and down the mountain, it tasted like pure manna from heaven.

It then became time for the band to show us their signature Tortoise Minja move, which was a kind of finger motion paired with a high pitched screeching sound. It might be more illustrative to just show you the video…

With that out of the way, it was time for more singing. And so we did, taking turns between singing a Russian or Uzbek tune, and singing an American tune. In one of the Russian tunes, they kept mentioning something called “pork vein” and once it was over, Scott and I asked what that might be.  “No, no” Minja replied. “It’s port wine.” Ah, of course.

In fact, the tune (by Viktor Tsoi actually if anyone is interested) goes “My mother is Anarchy, and my father is a glass of port wine.” Here it is:

[audio:http://asiawheeling.com/music/MamaAnarhiya.mp3]

We sat around playing and singing songs. While we sang, Jesus took my tuning pitch pipe out of my ukulele case and began playing it like a harmonica. It worked quite well. You can see him here pictured with it.

Then it was time to clean up and head out. So we did, bundling everything up, and doing our best to practice leave no trace style outdoor gonzo journalism.

Then we made our way out of the mountains and back down to the street. We had arranged with that morning’s cab driver to come pick us up, but he had decided he had better things to do, leaving us for the time being stranded there on the roadside in rural Uzbekistan.

It was well after dark by the time we caught a car driving by and flagged it down. The car had four open seats, and there were sixof us, but we decided we had better squeeze in.

During the ride my legs fell further asleep than they ever had before, wedged as they were between Scott and the boney elbow of the lead singer in an up and coming Uzbek heavy metal group.

I watched through the cracked windshield  of the Lada we drove on, jostled back and forth as the driver worked to avoid potholes and wandering dogs, getting us back toward town. As we drove, I thought how amazing Uzbekistan had been, what an unexpected gem this country was. It felt so good to be here, to be speaking Russian again, to be drinking Kvas, to be eating Plov, to be out in the dry heat and the blazing sunshine.

We were heading to Kazakhstan the next day. I could only hope that it would be half as good as this place.

We are so grateful to Shoney and his family, and to the many people who took the time to be interested in us, to show us kindness and warmth. Oh, but now you’ve got me tearing up over Uzbekistan again.

When we got back to Shoney’s house, his mother had unexpectedly cooked up another giant Plov. This one was, as the last had been, just too good to be true. We ate like ancient kings, struggling to drink enough water to begin rehydrating from the day, for space in the stomach is always at a premium when Plov is around.

In addition to that, Luiza was on the mend, and we were invited to stay there that night, saving us a return trip to that nasty hotel.

That night we stayed up for some time discussing the politics of Uzbekistan with Shoney’s father and mother, both of whom scolded us heavily for not having remembered sunscreen. Guilty as charged.

We woke up the next morning in Bukhara, Uzbekistan.

After feasting monstrously on the lavish breakfast at the Hotel Malika, we headed out into the street to find a black Lexus SUV with Chinese plates parked outside. It seemed these Chinese chaps were on their own adventure through Central Asia, and from what we could see, they were doing it in style.

We continued to wheel away from the old city, positively thrilled at how unique the buildings were here in Uzbekistan. So many of them managed to simultaneously channel the Soviet brutal vibe and the ornate central Asian vibe. It was stupendous.

Our first goal for that day would be to head to the post office and send off the plate we had purchased the day before for Project K9. Considering the standard Uzbek levels of bureaucracy, we were more than prepared for this to take most of the day. We were, however, pleasantly surprised to find that only a minimal amount of waiting in line and being cut by strangers, was required, and that (probably) because of the bizarre black market exchange rate we’d been using, despite the rather remote nature of the place, sending a giant fragile plate off via airmail cost less than sending a similar package from Saigon. Nice one, Uzbekistan.

Not only was there price performance and convenience to be found in this blocky Soviet building, but the workers at the Bukhara post office were wonderful people, more than ready to bend over backward accommodating our terrible Russian, and helping us to properly package the plate for its long overseas journey.

Feeling splendid about the completion of that mission, we piled back onto the bikes and headed out in search of a little more wheeling, followed by a little more food.

The wheeling was just too easy in this city. Any direction we chose to travel offered a fantastic assortment of treasures. The food, however, was tough, and we wheeled for quite some time before we spotted what you might call a “chicken from the machine” type restaurant. Not wanting to squander what could be the only restaurant we saw for the next  four kilometers, we headed in.

The owner of the place ran up from the basement kitchen to meet us. She spoke Russian that was accented much more like the Russian I’d learned in Petrograd, and I found her very easy to understand. She also seemed to really enjoy my filthy, broken Russian, complimenting me again and again.

With all those pleasantries out of the way, we decided to focus on chicken. Low and behold, it turned out to be chicken in the same Soviet style as the place Shoney’s grandfather had taken us to across from the Hotel Uzbekistan in Tashkent. It was accompanied by the same thick Bloody Mary mix sauce, though here the Soviet bread was replaced with Uzbek Lapyoshka.  So we drank Kvas and feasted on chicken, feeling things could not get much better.

Beside our table, a large fish tank displayed a nearby sign requesting patrons to “please not smoke near the fish.”

So with stomachs once again stuffed, we headed back out on the bikes, wheeling off in a new direction. This move ended up taking us out past some very remotely positioned government buildings, and into areas where giant swaths of farmland were being turned into huge public projects. Take this giant orb on a pedestal, for instance. There were probably a few square kilometers of walkways placed around here, with forests of tiny trees, just waiting to grow into a grand shady forest.

We rode in toward the orb on the pedestal, and as we grew closer, the sound of construction befell our ears. All around this orb were Uzbek workmen building both the orb itself and other structures, like a large theater-opera-house type building, and like this arena – for blood sports perhaps?

We wheeled the complex thoroughly,  before turning back to return to town, looping around the old city and by the giant fortress that we’d seen the day before. Soon we ended near a huge and ancient mosque, overlooking one of Bukhara’s last in-city ponds. Most of the ponds, once common in town, had been paved over by the Soviets, but as a man walking by with a rake explained to me, this one was kept around because it was the most beautiful, and played an important role in the architecture of the nearby mosques and schools buildings.

The nearby buildings certainly were impressive, with many of those large wooden hand-carved pillars, holding up plenty of complicated Uzbek tile work.

Then, true to our word, we returned to the giant stadium, where we began to give it a much more thorough exploration.

It was not abandoned, per say, but in the way that many things are in the post-Soviet world, it had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

It was still used by the populace though,  for children’s sports, physical education, and the like (we saw a few signs for youth boxing classes), but it also felt very much like a post apocalyptic wasteland at the same time. All bathed in that delicious Uzbek sunlight.

We took our Speed TRs for a quick lap around the track, there and then headed back outside, glancing down at our watches. It was high time to head back to the Hotel Malika to pick up our bags. The wheel to the train station was quite flat, but it was still 20 km.

On our way out, we were stopped by one of the groundskeepers at the stadium. He wanted to learn more about us, and we decided we could spare a little time to chat with him. When he found out we were from America, he became very excited and began asking about American Indians, which he referred to as Indianski people.

Are there Indians that still flight cowboys in America? Where do the Indians live? Are they rich or poor? Can they work any job they want? What about a hotel? A hotel for foreigners? So you’re telling me I might check into a hotel in the US and an Indianski might just take my bag or be working at the front desk!? Get out of here!

I’m sure he was imagining Chief Sitting Bull unloading his bags from a New York taxicab.

We had already been talking for probably 20 minutes, so I just said, “yep that’s right,” and then bid him farewell. And with that, off we went, swinging by the Malika to grab our bags, and then hitting the road. We were a little behind schedule, but if we rode hard, we should still have been able to make it to the train station in Kagan in time to buy a few snacks and get on the train.

Then my rear tire went flat. First flat of the trip, right there and then in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. We looked down at our watches… should we take a cab? Or should we try to fix this thing and keep moving. Finally, we decided that we’d give ourselves 15 minutes to fix the flat, and if we were having trouble getting the big apple tire off the rim, or it was just taking too long, we’d take a cab.

We immediately switched into AsiaWheeling crisis management mode, flipping the bike over and working as fast and precisely as we could. As we were frantically working on the cycle, a child approached, pushing another legless child in a wheelchair. The two of them wheeled the chair up next to where I was furiously tearing the big apple off the rim and pulling out the inner tube.

Ah! It was a pinch! I had let my tire pressure get too low in my rear wheel! Good news was that the spotless reputation of our Schwalbe Big Apples (Thank you SpeedMatrix) was still unmarred. Bad news was that time was ticking and the kids had begun to beg from us in a most heart wrenching way, crying out as though we were their mothers, and asking in Russian for money, telling me he was cold (it was probably 90 degrees Fahrenheit out) and hungry (this was plausible).

In a stunning demonstration of inhumanity, I looked up from the wheel, and shouted in English “Times are tough for all of us, kid! Now get out of here!” I underlined the statement with a few choice phrases in Russian, and the kids shut up, but still hung around to watch the drama unfold.

A few minutes later, the tire was done and we were back on the road. The burst of adrenaline from the flat was still coursing through my veins and we road very hard, making the 20 km, fully loaded, back to Kagan in less than an hour.

Once at the train station, we purchased a a few snacks, and then headed for our train.

When we got on, we found our section of the train to be just packed with foreigners. There were five  or six Chinese stoneworkers from Beijing here to inspect a quarry, a family of somewhat disoriented French holidaymakers, and us.

I felt sorry for the poor automobile factory workers with whom we shared a bunk. For the air conditioning did not run all night long, the Chinese played Chinese pop music at ridiculous volumes from their mobile phones, and the French people were constantly occupying the bathroom having all been struck by dysentery.

The next morning I was feeling slightly better as we packed up our things and headed out from the hotel in search of more breakfast. We decided to sample one of the competitors to the simple hummus and flatbread restaurant that Samer had taken us to two days ago. And we were able to find one without much trouble. It was the same basic idea. Maybe not quite as jaw-droppingly amazing, but deserving of a very solidly applied seal of approval. I was unfortunately unable to eat much, but even sickened and without much appetite I was able to appreciate the love that went into those pastes.

We left that place and continued wheeling. It felt good to be back out in the sunshine. My energy levels were low, but pedaling felt good, breathing felt good, and Latakia was beautiful. I found myself swallowing curses at my illness for robbing from me a day of wheeling here.

We spent the afternoon exploring the city, poking our way through spice shops. Claudia had gotten the idea into her head that decorating her dorm room with sprigs of Syrian sun-dried objects would be the move.

And so that became our mission for the day. It brought us into a number of very interesting shops, and interactions with some fascinating members of the Syrian spice retail sector.

As Claudia was running into yet another shop, we stopped another bicycle coffee salesman, in order to procure some more lucidity. The fellow was very old, and nearly unable to speak. There was also a little bit of Popeye in the guy… at least in his hat. His coffee was quite good, though, and we felt confident that we paid a price easily four times the norm per cup, so we hopefully parted ways with him in good spirits.

After meeting back up with Claudia, we all began to make our way toward the Hotel Safwan, where we had stored our things. With all our belongings loaded onto the cycles, we headed back the way we’d come and arrived at the train station just in time to catch Samer, who had somehow figured out which train we were on and arrived there to wish us safe journey. We exchanged the warmest regards with him and climbed onto our train.

The Syrian railway was amazing. It was startlingly cheap, very clean, and luxuriously comfortable. The staff were amazing, and gave us a special place in the children’s play-car to store the bikes.

The children’s play-car was something like a McDonalds Playplace on the train, where your kids could let off a little steam, while you relaxed and watched the countryside fly by. And that was exactly what we did.

We arrived in Aleppo just as the sun was setting, and quickly unfolded our cycles right there on the platform.

We then wheeled right into the city. Our Syrian flashlights had now been determined to be total duds, useful only for a single ride, and long ago jettisoned. So we were once again without substantial lights. Luckily Aleppo too was very well lit.

All our Syrian friends to date had explained that all of their country was warm and hospitable (a fact with which we heartily agree)… except for Aleppo. For one reason or another, Aleppo was not popular with the rest of Syria. Hossam had explained to us that we needed to be careful walking at night there, and that the people would not be honest and would not respect women.

So it was with much interest that we took our inaugural wheel in this city. So far it was none too scary or grimy. In fact it had quite an affluent vibe.

When we saw a restaurant with a large picture of a drugged-looking cartoon bunny on the outside, we decided to stop to eat. It was true we had not found a hotel yet, but it had been way too long since we’d had that breakfast of pastes, and the search for a hotel and subsequent bargaining would be much more palatable on a full stomach.

The staff at the place was thrilled to have us around and busied themselves arranging places for our bags and cycles. We ordered a delightful feast of salads, pastes, and falafel sandwiches, and I did my best to put food in my body while Scott and Claudia ate hungrily.

Having eaten, the task of finding a hotel felt much more manageable, and it was not more than 20 minutes of wheeling later that we found ourselves checking into a very small, very clean, and splendidly affordable hotel in what appeared to be the tires and automotive parts district of town.