Steppe-in' Up 1

Oh my Pachamama, Allah, Buddha, Parvati and Jesus, these few days have been some of the most consistently beautiful of my whole trip.

And when I say that I’m not just talking about all the unbelievably stunning landscapes, so many of which have been indescribably spectacular, appearing for us as gifts from the goddesses, day after day after day.

But it was also the amazing warm company of Anna Lena and Julian, who could enjoy and appreciate the beauty with me, as well as some wonderfully hospitable and generous local people we met on our journeying together.

I really don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such riches, but I must’ve been a cracker of a good person in a previous life, to receive such limitless treasures in this one.

After a delicious fruity porridge brekky we left our second river campsite east of Almaty, and continued to head east, towards the morning sun.

Actually, we left later than we’d sorta planned, as I had a flattie in the morning, possibly as the result of a super sharp thorn that passed in and out of my tyre without a trace.

Believe it or not, but that’s the first time I’ve had a flat tyre from riding on the road since even before I went to India in October last year! I know. It’s hard to believe isn’t it, but it’s actually true.

I got another thorny devil flat a few days later, just to start getting my average heading back in the direction of something even close to normal.

Embarrassingly, (well not too embarrassingly), I needed help to get my brake pads just right, Anna Lena’s expertise and eyesight was exactly what I needed. I normally just throw them on pretty roughly, but the rushed cycle mechanic in Almaty had fiddled with them and I couldn’t get them right. Anna Lena had never changed brake pads like mine before, but she worked it out in two seconds flat.

If she ever becomes a surgeon one day I wouldn’t hesitate to trust her with my life.

She also patched my tube, on Penny’s rushed insistence, as my spares were packed deep in my panniers, and she didn’t want to wait for me to find them.

Penny was frustratingly quick to criticise me for not getting my bike serviced in Almaty, but I explained to her with barely hidden annoyance that none of the bike mechanics had any time to do it when I was there.

Penny shoots first, machine-gun style, and doesn’t even try to ask questions later.

But she’s right to suggest I shouldn’t have been riding with my brakes in that condition. The steep descents of the past couple of days had shredded what was left of them, and there was never much daylight time in the campsites to spend any time time sorting them out, given our late arrivals and early starts.

But that's no excuse.

Live and learn.

Anna Lena and Julian have time constraints, as they have a deadline, and don’t have the time to cruise in the way that I can. If I was alone I’d just spend a day camped up somewhere and would slowly sort out what I need to sort out.

Plus, as you may know by now, bicycle maintenance is not on my list of the great unbridled joys in life.

But them’s just the boring details.

The real story of the journey was the magnificence of where we were.

We rolled into a tiny village to get supplies, which were limited there.

Then we had no option to ride on quite a busy road for awhile, the only road heading east from Almaty, and Penny insisted we split into 2 groups, with a sizeable gap in between, for safety reasons, because "that's how all the cycling groups now do it in Europe."

Well maybe there's some reason for that, but I wasn't really into it, especially because it meant I was stuck with Penny, but I agreed anyway.

And she wasn't interested in the slightest in having any sort of conversation with me as we rode.

She insisted I ride in front of her, but then couldn't stop herself from telling me, every few minutes, to speed up, or slow down, or catch up with the guys in front again, or leave a bigger gap, blah blah fucking blah, in order to maintain a gap from the other guys that she determined was appropriate.

Eventually I'd had enough, and said I'd ride behind everyone, and would stay in the group formation she wanted, but only if she stopped telling me what to do.

And then later, as the traffic eased, I just thought "fuck it," and caught up with the other guys and rode with them.

But despite my mind sometimes being preoccupied with this nightmare of a social situation, the scenery was so stunning that it distracted me in a good way, and I absolutely loved the journey.

On the big road

We stopped in a tiny town for a bready lunch of boiled eggs and cheese and tomatoes and cucumbers, washed down with a huge carton of peach nectar and good ole bubbly soft drinks, chocolate biscuits and chocolate. Mmmmm.

The crew were so friendly, I look windswept and haggard. Penny had gone off to eat on her own.

I needed to go to the туАлет (toilet), and as I went in I slipped my phone into my shirt pocket. But at the time I was wearing Julian's high viz vest, and my phone hadn't actually made it into my pocket at all. As I went to squat, my phone fell down, bounced on the wooden floor, and skimmed right across the front of the hole leading to shit hell, just missing it.

I was so lucky!

If it had gone a couple of centimetres further across it would have bounced right down into the shit pit, and I would've had no option but to get in there somehow to get it.

Now that would've been a very shitty story to tell.

So lucky

Khorgos is the Chinese border, where I'd come from a few days ago, and we were heading towards Kegen.

We eventually had a long long climb to the top of the pass.

There's always Soviet-style kitsch at these places.

Get ready for cruise mode

It was a spectacular, long and fast roll down the other side. The views were unbelievable.

A moulting yak. Their fur drops off every spring, so they end up losing their jumpers, just like us.

We took this side road and headed off to find a campsite. There's an app called iOverlander, on which people tag spots like potential campsites, accommodation, water supplies etc. It's super handy.