For this current Siberian winter bike trip I’m using a Cumulus down sleeping bag. It’s the one I used in Scandinavia last winter. It worked great then. But I didn’t get the opportunity to really test it to it’s extreme. Now I have. The bag I’m using is the Cumulus Excuistic 1200. It’s made with [...]
Oh where do I start?! I think for now, I will just show you the photos from the last couple of weeks. Mostly it was too cold to stop and take photos… sometimes when I did, the camera wouldn’t work anyway. When it’s -40C and colder (when I woke one morning from the bivvy, it [...]
Just over a week has passed since leaving Irkutsk… and now I’m back. Briefly. Tomorrow I take a train to Neriyungri to begin the very cold cycle to Yakutsk. But back to the last week. It seems a lot has happened. Firstly I cycled to Lake Baikal – it took five days. A bit longer [...]
Time for a long-awaited update… After a few weeks back home, I’m finally back out in Russia – in Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. The first 3 weeks at home were spent indulging in the guiltless excesses of good food and drink over xmas, safe in the knowledge that I’ll be burning those calories off soon [...]
Each time I return home from an extended time abroad, I am engulfed with a mixture of emotions and impressions. And each time it is different. Last time, it was the shock at the pace of life so many live in the UK. The Rat Race. I hated it. I had gone straight back into [...]
I am back in the UK! Yes, that happened fast you say. Indeed, I’d been keeping my return quiet so I could surprise my mum for her birthday. But now I can tell you about the last days of the journey… Having cycled back to Moynaq, I hopped in a taxi and left a pool [...]
Rather than retrace the direct route to the main road via Urgench, cycled along the smaller roads for a short cut towards Nukus. Riding through small towns and farmland. Uninspiring. But I was quite happy just pootling along. No particular rush. I thought again how this countryside reminded me of Norfolk. Dusk arrived too fast. [...]
I pushed on towards Khiva, rather than camp – it would have been the crap kind of camping. Where you have to hide and make no noise and try not to be seen. There were simply too many houses and people from the main road to Khiva. Nothing like the desert the day before. Besides, [...]
Because it had taken three hours for the taxi driver to find 3 other passengers, it was well after dark when I arrived in Tortkul. So rather than cycling out of town and camping, I found a place to stay. From here I was going to start a mini tour of the crumbling ruins of [...]
After Samarkand, came Bukhara. On the route I’m cycling west, at least. It was the same for those merchants from the East trading along the Silk Road so many centuries ago, millennia even. Another central Asian city that has changed hands almost as often as I wash my clothes. First it was a vassal state [...]
