My thighs are firmer & my fitness improved after pedalling over 1,000 km in Kazakhstan and China with Sarah Outen. I also had to choose the right diet while pedalling that far. I flew to Almaty and despite arriving at 2am, I was instantly sweating in the heat. Wondering why I’d packed a down jacket, I contemplated just how hot it would be cycling throughout the day!

Sarah arrived a day behind schedule and I cycled out of Almaty to meet her and show her the way to the flat that we were staying in. 55km out of town, we met by the side of the road just as the sun was setting. Sarah had her first company for almost 3 months but was a little concerned that I’d wanted to wait for her ‘in the shade’ at 8.30pm at night — I was finding it VERY hot! Sarah spent the next day charging batteries, shopping, replacing her cracked back hub, answering emails and helping her ‘team’ back home to organise later parts of the trip – for example her rowing boat is just about finished and needs to get to Japan, and our kayaks need to get to Far East Russia ready for us to kayak from there to Japan in September. I helped as best as I could, while filming events. We took a couple of hours out to have a meal of kebabs & a salad with very suspect bits of meat in it. I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to unidentified pieces of meat, so I mostly picked them out!

After a lovely day in the Almaty mountains with Sergey from the ACBK, the admin continued for another half day and we didn’t leave Almaty until almost 4pm. A kind lady called Sasha, along with her father, had agreed to drive me and my bike out of the town so that I could film Sarah from the car, and get ahead and set up my camera to get a variety of shots without slowing Sarah down too much. It was also great that they could explain to people at roadside stalls why I was setting up a camera behind their tomatoes! As dusk approached, I jumped on ‘Bobby’ – my bike for the journey – and cycled a few kms more with Sarah to a grassy field beside the road that was to be home for the night. Big lorrys fly down the road at all hours, so it wasn’t exactly wilderness but it was great to be camping out again.

We were up at 5.30am – a habit we repeated for the rest of the trip – as we had 1,000km to cycle in 8 days. We aimed to get going by 7am when it was a bit cooler which meant I usually managed to cycle for a few minutes before I started sweating profusely with the heat!  Most days were hot, very hot, or really, really hot. Sarah reckoned it was about 35 degrees. Whenever we saw water – a river, a sprinkler, or a pipe from a natural spring – we’d stop and stick our heads under the soothing cascade, wetting our hair and clothes to stave off the prickly heat for another half an hour. Failing any natural source, we’d pour water from our water bottles over us to manage to keep going!

We were mostly on main roads as Sarah has limited time to reach Far East Russia. Near the towns, the traffic could be really heavy, with huge lorries steaming past us at high speeds, honking their horns to make sure we didn’t veer off to the left in front of them, or just to say hello. Sometimes it was nice to hear a friendly honk, but at times it was deafening, and accompanied by a spurt of toxic black smoke in our faces. Further from the towns the traffic thinned out and the scenery was lovely at times. We were mostly cycling up or down a big wide valley with high mountains on either side. The scale of the plateau was vast with the mountains a few kms away, but at times the peaks grew closer and the valley petered out and we climbed up over a pass or through a narrow gorge. In the first few days I found this very hard work and although Sarah was too polite to say – I’m sure we were moving slower than she would have done by herself. But then she has been cycling for 3 months – and is somewhat used to the heat.  At the end of our first day cycling together we climbed up through a lovely gorge to a small village. Men on horses rounded up sheep under a pink sky – it was a beautiful end to the day.

Lured in by a row of small shops offering ‘chai’ and ‘samsas’ (a delicious kind of cornish pasty with meat and onions inside) we sat down to watch the sunset and fill our empty tummys. Young kids and their parents crowded around to hear about Sarah’s journey and look at her map & we decided to ask if we could camp right here in the village. The kids helped us put our tents up, we bought some kebabs at a roadside stall and headed to our beds about 10.30pm. A group of young men had meanwhile decided to park their car right next to my tent and started to play really loud music, inches away from my weary head. I suspect the music was meant to be for our benefit, but 2 hours later I was going crazy inside my tent. I was really tired from 120km pedalling in the heat, I had to get up in 5 hours and I couldn’t sleep. My grasp of the Kazakh and Russian languages was pretty poor, and certainly didn’t extend to being able to say ‘Please can you turn the music down, or move your car further away’, nor was there anywhere else I could move my tent to. Crumpled up toilet paper in my ears didn’t block out the local tunes and eventually I resorted to unzipping my tent and using the only Russian I could come up with; “Niet music”. I would love to be able to apologize to the young lads for what must have appeared very rude, but anyway – it did the trick and the music stopped. Bliss! I could finally get some sleep.

On our 3rd day cycling, we reached the border with China. Sarah is keen to make sure she completes her round the world loop without using any motorised transport and she’d been warned that she would be asked to take a bus through ‘no mans land’ between Kazakhstan and China. She’d gone to great lengths to try to prevent this but the moment of truth would come when we arrived at the border and tried to convince the guards to let us cycle through. The first problem was knowing when we’d reached the ‘actual border’! We had our passports checked at 8 different checkpoints before we finally left Kazakhstan! A few times we thought we’d made it across, only to be greeting by another person wearing a Kazakh uniform asking for our passports! I don’t think they wanted us to leave!

Finally, we arrived at no-mans land (still in Kazakhstan) and were told we had to take a bus. Sarah tried to explain that someone important on the Chinese side wanted to come and escort us across but they weren’t having any of it! I gave them a pre-prepared letter in Russian explaining about Sarah’s journey and why she didn’t want to take the bus, and Sarah disappeared off with 8 uniformed officers for almost an hour. Towards the end, I noticed they were smiling and hoped that was good news. It was and we were allowed to cycle all the way to China (but not before 1 last check of the passports from Kazakh officers).

Outside immigration, in the city of Khorgos we were greeting by a crowd of men who descended on us like a swarm of bees, all thrusting bank notes at us, wanting us to change our Kazakh money with them. It was a bad first impression of China, but actually the only time we were hassled by anyone. Everyone else we met in Kazakhstan and China was really friendly & interested in what we were up to. Bottles of water or soft drinks were often pressed into our hands by total strangers and people at roadside stalls sometimes handed fruit or vegetables to Sarah and refused to take any money. It was late by the time we cycled out of the city & very few camping options as houses or fields of crops were everywhere. We resorted to camping on a grassy triangle by a motorway junction!

I told Sarah (any myself) that I would be feeling fit and strong by day 4 – as that is what used to happen when I was younger! The morning was depressingly tiring as we trended gently upwards towards a wall of mountains. I knew we had 1,500metres of climbing today and I was worried that I’d slow Sarah down & we wouldn’t make it to Urumqui before my flight home. But after a lovely meal in a roadside cafe I had renewed energy. I don’t know if it was the freshly made noodles, the fresh vegetables or the meat that looked like meat, but suddenly my legs had some power in them! We made good progress up the last 1,200 metres, gawping at the amazing mountains we were travelling through, stopping for a wash in a mountain stream, and enjoying the cooler air as we got higher. Near the top, thundery clouds rolled in & rain and hail started to fall on us. I didn’t put my waterproof jacket on early enough and I went from sweating to shivering in about 20 minutes. Our campsite that night couldn’t have been more beautiful, and more of a contrast to the motorway the night before. We pitched our tents by a high mountain lake, surrounded by horses and jagged peaks.

Day 5 saw my energy levels staying fairly high (helped by a 60km downhill run!) and from then onwards we were on a fairly flat straight road to Urumqui. We put in a few big days of around 100miles, ate at a lot of petrol stations & a few villages (there weren’t many shops by the roadside), and got closer to Urumqui. On the 2nd to last day I got some sort of tummy bug and had to urgently stop by the roadside 5 or 6 times during the day. Somehow I found some energy to go on and we finally arrived in a hotel in Urumqui about 9pm at night – 12 hours before my flight home!

Overall it was a great adventure and hopefully I’ve got some good footage for Sarah of her wonderful journey. I’ll next be seeing her in mid-September in Far East Russia, and kayaking to Sakhalin and then to Japan with her.

Thanks to Yellow Limited for providing me with fab Assos & Rudy biking gear, and to Lyon Equipment for providing me with great Ortlieb panniers. I used the bike packer classic panniers which fit easily on front and back wheels.

Thanks to Aleks Gusev at Avantura for providing me with a SPOT device to track the journey.

I uploaded more photos to Sarah’s flickr site which you can see here.

Comments are closed.